A couple of weeks ago I was in Receiver Coffee to pick up the peppermint tea that I often pick up on my way to the office.

While I was waiting for the tea to be assembled, I heard personable Joel, my server, refer to one of his co-workers by name.

“Can you get that for me, Alex?”, he said. Or something to that effect.

Which is how I came to know that Alex’s name is Alex.

I thanked Joel for his service, and he repaid the thanks by casually referring to coworkers Lauren, Luke and Danielle by name.

So now I know their names too.

I immediately made a note on my phone of these names so that I would recall them in the future; names are not my strong suit, so I need all the help I can get.

With echos of Michael Scott, I made a brief notation beside each name, so that I now have memory aids like:

Lauren (that will pop right up)

and

Alex (scruffy hat band guy)

This is an echo of a conversation I had over dinner at my parents’ house with my friend Morgan and his consort back in November. The conversation at the table turned to lubricants for the social graces, and Morgan offered up the suggestion that, upon being introduced to someone, you immediately turn around and call them by name.

“Morgan, this is my father Norman,” I might say; and Morgan would return “Hello, Norman, pleased to meet you.”

Thus imprinting my father’s name in is memory.

The Morgan Strategy (or the Joel Strategy, as it were) has been a great help to me in the closing days of 2017; I’m well on my way to learning the names of all the box office staff here at The Guild (a minor miracle, as there are seemingly dozens of them).

This is a first in a series of year-end blog posts I call Things I Learned in 2017; stay tuned for more.

When the weather started to get cold and damp last week, I noticed that our Jetta was struggling to start in the morning. I never reached the point of needing a boost, but I came awfully close, and I made a point of backing in wherever I parked, just in case.

With Christmas holidays—and the really cold season—coming on, a trip to Dave’s Service Centre was in order, and I dropped the car off this morning.

When I returned at 5:00 p.m. to pick it up, I learned that my battery—the original, 18 year old battery, remarkably—was only cranking out 250 amps, barely enough to start the car on a good day.

Dave swapped in a new battery, with 800 amps of cold-cranking power, and the Jetta starts like new.

Technically batteries aren’t supposed to last 18 years, so kudos to Volkswagen for quality parts.

In the midst of all this, I made a trip to Canadian Tire to get myself an emergency battery booster (I have an inordinate number of friends and neighbours with cars with batteries tucked in the back, boost-unfriendly).

I found, to my surprise, that the worlds of mobile phone chargers and battery jump-starters have merged: I came away with a paperback-book-sized box that will charge my phone and boost my car both, and is a flashlight to boot.

We’re ready for winter.

This year’s Christmas tree, procured from the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, fit sideways in our trunk.

I was talking to my old friend Stephen Southall on the phone earlier this week. Stephen was at home in Ontario; I was in my car, talking to him on my cell phone’s speakerphone, driving up North River Road, here in Charlottetown.

The quality of our conversation was similar to what one might have experienced from a ship-to-shore telephone in 1947: there were swaths of his conversation that I couldn’t hear, swaths of my conversation that he couldn’t hear, and a lot of jumbled speech in the middle.

Stephen made the cogent point that despite all the supposed advances in technology in recent years, there has never been a worse time to make a clear telephone call: if I’d called Stephen land line to land line in 1995, our call likely would have been clear as a bell. And if it wasn’t, I could have called Island Tel to complain about it.

Thinking about this today, I realized that, sitting here in the Reinventorium at my desk, I have at my disposal eight different ways of making telephone calls.

I decided to call my office voicemail from each of these, and read the identical phrase, by way of allowing me to contrast and compare their voice quality. Here are the results:

I am not an audiophile, so I’m not as well-equipped to judge the results as others, but I find the variation in quality interesting, and also find that samples that “sound worse,” seem to allow for a higher comprehension rate.

The Amazon Echo and Google Home, for example, both sound clearer on the surface, I find it easier to understand the speech on my cell phone, which is less clear, but seems to have a wider frequency range.

It’s also kind of freaky to realize that I have so many options at hand for making telephone calls.

Kerry Campbell and Sidney MacEwen are both uncommonly skilled at their jobs (CBC PEI Legislative Reporter and MLA for Morell-Mermaid, respectively). And so it was something of a delight to have one of my blog posts invoked in the middle of a Twitter exchange between the two:

This is the 2018 levee schedule for New Years Day, January 1, 2018 for Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island.

