After supper this evening we found ourselves in need of three things: numbing cream (to assist with a blood test Oliver is having in the morning), a toilet flap, and exercise.

As the nearest source of toilet flaps was Home Hardware on St. Peters Road, we decided to combine all three missions into an epic walk, stopping at Parkdale Pharmacy along the way for the numbing cream.

It was a beautiful, bright, warm night for a walk. Almost all of the ice and snow are gone from the streets, and the ground is almost dry.

We walked down Richmond Street to Cumberland, along the short Routes for Nature and Health diversion in back of Maritime Electric, along the Confederation Trail to Kensington Road, past the Civic Center (where the Islanders are playing tonight) to Linden Drive, and down Linden to Parkdale Pharmacy.

The numbing cream at Parkdale Pharmacy turned out to be considerably cheaper than at Shoppers Drug Mart, so by this point the trip had already paid for itself.

From Parkdale Pharmacy we walked straight out St. Peters Road to Home Hardware. After some consultations with a helpful clerk about the complicated world of toilet flaps, we acquired what, in his estimate, was the most likely candidate.

We walked out of the back of the Home Hardware parking lot to MacKay Drive, a street I’m pretty sure I’d never been on before.

At the top of MacKay Drive we encountered a prominent Charlottetown lawyer who marveled that anyone from downtown had walked so far out into the suburbs. He also told us something of the futuristic bubble house down the street that we’d encountered on our way up the hill.

We cut down Vic Campbell Boulevard to avoid getting trapped in a Möbious loop of deepest Parkdale, turned right on Palmers Lane, dashed across Mount Edward Road, and made our way onto the Experimental Farm.

On top of the rise we found ourselves in the middle of Premiers Grove, filled with trees planted to memorialize Island premiers. We found the Robert Ghiz tree, the Keith Milligan tree, the Catherine Callbeck tree, and the Wade Maclauchlan tree.

We made our way through the Grove, around past the Lily Pond, and back down to the Confederation Trail.

We ducked through the Farm Centre Legacy Garden, past the bee huts, and out the other side by Upstreet Brewing.

We crossed Allen Street to Walthen Drive, walked down Walthen to Prince Street School, cut through the playground to Upper Prince Street, and walked down Prince Street to home.

The walk took us 90 minutes from start to finish, covered 6.44 kilometers and 7,709 steps.

We fully expect that for generations to come the residents of MacKay Drive will speak of the time those two fellows walked all the way out from town on a bright spring evening.

Ton muses about an RSS Revival:

RSS is the most important piece of internet plumbing for following new content from a wide range of sources. It allows you to download new updates from your favourite sites automatically and read them at your leisure. Dave Winer, forever dedicated to the open web, created it.

I used to be a very heavy RSS user. I tracked hundreds of sources on a daily basis. Not as news but as a way to stay informed about the activities and thoughts of people I was interested in. At some point, that stopped working. Popular RSS readers were discontinued, most notably Google’s RSS reader, many people migrated to the Facebook timeline, platforms like Twitter stopped providing RSS feeds to make you visit their platform, and many people stopped blogging. But with FB in the spotlight, there is some interest in refocusing on the open web, and with it on RSS.

I’ve been an emitter and consumer of RSS feeds since the very beginning, and so, for me, there’s no need for a revival, as I never left. I currently have 86 RSS feeds in my RSS reader, ranging from Ton’s blog itself to security alerts to CBC news headlines to the blogs of several Prince Edward Island MLAs:

For the longest time, like many others, I consumed RSS feeds in Google Reader; when it was shut down by Google, I replaced this with a self-hosted instance of Tiny Tiny RSS, a serviceable replacement.

When I’m using my laptop, I read my RSS feeds in Tiny Tiny RSS’s web interface in a browser:

When I’m on my Android phone, I use the Tiny Tiny RSS app, which syncs itself with the server so that what I’ve read and what I haven’t is always current:

I self-host Tiny Tiny RSS, rather than using a third-party service like Feedly, because, well, once-bitten-twice-shy: I don’t want my RSS consumption to be dependent on the corporate whims of an RSS reader company. Besides, what’s the point of taking a collection of independent, decentralized feeds and centralizing them?

That said, I recognize that running a personal Tiny Tiny RSS server is outside the realm of possibility for most people. I also recognize that a lot of RSS nomenclature, including the name RSS itself, stands as a barrier to a lot of people. So there’s work to be done here to catalyze the revival that Ton writes about, a revival that, despite my own perseverance, I fully support and see the benefits of.

The ink is dry and I’m left with a pile of 75 freshly-printed envelopes, ready for use. I send more mail that the average person, so these won’t really last a lifetime. But they should take me through the year. Watch your mailboxes.

When Amazon search fails, it fails spectacularly: I was looking for the book, mentioned here, Bookbinding: The Complete Guide to Folding, Sewing & Binding. Amazon thought, absent that, I might be interested in a guide to folding knives. A complete guide.

