My friend Valerie spends the summer on Prince Edward Island, or at least a part thereof, and in past summers we often find ourselves at summer’s end realizing that we didn’t get to see each other at all. And so this summer we got together on one of the first Wednesdays that the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market was open mid-week, and have managed to repeat that, by cunning happenstance, every Wednesday morning since.

The Market being the Market, we’ve been joined by Special Guest Stars every morning: Sandy one week, Ann another, Ray this week and last.

The Wednesday Farmers’ Market is a very different beast than the Saturday one, especially the summertime Saturday market, which, with its throngs of tourists, is reaching a conceptual breaking point (I’ve resolved, after railing up ideas like “no tourists before 11:00 a.m.” regulations, that I need to just accept and release and go with the flow). Not only are the aisles clear on Wednesdays, but everyone’s calmer, and vendors can spend more time chatting with customers.

Another way it’s different is that our breakfast smoked salmon bagel provider isn’t at the Market on Wednesdays, leaving me casting about for other options. Today I opted for waffles from The Breakfast Guy. This is not, in and of itself, remarkable but for the fact that in 25 years of going to the market, I’ve not only never been a customer of The Breakfast Guy, nor paid his booth any heed. Such is being a creature of habit. And such is the power of Wednesdays to help break that. The waffles, with a side of potato, were very good, and I will be back.

Unable to break character completely, post-waffles I had my usual iced tea from Lady Baker’s Tea and my usual once-a-week, now twice-a-week, chocolate from Katlin.

I washed up my coffee mug and, on the way back to return it, I found myself walking by Tim and Jen Allen Chaisson, and we exchanged hellos. As I am a superfan, this made my heart go thumpety-thump.

Before I knew what happened, it was closing in on 11:00 a.m. and there was work to be done, so I decamped back to the office.

From Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves:

“I couldn’t disagree more!” exclaimed Pete Starling, with a nervous chuckle. “Doob, you’re going to be so useful up there, I’m afraid you’ll never get a moment’s rest! You have multiple core competencies with surprisingly minimal Venn.”

The final pieces of the homebrew bicycle cargo trailer came together today: I bought a large rectangular tote and a bag of bungee cords from Home Depot and, fortuitously, found that one 30 inch bungee on each end holds the tote snug.

There was a last minute departure delay on the tarmac when I went to affix the trailer to my bicycle and found the trailer hitch had, confusingly, switched sides and no longer mated with its bicycle counterpart. It took a lot of staring to come to the realization that this was because I built the cargo mod upside down, mounting the platform on the bottom of the frame instead of the top.

Fortunately the solution to this was as simple as moving the bicycle-side connector to right side from the left: otherwise the trailer runs equally well upside down.

The trip up Prince Street to Sobeys was in a cooling late-day sun shower, which was nice. I did my shop, packed my two bags of groceries into the tote, and headed home.

Just before I left the parking lot, an oldtimer ambled over and asked “you build that yourself?” This led to a brief conversation about 1x3s and bungee cords, and some oldtimer approval pixie dust which stoked me for the ride home.

Initial voyage: success.

There is a story that I tell myself that in my childhood we had fresh strawberries in April. This is clearly apocryphal: even though the growing season is expanding and contracting, Ontario has never had an April strawberry season.

Ontario does, however, have strawberries in early June; I know this because we stopped at a roadside stand in Queenston and bought some when we were there in the second week of this early June.

Prince Edward Island’s strawberry season was late this year and there were rumblings that there wouldn’t be a season at all; fortunately this proved to be untrue, and we’ve been enjoying local berries for the last three weeks.

This morning at Riverview Country Market we were warned that this will likely be the last week, and so we bought two quarts so as to have one last strawberry blowout.

They will be missed.

Our house at 100 Prince Street has a sandstone foundation that has kept it standing for 191 years. It is not a museum piece, but it is mighty.

On top of the sandstone along the driveway, supporting the sill, is a layer of bricks; I’d always assumed, for no other reason than ignorance, that the bricks were a later addition, but learned this week that they’re original equipment.

I know this by way of work on the bricks that we’re having done this week by Jake the mason and his crew. The need for the work was brought on by a driveway reconstruction project spearheaded by our indefatigable neighbour Angus. Removing the driveway asphalt revealed more clearly issues with the brick that were seen evidence of for some years, and if there was ever a time to do something, it is now.

The bricks, Jake tells us with his experienced eye, have been there from the beginning of the house in 1827. The work he’s doing for us this week will allow them to continue to be there for another generation; it’s not a total system reboot, but rather a careful and deliberate surgery. It is a joy to watch.

