Given that Oliver and I have made approximately 800 Saturday trips to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market together, we’ve a pretty good finger on what gets thrown away there, both from looking at our own waste, and watching what’s in the bins.

Because we have a rigorous weekly routine, I can tell you exactly what we contribute to the pile every week:

• Two pieces of paper towel, about 18 inches long each, used to wrap our smoked salmon bagels (compost).
• One plastic cup for Oliver’s smoothie (recycled).
• Two plastic cups for our iced tea (recycled).
• Two small paper wrappers from Katlin’s chocolates (compost).

About 10 years ago I started leaving a coffee mug at the Caledonia House coffee booth instead of using a paper cup every week; I’d always thought this was for “regulars” only, and then I realized that it’s an opportunity open to everyone (and also that, after all these years, I’m probably ready to consider myself a regular). So that’s, say, four or five hundred paper cups with plastic lids that I haven’t had to throw away.

I know from our own behaviour that we pay more attention these days to recycling things at the market that can be recycled these days (obvious recycling bins were only introduced over the last couple of years).

But even as I type I realize that it’s absurd that Oliver uses one plastic cup for a smoothie, recycles it, and then uses another plastic cup 15 minutes later; we should do something about that.

I’ve had an interest over the last year in how successful the three-stream sorting (recyclables, compost, waste) that’s mandatory here in Prince Edward Island works in public venues like restaurants, parks and places like the market, what the Island Waste Management Corporation calls public waste.

The cooperative that runs the Farmers’ Market knows the challenges on a larger scale, for they need handle the disposal of everything that goes into the bins on a Saturday, and they’ve plans to step up their efforts to reduce materials in the waste stream, and to improve the sorting of the three streams at the source; here’s what’s going to happen starting tomorrow:

• There will be three new centralized sorting stations for patrons: one at the front entrance, one in the lower eating area and one at the coffee corner.
• Each sorting station will have a volunteer to assist the sorting process, and sorting information will also be posted beside each.
• Market vendors are reviewing their plateware that is fully compostable, and there will be a move to order this cooperatively.

In addition to these public-facing changes, there will be some behind-the-scenes changes that vendors will make to improve the sorting of their own materials, and the large black and green bins that used to sit inside the market are being moved out to the back.

These are all very positive moves, and I hope that we patrons can step up and do our part to make these new systems work.

Among other things, this all demonstrates the power of cooperative enterprises to do things that aren’t solely aligned with the financial bottom line; I applaud the market coop for taking this on.

One of the most powerful conversations I’ve had in memory took place in the food court of a mall beside the Gesundbrunnen station in Berlin three years ago.

I was in Berlin for PirateBox Camp, and my friend Martina was passing through the city and had a few hours to spend between trains, so we arranged to meet and catch up.

One of the things Martina and I talked about was my work with PEI Home and School Federation, and our work to engage parents and guardians in education, and we talked about the importance of the invitation: the how and the why and the who, and the tone and the spirit and the logistics. It was an all-too-quick conversation that could have continued for the rest of the day, but it was a conversation that’s raised my awareness in the years since in ways that have been quite helpful.

I thought of that conversation today when I was reviewing the results of a survey I emailed out this morning to people who were invited to come to a barbecue that we organized for those involved in education and learning.

One of the questions on the survey was “did you come?” and if someone checked “no,” we asked “why not?”

Here’s one response to that question:

I had planned to be there but our round baler broke down and we didn’t finish our silage till after the BBQ was over:(

and then, later, to the question “What could we do better?”:

It would be better to have it an hour or two later in the day. For farmers in the summer there are a lot of afternoons that we are busy doing hay so a 6 is easier to get to than a 4.

These are things that never occurred to us when we were planning the event and considering the invitation; I’m so glad we decided to follow up and ask, so that we can do better next time.

In the grander scheme of Prince Edward Island corporate patronage, my little Reinvented Inc. is small fry. We, after all, is just me. And so while your Credit Unions and Cavendish Farms and PEI Mutuals can keep entire festivals and arenas alive with their largess, I have to be tactical.

