James A. Reeves’ luggage went missing at Heathrow:

Our luggage went missing somewhere in the depths of Heathrow, so I bought a cheap change of clothes at a discount chain called TK Maxx, which has the same logo and chaotic atmosphere as TJ Maxx in the States. Only one letter was different. This minor tweak captures the uncanny sensation of being on the other side of an ocean, yet everything feels more or less the same now that we’re living in the shadow of an end-game corporate colossus.

From Wikipedia:

TK Maxx is a subsidiary of the American apparel and home goods company TJX Companies based in Framingham, Massachusetts. … The chain uses a slightly different name from that of the TJ Maxx stores in the United States, to avoid confusion with the British retailer T. J. Hughes.

A confounding problem for someone like me who swipe-types thousands of words a week on my iPhone: the keyboard capitalizes words after a certain kind of delete, after a certain kind of autocorrect.

Swipe-typing on my iPhone is already a perplexing mix of inconsistency and getting “orgasm” when I want to type “program.”

Parliament’s Grievous Angel Charlie Angus On Getting from Darkness to the Light.

Sage, bracing words from one of our country’s most eloquent legislators.

During my public school years teachers would frequently write PLO on blackboards as a signal to custodians to not erase what was written, during nightly cleaning—Please Leave On.

That we were all returning home each evening to watch news of the PLO—the Palestinian Liberation Organization—was somehow ignored by everyone but me.

In grade 7 we had an all-school assembly, presented by a farm safety group, to talk about the dangers of the PTO, and getting caught up in it, something the farm kids understood intuitively that was lost on the rest of us.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned it stands for Power Take Off, the spinning gizmo off the end of tractors from which all manner of farm implements can be powered.

Browsing the KitchenAid mixer attachments website today, I realized that their stand mixers have what amounts to a PTO; they call it an attachment hub. You can attach a pasta roller, a sausage maker, or a juice squeezer.

What’s remarkable is that KitchenAid supports “cross-generational attachment compatibility” meaning that attachments from the 1930s can be used on modern mixers.

In an era when phone charger standards change with the season, this is a commendable buttress against obsolescence.

My first coffee in a coffee shop for 2022, a gift of the slight lessening in the march of COVID and the resulting slight loosening of the “stay in your homes and lock your doors.”

Not pictured: one of Angel’s chocolate wafers, which I’d missed.

The coffee—a hand brew by Hai at The Shed—was fantastic.

My first time inside an elevator in almost two years. It felt important to memorialize.

From this month’s Skyline Type Foundry update:

Last month I spent half a day up on a ladder flaking several years of accumulated type-metal off the ceiling of the foundry. When molten metal escapes from the caster it’s called a “squirt”, and it goes straight up and straight left (sometimes straight right too). The operator, standing in front and slightly to the right, is safe—provided you don’t have your face in the machine at the moment the piston drops (that’s the first thing you’re trained not to do). Almost all squirts are preventable. But they happen—mostly from inattention, or fouling of the stripper spring, which causes a jam-up where the type is delivered from the mold. You gotta to be ready to instantly shut ‘er down if it happens. The Thompson Type Caster was patented in 1907, and is most certainly not idiot-proof. You never take your attention off the machine while it’s in operation.

An easy dessert to make at the last minute, a gift of my friend Silva: chop up some dates, press them into a pan (I used a small spring-form cheesecake pan). Melt chocolate and pour over top. In today’s batch I added salt flakes. Amazing.

In today’s Prince Edward Island COVID briefing we saw Hon. Dennis King at his best, speaking without briefing notes from his heart, about where we’ve been and where we’re going.

It was appreciated.

I sent him a thank you card. Maybe you could too?

I’d resisted asking someone to take a photo of me riding Jack the Horse until today: I was, I think, afraid of what I might look like, afraid of being seen in a position of vulnerability, afraid I’d look like a dork.

But as my confidence has increased, I’m feeling less vulnerable (or simply more comfortable being vulnerable), and I don’t really care if I look like a dork or not.

So I asked Ashley to take a photo of me, and this is the result. Dorky? Possibly. But I’m smiling, deeply and genuinely, and that’s all that matters.