It’s not that I didn’t know that Lisa spoke Spanish, but it’s another thing entirely to listen to her speak Spanish to a taxi driver for an hour, wending through Mexico City traffic: like waking up one day and finding out you’re dating The Batman. 

Looptail g. Just down the street from our temporary house in Mexico City. Books about food. What’s not to love about Librería Gallina de Guinea!

On the weekend they played host to Feria del libro comestible, a festival of food and print, with exhibitors from all over, including Canada’s Chutney magazine.

Happenstance is a lovely guide. 

Twenty-three years ago, I wrote this about my friend Stephen Good:

I have known and kept in touch with Stephen longer than almost anyone else I know. At times it’s been a challenge — it’s hard to be a Godless heathen when you’re corresponding with someone who is prone to starting sentences like “I remember what Jesus said about bowling…” But we’ve worked out a common ground (he leaves out direct God references and I leave out my constant questioning as to the actual existence of God), and I’m sure we’ll be friends until we die.

And we were.

Stephen died on Saturday.

I hadn’t talked to Stephen in more than a year. Our last conversation was prompted by a one sentence email from him:

I need to talk to you.

I called him. We had a long chat, about everything you can possibly imagine. Somehow, through everything that separated us—and there was a lot—we stayed connected and interested over almost 40 years.

In a text to mutual friend in the weekend, I described Stephen as among the smartest people I’d ever known, and among the most naive. Those two combined took him to places of fascinating creativity and exploration, and to places of great challenge and tragedy. Somehow, in all of it, he kept the glint in his eye, the enthusiasm for to being curious.

I will miss you, old friend. 

The air compressors at Charlottetown-area gas stations are a dreadful bunch: many of the tire pressure gauges are faulty (or missing), those that charge money for air—a violation of all that is holy, in my books—often have faulty payment systems, and some of them simply refuse to emit air at all.

I’m happy to report that I’ve found the best air compressor in town, and it’s in Stratford, at the Mel’s Shell:

This compressor is free, it works, and it lets you dial in your desired PSI, and stops when that pressure is reached.

It’s on the right side of Mel’s, near the A&W drive-thru entrance. 

Our Dutch friends, printers Martijn van der Blom and Roy Scholten, have launched a fundraising campaign for a book about printing with LEGO, The Hilversum Method:

In 2023 we made our first book, showcasing a selection of projects from the first ten years of printing: Print & Play. The Art of LEGO® Letterpress.

Since then, we regularly get questions about how we do it. Because people all over the world are now happily printing with LEGO®. But not always with the quality and richness of forms that can be achieved using the Hilversum Method.

In this book, we will explain how it works, and why it’s such an endlessly fascinating way of working.

We’ll explain the technical aspects of designing, building and printing. And go into the specific creative and artistic opportunities in this approach to image making.

The book will be available in both Dutch and English.

You may recall our own experience printing in Hilversum with Roy and Martijn last year: they are creative, talented, and generous printers; you will not go wrong supporting their campaign.

For the past 6 weeks our neighbours have had a crew on site every day working on their complex century-old mansard roof.

Being cooperative neighbours, we’ve traded our driveway for their garage so that the crew can have room to work. 

The room they need has been primarily for lifts like this one:

This Genie Boom is, I’ve learned, one example of a “Powered Aerial Access Platform,” and we’ve heard its beep-beep-beep sound, every time it moves somewhere, so frequently as to almost be habituated to it.

You see these “PAAPs” all over town these days: our Queen Square neighbourhood has been a hotbed of construction activity since the Province House conservation started a decade ago;  with that, and the Daniel J. MacDonald building gutting, the Confederation Centre of the Arts renovations, one is seldom safe from the beep-beep-beep.

