After this journey into aesthetics, we relocated to a new had very good pizzas at Mediamatic ETEN. Elderflower lemonade! Someone speaking Danish tended the bar. “Take a look around!” Aquaponics gardening in a greenhouse with colored LEDs. “Oh, all food here’s vegan.”
There are plans afoot for Oliver and I to return to the Netherlands at the end of August, and I hope that we can make Mediamatic one of our destinations.
One of the advantages of having a partner in the fibre arts industry is a ready supply of various and sundry threads. Courtesy of same, I sewed up a new text block yesterday, using some red cotton thread that Catherine gave me to sew together signatures made from sheets of 70 lb. Strathmore drawing paper.
One of the challenges I face in learning about bookbinding is a striking inability to think clearly in three dimensions; it’s no wonder that my vocations to date have been firmly rooted in the comfortable two dimensional plane of printing.
Coptic binding is simple, at its heart, but it requires the ability to retain a three dimensional picture of where you’ve been, where you’re at, and where you’re going, and this is something almost beyond my abilities.
But I kept at it, and here’s what I made:
My stitching went off the rails a few times; most of the time I managed to wrangle things back into order, but there are a couple of gnarly bits there. Coptic stitching is a struggle to maintain just the right amount of tension in the cord to hold things pleasantly together, without making it tight enough to tear nor loose enough to flop around. I didn’t win that battle completely, and my book is a little too floppy for my tastes.
My big error in judgment was opting to use stock 20 pound printer paper for the inside pages; after dealing with the substantial living organism that is St. Armand machine made paper, constituted from rag not wood, stitching through Staples paper feels horrible and unforgiving and deeply unsatisfying. Never again.
That all said, the book does lay open flat rather pleasantly–coptic binding’s strong suit–and I was proud of my ability to translate the stitches on the video into stitches in reality.
I made the covers from the same sheet of “display board” I used to cover my hardbound book earlier in the week; I covered them with some lovely, thick green paper that Catherine gave me last year. The inside covers are Japanese paper from the same odds-and-sods lot I picked up at The Ikebana shop. The stitching is with green linen cord I purchased at the NSCAD art supply store a few years ago.
The only way I’m ever going to crack this thinking-in-3D nut is with practice, so I’ll make more coptic-bound books until I get it down.
It seems that I cannot escape the theatre: I move, and the theatre follows.
It all started with a sewer backup.
As the CBC reported in mid-June, the Mackenzie Theatre, an annex of the Confederation Centre of the Arts, experienced a sewer backup that forced the closure of a basement rehearsal hall. The spill-over effect of this was that the Confederation Players needed a new home for at least part of the summer and, St. Paul’s Anglican Church Parish Hall, being only a block a way, proved to be a convenient emergency base.
The Confederation Players are a Confederation Centre side-hustle wherein “history comes alive when you stroll down Charlottetown’s historic district … a troupe of costumed, young Canadians, trained as the Fathers and Ladies of Confederation.”
Said troupe of the costumed young now occupy the former Sunday School classroom beside my office here in the Parish Hall basement, and their youthful exuberance has spread over the land. At this very moment, for example, their voices are joined in harmony with a modern take on Total Eclipse of the Heart, Bonnie Tyler’s seminal 1983 power ballad.
Indeed this is but one example of what amounts to being the only fly in the ointment of this arrangement, that being that when the members of the troupe are here in the basement they are in their down time.
And so while they may be dressed like J.C. Pope, they are also talking about socialism, merengue, varieties of scotch, and the ins and outs of southern BBQ1. The effect is quite disconcerting, and effectively ruins the theatricality of the troupe for me when I encounter them playing croquet or holding forth on Maritime Union, as they are inclined to do outside these basement walls, when they are on the job (a job, I should add, that all evidence suggests they all take very seriously, with great concern for both historical nuance and theatricality).
It’s hard to believe the Disney magic when you’ve seen Mickey Mouse smoking out behind the castle.
