Our beloved Farmacy is morphing into something new, moving to Grafton Street and downscaling to retail-only.

They will be missed.

Farmacy is where Lisa and I laid eyes on each other for the first time, 5 years ago. It will forever hold a place in my heart.

We will still love them in their new form.

Our house will turn 200 years old next year. It was built in 1827 for the family of Henry Smith, by Henry and his brother Isaac. Isaac went on to design and build several other less modest buildings in Charlottetown, including our neighbouring Province House.

Province House just opened after a decade-long $100 million+ restoration, the root of which, when you get right down to it, was 180 years of water infiltration.

Our friend Brian Willis managed the restoration project for Public Works, and he gave an excellent talk the afternoon of Province House’s reopening last month, a talk that demonstrated his depth of knowledge about leaky old houses built by the Smith brothers.

Our house, alas, is also a leaky Smith brothers house.

The first time this came to a head was in the winter of 2001 when this:

Led to this:

Ice dams on the back of the house led to significant water infiltration, which required that we leave the house, with 4 month old Olivia, for almost a month, while the damage was remediated.

The remediation handled the restoration of the inside of the house, but not the fundamental infiltration issues, issues that, for the most part, I have been at least theoretically able to keep at bay by religious raking of the back roof after every snowfall, especially during the freeze-thaw ice dam periods of February and March.

Theoretically.

Things came to a head again in the fall of 2018 when the front roof started leaking, requiring me to maintain a network of buckets in the attic every night and, ultimately, a rush late-season roof job.

This past winter, alas, we started to get leaking through the window well in the back upstairs bath, and, this fall, into the window well of the kitchen below it.

I’ve been kicking this can ahead too many times to have not jumping back into it somewhat traumatic. Lisa, bless her heart, heeded my “can you move this forward and take the bull by the horns?” request.

Lisa’s brilliant first move: ask Brian, given his expertise in the “leaky Smith houses” field. He generously agreed to drop over after work a few weeks ago to take a look at our house with an eye to helping us understand how we can improve our situation.

Brian is, it became obvious, a patient and clear explainer—we knew that from his Province House talk, and it was even more impactful when his topic was our house. It turns out that some of what ailed Province House, in very general terms, is what ails our house, and so a plan has emerged for keeping the water out: sealing, insulating, venting are at the heart of it.

This week Ben Thompson and his crew from the (excellently-named) Bent Carpentry arrived to start the we-hope-it-comes-in-at-less-than-$100 million remediation job. Walls have been peeled away, ceilings opening up, the attic probed, ancestral tiny leaks spotted, a starling’s nest found in the exhaust vent from the exhaust fan. 

Our main bathroom is mostly out of commission during this work, something we’ll work around for the promise of a house that keeps the water out. Stay tuned.

Recommended by Kate Bingaman-Burt (she of Daily Purchase Drawings):

This is where I fell in love with the Faber Castell Artist Pitt Pen Family. I was a Super Fine Tip girly from 2008 until 2022, and then they introduced the FH tip, which stands for Fude Hard. It’s like a short, hard brush tip, and I love it. I use the SB (Soft Brush) for the outlines on my paintings and the Brush for fills and for type whenever I need to draw lettering that needs to be vectorized (it transitions to digital cleaner than the Super Fine).

I checked with Bookmark, and Dan didn’t have them in stock, but he pointed me to Blank Canvas, where I found plenty of Pitt pens, including the FH.

$3.80 later, and I’m the proud owner of one.

I had some apprehension going into Charlottetown Zine Fest today: the idea of spending six hours sitting in the same place, on display, subject to all manner of social interactions, wasn’t presenting as “delight” as much as “dread.” Or at least “I’ll power through.”

Surprise: I loved it.

What I learned, most of all: the people who will go to something called “Charlottetown Zine Fest” are, by and large, my people: weirdos, creatives, unusuals, divergents, the curious and daring. They were interested in our work. We had good conversations. Engaging tablemates. The spirit of the place was life-affirming  

Every so often I would head out on walkabout with a print I’d created this week that I thought represented the spirit of the day:

I gave these away to other “tablers,” and in every case this was sufficient breaking of the ice to have a nice chat with the comic book artists, printmakers, publishers, and artists who we shared the space with.

(Among them were an unusual number of people who’d passed through the printmaking program at Mount Allison, clearly a creative nexus.)

And we sold our work. 

Indeed we almost ended up selling at least one of everything we brought with us, including niche works like Terms of Union, which got more interest today than in the last 15 years (thank you PEI history weirdos!).

