My daily routine now includes 30 minutes of sketching every morning, between dropping Oliver off at school and arriving in the office. It’s a good way to start the day, and it gives me an excuse to grab a cup of tea and then sketch the place I picked it up at.

This morning it was Casa Mia. I’m proud of the way I captured the pop-outs on the third floor, and less proud of the way I didn’t capture the recessed entrance. I’m probably still a little obsessive about literally rendering bricks (as opposed to capturing a sense of them), and I’d still like to get better at windows, especially at giving a sense of what’s behind them.

You may recall my experiments logging the temperature and humidity here in the Reinventorium a few summers back. With Anne & Gilbert season about to launch, and spring in the air, it seemed like a fine opportunity to fire things back up publish the office weather report again. Here’s this week’s office temperature so far:

I’m logging this, as before, with a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor strapped to a Raspberry Pi running Node-RED. Beyond weather-curiosity, I’m using this as a chance to experiment with MQTT and The Things Network, inspired in part by my friend Ton’s participation in an effort to measure his new city. I’m still trying to grok the building blocks of MQTT–trying to sort out which way is “down” and which way is “up”–and once I do I should have an topic on The Things Network that you can subscribe to.

It’s the first sweaterless of spring. I celebrated with a cup of tea opposite the office with sketchbook in hand. Angles; it’s all about angles.

CBC News reports:

Catching distracted drivers is easy because they are distracted, say police.

A petard, by the way, is “a small bomb made of a metal or wooden box filled with powder, used to blast down a door or to make a hole in a wall.” If your petard blasts you down, something’s gone horribly wrong.

If you’re looking for a way to take Google Assistant for Android and iPhone out for a ride today, just say “OK Google, ask Farmer’s Almanac about today” to try out the new feature we’ve been working on for the past few weeks, a brief daily update.

Memorial Hall in Confederation Centre of the Arts was looking particularly striking today.

When Oliver and I were passing through Sackville, NB en route to Halifax in March, we stopped in at Tidewater Books on Bridge Street, and I picked up a couple of lined notebooks from the Circulo line of Vancouver’s Paper-Oh, notebooks that look like this:

I bought an A6 in red on black, and an A5 in orange-on-grey, both with lined paper; if I’d had my druthers, I would have bought the unlined variant, but this was before I started sketching, so they were intended for note-taking, not for drawing.

But I’ve been using them for sketching, for almost two months, and I love them:

• They’re built like tanks, and even after two months of wear and tear they’ve both kept their shape. The covers are unusually thick, and wrap around completely, which really helps in this regard.
• They have an ingenious almost-invisible magnetic latch. It seemed silly in the beginning, but the “click” of the latch, and the fact that it keeps the notebooks well-closed, is very satisfying.
• The paper is very pleasant to draw on.
• The lay-flat binding means that pages open right up, and the well-sewn binding means there’s no danger of pages falling out.

I’m well on my way through both notebooks, and so I went looking for a local source yesterday, but came up dry. Fortunately it looks like The Bookmark will be able to order some, so stay tuned if you want to get some for yourself.

I do a lot of sketching from the front counter at Mad Wok on Queen Street, so there are an uncommon number of sketches of The Root Cellar, Phở Hưng, and Linda’s Coffee Shop, all across the street, in my sketchbook.

I have some work to do on brick density and window rendering. It’s good to return to the same subject again and again and again to see evolution, as small as it may be.

From time to time, a new business opens in our neighbourhood that appears to make no sense. Often this lack of sensibility portends failure; the fishing tackle shop around the corner has closed, and one imagines that the kite/knitting shop that took its place cannot be too far behind.

I think Brìgh Music & Tea, however, is an exception.

While, on first blush, the notion of a shop selling tea and musical instruments appears to make no sense, once you walk in the door, meet the genial owners Mary and Cian, and realize there is method to the mad combination of music and tea, confidence in the enterprise’s future begins to emerge.

I’m enough of a musician to walk in the door of a music store, but, more often than not, I immediately feel like an interloper, and make haste lest I be asked whether I prefer dominant 7ths or minor 6ths. I would never, ever think of actually picking up an instrument.

At Brìgh, though, I have an alibi: I’m drinking tea, eating Katlin Doyle’s excellent chocolate, and listening to the impromptu jam sessions that appear to be a regular occurrence. I have a reason to be there.

And so, while I didn’t quite have what it took to pick up the lovely banjo hanging on the wall–someday–we did feel comfortable experimenting with the shakers, carimbas, drums, kazoos, and other musical curiosities that adorn the walls.

The tea–a lovely peppermint–was excellent, as was Katlin’s new Scottish Pureh tea-infused chocolate bar, shared with Oliver. And the musical accompaniment from the pipes and the fiddle as we sat on the stoop on a sunny Saturday was appreciated.

Cian and Mary seem, as near as I can tell, to be among the nicest people you’ll ever meet. Put all that together and perhaps Brìgh make more sense than first appears. I hope they’re a fixture on Water Street for the long haul.