We (me) have been a sponsor of The Island Fringe Festival, on and off, since 2013. My friend Ann was the original route in: she’s been a strong supporter of the festival since day one, and made a compelling case for support; in more recent years Josh Coles has taken up the mantle.

As a member of the audience, I thoroughly enjoyed last year’s Fringe: Oliver and I tried to take in all the shows (Catherine was confined to a hospital bed at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital that week, so it was a dizzying week of alternating fringe theatre and hospital visits).

Fringe 2016 left such an impression on me, that I emailed Josh when it was all over:

As a sponsor and audience member both, I was very pleased with the way things went this year.

As such, I would be well predisposed to a fundraising solicitation for IFF No. 6 while the heady glow of IFF No. 5 is still in the air.

Two weeks later, just as the heady glow was at risk of fading below the horizon, I received an email from festival director Sarah Segal-Lazar:

Josh mentioned that you had expressed interest in sponsoring the 2017 festival while 2016 is still fresh. We’d love to help make that happen!

To which I quickly replied:

I’m happy to double my contribution this year to $500. Let me know where to send the cheque.

I wish all patronage relationships could be so effortless; I’ve often thought that if we removed the “at the Gold sponsorship level you’ll get 2 VIP tickets and a 3x4” logo on the brochure” from the equation we could save everyone a lot of time and effort on both ends (in this regard my friend Tim Banks is perhaps a model to follow; his philanthropy is, in addition to its public face, often of the quiet kind).

Which is all a long lead-up to reminding you that the 2017 edition of The Island Fringe Festival is next week, August 3 to 6, 2017, right here in downtown Charlottetown.

As last year, my contribution to the festival, other than financial support, has been to take the schedule and turn it into data. So in addition to the festival website and the printed schedule, you can get a Google Calendar view of the Fringe Schedule and load it up into your device of choice; or, better yet, load this iCal feed into the calendar app on your mobile and have portable access to the schedule as you ramble around the city next week.

I’ll see you at the Fringe.

I’ve been meaning to join in the Confederation Centre Art Gallery’s Artist Trading Cards event for several years, but the timing has never worked for me: I’ve always been away, or busy, or distracted.

This year I resolved to break the logjam–I do own a machine capable of printing many copies of things, after all–and I sent my name in to the Centre in June, and in early July I got the call to produce:

The count is in. We all have 40 cards to make for the August 3 exchange.

The idea being that 40 people make 40 cards and then leave the evening with 39 new ones from other artists. At least that’s how I think it works; for all I know there’s competitive bidding and lava pits. But it sounds like fun regardless.

Then I procrastinated for almost a month.

With the event coming up next week (it’s Thursday, August 3 at 7:00 p.m., and everyone is welcome, card-trader or not), I decided that I’d better start printing.

But what to print?

This morning in the shower the word “whimsy” came into my head.

What about if I created a new “seven deadly sins”–whimsy, pith, ambition, and so on.

I Googled “seven deadly sins” when I got to the office to see what I was dealing with, historically. And in doing so I learned that in addition to seven deadly sins there are also seven virtues, and, of those, four are cardinal virtues: temperance, fortitude, prudence and justice. Ever-mindful of feature-creep, I reasoned that printing four virtues would be a reasonable task to take on in the time available.

The technical requirements for participation in the event are as follows:

Cards can be produced in editions (a limited number of the same card), series (set of cards with a unifying theme), or as singular originals. The main requirement is the size: cards MUST be the same size as modern baseball cards or 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (6 cm x 9 cm), small enough to fit inside standard card-collector pockets, sleeves or sheets. ATCs must be self-produced. The artist’s name and contact information, as well as the card title and the edition or series number is to be written on the back.

I decided to print 10 copies of each cardinal virtue, ending me up with a variety pack of 40 to go into the card pool.

And I decided to print the cards in Latin, what given that Saint Thomas Aquinas was their most recent canonizer.

And so was born the Quattuor Virtutes Cardinales project.

Prudentia, Temperantia, Iustitia and Fortitudo.

