Eight years ago we had the pleasure of touring southeastern Iceland. One of our first stops was at Strandarkirkja, a wooden church on the seashore. It was an inspiring place, and a good introduction to the rough, beautiful, complex simplicity that is Iceland.

Is it any wonder, then, that it is the third stop in Icelandic musician Ólafur Arnalds’s Island Songs composing tour of the country. Here’s a teaser video of the composition made there:

So the Premier dropped by for a chat this afternoon as planned.

My furious scrubbing of the office of copies of The Anarchist Cookbook and the Communist Manifesto was all for naught, as the consensus of the Premier’s advance team¹ was that the interview would be best conducted in the basement printing closet. So we shinnied our way around the Golding Jobber № 8 and conducted our chat while draped around the press.

On the upside, the office is now a lot better organized than it was 24 hours ago. I paid the bills. Organized the paper drawer. Filled out the Dishwasher Rebate form. Sorted out which glue bottles are dried up and which have life left in them. The impending arrival of a senior public official is, it turns out, a great stimulus toward office organization. I would recommend it to anyone.

The Premier has the benefit of being both inveterately curious and being a patient listener. I have little memory of what we talked about, what with the dizzy palpitatory nature of the proceedings, but I believe we spoke of the nature of the business, about printing presses, about The Old Farmer’s Almanac and about how I came to be here doing this.

It was, in other words, a slightly more formal version of “so, what do you do?” at a house party.

As you can see in the attached photo, taken by the Premier’s photographer², my proudest achievement of the day was having the wherewithal to dress myself in a non-wrinkled not-that-poorly-fitting white shirt for the occasion (note that the art in the background is part of a show currently on in The Guild from artist Suzanne O’Callaghan).

After he departed the printing closet, the Premier kept up a relentless pace on his curiousity tour; by the time I type this, 6 hours later, he’s made it all the way to the Maisons de bouteilles in Egmont. I expect that by August he’ll have interviewed everyone on the Island.

You were not in Victoria by the Sea on Monday night for the performance by The Lion The Bear The Fox.

I say this because I was there. And I didn’t see you. The theatre was sparsely filled; embarrassingly so.

Unfortunate, because you missed a very good show from three surpremely talented musicians who gave it their all.

Let this be an early warning to you all: the next time you have the chance to see them play, take my word for it and go and see and them.

(If you’re in Mission or Vancouver, BC, consider this your call to action: they’re performing locally there later in July).

Did you know that Premier MacLauchlan has his own YouTube channel of interviews with Prince Edward Island entrepreneurs?

A few weeks ago I got the call from his special assistant: the Premier wanted to come and interview me.

“About what?”, I asked, somewhat incredulously, as I do not fancy myself an entrepreneur (and, indeed, at least in theory, reject most of the tenets of capitalism).

“He wants to come to the Reinventorium to talk about printing and the Internet and other things that you do,” said the special assistant (and I paraphrase, as my incredulity was clouding my mind).

I was blinded by the inside baseball reference to the Reinventorium. And so I said yes.

And so the Premier and the special assistant will arrive here tomorrow at noon.

I’ve spent the last few hours bringing some order to the Reinventorium’s chaos, piling the stacks of papers more neatly, removing seditious literature, and generally seeking to make the operation look slightly less tangled.

I’ve watched a sampling of previous episodes of the show with an eye to getting some insights as to what we might talk about; they seem to run 3 or 4 minutes, but I’m pretty sure that between the letterpress printing, The Old Farmer’s Almanac, the Hacking in Residence, and the other procrastination projects, I can keep him going for at least an hour.

Wish me luck.

Recorded yesterday at the PEI Bluegrass and Old Time Music Festival. For kicks, listen to the first episode of our podcast from 10 years ago.

Oliver and my parents and I are spending the day at the PEI Bluegrass and Old Time Music Festival in Rollo Bay. Here’s a short taste of the Farm Hands Quartet from Nashville.

