Here’s what I try to do every night, just before bed:

• Empty the automatic coffee maker, and set it up for the morning to brew coffee at 6:30 a.m.,
• Empty the dishwasher.
• Clean off the countertops. 

I do not bat 1000 on this effort, but when I do it, it’s very satisfying, both in the doing (ending the day by defeating entropy), and the next morning (when it feels like a gift from my nighttime self to my daytime self).

David Cain writes about this sort of task in The Tiniest Mission:

Essentially, you’re taking the little act that’s before you, and making a tiny, focused mission out of it. Find the scissors in this drawer. Put the broom back on its hook. Pour myself a glass of water. You put a little imaginary wall around the act, making it into a small, two-to-ten-second arc in which you’re concerned only with the tiny mission.

Then you watch this little mission unfold to its end, which only takes a few seconds. You watch your hands fold the towel, or button up the shirt, or lift the faucet lever. You notice any obvious aesthetic details, like the bubbles forming and dispersing as you fill the glass, and the “chhhhh” sound of the running water.

Performing the tiny mission is only a matter of taking a real interest in witnessing what’s happening here, which only takes a few seconds. Be here for The Filling of the Glass. Be here for The Hanging of the Jacket. Then, tiny mission completed, you carry on with your day.

You don’t need to think about it or be fussy about it. Don’t worry about doing it slowly, or “mindfully.” Your body already knows how to do the thing. Your job is just to watch this work unfold to its satisfying conclusion, like a curious little film clip. It’s so short you won’t get bored.

While not explicitly written in reaction to recent revelations about writer Neil Gaiman, Annie Mueller’s When you love something made by a terrible person is a useful guide to processing the idea of beloved culture created by terrible people. 

Mueller’s conclusion:

I believe people can change. 

Most people don’t change, though, after a certain point. Changing requires thinking new thoughts, different thoughts. Changing requires adjusting your beliefs. Changing requires letting go of who you used to be and the first step to doing that is to recognize yourself.

But nobody wants to see a monster in the mirror.
Most people stay in the ruts they’ve dug and keep walking, back and forth, back and forth, around and around, deeper and deeper, straight into hell. 

But I believe in redemption. I believe if you can turn yourself into a monster, you can undo it as well. 

What you created, you can destroy.

Annie Mueller was featured last week in People & Blogs; the week before it was my friend Steven Garrity. Neither of them are terrible people in any way.

The photographer and impresario Oliviero Toscani died earlier this month. Toscani was a co-creator of Colors magazine, a brazen, colourful, quarterly, published between 1991 and 2014 by Benetton, the Italian clothing brand.

I loved Colors, and always bought it when I came across it (which was rare, as it wasn’t widely distributed in the hinterlands). It was an enormous influence on my typographic and design sensibility, and only served to cultivate my naturally occurring contrarian nature.

Frab’s and magCulture shared have remembrances.

The process of setting cold type is fiddly. Perhaps it’s the most fiddly thing there is, arranging tiny metal letters in a row, inserting spaces, filling out lines to be the same length, creating a forme that gets locked into a chase for printing.

Most of the time it’s just fiddly. Sometimes, though, things go horribly wrong. Often these times are times when too much time has been spent in the print shop, trying to do just one more thing, taking advantage of the ink already on the press.

Yesterday was one such time:

It was, indeed, the end of a long day. I’d set the type for a set of This Box is for Good boxes we’re about to send to our collaborator Simone, in Adelaide. 

I was tired, and rushing, and annoyed with the fiddliness. In a move to optimize the printing process, I turned everything 90 degrees at the last minute. And, in doing so, I crossed a line from stable to unstable; lifting the chase into the press, everything came crashing down to the floor.

I know enough to know that the proper response to this is to clean up and go home, returning the next day with fresh energy. 

That’s what I did, and today’s session went pleasantly crashing-to-the-ground-free. 

Hence this pile of almost 200 boxes, ready for shipment over the Pacific early this week:

Receiver Coffee opened a new treehouse location, a labyrinth of levels set into the branches of a banyan forest located, oddly, in central Charlottetown.

One afternoon, Tim Chaisson and I were sharing a coffee at the highest level of the forest-café when we both leaned back over the railing too far and fell over the edge.

“Grab the vines, Tim, GRAB THE VINES!”, I yelled.

We grabbed the vines, and we survived, unscathed.

Safe on the ground, I came up with a little rhyme to describe the ordeal, to which Tim exclaimed “That’s a song!”, which he then proceeded to improvise on his guitar.

And then I woke up from my dream.

Having spent the week nursing a cold and watching a lot of TV, including the entire season of The Day of the Jackal, it’s not hard to see the seeds of the dream.

That, and also that Tim’s band, The East Pointers,  released a new single yesterday, Anniversary. Give it a listen: it’s a rousing anthem, well-suited to January doldrums.

Also new in music this week, A Heart That Never Closes, the next in a slow drip of tracks from a collaboration among singer-songwriters Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart. The first track was Hold Everything. They are a folk-pop power trio, and I look forward to hearing what comes next (they’re doing a 6-night UK tour in March).

My cold has broken (it packed a wallop, that one: a solid 6 days from start-up to wind-down, complete with a classic mix of cold symptoms), and in my powering back up to REM sleep my dreams have been particularly active. 

In last night’s edition, I finally came to peace with the girl I had an unrequited (never expressed) crush on through much of public school. “We could just be good friends!”, she said. And rather than a come-down, that seemed like the best idea ever. That only took 40 years.

