This year’s Christmas tree, procured from the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, fit sideways in our trunk.

I was talking to my old friend Stephen Southall on the phone earlier this week. Stephen was at home in Ontario; I was in my car, talking to him on my cell phone’s speakerphone, driving up North River Road, here in Charlottetown.

The quality of our conversation was similar to what one might have experienced from a ship-to-shore telephone in 1947: there were swaths of his conversation that I couldn’t hear, swaths of my conversation that he couldn’t hear, and a lot of jumbled speech in the middle.

Stephen made the cogent point that despite all the supposed advances in technology in recent years, there has never been a worse time to make a clear telephone call: if I’d called Stephen land line to land line in 1995, our call likely would have been clear as a bell. And if it wasn’t, I could have called Island Tel to complain about it.

Thinking about this today, I realized that, sitting here in the Reinventorium at my desk, I have at my disposal eight different ways of making telephone calls.

I decided to call my office voicemail from each of these, and read the identical phrase, by way of allowing me to contrast and compare their voice quality. Here are the results:

I am not an audiophile, so I’m not as well-equipped to judge the results as others, but I find the variation in quality interesting, and also find that samples that “sound worse,” seem to allow for a higher comprehension rate.

The Amazon Echo and Google Home, for example, both sound clearer on the surface, I find it easier to understand the speech on my cell phone, which is less clear, but seems to have a wider frequency range.

It’s also kind of freaky to realize that I have so many options at hand for making telephone calls.

Kerry Campbell and Sidney MacEwen are both uncommonly skilled at their jobs (CBC PEI Legislative Reporter and MLA for Morell-Mermaid, respectively). And so it was something of a delight to have one of my blog posts invoked in the middle of a Twitter exchange between the two:

This is the 2018 levee schedule for New Years Day, January 1, 2018 for Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island.

The levee schedule is covered under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike License.

From an interview with a trio of YouTuber travelers about financing their travels:

5. What’s your top tip for someone trying to figure out how to make long-term travel financially possible?

If you want to travel long term, then you need to just get out there and stop stalling. There are plenty of ways to make money abroad. The city Paddy lives in (Chiang Mai, Thailand) has over 30,000 expats living there and most of them work remotely online. If you have skills that you can use on the road like photography, teaching, and anything online-based, then save up some cash, start traveling, and start hustling!!!

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard Chiang Mai described in this light: apparently it’s something of a Mecca for millennials earning a “passive income”–running a popular YouTube fitness channel and drop-shipping fitness equipment into Iowa, for example.

Here’s someone else, writing about the cost of living in Thailand:

I can live in Thailand, get massages every day, eat delicious and healthy foods, and do everything I want for about $25 a day and that’s while spending quite liberally and tipping.

If someone wanted to live cheaper, it certainly is possible. One expat I met told me he only spends $45 a month on rent!

The bottom line is: once you start viewing the world as a giant playground, the possibilities are limitless.

I’m all for the transformative power of world travel, but hanging out in an enclave of well-massaged digital beach bums in Thailand sounds like hell. And I’m not sure that “viewing the world as a giant playground” is the best use of globalism.

So many weather metaphors and realities today.

As we left the Coastal Inn toward downtown it was just slightly raining.

We walked down to the main road, along to the tourist information centre, hugged the shore of the Sackville Waterfowl Park, and then headed out onto the boardwalk right across it, and emerged out of a hollow onto Bridge Street, right in front of Thunder & Lightning, where we were headed.

Except we needed to eat first, so we walked two doors up and had quick burgers at Mel’s Tea Room, finishing up just after the 5:00 p.m. doors-open time next door.

Opening act Bernice was just finishing sound check as we arrived; we secured a table by the far wall, right in front of the stage. It’s hard to imagine a better vantage point, and there was a generous nook, between our table and the stage, for Ethan to stretch out.

Things got started just after 6:00 p.m. to a packed house full of young and old.

The presence of the young–Oliver, unusually, was not the youngest present–was enabled by New Brunswick’s liberal liquor regulations that allow minors in a pub (and, indeed, pubs at all) as long as they have an adult present. Such tomfoolery would not be allowed in PEI.

Bernice was new to me, and a revelation: lead singer Robin Dann has a welcoming way, a melliferous voice, and a band of skilled digital musicians backing her whose bleeps and bloops and fizzes miraculously synergized in a way you would think might be annoyingly Super Mario, but isn’t.

The band played a wide-ranging set, and finished with a Shawn Colvin cover as an encore.

After a brief interlude for a set change, The Weather Station took to the stage. The bleeps and bloops were replaced by a band of solidly analogue musicians supporting Tamara Lindeman, and their torrent of sound fulled the tiny room to just short of overflowing.

The band ran through its catalogue, now familiar to me through Spotify replay upon replay, and it was lovely to behold live: Lindeman is an accomplished guitarist and has a substantial vocal range. Her band was crack, and they obviously enjoy playing together, and enjoy being good at doing so.

