A photo I took of [[Oliver]] this morning during breakfast. My how he’s grown.

The Typism 2017 talk, and associated blog post, Scared Shitless: Facing fear and getting out of your comfort zone, by designer Maria Montes, is a lovingly-crafted tale. It’s funny, insightful, informative and beautifully illustrated.

In my first day in Australia I only had to accomplish two goals:
1) Do not get lost;
2) Have a coffee.

I was successful at the first one so I felt pretty good about the second task. At the English school where I enrolled, I asked about types of coffee in Australia and what they meant. I only had to memorise “small flatwhite, thanks”.

I walked in the coffee shop. There was a long line-up of people ordering take away so the longer I stood in line, the more nervous I became. Finally, my turn arrived and I said confidently “small flatmate, thanks”.

The bartender looked at me with big open eyes and shook his head. I was like “what? what’s the problem?… OK, my pronunciation is rubbish but surely he got what I said, right?! Wait… is this a coffee shop?”… I was so confused! A couple of seconds later, I realised what I said, and for the next three years I only ordered lattes although I hate latte’s foam.

I decided a few days ago that I wanted to loan a book to a friend. Things got out of hand. As it goes.

I decided that I needed an ex libris bookplate.

But why make only one; I should loan more books.

To the print shop!

Step one was to figure out a way of making my own “gummed backing” so that I could easily affix the bookplates to books simply by moistening and applying; I think I’ve cracked that. Or at least I’m getting close.

Step two was to set and print on the Golding Jobber № 8.

Fortunately, in a cache of printing ephemera that a book-making friend gifted me this spring, there was a perfect klischee: an open book laying on two other books.

I combined this with two typefaces gained from the same gift, Ultra Bodoni 14 pt. and Helvetica 18 pt., along with a couple of thin ornaments.

And then I printed up 100 on some white, unlined index cards cut it half vertically to become 3 by 2.5 inches.

The bookplates are drying now; tomorrow I’ll brew up a new batch of agar-agar and apple cider vinegar and, if everything goes according to plan, the book I set out to loan a few days ago will be in the hands of the recipient by sundown.

Summer Kitchen is a new restaurant in Charlottetown that’s moved into the space occupied for decades previous by the venerable Noodle House, which moved downtown recently.

The building has received a long-deserved clean-up and renovation; the pervasive pink has been expunged, and replaced by shades of red. The place has never looked better.

Oliver and I stopped in for lunch mid-afternoon yesterday. There being no vegetarian options evident on the menu, we asked our server for recommendations; she called the chef out to speak with us, and we took him up on his suggestion of spicy eggplant and tofu over rice.

The result was very good; indeed it may have been the first palatable version of eggplant I’ve ever been served.

They’re starting off slowly at Summer Kitchen, waiting for additional staff to arrive before they step on the accelerator. Now might be the best time for you to stop in for a meal, before it gets really popular, as I’m sure it will.

Open every day except Tuesday. Our bill was $16 for two, which included a plate of vegetarian spring rolls to start.

The Charlottetown Guardian is in the midst of a website relaunch, something I imagine comes as a result of its corporate parent changing.

One of the pages that I–and I expect many–visit every day on the newspaper’s website is the obituaries page, a page that, as of now, is showing “Oh no! Page not found” and then linking back to itself.

In the new site header there’s an “Obituaries” link that goes to this mostly-useless page that shows a seemingly-randomly-sorted collection of 4926 obits from Prince Edward Island, with no ability to see those that are recent.

It turns out that there is a page that will show you the recent deaths, it’s just not that one, it’s this one, the results of an “advanced search” of the InMemoriam.ca site for obituaries from The Guardian, in reverse chronological order.

I suspect that The Guardian will address this issue shortly, but if you want to keep up to date for the time-being, look there.

Back in 2015 I wrote about my first experience with Bitcoin: I exchanged $20 CAD for 0.06218887 BTC from a Bitcoin ATM in the back of Calories restaurant in Saskatoon.

Since that initial purchase, the value of Bitcoin has fluctuated a lot, but it’s had a general upward trend, and, recently, a dramatic surge; here’s the XE.com conversion chart from Canadian Dollars to Bitcoin from late May of 2015 until today:

As a result of this, the $20 I converted to Bitcoin in 2015 is now worth $445.83 CAD.

Or at least it would be; in the intervening years I’ve spent some of my original Bitcoin stake, mostly for donations to the Internet Archive and OSMC, and through my experiments with the Brave browser’s ad model.

I’ve also been paid back by Brave (0.00530655 BTC, at the time about $13 CAD, but now worth $38 CAD), and I purchased an additional chunk of 0.02 Bitcoin, online from QuickBT (no endorsement implied), which cost me $23.17 CAD at the time and is now worth $143.37 CAD.

Today the balance in my Bitcoin wallet is 0.00999723 BTC, or, at today’s exchange, $71.66 CAD.

So my spend in Canadian dollars, all-in, has been $43 and, despite having paid out several donations, I’m ahead $33.