I couldn’t choose the size of the cards, but I could choose the type, and I opted to use a recent acquisition, a sans serif font left at my doorstep by Sarah Saunders:

Also in the doorstep drop-off type surprise was a collection of various klischee, and I selected four, one for each virtue, to accompany the type.

I cut up 20 sheets of letter-size card stock into 9 baseball-card-sized pieces per sheet, to give me 180 cards in all (I only needed 40, but I know from experience that it’s always good to have lots of extras):

And then I set out to set-and-print, set-and-print: first four fronts, then the required title and credit line on the backs:

I started with Temperantia, using three dots as a symbol, reasoning that the visual metaphor of the ellipsis represented a sort of breath that one might take while considering restraint.

Two hours and three virtues later, I had 30 copies of each virtue’s card:

That the Latin word for “Justice” is Iustitia created a design issue, for the word looks like it starts with a lower case “L” to the uninitiated. But I can’t change Latin.

I used a tiny, tiny 6 point Spartan font of type, acquired from the print shop of the old Prince County Hospital, for the backs of the cards; it’s a well-used font, and so isn’t in the best of shape. But it’s the smallest face I have, and I wanted something tiny, so I decided to live with the irregularities:

Careful reverse-readers will note a missing “D” in cardinales which, fortunately, I caught early and tucked into place before printing.

The printing of the credits caused a little bit of show-through on the front, but nothing too dire.

The cards are all printed, both sides, and drying in the print shop now, ready for next Thursday.

Please do come out for the card-trading frenzy next Thursday; I’ll buy you a drink. And there might be lava pits.

I’m so glad we invented blogging. If only for Oliver.

This is a pretty good hook for a video series:

Long story short, I’m living with a family displaced from the war, former drug addict/alcoholic father, extremely poor, etc… but they also have the best functioning family I’ve ever come across.  They are beautiful.   There’s a lot to be learned here, and it’s been quite a radical and challenging adventure so far living outside of my language and normalities.

Fish Out of Water starts on YouTube today.

From Coudal Partners Fresh Signals this morning:

Thanks Pearle Vision for making me cry in my office this morning, Ben’s Glasses.

That was enough to get cynical old me to tap, while sitting waiting for my lunch to be served, this afternoon. And I did cry, right there in the restaurant.

It’s a brilliant ad.

I just watched it again, and tears rose up again.

Twice in the past month, once in a meeting and once in a telephone conference call, someone has used the phrase “let’s take this offline.”

By which they’ve meant “let’s not talk about this now, let’s talk about this later.”

But the phrase makes no sense to me: if we’re discussing something face-to-face (or telephone receiver to telephone receiver), we’re already offline, aren’t we?

Maybe I’m interpreting this too literally, but it gets even more confusing when you realize that when people say “let’s take this offline,” they often mean “let’s exchange some email about this after the meeting.”

In other words what they really mean is “let’s take this online.”

Am I missing something?

Since I decamped from social media six months ago, I haven’t really looked back. I’ve sent a couple of Twitter direct messages to people that I only know how to reach that way, but otherwise I’ve been absent from Twitter and Facebook and haven’t missed them at all. It all seems like a strange addiction now. So much pith, so much scrolling, so little satisfaction.

But then I started sketching, and I started to post some of my sketches on Instagram. And now I do it as a regular thing.

I like that, as a side effect of this, I’ve been able to chat, in real life, to a collection of people who follow me on Instagram about what I’m sketching, and how I’m sketching; it’s good feedback and great fun both. I like that other people have started sketching and posting their sketches, following my lead. I like seeing what they come up with.

And I enjoy, I must admit, the rush from the micro-dose of dopamine that comes when someone likes one of my sketches.

So I’ll keep posting, at least for a while; it’s a good summer to micro-dose on dopamine. But I’ll also remember to post sketches here too, because while Instagram is an ephemeral public canvas, this space is mine, and I don’t want to lose these moments to my personal historic record; future me should have a way to remember.

Magazine B has a list of places you can buy it. You could do worse that planning a world tour that saw you stopping at each.