After a hard long foggy week, we were all ready for a drive to the country yesterday, and so we piled into the car and headed to the north shore.

On the way through Wheatley River we spotted a sign for the Island Honey Wine Company; curious, we turned left onto the Millboro Road and, as promised, came across it 900 m later.

They were open, and we spent 30 minutes learning about honey wine (which is mead by another name) from Charles Lipnicki, the proprietor. Catherine tried a sample flight of their three offerings ($5, deducted from the price of an eventual purchase).

We left with a bottle of Wildflower Honey Mead along with a bottle of their honey and a bar of their soap.

Derrick’s leaving on the 6:30 a.m. flight this morning to go back to Windsor, and Ethan knows it.

Perched high atop the Confederation Court Mall, on the edge of the food court and occupying a space variously occupied over the years by all manner of businesses, Oliver and I came across the T2 Tea Company this afternoon.

We poked our head in the door, tentatively, and were warmly greeted by the proprietor, Liwei Han.

She questioned us about our tea preferences, and when she heard that we like green tea, she guided us to some newly-arrived Zhuyeqing green tea from Emishan in China.

“Do you want to try some?” she asked.

When we said we did, she guided us over to a tea sampling area, motioned for us to sit on the two stools in front, and then brewed up a batch of the tea, carefully measuring the tea, boiling and then cooling water to 85ºC, and steeping it for 2 minutes. The tea is fascinating to watch steep: it looks like a forest of tiny green cigars.

We quite enjoyed the tea when it was ready to drink, and had three tiny cups each.

The quality of the tea, of the instruction, and of the conversation, was such that, when all was said and done, the only logical next step was to buy a tin.

It’s not cheap: $57 for a tin of 20 sachets of tea. But, then again, as each sachet can make two batches, and each batch can be steeped twice, that comes out to only 71 cents a batch.

I asked Liwen how business was doing, and she said, diplomatically, that there are many people who like tea, but many of them are not on Prince Edward Island.

If you are interested in tea, and interested in meeting someone who is obviously passionate about it, and about sharing her love with others, drop by T2 on your next trip downtown. She is open 10:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday.

I wanted to be sure to remember the instructions we were given for making the green tea, and for the sample of fragrant oolong “rock tea” that we were given on the way out, so as soon as we got home I sat down and sketched them out.

Oliver and I have been making good progress at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market reducing our weekly waste footprint.

Today we got things down to two pieces of paper towel (compostable) and the water needed to wash out Oliver’s glass and my mug.

We realized that we don’t need straws to drink smoothie and iced tea, so we’ve dispensed with them.

We carry a cloth shopping bag, but still end up with a few plastic bags for carrying things like lettuce; we’ll work on that.

Market Manager Bernie reports that the waste sorting changes continue to work well, to the point where the waste is now going into three streams at Island Waste Management—recycling, compost and waste—whereas before it was all going into waste. The key is to keep the sort rate in the better-than-90% range.

The next step for the market is to get vendors together to bulk-purchase compostable plates, cups and utensils.

The Air Canada departure lounge at Boston’s Logan Airport Terminal B is an unfortunate closet far too stuffed with people. It harkens back to a more angsty, uncomfortable age of travel.

Today I discovered that if you get off the car rental shuttle at Terminal A, one stop early, you can grab a not-completely-unpleasant sandwich, and then walk upstairs to a sunny new pedway to Terminal B that affords a stunning view of downtown Boston as well as comfortable rocking chairs.

It’s a pleasant place to decompress before entering the security line and the stuffed closet that lies beyond it.

I made my regular pilgrimage to the great Toadstool Books and came away with these four. Between them they include most of what I’m interested in these days.

Last week at the David MacDonald seminar, I mentioned to the assembled group that I spend my life responding to bug reports:

In the discussion that followed, I talked about how I spend my daily life, in essence, responding to bug reports.

I talked about how, when you spend enough time shining light in the dark recesses of a digital system, addressing its bugs and trying to add missing features, sometimes you reach a point where you realize that the digital system’s fundamental design is one substantially unsuited to the task for which it’s being used.

One of the things that became clear from the reaction to this characterization is that the notion of a “bug report,” while second nature to the digerati, isn’t something that regular everyday people necessarily understand. That’s a shame, as I believe it’s a useful notion, one that allows many problems to be solved quickly, efficiently and powerfully without recourse to blame or getting overwhelmed by scale. Nothing everything can be characterized as a bug, but many things can, especially with regards to small-scale human systems like cities.

I had a chance to take this idea out for a ride last week when I noticed that Holland College had started to demolish buildings immediately upon receipt of a building permit, without waiting for the 21 day appeal period, which ends on September 5, to arrive.

This seemed like a bug to me in the city’s operating system: an unanticipated confluence of conditions that resulted in an unrecoverable error.

And so I suggested to the CBC that it do a story on this, Steve Bruce got assigned the story, and it was published today online and will run tonight on Compass.

I was happy with Councillor Greg Rivard’s reaction to the suggestion that this was an issue that needed to be resolved.

And how often does one get to read Rukavina is right as a subhead!

And that’s the thing about bug reports, and while they’re useful: I didn’t blame anyone, I didn’t suggest that anyone had done anything wrong, or that anyone was corrupt, or that anything more than Holland College following the rules, as laid out, had happened. I simply pointed out a logical consistency in a bylaw, with the hopes that it would be corrected.

In the summer, Air Canada runs flights to Montreal using its Rouge sub-brand, which is a euphemism for “cram as many vacationers onto the plane as possible.”

For the tall, like me, this means knees abut the seat in front.

For the run from Montreal to Boston I lucked into an exit row seat. It’s missing a right arm rest, but I have about a metre of leg room.

In all the years I’ve been flying out of Charlottetown, I’ve never seen it as busy at 6:00 a.m. as it is today. There are 3 flights departing within an hour of each other, and, from the looks of it, they’re all full.

I ignored the advice to show up 2 hours in advance as absurd (midwinter I’ve seen as few as a half dozen people in the waiting room). After all, what’s the point of living 10 minutes from the airport.

Most everyone else seems to have heeded the advice. And so there was no security line, and I went from cab to gate in 4 minutes.