One of the downsides of our patrilineal naming scheme is that I have tended to identify more with my father and my father’s father, and so on, following the line Rukavinas back in history. Talking with my mother over the holidays reminded me of the folly of this lopsidedness, and so I started to peer down my maternal line. 

While having the last name Rukavina is, in the Prince Edward Island context, a semaphore for “not from around here,” that my mother descends from Scottish and Irish immigrants means that I’m likely more of here than not. I’m as much Scottish as I am Croatian, genetically-speaking; and as much Ukrainian and Irish too.

My mother’s mother was a Fraser from Ontario; her mother was a Mathison, whose mother was a Rae, whose mother was Ann Dryden (which is one of our two connections to Canadian hockey royalty).

Following the Dryden line back to into deepest Scotland, thanks to the genealogy obsession of the Mormons, proves remarkably easy, and so I’m able to identify my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather as Alan Cochrane of that Ilk, born 1432 in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland. 

As you might imagine, having a relation whose name includes “of that Ilk” is rather delightful to me.

Also in my family tree are William “The Notorious Intriguer” Cunningham, Baroness Isobel Moncrieff, Sir Lord Archibald “Bell the Cat” Douglas, Lady Margaret Catherine Hoppringle (and isn’t that a delightful last name).

According to Rootsweb, 12 generations back I have 8,190 grandparents with a ballpark 705,588 descendants. So, in other words, I have no rightful exclusive claim to use “of that Ilk”  or “The Notorious Intriguer” as part of my name. 

But I’m likely related, thus, to many of my fellow Islanders at some point in the family tree.

I was lucky to receive a discarded calendar featuring vintage tourism posters from across Canada. I immediately set to reviving my bookbinding practice, making a coptic-stitched sketchbook from the “Toronto” page. I’m quite rusty, so this was more a beta test than anything; I’d forgotten how much I love book making, and I’ve already started on another, this time using a map of the area around Mbarara, Uganda that I rescued from the University of Calgary Library in 2014.

I found the videos Coptic Stitch Journal Tutorial! and DIY Coptic Stitch Bookbinding Tutorial helpful in reminding me of the stitching pattern; they compliment each other, and if you’re going to try your hand, I’d recommend watching both.

I enjoyed this couple interviewing themselves about coffee, especially as their starting point was a Gaggia machine similar to the one I’ve used for a decade.

This is a particularly helpful mnemonic:

Green coffee beans are good for three years. Roasted coffee beans are good for three weeks. Ground coffee is good for three minutes. And an espresso shot should be drunk in 30 seconds.

The standout culinary highlight of the fall was the new vegan pizza at Receiver Brass Shop’s Thursday night pizza-pasta: it is fantastic, and its freedom from animal products is remarkably incidental.

The key ingredient is labeled as “Lil’ Darlings Maple Sausages,” something that, according to the Internet, does not exist.

This week we solved the mystery, at Founders Hall: it turns out that Lil’ Darlings is a corporate side-hustle of Stir it Up, and soon we’ll be able to buy them at better Charlottetown food retailers.

We had the sausages for breakfast at Receiver Victoria Row last week and found they’re just as good for breakfast.

This is a great development.

There’s an exercise where you take an abstract scribble and transform it into a fully formed drawing. It’s hard not to think of that exercise when watching the Apple TV+ dramedy Ted Lasso.

The show, or at least its characters, started life as a series of NBC Sports promos starring Jason Sudekis, but those were mere abstract shapes compared to the fleshed out thing that they’ve evolved into.

Among the digerati, I’ve read more than once comments like these from Jason Kottke:

It’s ok if you don’t care for sports. It’s not about sports.

Assuming it was about sports kept me from watching it initially; when I finally succumbed I realized that, indeed, it’s not about sports, at least not in the sense that you have to be sporty to enjoy it. Which I do.

In this vein it’s not unlike Sports Night, the venerable Aaron Sorkin/Thomas Schlamme creation, from which the absence of a laugh track earned a New Yorker profile before it even debuted. Author Tad Friend wrote there:

The subject of sports isn’t particularly suited to a TV series, but likeable characters who like sports are.