Such a joy, at it happens, that yesterday, looking at brickwork and not where I was going, I twisted my ankle on the driveway. It’s been sore ever since, but seems to be slowly on the mend (rest, ice, compress, elevate).

With luck, me and the foundation should be fully supportive by early next week.

I’m no great fan of the fast food industry, but A&W deserves a hat-tip for its Beyond Meat Burger and the way they’ve presented it.

I remember, many years ago, going through the drivethru at the Burger King in Charlottetown and ordering a “veggie burger.” What I received was a bun with a tomato slice and lettuce. Technically qualified, but hardly satisfying.

I stripped down the child-carrying bicycle trailer we inherited from Erin Bateman and Dave Atkinson, added three six foot lengths of pine 1x3, four carriage bolts, and some #12 wood screws: presto, a bicycle cargo trailer, ready for Sobeys.

As the son of a geologist, and as someone with a soft spot for underdog monuments, the Charlottetown Boulder Park has always been an object of fascination for me. It was born the same year I was, in 1966; now, 52 years on, few people seem to know anything about its origins; indeed it’s easy to miss that it’s there at all, given the various renovations to the yard of the Hon. George Coles Building that have lessened the prominence and accessibility of the boulders.

I decided, given this, that I was the right person to shine light on the park and its history.

My inspiration came from a mention in Mita Williams’ weekly email newsletter of the utility of populating Wikimedia Commons with the images of Wikipedia and Wikidata entries that are missing them; this led me to the Wikimedia Commons app, and, in turn, I learned how Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia are linked together.

To lay the groundwork for this project, I started by taking out of cold storage a set of images of the boulders in the Boulder Park and the plaques describing them; I uploaded these to Wikimedia Commons, and tied them together with a Category called Charlottetown Boulder Park.

Next, I created a Wikidata entry for Charlottetown Boulder Park, along with Wikidata entries for each individual boulder (here’s Alberta, for example). I attached the Wikimedia Commons images I’d just uploaded to each boulder, along with its geographic location and, where possible, made each an “instance of” the type of rock it’s composed of.

I then edited OpenStreetMap and added links to the Wikidata entries to each of the boulders I’d plotted on the map several years ago.

Finally, I set out to author a Wikipedia page, the most daunting task of all, as it was completely new terrain for me, and something cloaked in mystery, with seemingly arcane rules and style requirements.

It turns out that there’s a remarkably helpful set of resources to help the new Wikipedia author, starting from Wikipedia: Your first article.

Wikipedia requires sources to be cited, so my first task was to find documentation for the history of the Boulder Park; I had help in this regard from the Public Archives and from Robertson Library, and this helped me find my way to articles from The Guardian and the Evening Patriot from 1966 that documented the opening of the park. I found an additional, contemporary reference in The Guardian–a column by former editor Gary MacDougall–in a full-text search of the paper on the library site:

• The Guardian, September 2, 1966: page 1 and page 3
• The Evening Patriot, September 2, 1966: page 2
• The Guardian, September 6, 2014: page 13

With these references in place, I set out to create the page: I wrote a paragraph about the history of the park, a paragraph about its opening, and I filled in the details of the “info box” template for parks. I added a table with information about each boulder (using the Wikimedia Commons images I’d created earlier), and I added an embedded OpenStreetMap map showing the location of each boulder.

Once I’d finished, double-checked everything for typos and style, and had some trusted friends review it with fresh eyes, I clicked “Publish” and the new article went into a queue for review; there was a box at the bottom of the article at this point alerting me that this could take up to 5 weeks, as there were 2000+ articles in the queue at this point.

The review happened much more quickly than that, though: within 24 hours I got an email alert telling me that someone had updated the article, and, sure enough, the history for the article showed that it had passed the review and was now public.

So, ta da, here it is: Charlottetown Boulder Park in Wikipedia.

I finished up the linked by connecting the OpenStreetMap boulder park relation and the boulder park Wikidata entry to the Wikipedia page, thus nicely knitting all the various manifestations of the park together.

But I’m not done yet!

I’ve been in touch with the operators of the Street Eats food truck that’s set up this summer on the edge of the Boulder Park, and they’ve agreed to provide a home for a printed guide to the Boulder Park, so my next step is to make one.

Thank you to Mita for the inspiration, Olle, Simon, John and Ed for the reference help and proofread, and to Graeme for the Wikipedia review.