Spotted recently: Instagram now supports downloading all of the data you’ve contributed to it since you opened your account. To use this tool, login to Instagram and navigate to the “Privacy and Security” setting and scroll down to “Data Download”:

It takes a few minutes (at least in my case) to build the archive, and when it’s ready you get a only-works-for-four-days download link to grab a ZIP archive of all the images and videos you’ve uploaded, along with JSON representations of likes, messages and other metadata.

Once the black dried on the C1A 4R4 envelopes, I added a red layer, with my name:

I love the “taking the smallest element and making it the biggest” aspect of this design: the postal code is often a throwaway item added (or not added) to a return address; this flips that, and makes it unavoidable.

My contacts within Canada Post suggest that if you mail a letter addressed simply to “Rukavina C1A 4R4” there’s a good chance it will get delivered; this puts that to the test, at least on the return side.

When I bought the Golding Jobber № 8 letterpress from Bill and Gertie Campbell, Bill generously spent a couple of hours with me showing me some of the trickier bits of using it.

One of the things he taught me is how to print envelopes. Because of the way they’re constructed, printing on envelopes often means printing on different thicknesses of paper at the same time. If you just print as you normally would, the impression will be uneven because the pressure will be uneven on different areas.

You can see the result in this first print of a C1A 4R4 envelope I printed today:

What Bill showed me is how to construct a sort of paper “shim” under the envelopes so that everything ends up being the same thickness when printing. To make the shim, I took the envelope I test-printed, and chopped it up with a knife, using the print as a template for the areas that needed buttressing. The result looked like this:

I covered the shim with a layer of paper to avoid it getting caught up in the envelopes while printing, ending up with this:

With the shim in place, the envelopes printed cleanly across the entire surface:

I’ve got one more run to take at these envelopes, printing a line, in red, between the C1A and the 4R4; I’ll do that once the black has dried.

With temperatures in the mid-teens and wearing Spring jackets and sneakers for our after-supper walk, it’s hard to believe that 3 years ago this week there was still a lot of snow and ice on the ground, the result of 2015’s endless winter.

Here’s 2015 in our backyard vs. tonight.

In an exchange that reflects blogging the way it’s supposed to happen, Ton left a comment about energy usage data in the Netherlands on my post about my postal code. And then, when I asked him a question about this, he responded with a detailed and very helpful blog post of his own.

One of the things he revealed there is that his house in the Netherlands consumes 3700 kWh per year of electricity.

Because we’ve been doing detailed logging of our own electricity consumption, this gives me an opportunity to compare.

Our Maritime Electric electricity meter read 1702925 on April 24, 2017 and reads 2246469 as of one minute ago, a difference of 543544, or 5435.44 kWh.

This means that we consume 1735 kWh–46% more–per year for our detached single family home of three than Ton’s detached single family home of three.

Our friends Bill and Michelle, who are also participating in my electricity and water monitoring project, and also have a detached single family home of three, started out at 3125321 and are now at 3615162, a difference of 489841, or 4898.41 kWh, which is about 10% less than us, and 32% higher than Ton.

I’d be interested in drilling down into the primary reasons why our electricity consumption is so much higher.

Over March Break in Halifax, Oliver and I stopped in to see our friend Nardag*, daughter of our old friends Bob and Yvonne. I’ve known Nardag all her life, and it still seems odd that she’s now a independent young woman. It was wonderful to see her.

While we were visiting, Nardag’s neighbour was over for a visit, as it was Friday, and Friday was the day set aside for smoothie bowl breakfasts (in this, she explained, she takes after her father, who is similarly regimented in his habits).

What is a smoothie bowl, you ask? I put this question to our hosts: “it’s a smoothie, but in a bowl,” they replied in unison, “with things sprinkled on top.”

They offered to whip up a couple of extra smoothie bowls for us, and we eagerly agreed. Shortly they were placed in front of us and an array of the “things” laid out surrounding. This array included everyday things like nuts and shredded coconut, along with various other mysterious powders, some of which we were warned were rather bracing to consume.

We opted for a safe sprinkle of known things, and enjoyed the experience immensely.

To the point where we have now introduced the radical smoothie bowl concept into our own breakfast routine.

I remain unclear as to whether Nardag and her neighbour invented the smoothie bowl—for all I know Californians have been consuming them for decades—but I’ve opted to believe so.

They’re simple to make: prepare a smoothie as you normally would, albeit perhaps a bit thicker. Pour it in a bowl. Sprinkle to taste with coconut, yak horn powder, etc. Enjoy.

* Nardag is not Nardag’s actual name. On the day she was born, Catherine got a call from her mother and misheard her name, which is actually Nadja, as Nardag. While this struck me as an odd name, her parents have a Bohemian bent, and so it was not outside the realm of possibility. As is my wont, I embraced the mistake entirely.