The characters of Ted Lasso are exceedingly likeable, especially Sudekis, who, with his costar Brendan Hunt and two others, created the show. The original Ted Lasso, from the NBC Sports days, was all thinly drawn goofy parody; the Ted Lasso in the series is that, plus backstory, plus heart, plus metaphysics. He is the coach we all wished we once had.

This success of transforming a sketch into a work of art makes me think I should option the series rights for those old Peter Pan commercials.

Sparrow writes about the death of his mother in The Sun:

How to describe what I’m going through? It’s like breaking up with your girlfriend, if your girlfriend had also given birth to you.

I made this Coconut Chickpea Rice for supper tonight (ingredients and recipe in the video description); it’s very good. It also makes it clearer why we once went to war over spices.

Every once in a while I get an email from Google letting me know that a photo that I took in 2017 of Clover in Burlington, MA, has been seen some awesome number of times — 1.5 million was the count today:

It turns out that this is because if you look up Clover in Burlington on Google Maps, it’s my photo that’s featured:

There are scores of photos attached to that Google Maps listing; I have no idea what makes my photo the one that’s deemed worthy of illustrating the location, but I’m happy to have it do so, as I’ve always had a good meal there, and I like the Clover concept.

I especially like the blog the company keeps that chronicles its mistakes.

It’s been two months since I launched Queen Square Press as both an imprint and an online shop for my creative goods.

It’s been a resounding success, both financially (in its own modest way) and spiritually (there’s nothing like the feeling of having things you dreamed up and made by hand wing their way around the world).

Here are the first two months of results:

• Orders: 44
• Revenue: $1,173.78
• Most Popular Products
  • You Are On Mute tag (sold out) - 20
  • MMXX! card (sold out) - 19
  • Clear Cloud Rain Snow - 10
  • Tidings of Comfort and Joy - 9
  • Remember Other Places - 8
  • Using Her Marbles - 8
  • Set a Goal - 7
  • Ask Questions - 5
  • I am a Canadian (sold out) - 4
  • Prince Edward Island Postcard (sold out) - 4
• Least Popular Product: Two Month Calendar (apparently I overestimated the modest-calendar market).
• Conversion Rate: 5.2%
• Shipping Country:
  • Canada - 34
  • USA - 4
  • Germany - 2
  • Denmark - 1
  • Netherlands - 1
  • Sweden - 1
• Shipping Province in Canada
  • Prince Edward Island - 19
  • Ontario - 10
  • Alberta - 2
  • British Columbia - 1
  • Nunavut - 1
  • Quebec - 1

As seems to be de rigueur these days, I may shutter the shop for a while, and launch a new “season” in the spring; for the time-being, however, it’s open for your shopping pleasure.

Oliver had a huge breakthrough in late 2020, overcoming his anxiety about crossing streets to the point where he can now happily retrieve the mail from our community mailbox, which requires crossing Grafton Street, every night. He parlayed this new superpower into a double-street-cross last week to meet our friend Sandy for coffee at Leonhard’s.

Oliver’s okay crossing at traffic lights, but not yet at intersections without lights; although this limits his terrain, it’s a terrain vastly expanded nonetheless, and a great boon to his independence.

In order to give him an idea of where he can reach within the traffic-signalled area of downtown, I used Overpass Turbo to plot the locations of the 10 traffic lights of downtown Charlottetown on a map:

When we bought our house in 2000, at 100 Prince Street, we purposefully relocated as close to the heart of the city as possible: Catherine didn’t drive, and, about to be a mother and coming off 5 years of expensive taxi rides from our house in Kingston, she was eager to be able to walk everywhere. Little did we know, at the time, that this would, 20 years later, prove to be a wise decision for the next generation as well.

Although there are 10 traffic lights downtown, the lack of lights on Fitzroy Street means it’s a hard firebreak for Oliver, so there are really only 6 lights that are relevant; even with that limitation, he can still reach most of the streets in the downtown core between the north side of Richmond and the south side of Fitzroy and the east side of Pownal and the west side of Hillsborough:

Included in this area are the downtown public transit hub, a couple of dozen restaurants, The Bookmark, two pharmacies, The Guild, the Confederation Centre of the Arts (with its theatre, art gallery and library), City Hall, the Legislative Assembly, at least two places where he can buy carrots and fresh-baked bread, and an ATM that works on the Credit Union network.

Go Oliver!