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

From an interview with a trio of YouTuber travelers about financing their travels:

5. What’s your top tip for someone trying to figure out how to make long-term travel financially possible?

If you want to travel long term, then you need to just get out there and stop stalling. There are plenty of ways to make money abroad. The city Paddy lives in (Chiang Mai, Thailand) has over 30,000 expats living there and most of them work remotely online. If you have skills that you can use on the road like photography, teaching, and anything online-based, then save up some cash, start traveling, and start hustling!!!

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard Chiang Mai described in this light: apparently it’s something of a Mecca for millennials earning a “passive income”–running a popular YouTube fitness channel and drop-shipping fitness equipment into Iowa, for example.

Here’s someone else, writing about the cost of living in Thailand:

I can live in Thailand, get massages every day, eat delicious and healthy foods, and do everything I want for about $25 a day and that’s while spending quite liberally and tipping.

If someone wanted to live cheaper, it certainly is possible. One expat I met told me he only spends $45 a month on rent!

The bottom line is: once you start viewing the world as a giant playground, the possibilities are limitless.

I’m all for the transformative power of world travel, but hanging out in an enclave of well-massaged digital beach bums in Thailand sounds like hell. And I’m not sure that “viewing the world as a giant playground” is the best use of globalism.

So many weather metaphors and realities today.

As we left the Coastal Inn toward downtown it was just slightly raining.

We walked down to the main road, along to the tourist information centre, hugged the shore of the Sackville Waterfowl Park, and then headed out onto the boardwalk right across it, and emerged out of a hollow onto Bridge Street, right in front of Thunder & Lightning, where we were headed.

Except we needed to eat first, so we walked two doors up and had quick burgers at Mel’s Tea Room, finishing up just after the 5:00 p.m. doors-open time next door.

Opening act Bernice was just finishing sound check as we arrived; we secured a table by the far wall, right in front of the stage. It’s hard to imagine a better vantage point, and there was a generous nook, between our table and the stage, for [[Ethan]] to stretch out.

Things got started just after 6:00 p.m. to a packed house full of young and old.

The presence of the young–Oliver, unusually, was not the youngest present–was enabled by New Brunswick’s liberal liquor regulations that allow minors in a pub (and, indeed, pubs at all) as long as they have an adult present. Such tomfoolery would not be allowed in PEI.

Bernice was new to me, and a revelation: lead singer Robin Dann has a welcoming way, a melliferous voice, and a band of skilled digital musicians backing her whose bleeps and bloops and fizzes miraculously synergized in a way you would think might be annoyingly Super Mario, but isn’t.

The band played a wide-ranging set, and finished with a Shawn Colvin cover as an encore.

After a brief interlude for a set change, The Weather Station took to the stage. The bleeps and bloops were replaced by a band of solidly analogue musicians supporting Tamara Lindeman, and their torrent of sound fulled the tiny room to just short of overflowing.

The band ran through its catalogue, now familiar to me through Spotify replay upon replay, and it was lovely to behold live: Lindeman is an accomplished guitarist and has a substantial vocal range. Her band was crack, and they obviously enjoy playing together, and enjoy being good at doing so.

Given the impending original set at 8:30 p.m., there wasn’t time enough for the usual cacaphony-encore-cacaphony-encore, and both bands departed the stage quickly and without fanfare.

By 8:00 p.m., we were out into the bracing Sackville night, the snow storm having started mid-set.

We set off up Bridge Street toward the Coastal Inn only to encounter the Vogue Cinema just letting in for the night’s showing of Thor: Ragnarok. We had no great desire to see the film, but my personal “when presented with an opportunity to see a film in a small town independent cinema, take it” rule kicked in, and we took our seats just as the film started. The Vogue is a huge old cinema, complete with sloping balcony, that has somehow managed to avoid both closure and being chopped up into a multiplex. The film was mildly more interesting than anticipated, and managed to keep our attention, if not change our lives.

When the film let out at 10:00 p.m. the snow storm was in full throat, and our plan to stay the night in Sackville rather than Moncton bore its intended fruit.

The snow wasn’t enough to keep us from walking home, though, and 20 minutes later, slightly soggy and fogged up, we were back at the Coastal Inn, satisfied with an excellent night out.