Thanks to the diligence and generosity of my mother, I am now the custodian of my great-grandfather’s barometer.

I happened upon a bootleg of this seminal episode of thirtysomething last night. I was reminded, yet again, how groundbreaking the series was, on so many levels.

This particular episode touches on war, American patriotism, free speech, advertising, and career burnout. It aired in May 1991, in the shadow of the Gulf War, and, in a way that would have been inconceivable in an earlier day—or, for that matter, since—it both called that war into question, and placed it inside the context of a military-industrial-advertising complex.

This all played out against the background of Michael Steadman (Ken Olin) having increasingly severe anxiety about his personal and political role in all this, playing against the unvarnished capitalist Miles Drentell (the brilliant David Clennon).

The part of the episode that hit me the deepest, though, is how Michael and his wife Hope (Mel Harris) touch each other: again, in a way that wasn’t seen on television before, and has seldom been seen since, it is the unhurried workaday touch of mutual affection.

It’s not surprising I was drawn to that, I suppose, because in my own life it is that touch I miss the most.

Paul Hawken’s new book Regeneration came out last week. I have been following Hawken since his Growing a Business was published in the mid-1980s. I’m skeptical of “all we need to do is X and the climate crisis will be solved” books, but at this point I’ll take any help I can get. I’ll report back on what I learn.

If perchance you wake up one Monday morning, realize you forgot to go grocery shopping, and fall back on the leftover waffles from Sunday morning to feed your daughter breakfast, here is a piece of advice for you: wild blueberry mustard is not an acceptable substitute for blueberry compote. Your daughter is liable to say something along the lines of “these waffles are horrible!!”

I thought I could get away with it. I was wrong.

I thought this post on GNOME launchers would cover the same ground as this 1980 Maclean’s article on gnome launchers. But it didn’t.

Olivia and I have been in the habit of going to Starbucks every Sunday afternoon for the last year. Starbucks offers some advantages that trump the moribund coffee and aggressive capitalism:

First, we can order online, from the car, through its well-designed app (which Olivia can use without a credit card, as Starbucks essentially has its own currency). The app mitigates the usual choice-making cauldron that brews up when waiting in line, and Olivia has used this to good effect and has broadened out her order and tried a lot of new things (including that time she added every syrup and sprinkle and topping on the menu to her order, and almost exceeded the length of the cup-sticker printer).

Second, Olivia, over time, has gained the confidence to go in and pick up our orders by herself, which is a huge deal, inasmuch as it involves wading across a tricky line of caffeine-deprived drivers, going into the store, lining up, communicating with the staff, and making her way back.

Today, though, things went off the rails.

We found the app wouldn’t allow us to place an online order, meaning Olivia had to go inside and place the order face to face. That she was willing to level up to this new challenge is a credit to her burgeoning bravery and skills.

So far so good.

Except that when she got to the door, she found it locked, with a sign saying the store was closed for renovation, and directing customers to order at the drive-thru.

So that’s what she did: she walked over to the drive-thru speaker and placed her order. Without any problem.

Then she came to fetch me, as the logistics of making it to the pickup window were too much for her.

We made it around to the back together, wading through puddles and avoiding cars, only to be told that they couldn’t hand Olivia her order because she wasn’t in a vehicle. “It’s a liability issue,” the manager told us. While we were standing 3 feet away. To pick up an order. That Olivia had placed. At the drive-thru speaker. As the sign on the door instructed.

We were in no position to argue, as the manager was just following orders. So we bounced back through the cars and the puddles.

And drove down the street to the Atlantic Superstore. Where brave Olivia, undeterred, went in, placed her order at the in-store Starbucks, successfully, emerged to find us MIA, hidden in the parking lot, and persevered until we appeared.

We drank our coffee.

Olivia 3. Starbucks 0.

My friend Peter is Dancing With the Stars this month in support of Hospice PEI, an organization that’s been of great support to our family over the last two years.

Peter has a demanding day job; taking this on in the heart of his busy season is an act of great service and generosity.

Won’t you consider making a donation to “vote” for him!

Megan Hallinan has mushrooms nailed to her head:

You know how either as an adult, you see something dangled in front of you but you decide that it is not needed in the moment. So you carry on with your day assuming that this moment will be gone forever. But then it’s not. You have a un chiodo fisso—a single thought fixed in your mind.

Un chiodo fisso is such a lovely Italian idiom: there’s rarely a time I don’t have a single thought fixed in my head. Sometimes it’s a design for something, and the thought cannot be staunched until I make the thing, sometimes it’s a less helpful “if only X happens, everything will be better.”

Mindfulness is all the rage these days, enough to risk triggering my aversion-to-things-all-the-rage switch, had I not found it so darned helpful in navigating the emotional seas. Having a slight mindful remove from an unhelpful notion nailed to my head has proved a useful device for dislodging it.

As the instigator of the renaming of Pen Night to The Pen and Pencil Club of Prince Edward Island, I felt a certain obligation to create the first membership cards for the newly-named group.

As I was talking to myself about different ideas, it dawned on me that pen being embedded in pencil might be an interesting starting point.

I took P E N C I L out of the Akzidenz Grotesk drawer and played around with various arrangements.

What cemented things was remembering that I had a large ampersand, a wood type orphan that I acquired along the way. Sliding it into place as the glue, with its jaunty leg that sorta looks like a pen (or a pencil), I knew I had my design.

I decided to print two-colour, black for the letters, yellow for the ampersand. Things got really interesting when, after printing a run on white card stock, I experimented with some different colours: this opened up a whole new world of unexpected interactions between the yellow ink and the paper colour, pink being my favourite result, mostly because, well, who-woulda-thunk.

The cards are, of course, bigger than a typical membership card: that was intentional, as I planned for them to both stand alone and to work well as the cover for a pamphlet-stitched sketch or ink sample booklet.

I distributed the finished products tonight at the September meeting of the P&PCoPEI and they appeared to have been be well-received. I look forward to seeing how the members remix them.