Nonetheless, aside from the occasional theatrical outburst outside my door that disrupts my flow, I’m happy to have the young Canadians next door: if it weren’t for them, many days I wouldn’t lay eyes on a single soul outside my family, and the life they breathe into these hallowed halls is welcome.
1. My impression of what young adults talk about; this impression may be influenced by the fact that I can’t really here what they’re talking about.
Metadata at its highest expression: OpenStreetMap has a feature for excrement bag vending machine that I discovered by accident today whilst supplementing the map around Confederation Landing Park.
After a three week delay due illness, I was back at Canadian Blood Services in Charlottetown this afternoon for my monthly plasma donation.
Since I started on this round of donating, after a 10 year gap, today was my first time back wearing summertime clothing, meaning that the bright pink wrap, with “Give Blood” printed on it, looped around my donation site, was in full view. Making me appear to be a member of a militant band of pro-blood-donating rebels. Which, in a way, I am.
While I was having my blood pressure taken, during the pre-donation screening interview, I noticed a poster advertising Canadian Blood Services’ Give Blood mobile app, and I took advantage of the free donor wifi to install it on my phone while I was donating. It’s a slick, well-designed, helpful app packed with useful functionality, like calendar integration, notifications, a digital donor card, the ability to see (and reschedule, if needed) upcoming appointments, and a lifetime donation total (mine is 16; today’s will make it 17).
As I’ve mentioned in this space before, Canadian Blood Services has really upped its game in recent years: the plasma donation time is now down to about an hour (from the time you walk in the door until the time you walk out the door), the pre-screening questionnaire can be filled out online before you arrive, the call centre is religious about calling with appointment reminders; and the nursing staff are as friendly and accommodating as they’ve always been (my nurse, looking at my plasma through the microscope during the screening, told me that I have “beautiful plasma”).
If you’ve a spare hour every month–or every two months, or once a year–and don’t mind being poked in the arm (by some of the best arm pokers you’ll meet)–I encourage you to make an appointment: just call 1-888-2-DONATE.
One area that Jennifer’s workshop didn’t tread into was sewing together books with multiple signatures; she alluded to this being too complex a task to take on in a single day workshop, thus fixing it in my mind as the new impossibly complex thing.
This week, though, I busted through my preconceived notions about that, with the help of some YouTube how-to videos, and made myself a hardcover sketchbook.
I started out by making the text block, following the sewing instructions in this video. I used paper from La papeterie Saint-Armand that was leftover from the Confederation Country Cabinet project, and some red linen cord that I picked up somewhere along the way; for the endpapers I used two sheets of orange Japanese paper from an odds-and-sods pack I picked up in Halifax earlier this year from The Ikebana Shop. The orange bookmark-ribbon is something I found in a notions store (and something I should have made about 3 inches longer, so that it would loop through the book and out the bottom).
The linen cord was overkill–and a little knotty to wrangle–but it did the job. I managed to get the stitches in the right place in all but one instance, where the first signature was left flapping in the wind on one end, but I threw in a single stitch and a knot to secure it.
Next, I made the cover, combining the instructions from this video and this video. I purchased a sheet of “display board” from The Bookmark for the hardcover and spine and used a lovely sheet of heavy paper decorated with gold leaves that was a gift from Catherine.
There was a seemingly endless amount of PVA glue–purchased from Michael’s, Aleene’s Tacky Glue–involved in binding everything together, and my “not getting glue on everything” technique needs some work.
Each step of the process was aided by the book press that I found in a closet many years ago, a heavy cast iron beast that does an excellent job at holding things together and flat as the glue dries.
The final product isn’t perfect: there are air bubbles and glue bubbles in annoying little places, and it’s not completely square. But it’s much more than I thought mere mortals like me were capable of, and has stoked my thirst for making more books.
The Rainbow Valley film is playing every Wednesday night this summer on the plaza at the Confederation Centre; Oliver and I were there for tonight’s showing.