Yesterday I had enough energy to pull my first print on the etching press we have on loan, using a lino block Lisa carved in 2023, along with some Speedball blue-green ink, overprinted on Caligo Safe Wash burnt sienna that we picked up in London last month. 

It was only a technical test, a way to get to know the press. But I like the result:

One of our Australian This Box is for Good collaborators, Simone Tippett, was helpful in getting us this far. We need “rails” to assist in pulling the print through the press, and Simone told us she uses rails made from 1/8” MDF. 

When we went looking for some at Home Depot, there was nothing in evidence, but Ritchie Simpson (yes, that Ritchie Simpson: he is the perfect Home Depot employee) suggested that paint stir sticks might suit. 

It turns out that Home Depot paint stir sticks are exactly 1/8” thick. And they are free, as many as you want to take. So this is what the rig looks like now:

The paint stir sticks are attached to the bed with self-adhesive magnetic tape, so we can move them around.

We’re very excited to have a new press in the studio, and to see what new things we can produce as a result.

Just before the cold hit I pulled out my sketchbook for the first time in 2024, and, sitting in the window of The Gallery, sketched a slice of Victoria Row:

Over Christmas I read The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, and highlighted this:

It seems to me that if you want truth, if you want to lead a full and aware life, you should head towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change, because when you find the universality within that, you find yourself. Your ever-moving self. You arrive in the act of leaving. Of staying open, always, to the possibility that the simple things we tell ourselves may all be wrong.

That’s my intention for 2025.

Happy New Year.

Back in September of last year I wrote about the dance I went through to migrate this blog to Drupal 10, on a shiny new web server. 

I then followed up, in November, with a rundown of my side projects, still hosted on an expensive legacy server.

I’m happy — relieved — to have completed the last of the items under the “In Progress” heading on that “side projects” post, and with that, to have terminated the server (did I mention it was expensive) that was hosting them.

Beyond the technical ins and outs, this is a tale of procrastination, grief, overwhelm, and retirement: it took me 5 years to do what amounted, in absolute hours, a work week’s worth of shutdown work. 

That work required focus, and the ability to hold a lot of things in my head at the same time, and both of those things were in very short supply until recently.

I realize, in retrospect, that this Large Hairy Task had served a purpose as a last foot in the door of a digital life that I’d lived, intensely, for more than 3 decades. As long as it was hanging out there, not completed, I was still “needed” by the digital world. So I had to get over that to get to the finish line, and to be able to pull the big switch fully into the OFF position.

I still have a digital garden to maintain, but it’s a much less complex garden, and I’m no longer in the practice of making it more complex. I get my kicks from analog more than digital these days, and that makes me happy.

This is the 2025 levee schedule for New Year’s Day, January 1, 2025 for Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island.

Show levees that are ages 19+  Show only Charlottetown-area levees

The levee schedule is covered under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike License.

Through a circuitous yet delightful series of travel planning events, Lisa and I spent seven nights in Tallinn, Estonia last month. It was a truly lovely time: we enjoyed the art, design, architecture, and food of the city, and explored some fascinating nooks and crannies.

Two weeks later we were followed in Tallinn by The East Pointers, who played two dates with Trad.Attack!, a dynamic Estonian trio.

It is through this circuitous connection that we’ve discovered Liugu-laugu (feat. The East Pointers), a track from Trad.Attack!’s latest album, 2023’s Bring It On. It is a beautiful song. 

(We equally enjoyed Tim Chaisson’s songwriters’ circle this afternoon at the Trailside, featuring Breagh Isabel and Dylan Guthro. And remain a little in awe of how Tim could be in Estonia last week and Charlottetown this week, and still bring it.)

Canadian folk music legend Stephen Fearing is playing the Trailside in Charlottetown on February 9, 2025.

I haven’t seen Fearing play for a decade: the last time was in Sackville, NB, on the day Catherine was diagnosed with incurable cancer. In other words, a lot of water has flowed under my bridge since.

I first encountered Stephen Fearing on the radio, when I interviewed him for Trent Radio in the late 1980s. We were both in our 20s: he was already an accomplished singer-songwriter with an album under his belt; I was a inexperienced interviewer who fell back on incurious formulaic questions. But I became a fan in the process, and have been one ever since.

You will not be disappointed by this show.

One of the things I’ve missed since acquiring my Brompton bicycle a few years ago is a way to carry a water bottle: there’s no standard water bottle, mounting bracket, and, because the bicycle folds, any solution, ideally, can remain in place when the bicycle is folded.

I’d read all sorts of reviews, looked at Amazon products, etc., but I never found something that looked like it would work.

Last month, however, Lisa and I were in Islington, a London neighborhood, where we were looking up one of her old haunts, and going to an excellent art supply store. On our rainy walk from one place to the other, I spotted a Balfe’s Bikes, and popped in to ask what they’d recommend.

They only had one suitable accessory in stock, a made-in-the-UK Restrap City Stem. I tried it out with Lisa’s water bottle, and it fit nice and snugly. I liked the design, and the method for attaching it, and how it would survive the fold, so I bought it.

I got a chance to try it out last week on an unseasonably warm late fall day.

Here’s the Restrap holding my water bottle on the unfolded Brompton:

And here’s the Restrap, still in place, on the folded bicycle:

It worked exactly as advertised, and I enjoyed ready access to water as I toddled around town on my bike running holiday errands.