We made our way from Düsseldorf to Enschede, just across the Dutch-German border, on Thursday and settled in at Stadscamping de Twentse Es, which turned out to be a friendly campground with lots of bandwidth and a lot of rabbits.

A lot of rabbits.

For Ethan this proved a frustrating novelty, at least for the first few hours. Rabbit! Oh, rabbit! Rabbit! Then the novelty wore off, and now he hardly notices the rabbits at all.

With our bones still tired, and the scheduled start time of Make Stuff that Matters (our nominal reason for being here) set for 9:00 a.m., we decided to cook dinner, then get to bed early.

We did not do that.

Well, we cooked dinner – Catherine make a nice salad with fresh strawberries – but then I recalled that Oliver and I were due to deliver a talk on Printcraft, that “make stuff in Minecraft, print out on a 3D printer” technology that’s simply delightful. So we rallied, came up with a practical need – a dispenser for the rolls of blue dog poop bags that were unravelling around the camper – and set to work on a design. Without a ruler, we were left to use a ruled notebook as a proxy: we measured things out, figured out where the bags would come out and how we could make a slotted lid. We ended up with this:

We then set to work building our model inside the Printcraft world, staying up far too late for our own good. When bedtime was finally upon us, we had this:

The basic idea was to build a box that was “roll of poop bag”-sized, with a slot in the top for a sliding lid, and an outlet on the side where a single poop bag could be extracted. Oliver “walked” over to the Printcraft control panel, and hit it:

This generated an STL file – the lingua franca of 3D printing. We were ready for analog.

The next morning at Make Stuff that Matters at Ton and Elmine’s house, with Elmine pointing the way, we installed Cura, the app from Ultimaker (the brand of 3D printers in the house for the weekend) and converted this STL file into a G-code file required by the printer. We immediately realized that to print the box full-size was going to not only hog a 3D printer for much too long – 2 hours and 41 minutes was the estimate – but that were we to do so we’d not have the object in-hand for our demo in the afternoon. So we shrunk things down in Cura to 30% of full size, which took the print time estimate down to 19 minutes.

We put the G-code file on an SD card, put the SD card into the printer, selected the file and hit the “do it” button. Eighteen minutes later, we had a tiny poop bag box:

Truth be told, to allow the lid of the box to slide into the box required 10 minutes work of post-printing finessing with sandpaper and a pair of scissors (photo by Elmine Wijnia):

But it worked!

A few minutes later, Oliver and I were “on stage” in Elmine and Ton’s living room telling the story of the poop bag to a diverse group of interested people (photo by Elmine Wijnia):

Among those people listening was a young lad named Floris, a Minecraft savant: our little presentation was enough to enable Floris to make an very detailed castle in Printcraft; on the screen it looked like this:

Once the castle was printed, it was just amazing (photo by Ton Zijlstra):

The level of detail was a testament to the painstaking effort Floris took in Printcraft, dropping each block where it needed to go.

The opening salvo in Ton’s scene-setting for Make Stuff that Matters was a suggestion that we come to look at “making” not as a solitary digital act commited behind a screen, but as a participatory act of community. The exercises that Ton and Elmine designed to nudge us to that point got us in that direction, but to really get Oliver and I there all it took was a few “all you need to do is to stick it on an SD card” answers for Floris and his dad – the free sharing of otherwise mystical incantations.

In the months leading up to this event I’ve been thinking a lot about what “matters,” parsed out of “stuff that matters.” As there is a lot of evidence to suggest that most of what comes out of 3D printers is little more that tchotchkes 3d-waste, I wondered whether you could truly create something that “mattered” in a setting like this.

What I came to realize – or, really, simply have reinforced – is that the “stuff that matters” is the process, not the product.

If, as a community of consumers, we can collaborate to understand more about our consumption, and more about the production of what we consume, and more about how we can effect, control, or drive that production, what we will have achieved is far more substantial than whatever comes out of a 3D printer. 

But the great thing about 3D printers is that, in spanning the digital and the physical, offering the possibility of on-demand fabrication, and simply being something we can all stand around as magic appears to happen within, they can catalyze conversations about stuff that (actually) matters.

So we made a tiny poop bag box.

And made some new friends.

And had some revelations.

And passed on some knowledge.

And learned a lot more.

And had some fun.

That matters.

The thing you don’t realize about The Amazing Race is that while it might look simple to, say, “catch the bus to the heart of Rome, find a pushcart vendor selling cashews, buy a bag, and deliver it to the Vatican Library,” doing this while jet-lagged, brain-addled and on only a few hours of sleep is an entirely different prospect.

