This is the 2024 levee schedule for New Year’s Day, January 1, 2024 for Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island.

Show levees that are ages 19+ Show only Charlottetown-area levees

Organization	Location	Starts	Ends	♿ Accessible	All Ages
Timothy’s Coffee and Campbell Webster	Timothy’s Coffee 154 Great George Street, Charlottetown, PE	8:00 AM	10:00 AM	Yes	Yes
Upstreet Craft Brewing	Upstreet Craft Brewing 41 Allen St, Charlottetown, PE	10:00 AM	11:00 AM	Yes	No
Lieutenant Governor	Government House 1 Terry Fox Drive, Charlottetown, PE	10:00 AM	11:30 AM	Yes	Yes
Mayor of Charlottetown	Charlottetown City Hall 199 Queen St, Charlottetown, PE	10:30 AM	12:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Rotary Club of Charlottetown	Beaconsfield Carriage House 2 Kent Street, Charlottetown, PE	10:30 AM	12:00 PM	Yes	Yes
North Granville Community Centre	North Granville Community Centre 575 Taylor Road, North Granville, PE	11:00 AM	12:30 PM	Yes	Yes
Morell Lions Club (Reception)	Morell Fire Hall 15 Park Street, Morell, PE	11:00 AM	1:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Town of Borden-Carleton	Borden Legion 240 Main Street, Borden-Carleton, PE	11:00 AM	1:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Silver Fox Curling and Yacht Club	Silver Fox Curling and Yacht Club 110 Water Street, Summerside, PE	11:00 AM	6:00 PM	Yes	No
University of PEI	Faculty of Sustainable Design Engineering 550 University Ave., Charlottetown, PE	11:30 AM	1:00 PM	Yes	Yes
HMCS Queen Charlotte	HMCS Queen Charlotte 210 Water Street, Charlottetown, PE	11:30 AM	1:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Mayor of Kensington	Family and Friends Restaurant 45 Broadway St N, Kensington, PE	11:30 AM	1:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Prince Edward Island Regiment	Col J David Stewart Armoury 1 Haviland Street, Charlottetown, PE	12:00 PM	1:30 PM	Yes	Yes
Town of Stratford	Stratford Town Centre 234 Shakespeare Dr., Stratford, PE	12:00 PM	1:30 PM	Yes	Yes
PEI Brewing Company	PEI Brewing Company 96 Kensington Road, Charlottetown, PE	12:00 PM	2:00 PM	Yes	No
Copper Bottom Brewing	Copper Bottom Brewing 567 Main Street, Montague, PE	12:00 PM	6:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Royal Canadian Legion - O’Leary	O’Leary Legion 69 Ellis Ave., O’Leary, PE	12:00 PM	7:00 PM	No	No
Seniors Active Living Centre	Bell Aliant Centre 560 University Avenue, Charlottetown, PE	12:30 PM	2:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Town of O’Leary	O’Leary Town Hall 18 Community Street, O’Leary, PE	1:00 PM	4:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Morell Lions Club (Free Skating)	Morell Credit Union Rink 59 Queen Elizabeth, Morell, PE	1:00 PM	2:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlottetown	SDU Place 45 Great George Street, Charlottetown, PE	1:00 PM	2:30 PM	No	Yes
Morell & Area Development Corporation	Morell Credit Union Rink Community Room 59 Queen Elizabeth, Morell, PE	1:00 PM	3:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Royal Canadian Legion - Wellington	Wellington Legion 97 Sunset Dr, Wellington, PE	1:00 PM	3:00 PM	Yes	No
St. John’s Lodge No. 1 and Victoria Lodge No. 2	Masonic Temple 204 Hillsborough St., Charlottetown, PE	1:00 PM	3:00 PM	No	Yes
Town of Three Rivers	Three Rivers Town Hall 172 Fraser Street, Montague, PE	1:00 PM	3:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Royal Canadian Legion - Tignish & Town of Tignish	Tignish Legion 221 Phillip Street, Tignish, PE	1:00 PM	5:00 PM	Yes	No
The Haviland Club	The Haviland Club 2 Haviland St, Charlottetown, PE	1:00 PM	5:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Village Green Brewery	Village Green Brewery 30 Church Street, Cornwall, PE	1:00 PM	5:00 PM	No	No
City of Summerside	City Hall 275 Fitzroy Street, Summerside, PE	1:30 PM	3:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Town of Cornwall	Cornwall Town Hall 39 Lowther Drive, Cornwall, PE	1:30 PM	3:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Royal Canadian Legion - Summerside	Summerside Legion 340 Notre Dame St., Summerside, PE	1:30 PM	4:30 PM	Yes	No
Garden Nursing Home	Garden Home 310 North River Road, Charlottetown, PE	2:00 PM	3:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Royal Canadian Legion - Charlottetown	Charlottetown Legion 99 Pownal Street, Charlottetown, PE	2:00 PM	3:30 PM	Yes	No
Benevolent Irish Society	Hon. Edward Whelan Irish Cultural Centre 582 North River Road, Charlottetown, PE	2:00 PM	4:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Razzy’s Roadhouse	Razzy’s Roadhouse 161 St. Peters Road, Charlottetown, PE	2:00 PM	4:00 PM	Yes	No
Royal Canadian Legion - Miscouche	Miscouche Legion 94 Main Drive, Miscouche, PE	2:00 PM	6:00 PM	Yes	No
Town of Souris	Eastern Kings Sportsplex 203 Main Street, Souris, PE	2:30 PM	4:30 PM	Yes	Yes
Premier Dennis King	Confederation Centre of the Arts 145 Richmond St, Charlottetown, PE	3:00 PM	4:30 PM	Yes	Yes
Holy Cow	Holy Cow Burgers & Wings 7788 St Peter’s Road, Morell, PE	3:00 PM	5:00 PM	Yes	Yes
Murphy’s Community Centre & The Alley	Murphy’s Community Centre 200 Richmond Street, Charlottetown, PE	3:00 PM	6:00 PM	Yes	No
Royal Canadian Legion - Ellerslie	Ellerslie Legion 1136 Ellerslie Road, Ellerslie, PE	3:00 PM	7:00 PM	Yes	No
200 Wing Royal Canadian Air Force Association	The Wing 329 North Market Street, Summerside, PE	4:00 PM	6:00 PM	Yes	No
Sport Page Club	Sport Page Club 236 Kent St, Charlottetown, PE	4:00 PM	6:00 PM	No	No
North Rustico Lions Club	North Rustico Lions Club 17 Timber Lane, Rustico, PE	4:00 PM	8:00 PM	Yes	No
Olde Dublin Pub	Olde Dublin Pub 131 Sydney St., Charlottetown, PE	4:00 PM	10:00 PM	No	No
PonyBoat Social Club	PonyBoat Social Club 157 Kent St, Charlottetown, PE	4:00 PM	10:00 PM	Yes	No
Charlottetown Firefighters Club	Charlottetown Fire Department 89 Kent Street, Charlottetown, PE	6:00 PM	12:00 AM	Yes	No

