Nineteen years ago, at the PopTech Conference in Maine, I first learned about Canada Post’s custom postage stamp service, Picture Postage; Megatrends author John Naisbitt mentioned it in his talk.

Being a lover of postage, and of customization, you would have thought I’d have jumped at the change to craft my own stamps, but it’s taken until now for the stars to align: at the end of November I ordered a sheet of stamps using the MMXX! card I’d printed on my letterpress as the image. I’m not entirely satisfied with the result: the service imposes a design requirement to use one of its frames around your chosen image, and the only not-completely-ugly-and-intrusive option is “shadow,” but even that imposes a certain pall of ugliness on anything it wraps around.

Nonetheless: I have stamps. That I designed, typeset, printed, and photographed. That’s pretty cool.

A sheet of 50 stamps came to $80.88 with taxes and shipping included, or $1.61 for each stamp, a 75% premium over the cost of a regular 92 cent stamp. So I won’t be replacing them as my everyday postage of choice. Delivery took 17 days from my initial order.

The Coast Guard knows how to celebrate Christmas, in its own quiet way, as evidenced from these buoys on the Charlottetown waterfront near the Marine Terminal.

(The black and yellow buoy in the middle, marked CJB, is overwintering here, but during navigation season it serves as “Spithead East Cardinal light buoy,” off the coast of Cumberland, something I know from List of Lights - Atlantic).

I’ve now been archiving Prince Edward Island electricity load and generation data for the last 7 years. Last night at supper time, the Island was consuming more electricity than it ever has before: we reached a peak daily load of 286.29 MW at 5:29 p.m. This tops the previous peak of 285.99 MW, reached January 17 of this year.

There must be some confluence of electricity-consuming behaviour on December 16, as previous yearly peaks were on this day of the year in both 2016 and 2019. Perhaps it’s a combination of a sudden plunge of temperatures (and maybe an over-compensation by Islanders, turning up the thermostat in disbelief that winter is happening yet again), combined with holiday lights, and Christmas baking?

Here’s a chart showing the peak daily load from January 1, 2013 to yesterday (and here’s the CSV file of the data used to generate it):

A reminder that if you have an Amazon Echo or other Alexa-powered device, you can ask it things like “Alexa, ask PEI Power for the peak load in 2016” and “Alexa, ask PEI Power for the wind energy.”

And if you want to keep your finger on the pulse of electricity load and generation of the Island, pei.consuming.ca is a compact, portable way of doing so.

My old friend, and former business partner, Dave Moses is conjuring magic from his closet during these unprecedented times. Oliver and I had front-row seats in the Zoom audience last night, and we emerged, truly, amazed: I have no idea how Dave did most of what he did.

If you’re looking for some socially distanced family fun, look no further: buy tickets here.

Shopping at Monsieur Vrac, the new zero waste general goods store next to Best Buy in West Royalty, is a pain in the ass.

That’s kind of the point.

Or at least it was the point driven home to me. 

All the futzing around with grease pencils (to mark product codes on bags and jars). All the scooping, filling, pumping. All the trying-to-figure-out-what-everything-is-from-the-tiny-labels. All the math and mass.

Combined, the point it all drives home is why we have packaging in the first place: it’s simply a lot easier to pick up a plastic container of roasted almonds from a rack, a container that has a price on it, and put it in your shopping cart than it is to find the right size glass jar, place it under the roasted almonds dispenser, unleash the trap door so that the almonds can flow, hope that the almonds don’t overflow all over the place, and hope that you haven’t mistakenly served yourself $25 of roasted almonds (or, in my case, $20.56 of vegan dark chocolate chips).

On my first visit, last night, my purchases ranged from 1 cent worth of coriander to $20.56 worth of the aforementioned chocolate; there are no itemized receipts provided, in keeping with the zero waste philosophy, but you are invited to take a photo of the display of the point of sale system; here’s mine:

Because of COVID-19, you’re not allowed to bring your own containers, leaving the only option to purchase glass jars (which cost between $1 and $2 each, depending on the size) or to use (free) paper bags (which, led to an embarrassing chocolate chip spill when the bag broke). The jars can be returned to the store for credit on your next order, so it’s not entirely an out-of-pocket cost; post-COVID, when we’ll be able to take our own containers, things will improve (although there will be the need to weigh containers before filling, which is another hill to climb).

Sharon Labchuk, founding leader of the Green Party of PEI, once talked on the radio about how it’s not that the things we consume on Prince Edward Island don’t consume energy and generate waste, it’s just that the energy and the waste, from creation and packaging both, is hidden from us, because it happens offshore; at M. Vrac we’re called to replace some of that energy with our own energy. In doing so, we make the hidden obvious, and I emerged, after 45 minutes of wandering and filling and labeling and (accidentally) spilling, with two shopping bags full of things I am going to either eat or use again, rather than throwing away.

All that said, I’m not sure whether I’ll go back to Monsieur Vrac: I’m completely on board with the philosophy, and seeing how much packaging I didn’t use was enlightening, but I wonder if I have it in me to bus my own tables week after week. I will try. I hope others will try. In the meantime, I have a lifetime supply of vegan 70% chocolate chips.

Oh, and one more new thing in the shop today. Perhaps the nichiest of niche products. But if you’ve an Evelyn in your life, it doesn’t get much better than this.

New in the letterpress goods shop this afternoon, a 2-month calendar for January and February 2021. Also accurate in 2027, 2038 and 2044.

Night Shift by Lucy Dacus.