Given the impending original set at 8:30 p.m., there wasn’t time enough for the usual cacaphony-encore-cacaphony-encore, and both bands departed the stage quickly and without fanfare.

By 8:00 p.m., we were out into the bracing Sackville night, the snow storm having started mid-set.

We set off up Bridge Street toward the Coastal Inn only to encounter the Vogue Cinema just letting in for the night’s showing of Thor: Ragnarok. We had no great desire to see the film, but my personal “when presented with an opportunity to see a film in a small town independent cinema, take it” rule kicked in, and we took our seats just as the film started. The Vogue is a huge old cinema, complete with sloping balcony, that has somehow managed to avoid both closure and being chopped up into a multiplex. The film was mildly more interesting than anticipated, and managed to keep our attention, if not change our lives.

When the film let out at 10:00 p.m. the snow storm was in full throat, and our plan to stay the night in Sackville rather than Moncton bore its intended fruit.

The snow wasn’t enough to keep us from walking home, though, and 20 minutes later, slightly soggy and fogged up, we were back at the Coastal Inn, satisfied with an excellent night out.

Despite the impending first snowfall of the year, Oliver and I have temporarily relocated to Sackville, New Brunswick–90 minutes and half a world away from Charlottetown–for The Weather Station gig tonight at Thunder & Lightning.

The original plan was to stay at the Fairfield in Moncton, 30 minutes up the road and on the fringe of that urban wonderland, but the threat of post-show-snow forced me to cancel our reservation there last minute (thank you, Marriott, for allowing that!) and book us in to the Coastal Inn in Sackville, just 20 minutes walk from the venue.

Oliver’s first impressions of the Coastal Inn: “it’s not swanky and modern.”

Which is about as good a description of the Coastal Inn as I can imagine: it’s a decidedly utilitarian hotel at the intersection of Sackville and the highway, and I expect that the bulk of its business comes from hockey tournaments, waterfowl tourism, Mount Allison University proximity and stranded winter travelers. But it’s clean, the staff are friendly, and it’s possible to walk downtown through a trail dedicated to the aforementioned waterfowl.

Oliver is spoiled, of course. He’s seen all manner of interesting accommodations, from Osaka to Liguria. So what did I expect?

Sackville is a town that reveals itself slowly. For years we paid it no heed, missing it entirely on the way both to Ontario and to Nova Scotia.

But then Shauna McCabe invited me to speak to her Mount Allison class back in 2008 (about psychogeography and Plazes), and I had coffee at the Bridge Street Café, and got into the habit, thereafter, of making Sackville a pit stop on the way elsewhere.

I peeled away another layer when I saw Stephen Fearing here in 2014, and, more recently, I’ve been parking my car at Rod Allen’s lot and heading east or west on VIA Rail.

Today we discovered the Cranewood Bakery, tucked in behind the Bridge Street strip: excellent coffee in the former Mount Allison presidential manse.

And, as a little diversion before we even landed here, we took the road 20 minutes north to see the imposing Dorchester Penitentiary, which we’d previously seen only from the return VIA train back in June.

Like Charlottetown, Sackville is a town better outfitted than those of similar size elsewhere.

In Charlottetown it’s because we’re the provincial capital; in Sackville’s case it’s because of Mount Allison. There would be no cause to have good coffee, tasty milkshakes, and tony bookstores and art galleries without Mount A; it would be Montague rather than North Adams. (Although, it must be said, even Montague has a craft microbrewery now).

In a few minutes we’ll don our all-weather gear, suit up Ethan, and head downtown for supper at Mel’s before heading a few doors down for the show. The Weather Station has proved so popular that they’ve put on a second, earlier show that starts at 6:00 p.m., which is just fine for our too-old-and-too-young-to-really-rock selves. That said, the drink special is the Negroni tonight, so we might have a repeat of The Paris Situation. Thank goodness for Oliver.

What is it about Tony’s pastries?

Our PEI Home and School Federation board meeting last night was a potluck, and, scrambling at the last minute to assemble a non-embarrassing offering, I stopped by The Brass Shop and picked up a John Dale baguette, and then looped over to Riverview Country Market to get some COWS butter.

COWS has three varieties of butter: unsalted, sea salted, and sea salted cultured, and all three were on offer at Riverview, and I didn’t know which to choose, so I opted for the sea salted.

At the potluck, I asked those in attendance whether they knew what cultured butter was, and nobody did, so I looked it up on COWS’ website today:

Sea Salted Cultured Butter is a premium butter containing 84% butter fat. Cultured Butter is made from cream that is cultured with active bacteria and has a distinctive, slightly tangy taste. It can be used interchangeably with regular butter in cooking. Cultured Butter is common in Europe and is becoming increasingly available in North America.

So know I now. I’m going to pick some up next time I’m at Riverview and will report back on my fancy European tangy experiences.