I’m New Hampshire-bound this afternoon, flying down through Boston to spend a week with my longtime colleagues at Yankee Publishing in Dublin.

I’ve been visiting Dublin for 20 years, 3 or 4 times a year.

In 2003 I started creating an email folder containing all the travel-related emails for each trip; there are 34 of them now, and this trip will be number 35. With the trips that happened between 1996 and 2003 I suspect I’m coming up on 50 trips south.

Most of those trips have been by myself, but sometimes they were with my brother Johnny, and, especially in the early days, in the summer, they were with Catherine and, later, with Oliver too. We once spent a week in Dublin, NH and then drove to Boston and got on a plane and landed, the next morning, in Dublin, Ireland.

I’ve been working remotely with Yankee for so long that it’s second-nature now; these occasional visits are an important part of why we work so well together. It’s important to put faces to new names at the company. And it’s important to sit around a real, physical table with folks I otherwise only see on the other end of a weekly Skype conference call.

It’s also important to go out to lunch and supper together, so that we can remind ourselves that, outside of work, we have other lives and interests. It helps to make us whole people to each other.

So this afternoon I’ll get on Air Canada 7753 from Charlottetown to Halifax, then, an hour later, Air Canada 8895 from Halifax to Boston. When I land in Boston I’ll pick up a car from Hertz and drive the 90 minutes north – along Route 93, Route 95, Route 3 and Route 101 – to the Jack Daniels Motor Inn in Peterborough, NH a place I’ve been staying for years and years and years.

And tomorrow morning I’ll get up, have breakfast at Aesop’s Tables, and then drive up to Dublin, NH to start my workday.

As a special bonus, I’ll be in New Hampshire for Primary Day on Tuesday, as I was 12 years ago, and I plan to take in a variety of campaign rallies on Tuesday night in Nashua and Manchester; I’ll report in to Island Morning with a post-Primary review on Wednesday morning.

These days the bulk of my personal satisfaction in life comes from success at roof raking.

Last night, during a storm that dumped 50 cm of snow on the city, I made two trips out, followed by a more complete rake this morning. The result, with the cooperation of the bright sun today, is a good metre of bare roof on the front, and very little, if any, ice damming. Success!

Tomorrow I fly away for a week in New Hampshire and Ontario and I have to rely on the good graces of others to keep the roof clear in my absence.

On tonight’s edition of CBC Compass there was a story by Laura Meader on Oliver and Ethan.

Thanks to Laura, and to Dave Campbell (one of Oliver’s educational assistants) and Frances Squire (his homeroom teacher) for helping to tell their story.

And to Oliver and Ethan for putting up with all the “could you scratch his head a little more to the right” stage directions (a teachable moment in its own right: Oliver learned that news is storytelling, and is partly real real and partly simulated real).

With the new synergized CBC, it was wall to wall Ethan and Oliver today: in addition to Compass, a version of the story aired on Island Morning on the radio, another version on the local news, and yet another on the CBC website. We need to go into seclusion now.

I had KKP print up some PDF extracts of OpenStreetMap maps of Charlottetown this afternoon.

And so here I sit in Receiver Coffee looking at a map showing Receiver Coffee.

Come see them tonight at the Delta Hotel from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.

I’m talking about OpenStreetMap tonight, and I thought it would be useful to have some cards to pass out to remind people of the web address. Fortunately, I own a printing press. I really hope the ink dries in time!

Every board I’ve sat on in recent memory has grappled with the issues raised in this article.

I always ask, at my first meeting, what the consensus on sharing discussions is, and how widely the minutes will be distributed. I have a strong personal belief in 100% transparency but I know enough from the conversations that have resulted to know not everyone shares that belief, and that some feel that the prospect of transparency inhibits free-flowing discussion.

See also Chatham House Rule and PEI Home and School Federation board minutes (which we publish online after they are approved at the following meeting).

We’re going to experience almost every weather condition today in Charlottetown: clear, partly cloudy, cloudy, light snow, heavy snow and rain.

And the wind is going to do a 180 as the day progresses and the temperature climbs from -11°C to 2°C.

(Screen shots from Forecaster, a nice little Android app that uses Forecast.io data).

I ordered a Rii wireless mini keyboard last week for $23 from Amazon and it arrived today.

I plugged it into the Raspberry Pi that we run Kodi on and, presto, now I have a supercharged remote control for our homebrew media centre.

Citizenship edge case:

I was born on an airplane while it was flying over the USA. Do I have a claim to US citizenship?

Answer: Maybe.