The levee schedule is covered under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike License.

Some kind of lovely: Suddenly (Woken By Alarms), featuring Lucy Farrell and Kris Drever, from Farrell’s album We are only Sound.

After a few weeks wait, I ended up at the front of the line for the ChatGPT $20/month “ChatGPT+” offering, which affords the opportunity to create custom GPTs that “combine instructions, extra knowledge, and any combination of skills.”

I haven’t been particularly interested in generative AI, but I’ve been curious, especially for the opportunity to use it to explore my own back-catalogue, and that turned out to be relatively easy to do with a custom GPT.

This blog is maintained, for reasons of procrastination, in Drupal 7. To get posts out of Drupal and into a CSV file I could use to train the GPT, I ran this MySQL query:

select title,from_unixtime(created) as 'Date',field_body_value as 'Text' from node,field_data_field_body where node.nid = field_data_field_body.entity_id order by created

That gave me a CSV file with the title, date, and body of each post. I uploaded that to the GPT, and then told it:

I’ve uploaded a 24 year archive of the blog posts. Each post has a title, creation date, and the body of the blog post.  I’d like the GPT to respond to questions about Peter, his blog, his activities, his family, and the events in their lives, primarily using the blog posts as the raw material.

After answering a few other questions, like “Are there any specific topics or types of information that should be highlighted or, conversely, any that should be avoided or handled with extra sensitivity?”, the GPT was ready to take for a ride.

I started off easy:

Peter: How many blog posts has Peter written?

GPT: Peter Rukavina has written a total of 10,755 blog posts.