The prize at the end of our own amazing race that began Tuesday was not a Polaris Sea-Doo or an amazing trip for two to Cancun, but rather supper on the banks of the Rhine.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

We left Charlottetown at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday and drove to Halifax, making good time and arriving 3 hours in advance of our flight. We parked the car at the Hilton, caught the shuttle to the airport, and found the Condor check-in desk.

Where we were told that our flight was delayed by two hours.

Oh well.

Condor had record of Ethan, made no fuss about his traveling in the cabin with us, and the only requirement was for us to sign a waiver, the contents of which I cannot recall now (perhaps “if your dog eats another passenger, it’s not on us” or something like that?).

We occupied our extra time with eating, drinking (at the pleasant-respite-from-the-airport-feeling Alt Hotel lobby cafeteria) and making merry in the nicely-appointed dog area (under the bridge to the parking lot: it really is a wonderful feature of the airport).

The plane boarded around 10:30 p.m. and, what with Ethan being in our charge, we got super-deluxe, take-the-back-way-in, board-even-before-the-children boarding privileges.  What’s more, the purser, on seeing us trying to squeeze into the almost-no-room-for-Ethan economy class seats immediately upgraded us to “premium” economy. He did this quickly, and in an “of course we will do this” manner that made me fall in love with him instantly. And premium economy, by compare, was dreamy: Oliver and Ethan and I got three middle seats to ourself, so Ethan got a full underseat to call his own, and Catherine got the entire row behind us to herself. We even got one of the swanky “amenities kits” that I last remember receiving on a BOAC flight in 1972.

Ethan weathered the trans-Atlantic flight in fine form: he did what he was trained to do, which is to gamely and calmly stand by. He neither complained nor barked nor made a fuss nor tried to climb up on the seats nor did he eat any of the other passengers. He was a dream-dog.

We arrived in Frankfurt on-time and, all things considered, in pretty high spirits. We found our way to the next terminal over, found the Lufthansa check-in desk, got a boarding pass for Oliver which, mysteriously, they had been unable to print in Halifax, and addressed the “oh, he’s a service dog riding with you in the cabin!?” nature of Lufthansa’s electronic non-record of Ethan (it was handled quickly and efficiently and we were re-seated three-abreast rather than in different parts of the plane).

By 2:00 p.m. we were in Düsseldorf Airport looking for a place for Ethan, who had gamely held his bladder for the entire trip from Halifax, to pee. Patch of grass beside the parking lot located there was, as expected, much peeing to be had.

We flagged a taxi, handed over the the address of the DRM camper rental outfit south of town, and then enjoyed the little tour of the edges of the city, bearing witness to the devastation wrecked on the city a few weeks ago by a suddenly-arising “super cell” storm that uprooted what appeared to be every second tree.

Picking up the camper was easy: handed over driver’s license and credit card, signed a few forms, received a walk-around and guide to using the VW camper’s complex system of push buttons (raise the pop-up, turn on and off the fridge, etc.) We filled up the water tank. I figured out how not to stall the camper in 1st gear. And we were off.

On our own amazing race.

Goal: buy dog food, find a SIM card for my phone, get groceries, find our campsite.

The challenge: jetlag setting in, an unfamiliar vehicle, no maps nor GPS (a chicken-and-egg problem involving the SIM card), streets crowded with downed trees.

The dog food was easy: there was a Fressnapf outlet only a block away from DRM.

Dogfood in hand, we headed off to find the “real,-” (yes, that’s how it’s set) store that, the web told me, would be the get-everything-else-you-need store. Miracle of miracles, following only the rough “Turn right on Fredrichsomething” notes I’d taken in the airport the night before, we found our way.

We bought groceries, negotiated a thicket of mobile operator offerings with a helpful (though non-English-speaking) clerk, and even remembered to buy towels and get a Benadryl-like cream from the pharmacy across the hall.

Back into the van and the degree of difficulty went to 11: the simple-seeming directions I’d written down for this leg of the trip – grocery store to campsite – turned out to be some sort of abbreviated list of street names that the Google Maps directions app gave me rather than a detailed route. So what turned out to be a 30 km journey on all manner of different roads and tunnels boiled down to a list of streets and tunnels only loosely connected.

But wait, you might be saying, I had a SIM card now, and thus should have had a GPS to guide me.

