I haven’t worn a watch in 40 years, and I’ve no inclination to start. But the Pebble watch has always intrigued me, as has its recent rebirth.

I’m especially impressed by the degree to which the rebirth is being done out in the open, in particular the video series, Tick Tock, by founder Eric Migicovsky (see also Naming things is hard, by my friend Steven).

A comic about yoga, sketched this morning at The Cork & Cast, and finished at the Charlottetown Library.

Here’s a transcription:

First Page

My Auntie Fran was the first person I ever knew who did yoga. She was dogged by back pain and hoped it might help.

My scientist father thought yoga was loopy and a “woo-woo” distraction.

DID YOGA HELP HER? I HAVE NO IDEA.

But what stuck in my mind: yoga = WEIRD

When Auntie Fran took her own life when I was a teenager, it only served to cement “stay away from any of that,” deep inside me.

AND SO I STAYED AWAY (far, far away)

UNTIL 2018 when, feeling anxious and unsettled almost all the time, I emailed my friend Ian, who I’d seen heading to yoga in a nearby church every Thursday morning.

“Tell me about yoga,” I asked. AND HE TOLD ME!
Ian is a professional explainer, and he wrote me a 500-word missive on the value of yoga in his life. I WAS SOLD!! And so…

Second Page

I did absolutely NOTHING.

2019 → 2020 → 2021 → (6 years passed) → 2022 →
(still nothing) 2023 → 2024 → 2025 → until…

…this spring, Lisa started going to Ian’s Thursday morning class. She loved it. She came home (literally) SINGING. ♪♬

She invited me to join the class… (oh my…)

NO WAY!!

I rejected the idea out of hand.
Lisa felt shut down.
We got into an argument.

I came up with all manner of practical reasons why I couldn’t join the class. Scheduling conflicts. Interference with my workouts. “Honing in” on Lisa.

— AND. THEN. I. SAT. WITH. MY. FEELINGS. —

AND I realized that all my ‘reasons’ were rooted in a deeply-held childhood story. So I called bullshit on myself. I re-read Ian’s words. I took Lisa’s to heart…

AND I SIGNED UP FOR YOGA!

Third Page

Today was week number 4!

And…

YOGA IS WEIRD

But that turns out to be okay.

Every Thursday morning at 9:00 I join about 20 women, plus Ian, in the Trinity United basement for 90 minutes, led by Judith (who is sincere, welcoming, and funny).

I AM OKAY. IT’S OKAY. 

It’s okay. And confusing. And fun. And energizing. And connecting. It helps in all the ways Ian and Lisa predicted it would.

OM

The moral of the story? Listen to your friends. Listen to your love. Trust. Realize trauma for what it is.
Call bullshit. Lean in. Leap in. It will be (better than) OK.

A comic about my experience last week getting a Criminal Record Check:

I signed up to volunteer for “Cycling Without Age”, a project of Bike Friendly Communities to pair “pilots” to cycling a tri-shaw for those who cannot cycle otherwise.

To volunteer requires a “Criminal Record Check” from the police dept. I submitted mine…

A few days later:

“Hello?”

“Is this Peter?”

“Yes!”

“I’m calling from the police…”

The police called and asked if I’d ever been fingerprinted for a “Criminal Record Check” before. I HAD BEEN ! Three years ago to volunteer at a school fundraiser.

They needed to see my fingerprints. Why? Because there is a criminal who shares my EXACT DATE OF BIRTH! “People can change their name, but not their birthday,” he said. I showed them. I’m good to go.
 

From Karine Polwart:

My kids are half Canadian. Their dad grew up in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia on the maritime east coast. Indeed, he’s just been there celebrating the 80th birthday of his mum, my kids’ remarkable Grandma, Joella Foulds. 

This by way of introduction to her version of When I First Came to Caledonia, which is lovely.

Meanwhile, Alan Doyle has released his version of Joel Plaskett’s Hey Moon. This served both to redeem, or perhaps to reanimate, Alan Doyle in my heart, and to take another look at Joel Plaskett, heretofore dumped in a file drawer labelled “the one who isn’t David Myles.”

(This all came about because of the recent release of Songs From The Gang — A Celebration of Joel Plaskett, which has been on frequent rotation in the household, as Plaskett is much esteemed by Lisa).