While my head dances with dreams of having, say, purchased $20,000 in BTC and now having $445,830 CAD, what would have been both beyond my means and an absurd risk. But what fun it would have been.

Stay tuned.

When I was a kid somebody told me that Jello was made out of dinosaur bones.

This could have been a schoolyard misunderstanding.

Or perhaps my mother thought that it would be more palatable for me to eat my Jello thinking of dinosaur bones–ancient, lumbering, precious–instead of something “extracted from the skin, bones, and connective tissues of animals such as domesticated cattle, chicken, pigs, and fish.”

Regardless, the dinosaur bones left a lasting impression on me, and I’ve avoided gelatinous things since.

But what of this gelatin.

We met again today when I googled “make your own gummed envelopes” and ended up at DIY Envelope Glue for Handmade Envelopes. Which provides a recipe that calls, in part, for “1 packet granulated gelatin.”

“Gelatin?” I asked myself, “What is this gelatin?”

Which is how I learned about the cattle and chicken and pigs and fish.

It did not seem appetizing, especially for one such as me who wanders mostly on the fringes of vegetarianism.

Some more Googling. Led me to animal bones, which sets the scene:

So I did a little of my own research on this topic. I found out that gelatin (the stuff that is used to make jell-o, custards, marshmallows (yes, even PEEPS!) is made from the bones, connective tissues, organs, hooves and some intestines of animals like cows and horses. A lot of glues also contain these same animal byproducts.

And then provides the antidote, in the form of agar agar.

Agar agar and I had crossed paths before, in biology class in high school, where we used it as a medium for various things the details of which escape me.

Then, as now, I got mildly distracted, in a Boutros Boutros-Ghali way, by the name: what’s with the double-agar? I’ve been unable to find an answer to this: indeed, the Wikipedia for Agar Agar redirects to Agar and then, without explanation, starts:

Agar (pronounced /ˈeɪɡɑːr/, US: /ˈɑːɡər/) or agar-agar is a jelly-like substance, obtained from algae.

But I didn’t want to continue down that rabbit hole. Just call me Boutrous. Onward.

On my lunch hour I stopped in at the Root Cellar and picked up the necessary ingredients to made vegan envelopes: 2 oz. of “agar power” (confusingly: “Ingredients: Agar-Agar Powder”) and a bottle of apple cider vinegar:

This being the Root Cellar, the total bill was $20; not sustainable for bulk envelope production, but unarguably close at hand.

Back at the office, I decided to proceed with a prototype of an ex libris before getting tied up in envelopes, so I cobbled one together with a snippet of acetate and a green Sharpie:

Next I poured some apple cider vinegar–about 5 or 6 tablespoons, eyeballed–into a china coffee mug and heated it up in the Guild’s microwave for about 45 seconds (until the pungent aroma of sweet vinegar filled the air).

I sprinkled about a tablespoon of the agar powder into the hot vinegar (again, eyeballed), and mixed together until, like the blog said, it was the “silky consistency of maple syrup.” It was actually more like honey.

I took a throwaway paint brush and coated the ex libris prototype from side to side to side:

After about two minutes the agar agar had dried, and the ex libris had curled up a little:

I waited a few more minutes, then grabbed a book at random from my bookshelf–What Color is Monday?, as it happened–licked the back of the ex libris (“mmmm, no dinosaur bones!”), and stuck it in place.

The effect was dramatically unsatisfying: it didn’t “stick” like glue, it merely “flopped” like a wet dog.

I was ready to count the effort a failure when I decided to be patient: I closed the book’s cover and compressed it in the office book press for 10 minutes.

That worked.

It’s still wet (hence the discolouration), but the parts that are dry have seemingly fused with the book.

Amazing.

I’ll fine-tune the agar agar-vinegar ratio as I experiment further, but now it’s to the type cabinet to set up a real live ex libris for the books in my library.

I feel satisfyingly alchemical today.

The case I carry around with my sketchbook and the supplies I stuff inside it. The Tile tracker is a recent addition, because I’m always misplacing the case.

This sketch was a revelation to me because I realized I don’t have to colour inside the lines.

I read about Meguiar’s PlastX Clear Plastic Cleaner & Polish on Cool Tools, and immediately ordered some, as the prospect of being able to polish the headlights on my aging VW Jetta was alluring.

It worked as promised and new breath was blown into the eyes of our car.

I’ve taken to sketching what I eat.

There’s a downside to this: I have to sketch first, eat later. Otherwise the source code gets eaten up before the program has run.

Receiver Coffee’s been making a Oliver, Pepper and Feta Pinwheel this season that was ripe for the sketch-eating.

The real thing is more complex that I’ve rendered it. But I like the way the olives worked out (I am to be the Island’s foremost olive sketcher). And the sketch makes me jones for a pinwheel, so there’s that.

I made the sketch on a Strathmore Watercolour Postcard, which really loves the paint in a way that’s novel and interesting. Once the paint dried I put a couple of stamps on the back and mailed it to my friend Tom.