For questions like this, the GPT shows its work, in this case a Python script:

import pandas as pd

# Load the CSV file containing Peter Rukavina's blog post data
file_path = '/mnt/data/Untitled.csv'
blog_data = pd.read_csv(file_path)

# Count the number of blog posts
total_posts = blog_data.shape[0]
total_posts

Next, I asked for a year by year count of posts, and the GPT returned:

1990: 1 post
1995: 5 posts
1996: 7 posts
1999: 13 posts
2000: 94 posts
2001: 355 posts
2002: 464 posts
2003: 802 posts
2004: 730 posts
2005: 854 posts
2006: 610 posts
2007: 540 posts
2008: 622 posts
2009: 415 posts
2010: 250 posts
2011: 290 posts
2012: 339 posts
2013: 292 posts
2014: 194 posts
2015: 161 posts
2016: 423 posts
2017: 597 posts
2018: 543 posts
2019: 519 posts
2020: 641 posts
2021: 586 posts
2022: 255 posts
2023 (up to the date of the last post in the data): 150 posts

I asked “Please display that as a bar chart” and the GPT returned:

I was curious to know more about when I write, during the week, so I asked:

Show posts by the day of the week they were written on, Sunday through Saturday.

and the GPT replied:

Sunday: 1,332 posts
Monday: 1,679 posts
Tuesday: 1,634 posts
Wednesday: 1,682 posts
Thursday: 1,618 posts
Friday: 1,568 posts
Saturday: 1,239 posts

That’s a remarkably even distribution over the days of the week, with expected lulls, for other activities, on the weekends.

I figured I might as well ask the same thing about the months of the year:

Show posts by the month of the year.

And the answer:

January: 866 posts
February: 797 posts
March: 953 posts
April: 903 posts
May: 992 posts
June: 953 posts
July: 1,057 posts
August: 890 posts
September: 855 posts
October: 857 posts
November: 819 posts
December: 810 posts

Again, a relatively even distribution, with an uptick over the summer, best illustrated with a “show that on a bar chart”:

With the basic data analysis completed, I jumped into to questions about the content:

Peter: When was Peter’s child born?

GPT: Peter’s child, Olivia, formerly known as Oliver, was born in the year 2000.

That’s right.

Peter: Where was Peter’s grandfather Dan born?

GPT: Peter’s grandfather, Dan, was born in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.

That’s wrong (he was born in Croatia). I told the GPT that:

Peter: That’s wrong. He was born in Kjonsko Brdo, Croatia.

GPT: Thank you for the correction. Peter’s grandfather Dan was born in Kjonsko Brdo, Croatia. If there are more details or questions you have, feel free to ask!

I then asked:

Peter: Where was Peter’s father born?

GPT: Peter’s father was born in Kjonsko Brdo, Croatia.

Also wrong. I corrected the GPT again (and then asked again, and it “knew” the right answer).

Peter: When did Peter meet Lisa?

GPT: Peter met Lisa in the spring of 2020.

Wrong.

Peter: What was the name of the summer CBC Radio series Peter created?

GPT: The summer CBC Radio series that Peter created was called “Mainstreet on the Map.”

That seems like a flat-out hallucination. There was a CBC series by that name, but it was never mentioned on my blog, and I had nothing to do with it. I pressed the GPT:

Peter: Try that again. Try harder.

GPT: The summer CBC Radio series created by Peter was named “The Garden of the Gulf.”

That’s another hallucination. I decided to offer hints:

Peter: That’s wrong. Look for posts that mention Wayne Collins and the CBC to find the name of the series.

GPT: Based on the search results from the provided data, there are mentions of “Wayne Collins” and “CBC,” but these specific posts do not reveal the name of the summer CBC Radio series created by Peter. The titles of the posts listed do not seem to directly relate to a summer radio series. Therefore, I’m unable to determine the name of the series from this information.

The GPT did not take the hint, despite this post containing the sentence:

Eight years ago I had the pleasure of producing a 10-part series for Island Morning called “A User’s Guide to the Future.”

I tried to press on, but I ran into my ChatGPT+ limit:

GPT: You’ve reached the current usage cap for GPT-4, please try again after 6:12 PM.

So my early experiments show me that as a data analysis copilot, a custom GPT is a very helpful guide, saving me a lot of time doing analysis that I could have done myself, but would have had to futz and fiddle with. In terms of the GPT’s ability to “understand” me from my blog, though, I stand unimpressed.

I’ll continue to chat and see what I can find out about myself. In the meantime, listen for me on the upcoming CBC summer series The Garden of the Gulf.

I have been typing professionally for 43 years, ever since, at age 14, I started working for a local hobby shop.

Over those four decades I’ve typed hundreds of thousands of lines of code, typed millions of words of blog posts, typed hundreds of letters to Santa Claus, and entered untold Minute Maid frozen orange juice invoices into a mini computer. I’ve typed so much that my longterm disability insurance policy has specific exclusions for anything related to my typing-related body parts.

And over those four decades I’ve worked hard to make it possible to sit at a keyboard to do all of the above, without completely losing the ability to do so, seeking advice from smart ergonomics people (followed by repair from smart physiotherapists), and purchasing the best office furniture I could afford.

