There hasn’t been much innovation in the toilet seat space in my lifetime: the methods for affixing the seat to the toilet have either been cheap plastic bolts that eventually give way, or solid metal bolts that, once exposed to the rigours of the toileting environment, rust, never to be loosened again.

Today I had a rare celestial event: a need to replace both of the toilet seats at 100 Prince Street, upstairs and down, and this led me to discover the “Easy Clean & Change Hinge” on Bemis-brand seats at Home Depot.

It’s an ingenious scheme that has you affix solid-seeming plastic bolts to the toilet and then simply dropping the seat into place and locking it. This upbeat video will walk you through it all.

While delays from prying off the rusted bolts of the old upstairs seat, with the attendant frustrations and swearing, caused Oliver to almost burst for lack of toilet, the new seat went on in about a minute, and the crisis was averted.

Bravo, Bemis, bravo.

Available in the shop. 

Don Jardine continues to harvest great stories from PEI’s weather history: like that time an RCAF bomber dropped depth charges on Sherwood.

You might think that alone would be the remarkable part of the story, but:

The plane eventually crashed near Shemogue Lake, New Brunswick within 100 metres of the shoreline, and the four occupants parachuted from the plane and landed on ice floes in Northumberland Strait. They were rescued after spending five days on the ice.

From the February 25, 1943 edition of The Guardian:

The first crocus of 2021. Twelve days earlier than last year.

I missed the golden hour of creativity today for making an everyday book, although, to my credit, I did use the first-hour-of-the-morning time for good, not evil. So I went at it this afternoon.

Rough and ready today. Orange cards on the inside, black card wrapped around the top, all glued together.

The 38 cent Inuit kayak stamp on the front is from 1989, with artwork by Louis-André Rivard, based on illustrations by Bernard Leduc

Everest Pipkin on NFTs and art is a phenomenally compelling piece of persuasive writing, and worth reading on that level alone, even if you’ve no interest in the blockchain, art, the environment or common sense.

By no means their only conclusion, but the one that stuck for me:

I’ve been working in digital spaces making artwork since well before cryptocurrency was around, and lack of scarcity is the only thing we’ve got.

I drove out to the North Shore on this warm day after realizing I hadn’t been outside in a few weeks.

My friend Chantal sent me and Oliver and lovely, ornately-crafted letter earlier this week, wrapped in an envelope of her own creation. I turned around and turned the envelope into a book and mailed it back to her. It wasn’t a Big Important Project, it was an end of the day “I’ve had too much coffee and have too much unused creativity” project. I loved it.

I read someone a few weeks ago reflecting on their work, and they mentioned taking maximum advantage of the “golden hour.” In photography and film this is the time, around twilight, when you can take photos like this (Boston, MA, 6:35 p.m., April 6, 2019):

In work, and creativity, though, the golden hour doesn’t need to align with the sun: it can be any time of the day when conditions are ripe for maximum creativity. 

Upon finding this hour–I’ve a sneaking suspicion that for me it’s the first hour I’m in the shop every morning–and then using it for something other than catching up on email, prioritizing my ticket queue, and generally entering the QEW of frenetic work life seems key to establishing a healthy creative practice.

So that’s what I’m going to do, for the next while.

Every morning when I arrive at the shop, I’m going to leave the computer off and make a book.

Not a Big Important Book, but an improvisational see-where-the-wind-blows-me book. Like the one I made for Chantal yesterday. I suspect some will be ugly. Some won’t work. Some will be frustrating. And some will be awesome.

Here’s today’s:

The cover is cut out of a cardboard envelope I received in the mail; the inside papers are pink card stock (which, really, was too heavy for this task, but I love the colour); the cord for the binding is Michael’s hemp beading cord; the twine for the button enclosure is baker’s twine from The Bookmark; the yellow buttons are from the shop button jar. The stitch is a simple pamphlet stitch, the sewing of which was so breezily satisfying after the rigours of the coptic stitch experiments of earlier in the year (here, here).

That time 15 years ago when Dr. Chris Lantz removed the “most challenging foreign ear body ever” from my ear. He has yet to redeem any of his three wishes.

Kalinko distributes Burmese-crafted objects around the world from their base in Yangon. They posted today on their blog about the situation on the ground there:

We’ve had team members having to hide behind bins from gunfire as they try and make it home from protesting. We’ve had makers messaging us in total panic not knowing what to do next or where to hide. We’ve had friends separated from their children overnight by military blockades cracking down on entire areas of Yangon. The internet is cut every night, and the electricity is worse than ever, so people are literally in the dark about what’s going on. Our colleagues are having to hide their toddlers in the bathroom in the evening to try and stifle their shouts of excitement while police are passing their doors. They think the gunfire is fireworks and can’t understand why they can’t go and watch.

There’s a section of their website devoted to profiling everyday people in Myanmar that serves as a powerful reminder of who’s being affected by the coup d’état there.