Today’s notebook has some mind-bending wavy red and gold Japanese paper endpapers and a hot green neon text block. This is the thickest notebook I’ve made so far, and I ran into some paper-wrangling challenges in trying to line up the signatures in the text block before the first gluing. I sense an ingenious jig is in my future; to the YouTube. See also Sting.

I am a big fan of the window fan: our 189 year-old house is pretty good at keeping cool in the day if you fill it with cool air overnight, and 2 or 3 strategically-placed window fans have, for the last 16 years, been enough to do the job.

I last purchased fans about a decade ago and, if memory serves, they were plentiful in local stores, with several different models. We were well-served by our fleet of fans until this year when, all at once, they disintegrated before our eyes, riddled with mold and mildew and with various plastic bits and bobs falling off. It was time to replace them.

My first stop was Home Hardware on St. Peters Road: it’s close by, the staff are friendly, and they generally have a good product selection.

I picked up a couple of 3 Speed/3 Fan Thin Window Fans from Bionaire, based on its thin profile and claims of “40% greater air velocity compared to similar window fans.” I installed one in Oliver’s room and one in our bedroom and left them running full-tilt overnight.

I was not impressed. I’m not sure what the “40% greater air velocity” claim is relative to — perhaps it’s simply relative to other “tiny 3-blade window fans” as opposed to being relative to “other window fans” — but the airflow was depressingly tepid compared to our old fans, and our room was almost as warm as it would have been if we’d had no fan running at all.

So I returned those fans yesterday and exchanged them for the 2 Speed 2 fan 7” from Honeywell, the only other model they sell. I reasoned that because this model had a similar form-factor to the old set, we’d get similar performance (I also saved $46 in the process, the difference between the price of the Bionaire and the Honeywell).

The Honeywell model was, alas, also a big step down from what we’ve been used to: two speeds (as opposed to three), uni-directional (the old fans had a “reverse the fan direction switch”), not nearly as powerful and, most concerning, with the “accordion wings” that used to adorn every model of fan replaced with cheaper and less flexible plastic sheets.

This last factor was a deal-breaker in this case: the fans simply wouldn’t fit in our windows, as with the “fins” installed they were too big and without the fins installed there were gaps.

So I returned the Honeywell fans this afternoon, thus exhausting our options at Home Hardware.

Next step was Canadian Tire, where we’d purchased all of our previous fans.

Nowhere was the seeming transition from window fans to cheap air conditioners more obvious than in aisle 29 in that store: they now sell a single model of 7” window fan, made by Likewise, and it was lost in a jungle of air conditioners of various formats. I don’t need my air chilled: the earth already does that for me; I just need the chilled air moved inside, so there’s no reason to get an air conditioner, despite prevailing trends.

I didn’t even bother with the $37 Likewise: we took one out of its box and found it cheaply constructed and similarly limited in functionality. We left Canadian Tire empty-handed.

After a quick stop for an cold brew coffee we ended the afternoon at Home Depot where the only model of window fan in stock was the 9” Twin Window Fan. I was impressed by the size of the blades — surely 9” blades will move more air than 7” blades — and this model seemed to have all the features we were looking for (accordion-style fins, reversible motor, 3 speeds).

The only problem was that they only had a one, and I wanted two.

Just before giving up, I noticed that there was a fan mounted to the wall as part of a fan display. I tried to find a staff person to see if I could buy it off the wall, but I couldn’t find one. Noting that it had a price tag on it, which to my mind makes it “for sale,” I slipped it out of its mounting bracket, grabbed the one in the box, and headed to the self-checkout where the robotic cashier happily let me purchase it.

As I write the fans are in the trunk of our car waiting for installation tonight. I shall report back on the results.

Today’s notebook (see also here) recycles another part of the Architecture of Peace issue of Volume magazine for its cover. It’s smaller – just 4 by 2 inches – and made to slip inside my bag. The endpapers are a lovely ruffled Japanese paper in ruddy brown.