(See also Sloan’s Chris Murphy is one of 22 artists celebrating Joel Plaskett with a special musical tribute, from CBC Q, which is a good introduction to both Plaskett and Sloan).

Also new is Bitter Ender, from Mary Chapin Carpenter’s upcoming album:

Pride is a curse but no pride is worse
And lately that’s just what it is
Whatever we’re told, everything gets old
Nothing changes it’s the same old shit

(Carpenter, you may recall, just to take this full circle, released an album with Polwart earlier this year).

Finally, new last month a new album, What It Takes, from May Erlewine. My favourite track so far is Forgot Myself.

(Erlewine’s arresting performance of Wild from 2017 helped me keep my emotional head above water through the dark times).

Friend of the blog Martin Rutte let me know about Moe’s Latte, a new coffee shop around the corner from us on Kent Street. It’s a Lilliputian place, with half a dozen stools, serving coffee and pastries, along with some savoury things. The vibe is chill, with a Phoebe Bridgers-forward soundtrack on the PA.

It’s nice to know there is still entrepreneurial energy in the Charlottetown coffee scene, and it’s nice to see low road spaces in downtown-adjacent Charlottetown filling out.

The front counter turns out to be an excellent place to sketch Central Christian Church across the street, which turns out to be architecturally more interesting than I’d ever paid attention to:

My friend Dave tells the great story of how he started at the CBC. He begins:

Have I told you the story of how I got into CBC? It’s ridiculous.

I was a CBC Radio listener in my late teens and early 20s. In June of 2000, I was listening to our local morning show host … introduce a contest they were running for Canada Day. He asked listeners to write a parody of a famous Canadian song. The best would win two first class train tickets to Ottawa for Canada Day, VIP passes to all the shows on Parliament Hill, and three nights stay at a hotel downtown.

Like many great “how I ended up” stories, it’s a topsy-turvy path of bravery, skill, and creating the necessary preconditions for luck.

I’ve had a similar journey.

If my mother’s college friend Heather hadn’t mentioned to me that a Victoria College professor was looking for volunteers to help enter Greek texts into a database?

If my high school biology teacher hadn’t taken us on a field trip to the Vertebrate Palaeontology lab at the Royal Ontario Museum, where they happened to need a FORTRAN programmer?

If my former Trent University professor hadn’t given me an office with a terminal that let me use the World Wide Web months after it was released?

If I hadn’t come across a copy of The Guardian in a Toronto library and found an ad for a job on PEI?

Every twisty turn was a doorway.

Every twisty turn involved help from others, enormous privilege, luck.

(My own story of “getting into the CBC”:  through Marg Meikle, I met Ann Thurlow. Ann took care of the rest.)

Many years ago, I met Igor Schwarzmann in Copenhagen. We were both staying at a CABINN hotel while attending the reboot conference, and, one late night we both ended up in the lounge and struck up a conversation. We’ve been friends ever since.

Igor’s one of the most interesting people I know: a deep thinker, a trend-spotter, a deep-diver. His friend and sometimes-collaborator Johannes Kleske has similar qualities, and recently their collaboration has taken the form of a podcast, Follow the Rabbit:

We’re Igor and Johannes, two endlessly curious minds who’ve built our careers on exploring the ever-shifting landscape of culture. Join us as we work with the garage door up, sharing not just our findings, but our entire journey of discovery. Whether you’re a curious mind, a fellow researcher, or a potential client, Follow the Rabbit offers a unique glimpse into how we map, frame, and engage with culture.

Inasmuch as I’m also “endlessly curious,” and share an interest canvas with significant overlap to theirs, I’m a frequent listener.

Take this week’s Indie Magazines: From productive nostalgia to cultural anchors, where they dive into the world of print publishing, especially in the Monocle and Monocle-adjacent spaces. In part:

There is a small anecdote that I need to tell you about Monocle and their events, because when we were both, last year in London, and because Johannes is a Monocle patron, we attended a Monocle event about… What was it? Yachts and private jets?

It was private jets, mostly private jets.

And the event started with the question, do you get first a yacht or first a private jet? Which I felt like this talks to my soul. And the reason why I’m mentioning this is that you can see also there is a certain style that Monocle cultivated over a long period of time.

And they are doing it so well. And I think very few organizations are able to be so consistent across time, it makes them so recognizable and so relatable. 

