Earlier this spring Oliver and I walked into the Sobeys grocery store on Allen Street in Charlottetown on a Tuesday night.

As soon as we walked in the door I noticed that something was different: the lights were lower, there wasn’t any Muzak, and I didn’t hear any announcements over the public address system.

It was as if Sobeys had opted to remove a bunch of the really annoying things about being in the store, things that we might not be completely aware are annoying until they’re removed.

It turns out that we had, by happenstance, walked into Sobeys during the two hour period, every Tuesday night, when they offer “Sensory Friendly Shopping,” an initiative undertaken in cooperation with The Autism Society of PEI.

This is a great idea, and one, I am told, that may in fact be spread to Sobeys stores across Canada in the near future.

Not only is it a gift to autistic people, but it is a gift to everyone, proving, yet again, that “accessible design” is most often synonymous with “good design.”

If you get a chance to experience Tuesday night shopping at Sobeys, and you agree, perhaps you could drop Sobeys a note of thanks?

A excellent tangible spin-off of Crafting {:} a Life: Rosie has started a new blog:

Who starts a weblog in 2019? This kid, apparently.

I’m sitting on my porch in Charlottetown on a sunny Sunday morning. It’s the first day I’ve worn shorts outside this season. Everything is fiercely green and the critters sing their existence from around the neighbourhood. Most I don’t know, but I can pick out squirrels, crows, and the grackles that have nested in our eves. Sam the cat kept me company on the porch while I set up a new VM, WordPress, Apache vhosts, and SSL certs – the method I’ve chosen to do this… new blog project thing. It’s not hard for me, I’ve set up websites before, but I find it hard to get through without a checklist – my brain doesn’t hold a stack well.

There was a lot of talk about blogging at the unconference–three sessions, by my count–and I’m happy to see the corner turn from “why did blogging die when we loved it so?” to “I’m going to start a new blog!”

After watching Andrea Ledwell receive her vegan powerball at Receiver Coffee in a coffee cup on Sunday, and hearing me joke that it was intended to have something poured over, Oliver went for it today, and poured blood orange Sanpellegrino over his own powerball. We dubbed it “The Andrea” in her honour. And he ate/drank it with a demitasse spoon. Ask for it by name next time you’re in for a snack.

While we were waiting for the bus home today, Olle explained to me and Oliver how QSL cards work: two ham radio operators establish a radio connection, the more distant and unlikely the better; during the connection they exchange call signs, which are globally-unique and can be used to look up a postal address; to mark the magical radio connection, a printed QSL card can thus be sent, acting as a kind of award of merit for defeating geography via radio.

Olle delivered this explanation in light of Ton’s proposal:

Letterpress printed QSL cards for successfully sent and received Webmentions must be the most finely targeted joke. The audience very likely not larger than 3 people.

Being interested in Webmentions, and also being a letterpress printer, I feel an obligation to make this happen.

Here, then, are the Indieweb building blocks:

• Olle writes a blog post.
• On my blog, I reference Olle’s blog post, and so my blog sends him a Webmention.
• Olle’s blog receives the Webmention, and looks to see if he’s ever received one from me before.
• He hasn’t!
• Olle’s blog looks for a postal address h-card on my blog and, finding one, sends a mailing label to Olle by email, ready for attaching to a letterpress-printed QSL card that he can pop in the mail to me.

For this to work as outlined:

1. Blog authors need to includ their postal mailing address on their blogs, marked up as an h-card. I’ve got this but not everyone does.
2. The Webmention-receiving logic on blogs needs to be able to track first contact, and trigger a QSL-card-sending callback when it’s established.
3. Letterpress QSL cards need to be printed. I can do this.

I agree with Ton that the audience is small. But we’ve already got 3 people, so the idea has already reached 100% of its estimated audience.

Tim Carmody, on Kottke.org, writes about pain medication; in part:

This is all to say: no, I’m not on pain medication. Yes, I’m terribly uncomfortable. No, I’m not uncomfortable enough to jump through hoops and beg for more drugs. (Maybe if I were, things would be different.) And at the times I was most uncomfortable, those were the times when medicine was the least available to me, by design.

We’ve got to get over our weird Puritanical crap about pain and pain medication, and accept the fact that in certain contexts, we need the drugs. And by “we,” I mean myself, the medical system; everybody. We can’t be responsible for the entire opioid epidemic every second of every day. Sometimes we just need to be able to go to sleep.

I’ve learned a lot about this domain in the last 5 years. The backlash against opioids, while understandable given the toll that they’ve taken, has also served to cast an unhelpful shadow over pain meds of any type. For those in chronic pain, carrying the extra weight of that shadow is the last thing they need.

Blog posts about Crafting {:} a Life from people who were there:

• Crafting {:} a Life Unconference Day 1
• Crafting {:} a Life Unconference Day 2
• Crafting {:} a Saga
• Leaving PEI
• Fantasy Cartography
• Crafting {:} a Life
• Crafting {:} a Life initial impressions
• Press Pound to Publish
• Communication does count
• Crafting {:} a Blog
• Three Conversations about Blogging
• Unconference Aftermath / Unconference Forwarding
• Connection Problem
• Canada - Crafting {:} a Life (Flickr photos)
• Crafting {:} a Reflection

If you’ve written something I didn’t catch, please let me know.

Lost in all the hullabaloo this past week was Oliver’s last day of public school.

Ton Zijlstra wrote about the first day of our unconference.

There’s too much for me to process right now to write more myself, other than this snippet, written to a friend last night:

I realized that, by being the organizer of the unconference, I wasn’t really able to “go to the unconference” myself. Which is not to say that I was disappointed at all, just that my experience was necessarily different. More the palpable thrill of catalyzing connections. And the frightening/joyful realization that it’s possible to tenaciously conjure good things.

We gather for day two, starting with a walk to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, in 90 minutes.

For years I’ve been suggesting people or chairs in a circle, but they always end up in neat rows, like a school classroom. It seems like overkill to organize an event just to realize this dream, but you do what you gotta do. Crafting {:} a Life starts in an hour.