I got curious about what seems to be the sudden transformation of construction-at-height from using scaffolding to using these machines, and I found some insight in Powered Aerial Access Platforms (PAAPs): Their Use and Benefits, from CIB World Building Congress 2007, which describes their deployment in South Africa:

Enhanced access, enhanced productivity, maneuverability, and enhanced safety predominate among benefits resulting from using PAAPs in lieu of other access, such as scaffold platforms and ladders. Enhanced worker satisfaction, overall cost savings, and enhanced client satisfaction were identified by between 33 % and 40 % of respondents. Slightly more than a quarter of respondents identified enhanced stability, hassle-free work, and lifting of materials and equipment.

A more recent reference, from a not-unbiased vendor, CMC, The Impact of Aerial Platforms on Working at Height:

Technological evolution has radically transformed how works are carried out off the ground. Whereas in the past the use of scaffoldings was the norm, today, the advent of aerial work platforms has revolutionised the industry, significantly enhancing efficiency and safety. In particular, aerial work platforms offer a combination of flexibility, swiftness and safety, which are key elements to increasing productivity and reducing operating costs.

A check of the local market showed that I could rent a PAAP for about $2500 a month, which seems cheap given the labour it saves compared to the cost of erecting and dismantling scaffolding, to say nothing of its ability to heft heavy things up and down.

In an introduction to pieces by Catherine currently hanging at Confederation Centre Art Gallery, I read this today:

Our first Island Focus shines a spotlight on the work of artist, educator and activist Catherine Miller (1963-2020).

Heretofore I’d not seen Catherine reflected posthumously like this, and it came as a something of a shock, the finality of it all, especially in the context of her work as an artist. 

“That’s all,” it says. That’s a lot. It took some of my breath away.

Curator Pan Wendt wrote a very nice introduction to the two pieces of Catherine’s work, finishing with:

Her exhibition Catherine Miller: Changing Environs, shown at Confederation Centre Art Gallery in 2013, included the work Rising Sea Level, P.E.I., five woven wall hangings that use rusting iron nails to represent the shifting terrain of Prince Edward Island in the context of climate change. In 2018, while fighting the effects of cancer, Miller embarked on a more personal project, documenting her day-to-day preoccupations and activities in hanging texts woven from cotton and silk thread. In both projects, making art became an exercise in concentrated, creative resilience in the face of overwhelming challenges.

I’d never seen the two pieces as being thematically similar, but Pan is right: she followed her work on the deeply political overwhelming challenge of climate change with deeply personal reflections on the overwhelming challenge of living with cancer.

It was indeed “concentrated, creative resilience.”

The two pieces on view are ones Catherine was particularly proud of, and ones that involved hundreds of hours of labour.

For the first, Rising Sea Level, Catherine hand-wove five panels from undyed cotton, working rusty nails into the fabric in an outline of Prince Edward Island, with the Island shrinking, due climate change, in each successive panel.

Catherine Miller Rising Sea Level, 2010; undyed cotton, hand-drawn nails, plaster. Gift of the Estate of Catherine Miller, 2024.

She auditioned many different types of nails before she found the ones that rusted as they did in her imagination.

For the second piece, Lists of Life, she stitched words over fishing net (using a dissolvable medium for initial stability).

Catherine Miller, Lists of Life, 2018; cotton and silk thread. Combination Purchase and Gift of the artist, 2019.

The lists are ones I recognize from the life we lived together. It’s both odd and delightful to see these  artifacts immortalized.

Some are a testament to the emotional labour she bore (labour that, more often than not, was opaque and unrecognized, both by me, and by the community around her), like this one:

Detail from Catherine Miller, Lists of Life, 2018; cotton and silk thread. Combination Purchase and Gift of the artist, 2019.

Others are a testament to the things she never got to do, like this one:

Detail from Catherine Miller, Lists of Life, 2018; cotton and silk thread. Combination Purchase and Gift of the artist, 2019.

Again, “that’s all.”

While the larger Together With Time exhibition will be on view until April 5, 2026, Catherine’s contributions will rotate out as part of the “Island Focus” section by the end of November. I encourage you to visit them.

(It’s fitting that this exhibition is the last to be mounted under the tenure of retiring gallery director Kevin Rice, who was  such a strong supporter of Catherine’s work).

