Oliver and I went over to Memorial Hall at Confederation Centre of the Arts for the Artist Trading Card event last night.

The setup was similar to previous years, but for the palpable feel of COVID in the air. Oliver, ever receptive to any hint of tension coursing through the zeitgeist, was somewhat on edge, to the point where minor violations of (his) protocol, like only my name being written on the Ziploc bag provided for card-collecting, came close to sending him over the edge. But we made our way, and things simmered to a low, sustainable boil.

There were 40ish participants, each of us bringing 39ish cards, so that we all left with one of everything. My entry was unique inasmuch as there were four parts to it: WE, ARE, HERE, plus a loose-leaf binder ring. I put an example of the ring-grappled cards at the head of the table as a guide, but otherwise left it to people to figure out what to do (leaving one of the most interesting aspects of the night, for me, eavesdropping on conversations among the others: “what, um, are we supposed to, um, take all three?”). Because I put 40 of each card, and 40 rings, out on the table, at the end of the night I had analytics to show that 5 people took only a WE, unable to take the hint (and/or perhaps having nobody to whisper to for support).

It would be a stretch to call the evening “fun,” given the heat, the noise, the mask-wearing, the aforementioned tension. But I’m glad I did it nonetheless, and I’m glad Oliver came with me.

My table at Artist Trading Card night 2020 at Confederation Centre of the Arts, with my We Are Here laid out.

Every weekday morning for three years I drove Oliver to Colonel Gray Senior High School. When we arrived at the school, I would text his educational assistant–usually Dave, but sometimes Jill or Laura or Maritza—so that they’d know to come outside and fetch him to go on their morning constitutional.

We are here, I texted every morning like clockwork:

We Are Here, texted for several days in a row.

Oliver turned this into a stirring recitation one morning when we had a little bit of extra time to kill in the car while waiting.

When it came time to pick a subject for tonight’s Artist Trading Cards event at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, We Are Here popped into my mind as a kind of baseline statement of claim for humanity.

The times may be challenging, but we are here. So to speak.

I had a couple of 100 packs of № 1 shipping tags here in the shop, and decided to use those as a starting point (shipping tags come in standard sizes; № 1 are the smallest, at 70 mm by 35 mm).

I chose 30 point Futura Bold (acquired in 2015 from Letterpress Things) for the typeface, and Southern Ink Dense Black as the ink. I experimented with using upper and lower case, but opted for all caps for symmetry’s sake.

Shipping tags turn out to be a joy to print on: they’re nice and meaty, easy to get in and out of the press, quick to dry.

I printed 50 each of WE, ARE and HERE:

A set of HERE set out to dry.

Three piles of shipping tags, one of WE, one of ARE, one of HERE, stacked beside each other.

Three tags laid side by side, printed ARE, WE and HERE.

Once they were printed and dried, I decided that my artist trading card partners would need something to lasso their sets together, so I purchased three boxes of 1 inch silver “loose leaf rings” from Staples:

We Are Here held together by a loose leaf ring.

While I went into this project thinking WE ARE HERE, I realized, as I continued, that there are many combinations that can be made from these three words:

WE ARE HERE
WE HERE ARE
ARE WE HERE
ARE HERE WE
HERE WE ARE
HERE ARE WE

Mathematically, to calculate the number of permutations in this case, where there are 3 objects combined into sets of 3, you simply add up the integers from 1 to 3, so 1 + 2 + 3, to get 6 possible combinations.

I’ll be trading sets tonight at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, starting at 7:00 p.m. Unfortunately, due COVID, it’s not a public event, so you’ll have to use your imagination to recreate the thrill of the trade.

My font of 120 point Akzidenz Grotesk is missing the apostrophe. But there’s a comma. And what is a comma but an apostrophe in need of a lift.

Letterpress type showing a comma used in place of an apostrophe.

Spotted near the Murphy Community Centre on Richmond Street in Charlottetown: “No Parking” has given way to the “circle P slash.”

Photo of No Parking zone, showing P with circle and slash painted over the words No Parking from previous years.

Ellie, who until recently was a #vanlifer with her partner Charlie, has gone solo, ditched Charlie and the van, and flown from the UK to South Korea, where she must quarantine for 14 days. She’s vlogging about the experience, focusing on the interesting minutiae.

On my computer I had a task list called “Peter” that was empty, and that I never used. So I deleted it. I did not realize that, in doing do, I was also deleting my calendar of the same name.

Oops.

In the normal course of affairs this would have been a cataclysm: appointments, meetings, events, all lost track of. My personal and professional live in ruins.

These times are not normal, though: a weekly Friday appointment, plasma donation tomorrow, Pen Night on Saturday, a dentist appointment next week, two meetings in September. It took me 5 minutes to rebuild my calendar from scratch.

There truly is nothing going on.

That said, I discovered that I need a more robust backup routine for my personal data. I’ve put doing that on my calendar too.

My Artist Trading Cards entry (from the back), hung in the window of 100 Prince Street on bright orange string. They also come in “Here We Are,” “Are We Here” and “Here Are We” models.

Photo of WE ARE HERE cards in the front window of our house, from behind.

For more than a month now I’ve been consuming a diet, every morning, of the blog posts I wrote on that day, over the last 20 years.

Beyond giving me a sense of my mortality, I’m using this to triage blog posts that need updating. This involves things like dealing with the Share on Ovi fiasco, repatriating photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube, and fixing any odd early-oughts HTML that needs fixing.

Here’s how I do this.

I use Reeder on my iPhone to consume RSS feeds (see aboutfeeds.com for what this means), and one of the RSS feeds I consume is this one, which contains the “on this day” posts. 

Here I am, for example, reading, reading this stressful blog post from 2019:

Screen shot of a blog post in Reeder on my iPhone

When I come across a blog post that needs updating–something I’ll do later in the day, once I get to the office–I invoke an iOS “Shortcut,” like this, selecting “Update Blog Post”:

Screen shot of the "share sheet", showing the Update Blog Post shortcut

This Shortcut creates a reminder for me, in the Reminders app:

Screen shot of the iOS Shortcut showing that it adds a Reminder with the URL

When, later in the day, I get to the office and have some spare time, I open up the Reminders app, and see a list of URLs to update:

Screen show of detail of the Reminders app showing blog posts to update.

Over a month of doing this I’ve developed the muscle memory to make it a habit, and I’ve come to enjoy the daily bit of detective work that patching up shaky old posts entails.

The documentary The Booksellers : A behind-the-scenes look at the New York rare book world is streaming in Canada on CBC Gem.

About This Blog

Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

To learn more about me, read my /nowlook at my bio, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way). You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, or receive a daily digests of posts by email.

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