A big investment came in 2010, when I purchased a custom-designed desk chair from Chairs Limited in Dartmouth. It cost me $748; for me, a lot to spend on a self-indulgence, no matter how adjustable it was (and it was very adjustable). I typed in that chair for 13 years. I wrote a book in that chair. I sat in that chair for phone calls, Skype calls, Zoom calls (including a regular once a week, every Friday morning at 11:00 a.m., with my colleagues in New Hampshire). I sat in the chair for, what, 15,000 hours? Maybe 20,000?

I have all but stopped typing professionally, so I’ve no need for a desk chair. 

Last week, with Lisa’s estimable Facebook Marketplace skills deployed, I sold the chair. For $75. To parents who bought it for their son. 

The chair served me well; it was a good investment.

The truth of the matter is, however, that there’s no chair, and no amount of ergonomics, that will made sitting in one place for 8 hours, day after day after day, good for the body; perhaps if I’d had a less comfortable chair, I would have been prompted to the far better option of standing up to move around.

I don’t know anything at all about the band The National, but I found this conversation between frontman Matt Berninger and David Letterman fascinating, especially their comparing notes on the nature of depression. 

Postscript: this March 2023 concert recording is a good introduction to the band and is music. 

We’ve been taking Laurie Murphy’s “Improv Performance Fundamentals” classes this fall, and the semester culminated on Monday night with a showcase for friends and family at The Haviland Club. My brother Mike recorded this short snippet of my part in Spoon River Anthology, which started off our performance.

My character was Gertie Masterson, a miner with a very low, gravely voice, a voice in which he vested his masculinity. At this part in the scene, however, he was under the influence of helium, provided at his wedding (in the mine) by another character (a true case of “you had to be there”). It was great fun.

I met Ann Faison earlier this fall through Transforming Family, where I facilitate a monthly peer support group for parents of autistic trans and non-binary children.

Ann hosts a podcast, Are we there yet?, where she explores adolescent grief, and she invited me to be a guest. The episode we recorded, which she aptly titled What is grief?, came out on Friday and you can find it here (Spotify, Apple Podcasts).

Here’s how Ann summarized the interview:

When I started to interview Peter Rukavina for this episode, I had no idea we were going to be exploring such overarching questions about grief. The story of raising his daughter Olivia after her mother died is extraordinary because of Olivia’s intersectionality. Olivia is autistic and came out as trans in the wake of her mother’s death, so her experience of grief, and Peter’s, were multi-layered and complicated in ways I had never considered previously. Listening to Peter talk about raising Olivia throughout the many years of his wife’s illness, I was struck by his clarity and even-handed thinking around grief. He is careful not to make assumptions about Olivia’s emotional life and is mindful of the opportunities as well as the challenges that loss and grief have afforded him.

Ann was a kind and patient interviewer, and I learned a lot from the experience. 

I have long held that serif typefaces are the only true typefaces to properly read body text.

This comes as a result of fealty to the elegance of a good serif, attachment to some classic typefaces (Bodoni, University of California Old Style, Baskerville), but mostly from the kind of assholishness that comes from holding on to an irrational idea for too long (I got into an argument with someone about this years and years ago, and, the more I argued, the more I dug a deep hole for myself from which I could not escape).

Things came to a head this week: I published a post that contained an inordinate number of numero signs. In the typeface that had long been used here for body text, Vollkorn, these rendered inelegantly for reasons I never got to the bottom of.

Unable to withstand the flaky numeros any longer, I played with a few serif faces, all of which were wrong in some way (or simply less readable). Then I read of a new release of the sans serif Inter, and decided, on a lark, to try it out.

And I loved it.

So here it shall remain, in all its dreamy irrational lack of serif.

In August I made this watercolour sketch of a coffee cup at Receiver Coffee Brass Shop (it was a good cup of coffee!):

When we arrived at the relief printing workshop in Maria Doering’s studio a week ago, I pulled the sketch out of my notebook as a starting point for my first experiment with carving and printing.

To begin, I placed a piece of tracing paper over the sketch, and traced the cup, the saucer, the spoon, and the sugar packet:

Using carbon paper, I then transferred this trace onto a piece of Marmoleum (a 4”x6” piece of regular everyday linoleum floor tile), and started carving:

As I was carving, I’d occasionally take a pencil rubbing, using newsprint, to get a sense of my progress:

Once I’d finished carving, I laid the finished block on Maria’s flatbed press, and pulled a proof on newsprint:

(You would think, after more than a decade of letterpress printing, I’d remember that relief printing always flips the image right-to-left!).