Except that the one downside of the “all you can eat high-speed data for a month” SIM I purchased from Blau was that you had to be online to register and activate it. And so until I could get online some other way, I couldn’t get online from the van.

My ace in the hole was parsing Rheinbrücke, one of the random street names Google gave me, into “Rhein bridge.” I knew where the Rhine was, because my friend Pedro lives near it, and he also lives near the big highly-visible tower in the city, so putting all that together I came up with a plan: head for the tower, find the river, drive over it, and hope for the best.

It worked!

We got close enough to where we needed to go that the final street names on the list started to fade into view, and having a general notion from the name of the campsite – Rheincamping – that it too was on the river, we found our way there.

The “booking” I thought I’d made the night before turned out to have been only an “enquiry”; fortunately, because we were only staying a single night, they had a site for us, right on the banks of the river.

With hardcore addling now setting in we nonetheless somehow managed to: find the site, put up the pop-up, make supper, figure out the complex toilet-entry code system, make up the beds, feed and water Ethan, and then, gloriously, sleep.

Our amazing race, or at least that little part of it, was over.

The next morning we woke up to fresh air, a constant panorama of river boats, and the fog of travel lifted – mostly – from our heads.

One thing any PEI Home and School Federation past-president will tell you is that one of the highlights of the official duties of the office is the presentation of the School Bus Driver of the Year awards.

This year I had the pleasure of recognizing Johnny Deagle, a bus driver for Souris Consolidated, with this award. We presented to him at the closing celebration for the school, a rollicking musical event held in the Eastern Kings Sportsplex.

One of Johnny’s many talents is as a musician, so, by chance, I got to present to him just as he was walking off the stage after playing, with a bunch of students, a rendition of Wagon Wheel with words rewritten for the occasion.

Because Oliver and Ethan were along for the trip, they got to come up on stage for the presentation with me.

[[Catherine]] and her partners Lori Joy Smith and Norma Jean Maclean are opening a show in The Gallery at The Guild on on Wednesday, June 18, 2014.

Each of them has a distinct style, and, beyond that, their show has no unifying theme, at least to their mind.

So what to call it?

They hemmed and hawed and finally came up with “Untitled.”

How to design a poster for a show named “Untitled”?

Cut out the title!

Ironically, Catherine and Oliver and I will be driving our VW camper north from Düsseldorf as the show opens, and we’ll be in Europe for its entire duration.

While I’ve been fiddling with 2014-celebrating type over the past two weeks it’s been more than a few times that I’ve been sharing workspace with the team behind the 2014-celebrating Tall Hat Chronicles, who have been writing and rehearsing here at The Guild. We’ve both found ourselves weaving and dodging to keep out of the way of the all-pervasive Anne and Gilbert, the cast and crew of which, deep into their own rehearsals, seem to ooze from every pore of building.

Having a “Tall Hat Chronicles: Behind the Music” view into the creative process has left me with a deeper appreciation for the fine crafting that goes into making the funny: the show, described for tourismocratic purposes as a “comedic and satirical look at our Island history as it relates to the wider history of Canada and the world,” is, as you might expect, profane and iconoclastic and filled with penises.

And brilliant.

And it is, I can attest, being thoughtfully crafted (I believe I may have heard one of the cast say something like “I don’t think James Palmer would say something like that”) and there were several times when I was at the letterpress and they were reading lines on the sofas around the corner when it was all I could do to contain myself from bursting out in (likely inappropriate) laughter.

I’m looking forward to it. Here’s a taste:

Most Wednesday and Saturday nights this summer at The Guild starting July 2. Get tickets here.

I’m happy to report that my application to the City of Charlottetown Microgrant program for The Social Consumption Project was approved and funded in full (for $900).

I signed an MOU with the City this morning and I’ll begin work on the project in late July, documenting everything I do here.

After I spoke at the Winsloe Lions Club Charter Dinner last Saturday, we were presented with a lovely gift: a framed photo of Catherine, Oliver, Ethan and I walking down the Confederation Trail during the Purina Walk for Dog Guides.

Not only is it a great photo, but it’s the first one of our newly-expanded-by-dog family, and, indeed, one of the few photos we have of our entire family at all, as it’s usually one or the other of us that’s taking pictures.

I was such a nice gesture for them to do this.

I have been buying eggs and mushrooms from Paul Offer at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market. I know him to be a man of both good humour and exacting standards, and I feel proud to be one of his customers.

