As of 3:30 p.m. today (Friday, Feb. 20, 2004), downtown Charlottetown is still pretty closed down, post-blizzard.

Tim Horton’s on Kent St. has been open all day, and there’s a steady from of customers. Timothy’s and the Formosa Tea House are both closed.

All of the stores in the Confederation Court Mall are closed for the day, with the exception of Shoppers Drug Mart and Nature’s Harvest (although Nature’s Harvest might close early: I was their first customer in a couple of hours).

There appears to be at least one lane open on most of the streets downtown, although there are plenty of huge snowbanks all over the place, and the sidewalks are hard to navigate.

Here’s Kent Street, looking west from the pedway:

One of the many benefits of having a neighbour with a Bobcat is that your sidewalk gets blown out early:

The sidewalks along the east side of University Avenue hadn’t been plowed as of noon today (I’m not complaining, just commenting: there’s one hell of a lot of snow to get moved, and the City is doing an admirable job). Here’s what it looked like:

On the left: my boots and Catherine’s snowshoes after my 15 foot attempt to get to work. On the right: the view out our front door of our neighbour’s compost bins, left in the driveway.

There is a mighty storm happening around us. This isn’t some sort of minor-league “a little snow” kind of storm: it’s a “we can’t open our front door” storm. No snow plows. No police. Tried to get to work, but turned back after about 15 feet. So far, though, we have power. Will hunker down and watch the SponsorGate hearings on Newsworld.

Okay, this is cool: Teleport lets you use one keyboard and mouse to control two Macs, over Ethernet. It’s impossible to do justice to how useful it is until you’ve set it up, and have your iMac and iBook side by each. If you have two Macs, you should try it out. [found on MacOSXHints.com]

At the New Years Levee held by Premier Pat Binns, Brian Simpson, the excellent Provincial Photographer, was taking pictures of every attendee. This was a huge challenge, as I’m sure there were at least 500 citizens paying their respects.

About a month after the levee, using some highly sophisticated identity matching system, every person who had their photograph taken received a personal note, signed by the Premier, with a copy of the photo, in the mail.

Here is mine:

Notice several interesting aspects of the photo:

• I am paying attention to the photographer, the Premier is not; as a result, it looks like I’m not paying attention to the Premier.
• I am wearing my famous green cardigan (the one that Ian and the Bishop have complimented me on, and that Daniel seems to think disqualifies me from being able to start a rock band if this web thing doesn’t work out).
• I have a weird grin on my face. This might be partially explained by my partial drunkenness.
• For some reason, I appear to look a lot more like Father Mulcahy than I’m comfortable with.
• The Premier appears to be slipping me a $100 bill. In fact he slipped me a limited edition Prince Edward Island pin.
• My natty green shirt is by Simons Montreal.

If you come a-leveeing next year, you’ll be able to get your very own picture!