Today was the day for the installation of the new finial, crafted by Kelly Caseley, above the door to St. Paul’s Anglican Church. The new finial is a bang-on reproduction of the original; Kelly did great work.

This is the 2019 levee schedule for New Years Day, January 1, 2019 for Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island.

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

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

If you’re a new friend of the blog you may have missed this fascinating tool of cats and mice, related to Matthew Rainnie on CBC Mainstreet on September 22, 2000 (9 days before Oliver was born!).

I have always loved making radio with Matthew, and I think this piece was a high point for us.

(The issue of mice on Marion Island is ongoing, 18 years later).

In 2013, on our last night in Tokyo, Oliver and I went out for conveyor-belt-sushi to Pintokona in the Roppongi district.

After supper we wandered up the street to the Aoyama Book Center Roppongi, where we spotted a copy of Tsuyoshi Takashiro’s book Life Packing, a delightful rumination that, among other things, is an unintentional recapitulation of George Carlin’s place for your stuff routine.

I’d seen the book earlier on our trip, neglected to purchase it, and regretted the decision. Finding it again gave me a second chance, and I purchased it immediately, which also gave me a chance to experience the lovely Japanese style for wrapping books in a bookstore in paper upon purchase.

I learned today that the Aoyama Book Center closed earlier this year and that its space is now occupied by the newly-opened 文喫 (Bunkitsu), a bookstore with a cover charge:

Once you’ve checked in, take your free cup of coffee or tea and wander endlessly through books on humanities, nature, art and design, all of which have been thoughtfully curated by the book lovers of Yours Book Store. Every book is for sale, but you can also spend an hour, 5 hours or the whole day and not buy a thing. And if you get hungry, they even have a small café that will sell you lunch or a light snack.

I’m inclined to jump on a plane right now; barring that, here’s a walkthru video from YouTube.

PEI Green Party leader Peter Bevan-Baker on the importance of priorities:

Politics is how we make collective decisions, and it touches on every aspect of our shared lives. Part of the art of politics, I believe, is in choosing what priorities get placed at the front of the line. The word priority quite literally means “prior to” – what things need to be done prior to the rest. In that sense you can’t have a whole bunch of priorities, only a few.

I think regular blogging should be an expected duty of any member of the legislature; it’s a form of communication tailor-made for the profession, and I so appreciate Peter’s regular insights.

PC MLA Brad Trivers is a thoughtful blogger too; I’d like to read 27 MLAs’ blogs, though, not just two, and wish others would join in.

Of all the foods of the world that have come to be regularly available in Charlottetown in the last 25 years, among my favourites is bibimbap, a Korean rice dish available at Mr. Sushi, at Seoul Food and at Ta-Ke Sushi.

Each place has its own way of preparing bibimbap, but what’s common to all is a bed of rice topped with various things–meats, vegetables, often an egg–and then, at your option, slathered in chili sauce. It’s very good.

Here’s mine, from lunch today at Mr. Sushi (and here’s the sound of it cooking itself in the heated bowl, recorded in 2013):

Greta Thunberg is an autistic teenager from Sweden. She is changing the world with her clear-eyed talk about climate change (watch her TEDx talk or her speech at the COP24 last week).

It snowed yesterday, quite a lot. School was closed, and then it was closed again today given the condition of rural roads. I stuck my phone on the front screen door this morning as the snowblower and its symbiotic dump trucks moved by 100 Prince Street. This method of clearing and removing the snow happens across downtown Charlottetown after a big storm: the snow gets gathered into the middle of the street into a big pile, and then the giant blower gets it into dump trucks that cart it off to the snow dump.

I first encountered Euan Semple when he spoke at Reboot 11 in 2009, and I’ve been a reader of his blog, off and on, for the years since.

Recently I noticed that he’s been referring to a sideline as a truck driver, and he connected me with this post from the summer that provides a little of the backstory to this.

Career corner-turns are fascinating to me–journalist starts working for the man, pilot becomes dolphin trainer, etc.–and I’m enjoying reading about Euan’s bifurcated adventures.

(That Reboot was the one that was sponsored, in part, by my friend Ton–you can see him at the very beginning of Euan’s talk, taking a photos–and it will be ten years since that Reboot in 2019; there’s an interesting cache of videos shot that year here. That was the Reboot when Catherine and I left Oliver in Canada and attended together).

Like last year, I invite you to join me in a small intervention into the service economy that I call The 12 Tips of Christmas.

The idea is simple: every time you leave a tip in a restaurant or coffee shop this holiday season, leave a percentage that matches the day of December.

So today, for example, I tipped 18% because it’s December 18.

Tomorrow I will tip 19%.

And on the last day of the year I will tip 31%.

Workers in restaurants work hard for low wages: the holiday season, with its harried customers, variable weather, and other pressures, is a time to particularly recognize their service.

My hope is, of course, that by exercising our tipping muscles upwards, we all become more generous tippers year-round.