It’s such a great film, and I was happy to see it again; I was reminded what a masterful story Patrick and Alexis crafted, one that so wonderfully captures the essence of what Rainbow Valley meant to so many of us.
The Google Home Mini is on sale for $39.99 until July 12, 2018 at The Source (née Radio Shack). I picked up an extra one, for Oliver’s room, to allow him to listen to music at bedtime.
It replaces a complex system involving his MacBook Air, an old Moto G and a Bluetooth speaker, a system that was prone to failure and a nightly source of angst for both of us.
If you’re okay with the “allow Google to listen to everything I say and do,” the Home Mini is a very capable device, with surprisingly good sound for such a tiny speaker.
In 2013 the City of Charlottetown offered free “low flow” shower heads to residents with shower heads rated more than 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm). Ours was exactly 2.5 gpm, so we weren’t eligible, but I took the opportunity to live up to the spirit of the program, and replaced our shower head with a 1.6 gpm model, a simple Waterpik head that I bought at Walmart for $18.
As a result of the change, if I take a 5 minute shower, the savings of 0.9 gallons per minute translates into 4.5 gallons of water saved; over the course of a year that’s 1642 gallons (6215 litres or 6.215 m3), saved.
That’s a lot of water. About 5% of our yearly household water consumption.
Oddly, though, it’s not much of a cost savings: the city bills water usage at 26.4 cents/m3 and sewer usage at 58 cents/m3, so our yearly cost savings is only $5.25; usage-based billing amounts to only 23% or so of my quarterly water bill, the remainder coming from flat-rate daily charges. So, even though we cut our consumption by 5%, we save only about 1% on our water bill over the course of the year from the switch (of course I’m not accounting for the 6215 litres of water we don’t have to heat up every year, which has its own cost saving attached to it).
But, still, saving water is good, no matter the financial pay-off.
I didn’t suffer from the decreased flow; the Waterpik unit does a good job at maximizing power even with less water. The only negative side-effect of the switch is that, because there’s less water running through the shower head, it takes the cold water all that much longer to flush out of the system when I start up the shower in the morning. It’s not that there’s any more cold water to be flushed out, but the increased time means that I’m far more inclined to start up the shower and then go and do something else.
Like shave, for example. Or empty the washer. Or fold up the towels.
And that something else often takes longer than the cold water takes to flush out, meaning that the water is needlessly running, hot, while I’m distracted otherwise.
Behavioral waste occurs when bathers use their time comfortably and efficiently while waiting for hot water to reach the shower. Instead of patiently waiting for cold water to exit the shower head most people leave to do something else. Typical activities include brushing teeth, using the washroom and picking out clothes. Because bathing only begins after the tasks have been completed, countless gallons of hot water are unintentionally wasted at the start of every shower.
I came across a mention of it via Cool Tools, and sent a note to Charlottetown Water & Sewer about it to see if they’d had any experience with it. They hadn’t. So they went out and bought one, and offered to loan it to me to beta test.
I picked it up today and did just that.
It’s an easy device to install: you just unscrew the existing shower head, screw on the ShowerStart, and then screw the shower head into the ShowerStart.
It works like this: you turn on the water as you normally would, and the cold water flushes out; as soon as 95ºF water starts to flow, the water slows to a trickle, leaving me free to shave or whatever else occupies me. When I’m ready to shower, I simply pull on the pull-cord, and the hot water starts to flow.
Here’s the beta test on video:
The water slows to a trickle after 41 seconds, meaning that, at 1.6 gpm, it’s flushing out about 4.1 litres of cold water.
Assuming that it takes me 4 minutes to shave, that means that, with the ShowerStart in place, I’m saving 3 minutes and 20 seconds in hot water needlessly running, or 20 litres of water.
Over the course of the year then, ballpark, I’ll save 7300 litres of water using this device. Which is more than I saved by switching to a low-flow showerhead.
I’ll use the ShowerStart for a couple of weeks and report back on how it works in day-to-day use.
I am 
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