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.

I’ve been thinking more about transparency ticker tapes since I wrote this post.

The problem, I realized, with budget documents, like this 2017 one for Prince Edward Island, is that everything’s expressed in year-long chunks. And when faced with tables like this, most people who are not the Provincial Treasurer, myself included, glaze over with with incomprehension.

Things become much more comprehensible when you divide year-long numbers by 365 to get day-long numbers.

So, for example, it costs about $726,000 a day to have schools, early learning centres, museums and libraries.

And it costs about $16,000 a day to have a Legislative Assembly, $7,000 a day to have a Chief Public Health Office, $1,900 a day to have a Premier’s Office, and we spend $21 a day on forest fire equipment.

We get about $2 million a day from the federal government, $90,000 a day from tobacco taxes, $20,000 a day from beverage container deposits, and $1,900 a day from boiler, electrical and elevator inspection fees.

When everything is rolled together, we take in about $4.9 million and spend about $4.4 million, every day of the year (note that I’m not including the substantial $197 million a year spent on interest and amortization in this calculation).

The Hollywood community space Junior High is transparent about its finances. For example:

rent / landestine, llc: $2500.00

electricity / los angeles department of water and power: ranging from $60-$150

internet / time warner cable: $79.99

toiletries and cleaning supplies: ~$25

restock on merchandise: ~$500

retail supplies: ~$50

paypal and paypal here for retail sales and additional banking. paypal is a business we do not support ethically, but are having trouble finding another company with similar ease and accessibility that does not subscribe to shitty ethical practices.

I’ve been thinking a lot about government and transparency; I’d like to see a similar human-readable ticker tape from the provincial government, for example, summarizing expenses and revenue every day.

We spent $32,000 on road salt and $79,000 on CT scans today, and took in $46,000 in HST revenue.

Not since Canada Rocks have the preparations been as elaborate. Very excited for this.

Island legislators have been in a tizzy this week about documents tabled by Hon. Tina Mundy, Minister of Family and Human Services, that accidentally had political annotations on them.

In doing so, Ms. Mundy lifted a curtain on a practice that everyone knows goes on–political primping during polling season–and that has been practiced by all political parties for generations.

One wishes, as the opposition has highlighted, that governments were less concerned with “good news,” and more concerned with “good governance.”

But the issue is hardly deserving of the fusillade that has been lobbied. And, ironically, the fuss that’s being made has taken the opposition’s attention away from holding government to account on things that is should actually be held to account for.

In light of all this, let me relate another Tina Mundy story.

Last month Oliver and I went to an evening session of the Legislative Assembly. As the evening went on, there was a break in the proceedings while members waited for some photocopying to happen, and during this break Ms. Mundy came outside the rail to speak to us. She sat down in front of us on one of the pews in the public gallery, and we had a pleasant conversation about, among other things, Oliver’s service dog Ethan. She was curious and engaged, and talked to Oliver as a human being; these are qualities you want in your Minister of Family and Human Services, and this made me happy.

Later that night, after we got home, Oliver and I were chatting about the Walk for Dog Guides that’s coming up at the end of May, and how we could encourage people we know to support it. Unbeknownst to me, Oliver then took the opportunity to send a message to Ms. Mundy encouraging her to participate in the walk; the next day he received a message from her back telling him that she’d looked up the walk in her district in Summerside, and that she’d make an effort to attend if she could.

Politicians do boneheaded things. People do boneheaded things. While we shouldn’t ignore them, and while we should treat them seriously if they have serious import, we should also remember that we all do thousands of non-boneheaded things every day. And some days those things, while they might seem small and inconsequential in the grander scheme of things, can show a young man that engaging with politicians is a normal, everyday thing.

Every now and again, Google Photos goes off half-cocked and comes up with its own collages of my photos. Here’s the one it offered up to summarize two years ago this week; the robots appear to assume that “dark Pete” and “light Pete” are two different people.