We also sold a good number of The Thing About Islands, more than a few fuck, and many copies of relief prints that Lisa conceived, carved, and printed in just the last 72 hours:

Lisa’s My Higher Self Wears Hot Pink was popular, as were deep cuts like Aslan is on the move and There Will Be Brighter Days.

The only item that didn’t sell a single copy was Lubricate Often.

The six hours passed quickly, due in no small way to Lisa’s good company, punctuated by frequent buying/trading trips out into the room.

Charlottetown Zine Fest is a great gift to the city, and we should all laud its founders for their dedication and tenacity.

We shall return!

From The Last Terrace Day. by Leo Umilio:

Observe the population of a café terrace in the last week of October, because it is not the summer crowd in warmer clothes; it is a different institution entirely. The fair-weather sitters went indoors weeks ago, correctly, comfortably, and nobody blames them. The ones still out here, gloved around their cups, breath visible over the espresso, blanket across the knees like passengers on some slow northern crossing, have all made the same calculation and arrived at the same defiant result: the chair inside is warmer, and the chair outside is better, and warmth was never actually the point of sitting in a café. Everyone out here has chosen the worse table on purpose, and the choice is the entire message. The message is addressed to the year itself, and it says: not yet.

(via Juliane)

She won!

By a substantial margin.

In every ward.

A victory for progressive values, for science, for data, for compassion, for gender equity.

I’m proud, so proud, to live in a city that’s moved—finally!—beyond the same old same old and fully embraced the possibility of someone proposing we take a different tack.

Brava Amir.

From An Ode to the Return of Standard Time by James A. Reeves:

Let’s celebrate the end of Daylight Savings Time, my favorite moment of the year because it brings the night closer. And if you’re staying at a motel, you get a free hour. Changing the clocks should be the year’s biggest celebration with fireworks, parades, and gift-giving. Because if we can rearrange time, we can do anything we want. Invent new colors. Add more days to the week. Reset the internet to 2009. Have a functional government.

I happened to catch this graphic on Facebook yesterday, advertising the opening of a new taco place, Taco Libre, just a few blocks down the street:

Of course I insisted that we get takeout for supper, and I walked down in the rain just after they opened to pick it up. 

The menu, as promised, is taco-focused:

I ordered us a couple of chicken tacos, a couple of longaniza tacos, and a carlota for dessert.

While I was waiting, my server brought me a (tasty) sample of their esquites to enjoy:

Twenty minutes later I was walking up Prince Street, bag of tacos in hand. We enjoyed them while binge-watching (the chilling) Playing Nice on TV. 

The tacos were lovely, and hit the spot on a cold rainy night; the carlota moves into contention as “favourite Charlottetown dessert.”

I consider myself blessed to have such handy access to such tasty Mexican food.

I’ve updated The Evolution of 35 Prince Street post accordingly. 

One of the typefaces I acquired on a 2012 trip to Montreal was a one I labelled simply “36 pt. Sans Serif” once I got it home.

Longtime readers will recall the typeface from my pieces You Are On Mute, and Furiously Curious.

Today, in an effort that was part satisfying shopcraft, and part procrastination, I set out to vacuum out that type case, using a DRY Inc. vacuum cleaner attachment. 

Once I’d removed each letter, vacuumed out its cubby hole, and replaced each letter, I set out to identify the face.

It turned out not to be that hard. The typeface, which I have in all-caps in two weights, has several distinctive letters: Q, G, M, W and J are all quirky. 

I mean, look at this Q, it’s fantastic:

The big help, though, was the pin mark:

If you zoom way in to the mark on top you will see that it reads “Stephenson Blake,” which identifies the British foundry where it was designed and cast. From there all it took was a flip through the foundry’s catalog to find a match, Stephenson Blake Grotesque No. 3:

Sure enough, when I pulled out the obscured-by-grime type case label from under a piece of plastic, this was confirmed:

The type vacuum attachment is brilliant. Here’s how DRY explains it:

Intrepid letterpress fans who rescue old metal type from barns, basements, and decades-long neglected shops know the frustration of dust, chipmunk nests, and mouse turds that can inhabit as much space as the type in an old case. The age-old dilemma of how to clean these out has been the bane of letterpress printers for ages. We found one solution that we absolutely love. This vacuum nozzle attachment allows light materials to be sucked up while leaving the type in place. Larger materials stay stuck to the nozzle while running and can be lifted away…again leaving the type in place.

And it works: it sucks out the grime, and leaves the type.

I’ve grown fond of 36 pt. Sans Serif Grotesque No. 3 over the years, and feel an even greater fondness for it now that I know its provenance.

We’re down to the last six cruise ships of the season here in Charlottetown, with three in port today. This is the view down Prince Street this morning.