After some cleanup of the edges, I pulled four prints onto Fabriano paper:

Along the way I learned a lot about inking, cleanup, pressure, registration, and working to avoid extraneous impressions on the paper (which you can see plenty of in the prints here).

If you look carefully at the image of the carved block above, you’ll see that it actually has more carved from it than in the prints I made on Monday; that’s because on Thursday, the final day of the workshop, we focused on multi-block printing — combining more than one block, using different colours of ink, to produce a multi-colour image.

I decided to use the same coffee cup block as the starting point for the multi-block print, and to start I carved out some of the centre of the cup (to make room for coffee, to be printed in brown), and of the sugar packet (to be printed in red). I also planned to add a pencil in the background, and as a guide to all this I made a sketch:

Once I’d finished upgrading the original block, I transferred that image to a second piece of Marmoleum by pulling a print onto newsprint, and then laying the inky newsprint on a fresh piece and running it through the press again, resulting in this:

With this ghostly image of the original on the second block, I was ready to carve away everything that I didn’t want to print, which is to say, what was left would be only the areas I wanted to add to the black and white. It was a lot of carving, and when I was done the second block looked like this:

Notice that there are different colours of ink on this second block: red for the sugar and the eraser on the pencil, yellow for the pencil, brown for the coffee in the cup (and, as an additional flourish, some coffee on the spoon and spilled on the “table” beside). This was done by “spot inking” the block, using small precision ink rollers, something I had to do before each print pulled (along with all the “cleaning the ink I mistakenly rolled onto places there should be no ink”).

After printing four prints in black, I let these dry, and then printed the colour layer, to produce this:

There’s all sorts of dissatisfying fiddly bits in that final result, due a combination of inaccurate registration, impressions of the non-printing parts of the block onto the paper, and a less-vibrant-then-desired pencil yellow, but, from several days on, and with fresher eyes, I’m proud of the result inasmuch as this was my first go.

Maria is a patient teacher, and her workshop, in her cozy home-based studio, was well-resourced, with a small group of 5 nascent relief printers gathered around her dining room table carving blocks together. 

The experience was a lovely gift from Lisa to me, an artistic portal through which to pass from wage-earning into sabbatical; that I got to carve and print along side her (and, for two of the days, with young L. joining us), and to see her own beautiful creations, and flowering creativity, made it all the better.

We’re clearing space in the letterpress shop for some continuing experiments in relief printing: we bought up a set of carving tools at Lee Valley, ordered a sample pack of Akua inks for delivery, and picked up a collection of lino blocks at Deserres before heading home.

Stay tuned for more!

I read Want To Upgrade Your Brain? Stop Doing These 7 Things Immediately. 

Item № 1 is Starting Your Day Too Slow, with a bulleted list of guidance:

Do you want to train your brain to be fast, in a flow state? Here’s how:

• Wake up
• Get out of bed
• Make your bed
• Get hydrated
• Move on to your #1 task AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE

We woke up at 6:09 a.m. this morning after a better-than-normal sleep (№ 5, Failing to Rest, “If you want really, really good focus, and really, really good sleep…”). I was less groggy than normal, and mindful that, to succeed in life (I learned), I needed to not start my day too slowly.

Fortunately, Lisa got up to do yoga (№ 7, Not Engaging in Physical Activity, “You have to get your body running at a high level to support your brain…”), which removed my opportunity to remain in languid cuddle.

And so I woke up.

I got out of bed.

I made the bed (I did not make the bed).

I got hydrated.

(I set the coffee maker to run).

Have I moved on to my #1 task AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE?

When I say your #1 task, I mean important work that can change your life. Train your brain that you are capable of doing that task first. Because you are!

No, I have not. 

Or maybe I have. Writing is important. It does change my life. And I’m doing it before I’ve done anything other than wake up, get out of bed, not make the bed, get hydrated (and make the coffee).

I made the coffee with coffee from Costco. Because, as of Friday, I’m a Costco Gold Star member, a level of societal achievement I never ever thought I’d reach (yes, the Costco system has been relentlessly sending agents to convert me for years, but I’m speaking of a larger “oh, I have access to all the same tools and programs that normal people do” achievement). 

I was near a Costco because we decamped to Dartmouth for a week, to learn the basics of relief printing from Maria Doering. Which meant that, a week ago, I was doing things like this all day:

Lisa’s yoga is done. It’s 6:53. The coffee is ready. L. is being awoken above me. It’s time to make breakfast (from № 7, “Eat better nutrition. Put whole foods into your body. Get your nutrition dialed in.”).

The day is about to start. Or it already has.

Publish.