What I love about that isn’t that Igor and Johannes are of the jet-or-yacht class, but that they are curious about those that are. And about the house journals of those that are. (I am not immune to this Monocle-affinity: I’ve been reading since issue one).

Similarly worthy of a listen, Monthly Rewind: Luxury Markets, ADHD Soundscapes, and Conversations as Culture. What’s not to like about a wide-ranging conversation about Ozempic, trendy LA grocery stores, and an app that adjusts a soundscape to your location, activity, and mood.

(It was Johannes who originally turned me on to Readwise, an app I’ve spent hundreds of hours inside since, so I trust his futurecasting).

Listening to the podcast, I’m reminded why I love Berlin, and how long it’s been since I was there.

Last week, with great fanfare, I announced that I’d switched from using MailChimp to using Buttondown to power the ability to subscribe to a daily digest of my blog posts by email.

A week later, Buttondown suffered a technical meltdown, something that resulted in some of my 94 subscribers receiving 8 copies of that day’s email, and some—like me—not receiving it at all.

Needless to say, I was pissed off and frustrated, all the more so when the reply I received from Buttondown support was disappointingly “we’ll get back to you about this, but don’t hold your breath”:

Thank you for raising this issue about the duplicate emails going out. I have filed your experience on the Buttondown Roadmap page to be investigated and addressed. I have also associated your message to support with the ticket so that when it is resolved we can reach out directly to update you.

I was frustrated enough that I started to look elsewhere for alternative providers, to the point where I got pretty deep into setting up Moosend, a process that involved its own frustrations and limitations.

Today, before continuing down this road, I thought to look and see if Buttondown has a status page. It does. And on that page I read a very detailed blow-by-blow about what had happened, in part:

Bad configuration on one of our self-hosted SMTP servers caused a crash that proved difficult to recover from, leaving lots of emails “stuck” in varying degrees – and their being stuck manifested in a slew of unpleasant ways. We’ve fixed the configuration, are investing (literally, right at this very moment) in better tooling and alerting, and are architecting a way to prevent this from ever happening again.

and then, later on, in more detail:

Over the course of the afternoon, approximately 13,000 subscribers across 40 authors experienced some combination of the following:

• Multiple hour delays before receiving a message
• Not receiving an email at all (though we’ve redriven these.)
• Multiple sends of the same email

And that’s the fate that befell my subscribers and me.

Having managed servers professionally for more than 30 years, I am no stranger to confounding cascading technical meltdowns: some of my most challenging and frustrating hours have been spent in the wee hours, trying to diagnose some combination of web and database servers being overwhelmed. I was religious about telling my clients, when this sort of thing happened, exactly what happened and why; I treated that responsibility as seriously as my responsibility to actually fix the problem.

As I wrote last week:

I’d been reading the blog of Buttondown’s founder for awhile, and liked the cut of his jib.

Posts like this, with a photo of his office, and his bicycle, remind me that he’s a person like me, and he’s likely had a really shitty week.

This all combines to me unusually sympathetic to the Buttondown’s plight, and so I’m going to stick with them.

IKEA offers a service whereby you can have online order shipped to a central warehouse on PEI, the advantage being that it’s cheaper than having things shipped directly to your door.

We were in Halifax in March, bought a BILLY bookcase, and then realized there was no way to fit it into the car, so we returned it, and had it shipped. 

(Delivery directly to our house would have been $99; shipping to the warehouse was $49.)

BILLY arrived this week.

It turns out that the IKEA warehouse on PEI is located in the Rush Transfer warehouse, on the Mason Road in Stratford. If the number of parcels in the warehouse when I went to pick up our bookcases, any indication, Islanders are ordering a lot of things from IKEA.

In a CBC story about ferry service returning for the season, I noticed this brief mention of a new event:

To welcome it to eastern P.E.I., the Northumberland will be open to the general public on April 26 and 27 as part of Doors Open Down East event.

I went looking for more information about this event—anything behind-the-scenes is my jam—and it proved hard to come by outside of social media, so I grabbed the map that’s promoting it:

There would have been a time when I would launch off on a side-project to do a levee-style razzmatazz treatment of this data, but I don’t have it in me to go there.

But you can bet you’ll see us down east next weekend.

(Kudos to Belfast Councillor Trisha Carter who first proposed the initiative back in November).