One of my favorite new restaurants in Charlottetown last year was Mad Wok. It’s a quick-service cafeteria serving Asian food that set up in the old Kay’s Building downtown.

I always order the same thing—Cashew Veggie and a jasmine tea—so I cannot speak to to the breadth of the menu. But the Cashew Veggie is very good, especially if ordered “spicy.”

Other things I like:

• If you’re ordering in, they now serve you with real plates and cutlery instead of disposable paper and plastic.
• Their mobile app (Android | iOS) allows me to order my lunch so that by the time I walk down the street from the office it’s hot and ready.
• They’ve paid a lot of attention to both graphic design and interior design: there’s a real attention to detail on both fronts.
• Spotlessly clean; they push chairs back into place, clean tables quickly, and all the cooking is done out in the open.
• Very friendly and accommodating staff.

At a time when many businesses created by new Islanders seem to be created by regulatory requirement and are decidedly disposable, Mad Wok looks like it’s settling in the the long haul.

Welcome.

Regular style-watchers will recall that I acquired a new pair of eyeglasses from Gaudet Optical back in April.

As my personal style gravitates toward schlump, wearing these glasses over the nine months has been something of a revelation to me: for the first time in my life I received compliments from total strangers.

“That’s fetching eyewear you’ve got chap,” and the like. I’ve never felt closer to Philip Johnson as I have this year.

On New Year’s Eve, the eyeglasses tumbled to the ground from my head during fatherly-related anxiety-containment duties at Pearson Airport in Toronto. The glass itself was unaffected, but the left arm became detached at a most inconvenient place:

Fortunately–given that the world is blurry, both near and far, without eyeglasses–I was still able to wear the glasses with one arm. But any activity that involves bending over risks the glasses falling from my head.

I emailed Gaudet Optical this morning to see if they glasses might be repaired and their response came quickly, and with good news:

That does look like a very unfortunate incident indeed. Your frame is under warranty so I will order a new frame front for you today, the company generally says is take about 2-3 weeks to ship into us (coming from Europe).

How wonderful!

So I will be a one-armed eyeglasses wearer for January, and then get by on my old glasses for a few days as the repair is affected over in Halifax.

(Post best read while listening to this).

The Old Farmer’s Almanac webcam captured a stunning sunrise over Dublin, New Hampshire at 6:30 a.m. on January 1, 2017:

Last week we make a lightning-fast dash through southern Ontario to visit Catherine’s family and mine. We had a little bit of time, here and there, to go exploring once we’d set down in the Golden Horseshoe, and I’ve noted a few of the highlights over in the Travels section:

• Tamp Coffee
• Mixed Media
• Burro Tacos
• A Different Drummer Books
• The Cannon
• Hamilton Museum of Steam & Technology

We counted no fewer than three stores focusing exclusively on “Hamilton” products–either products make in Hamilton or products branded with variations on Hamilton. The city appears to be latching onto some Detroit-style “gritty but proud and rising” spirit these days, and the result is a kind of gentrification that doesn’t, at least on first blush, seem soul or neighbourhood destroying.

Never ignore the pleasures of the second city.

One of my young niblings and I invented a thing we call Math Minute while we were together in Ontario last week.

Every night at 7:02 p.m. we’d do math. For a minute.

It was great fun.

Before we returned to our home provinces, I assured said nibling that they could call me at any time for a remote Math Minute.

On January 1, sure enough, at 6:02 p.m. I received the call (the nibling went as far as doing the proper time zone conversion, itself an exercise in math).

Except that, for some reason, my phone didn’t ring, and so a voicemail was left. It was one of best voicemails I’ve ever received.

Of course I called the nibling back, we had a (late) Math Minute (5+4 and 10-1), and the good times rolled again.

Small things mean a lot.

At The Cannon in East Hamilton. Great coffee. Very good waffles.

Oliver divided the family up into squads yesterday: kids, teens/pre-adults/older kids, younger adults, and older adults/elderly. I was in the older adults/elderly category.

There were 15 of us for supper at my parents house: more Rukavinas-and-partners than have ever gathered in one place.

Supper was a IKEA-themed, with meatballs (vegetarian and otherwise), boiled potatoes, gravy and salad.

Gifts were exchanged; more gifts than you can possibly imagine (not quite 15 squared, but it seemed that way).

We all disperse to the corners of the continent starting tomorrow when Catherine, Oliver, and I take the early morning jet to Charlottetown by way of Montreal.

Merry Christmas.

I was on a conference call yesterday with a firm based in Phoenix, Arizona and, as I joined the call early, I had a chance to engage in some casual chitchat with the call’s host.

When I revealed to the host that I was calling in from Prince Edward Island, he asked me “what province is that in?” And when I explained that PEI is, in fact, a province unto itself, he expressed a mixture of disbelief, shame at his geographical ignorance, and a commitment to correcting the problem.

All of which got me thinking: as we’ve decided to throw off the shackles of humility and boldly proclaim our collective mightiness, we’re going to have to all dip our oars in the water of raising the Island’s profile globally.

One way of doing this would be for there to be a rapid-response team at the ready, waiting to address issues like my Arizona Situation. I’d like my Arizona contact to receive, posthaste, a package in the mail that helps him address the obvious hole in his geographic knowledge. It wouldn’t hurt if he received hat too. And perhaps a coupon for a free COWS ice cream cone.

Becoming the Mighty Island in truth rather than just aspiration is going to require all of us to do our part; part of our mighty potential are the tentacles of family, business, and society that worm their way out from the Island to all points on the globe; let’s leverage those tentacles to become indoctrination pipelines for spreading the word that we’re here, we’re a province, and we’re ready.

Longtime readers will know of my great affection for Allan Rankin’s song Raise the Dead of Wintertime, a love that last bore public fruit when I used it to introduce my “Walking for Free” talk at Reboot in 2008 in Copenhagen.

The song is timeless; like Ron Hynes’ Sonny’s Dream, it transcends regular space and time and feels like an inviolable aspect of the Island’s cultural identity.

When I was casting about for a theme for the Christmas card I would print this year, my mind went immediately to the last verse of the song:

And when at night we’re by the stove,
Our bellies full and our stories told;
The winds of winter might blow cold,
But none of us will feel it.

Those words, even though they speak to the ways of an earlier day, are so helpful to the soul on a cold Island winter night still. I asked Allan if he’d be willing to allow me to set and print the verse on cards, and he quickly and generously agreed.

As usual when printing with a limited repertoire of typefaces it took some figuring to find the best way of rendering the verse in print: I wanted to print a square card, but the lines were too long for that, and so I compromised and wrapped them under each other, deciding on 18 point Gill Sans (from M&H Type Foundry in San Francisco, also used for the 2010 card) for the body and 12 point of the same face for the credit.

Lacking highfalutin paper in the cupboard, I used commodity Staples-brand white card stock to print on.

I printed 30 cards, and mailed them out to a random assortment of friends and family (if you didn’t receive one, don’t despair; we’re still friends).

Nothing gives me more pleasure than seeing work I print enter into the lives of others upon arrival, and there was no better example of this than the photo that Sarah Bennetto O’Brien posted on her Instagram.

It’s doubly appropriate that Sarah embraced the spirit of the card, as there is perhaps no more enthusiastic practioner of the belly-filling arts on Prince Edward Island working today.

This is the 2017 levee schedule for New Years Day, January 1, 2017 for Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island and area.

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