(Photo from The Guardian)

The CBC reported this morning that the dining room that Paul and his wife Jean operate out of the home in Tyne Valley has been ordered closed by the Public Health department because of new Food Premises regulations under the Public Health Act.

This isn’t because they’ve done anything wrong: simply because the new regulations don’t allow public meals to be cooked in private kitchens.

While I sympathize with the desire to enhance food safety, I’m uncomfortable living in a province where people like Paul and Jean Offer, 35 years into a project that’s an anchor in their community, a tourist standout and an important source of income to them, are shut down in its name.

Surely we can find a creative way to allow Paul and Jean to continue doing what they do, can’t we?

The regulations that threaten to shutter the Offers are only in draft form now, and public comment is welcome: send yours to the Chief Public Health Office and to the Minister of Health and Wellness.

And, of course, for now at least, you can make a reservation, for up to 6 people, for supper at The Doctor’s Inn.

It seemed like such a simple job: six sheets of paper, 790 words, 4,695 letters and spaces.

Brenda Whiteway approached me in February to see if I’d be able and willing to typeset and print passages of text for her Confederation Country Cabinet. She’d found me via the man who provides us both with paper – hers for the brush, mine for the press – David Carruthers at Papeterie Saint-Armand in Montreal. Odd that it took David to connect us, as we live only a few miles apart and know many of the same people.

“Six sheets: how hard could that be,” I told myself.

There was funding to buy some new type, and the paper. The passages Brenda had selected were interesting: Jack Layton, Frank Ledwell, Emily Carr, and more.

And Brenda’s larger project, a cabinet of curiousities, tickled me in all the right places.

How could I not.

What I discounted, of course, is that despite my best efforts to cultivate post-apocalyptic neo-luddite letterpress street cred, I am but a babe in the woods when it comes to the printing office: I know the broad strokes, I can print a decent coffee bag.

But lines and lines of poetry and prose, printed evenly, accurately, and by the beginning of May?

Well, that was interesting.

Today, almost 45 days after the first tentative deadline, the final piece – a reprint of a Frank Ledwell poem, reprinted because I’d bungled the citation on an earlier printing – rolled off the press.

To commemorate the end I left the ink on the press and set up a celebratory piece, taking the big bold and familiar Akzidenz Grotesk out and honouring my favourite line of all those I set, from that selfsame Frank Ledwell poem, “Charlottetown Conference”:

Along the way I learned so many things.

I learned, when starting off on a new print job, to leave the chase off the press while the rollers are being inked: that way the type doesn’t get over-saturated with ink, printing is much cleaner, and the cleanup afterwards goes more easily. Unfortunately I learned this – from “General Printing: An Illustrated Guide to Letterpress Printing with Hundreds of Step-by-Step Photos” – halfway through the project, and so suffered through three jobs worth of gloopy over-inked type, something that will be polluting my type cases for years to come.

I learned – after almost 3 years – how to adjust the platen of my Golding Jobber № 8. I should have learned this a long, long time ago, but I’d been afraid that, given that it’s 99 years old, if I removed a bolt here, adjusted a thumb-screw there, the entire thing might come tumbling apart. It didn’t, and the last two jobs in the project went so much quicker because of the simple adjustments I made.

I learned that my old friend Fred Louder – we’ve know each other for almost 20 years, but have probably spent less than 2 hours in the same room – is a fount of printing knowledge, which he dispensed liberally over Facebook chat in recent weeks at times I really, really needed it. Sometimes just explaining the problem at hand to Fred led me to an answer before he replied; more often, though, his counsel proved invaluable.

I learned how to take my “makeready” – the fine-tuning process, once the type is set and on the press, but before printing can start in earnest – to the next level, employing bits of tissue paper (especially cigarette paper, which is cheap, readily available, and comes with its own adhesive; thanks, Fred). There’s years more of learning to go, but at least I know the general terrain now.

I finally, years after meeting him, got to order newly-cast type from Ed at Swamp Press in Northfield, Massachusetts, the 14 point Bodoni that I used for the body of the pieces. Figuring out how to order type had its own learning curve and language; Ed made it easy, and I’m ready for the next time.

I got to have another lovely conversation with David at Saint Armand about his paper, and ordered and quickly received a ream (give or take) of their Canal paper, which proved a joy to print on.

I learned how entering a Zen-like state aids in the sorting of type after a job is complete: if my hands didn’t know the California job case layout before this project, they certainly do now, and the challenge when sorting type back into the case is to switch my brain to an idle state so that it doesn’t interfere with what my hands can do on their own.