One of the standard questions they ask at the admitting desk at Queen Elizabeth Hospital here in Charlottetown is “have you had any fall in the last three months?”

Ever since I broke my arm in July, I’ve had to answer “yes.”

What I didn’t know, until recently, was that answering yes meant that I got a special purple coloured wristband to wear in the hospital:

As it’s now been more than three months since I had that fall, today, when I went to admitting in advance of my physiotherapy appointment, I answered “no.”

This answer meant that I got the standard white wristband:

I was never consciously aware of how or whether healthcare staff change their behaviour  when they saw my purple wristband, and I certainly didn’t notice any difference today once I went over to the other side. But it’s good to know there is a system in place to provide additional support for the falling- prone, even if, as in my case, the fall was largely self-inflicted

Earlier this year, we prepared a guide for our Home Exchange guests that, among other things, points them to shops and restaurants in the area that we like. 

One recommendation is Bookmark, and when my friend Valerie was reading the guide this morning, she reminded me that I need to update the store’s address, as it has moved around the corner.

When I looked the new address up, and found that it was 111 Kent Street, my typographic brain went into creative mode. 

This afternoon I went over to the print shop, and tried my best to translate what was in my imagination into type. 

Here’s what I came up with:

I went in daunted by the task of angling the “ones” to resemble a falling stack of books, thinking I would need some specialized typographic furniture to pull this off, but I was able to do it through creative use of rectangles.

The bookmarks that resulted, printed in yellow on white card, look like this:

This was absolutely, positively not an original idea: my mother worked for many years as a librarian for Wentworth Libraries, the rural library system serving communities around Hamilton, Ontario that has since been amalgamated into the Hamilton Public Library. 

The library system’s logo was a brilliant riff on the same theme, a stylized capital W (for Wentworth) formed from books:

I love that mug: it reminds me of the tiny Carlisle Public Library, at the time located in the back of the Community Hall, where I spent so many hours as a kid (see also).

Once they dry I’ll drop the Bookmark bookmarks round 111 as a gift for the hardworking staff who just moved a bookstore.

My education as a letterpress printer was helped greatly by printing coffee bags for ROW142, the coffee shop up the street from the print shop. Our arrangement was simple: I printed the bags, they plied me with great  coffee.

There is no greater printing education than figuring out all the fiddly bits of printing a complicated coffee bag with multiple thicknesses. And then figuring out how to do that reliably over and over. I loved it. And I learned so much.

When ROW142 was about to give way to what is now Receiver Coffee, moving just up the street, I memorialized the move in a special limited edition coffee bag. 

Receiver posted this lovely tribute to that bag, and the move that begat it, on Facebook earlier this week:

You may have noticed a new piece of art hanging behind our counter on Victoria Row:

“WALK THIRTY NINE STEPS.”
Peter Rukavina, 2014

At first glance, it might look like just a framed coffee bag. For us, and perhaps for some of you, it’s much more than that. This piece was part of a very limited run of hand-pressed bags created by local artist and printmaker Peter Rukavina in late May and early June of 2014.

Peter had been designing and printing bags for us back in the PRE-ceiver days. So when we made the move down the street to open our very first Receiver Coffee location on Victoria Row, he marked the occasion with this thoughtful, conceptual piece.

The phrase “WALK THIRTY NINE STEPS” isn’t just a literal nod to the short distance we moved—it’s a subtle metaphor for progress, belief, and the small but meaningful steps it takes to turn an idea into something real. It reflects both our physical journey and the emotional one: the leap of faith it took to open our doors, and the creative energy that continues to drive us.

To our team, this piece is a daily reminder of where we started, what we believed in, and how far a bit of passion and persistence can go. And while it may have originated as functional design, we think it stands on its own as a quiet, beautiful work of art.

We hope it speaks to you as much as it does to us. Sometimes, the simplest works carry the greatest meaning.

Back at you, coffee friends: we were there together, at the beginning of our respective crafts, and we’ve both come a long way. Thank you for the tip of the hat.