I learned that, at 48 years old, I had to carefully budget my time for setting and printing because it really only works when I’m well-rested, well-fed and in a good mood. Staying too late in the evening, as I did a few times, results in frustration, spilled ink and, had I unwisely stayed any longer, accidents. Pushing through without taking breaks results in errors (see aforementioned Frank Ledwell 2.0). Slow and steady. Deliberate. Careful. That’s what works. Keeping the workspace clean – which I haven’t mastered – helps too.

I learned that setting an author’s work allows me to experience it in a way completely unlike simply reading it on the page.

“Its freshness for a hundred leagues to ocean’s briny wave”

“Water was not wet nor deep, just smoothness spread with light.”

“Canada is the scent of pines.”

“Our Hero keeps a precise record of how much he drinks, to the beer.”

“Optimism is better than despair.”

All those lines mean so much more when you’ve plucked each letter from its spot in the case, manipulated it into place in the composing stick, gently transferred it to the chase, locked it into place, whispering each line a hundred times by the times it’s all done, both to double-check and to aid in the process of returning it all to the case.

I learned that Brenda Whiteway is a patient, creative, witty taskmaster, the ideal client for my first big printing job. She took each delay with good humour, and wrote very nice things about me to boot.

And so here’s what I ended up with:

I came nowhere near perfection: the inking on the Jack Layton & Adrienne Clarkson piece is little inconsistent, the Milton Acorn inking is consistent, but with a too much ink, so that it’s bordering on looking like Bodoni bold, the “Frank Ledwell” in the citation for his poem is stands out a little too much, and the “m” in “poems” has a tiny nick in it.

But therein is another lesson to be learned: while my day-to-day life as a digital worker has a comfortable binary precision to it, and the possibility of endless iteration toward perfection, once the job is printed, the type sorted and the piece completed, well, that’s it.

There’s nothing more that I can do.

And so, for the next 50 years I’ll be walking by Brenda’s Confederation Country Cabinet in its home in the Coles Building and seeing that “a” is a little out of place, or wishing I’d staying in the shop an extra half hour that night to make the Emily Carr piece just that little bit cleaner.

Or I can, perhaps, just be satisfied that I worked hard, did the best job I could, learned a tremendous amount in a short space of time, made some new friends and cemented some others, lost some sleep, had some moments of pure printing bliss, and rest easy that in all that is where the craft lies.

Now, off to the Cross Keys for a bracer. Lord knows I need one.

A few weeks ago, reading through the City of Charlottetown’s Pedestrian Mall Bylaw, I noticed that section 5.7 of the bylaw specifically prohibits dogs from the pedestrian mall, with one exception:

No person shall bring, ride, or leave standing any horse or any other animal of any kind whatsoever onto the pedestrian mall excepting a seeing eye dog.

That exception – for “seeing eye dogs” – while laudable, leaves out many other types of service dogs, and so I sent an email to the chair of the Planning Commitee to see if it might be updated.

To my surprise and delight, he agreed that an update was in order, had a change drafted, and this change received 1st and 2nd reading at today’s council meeting; it will, barring any unforeseen actions in the interim, be passed with 3rd reading at the July meeting.

The amendment will simply change “seeing eye dog” to “service animal.”

Who knew it was so easy to get a bylaw changed!

Now, of course, I wasn’t asking for money to be spent, nor for some controversial step to be taken, just a minor wording change, but it reinforces to me that a lot of what’s important about democracy happens not at the barricades, but down in the engine room.

As it happens there were unexpected fruits of earlier labours in evidence at the same council meeting tonight: council approved the holding of a public meeting to review stylistic and wording updates to the Zoning and Development Bylaw, a move prompted, in part, by the presentation I made to the Atlantic Planners Institute last fall, Planning in Secret: Effective Strategies for Keeping the Public Out of the Planning Process, a presentation that suggested, among other things, that simply through adding whitespace and changing case could great things happen:

I presented the same talk to the city’s planning department a few weeks later and, apparently, they took some of my ideas to heart: they’ve reformatted, reorganized and reworded the bylaw and will present the results at a public meeting (date to be announced) for review.

Perhaps a drive toward a more open approach to data and information maintained by the city is a reasonable next project? (Although I’m feeling heady now, and wonder, now that I’m on a roll, if I should ask for citywide espresso-plumbing or mandatory letterpress training for all children).