A couple of crazy, passionate entrepreneurs, Rebekha and Adam Young, have relocated from Ottawa to Charlottetown to open a coffee shop-cum-knitting café at 98 Water Street, a space formerly occupied by Ampersand and now christened Youngfolk & the Kettle Black (and thus severely in need of a nickname, quick).

They are clearly breaking several hard-and-fast Charlottetown rules, chief among which is that it’s impossible to make a go of a coffee shop in what, in Charlottetown terms, is the far-reaches of the marketplace’s geography.  Coffee shops are supposed to be on University Avenue or Queen Street, and the notion that someone would walk all the way down Queen Street and up half a block on Water simply for a cup of coffee… why you might as well suggest they walk to Summerside.

They’re also targetting what might appear to be a sliver of the coffee shop market in Charlottetown, that which caters to people who actually care about the quality of the coffee they’re drinking.  As you may recall from my 2007 survey of Charlottetown cappuccino, much of what passes for “coffee” in this town is tepid brown-flavoured water. Things have improved since then (I rather enjoy my morning coffee at Casa Mia every day), but we are not, as a rule, a town of coffee elitists.

That all said, if any couple is going to make a go of a high-end coffee shop on remotest Water Street, it is Adam and Rebekha.

These folks have energy. I suspect they may never sleep (in addition to all of the above, they’re also home-schooling their three kids). They have a frightening attention to the smallest details. They have tapped into the Island zeitgeist more quickly than almost anyone I’ve ever observed. And the coffee business is not new to them: their life in Ottawa was based around a similar place in the Byward Market.

They have not gone into any of this halfway: they’ve been working on transforming the 98 Water Street space since the early fall of 2011 (Adam orginally made contact with me with an offer of possible basement space for my letterpress back in October). And what was once, as Ampersand, a rather dark, claustrophobic space has been opened up and transformed into a sort of Scandinavian homage (and, indeed, it has good hygge). You won’t recognize it.

I had my first espresso macchiato there this morning. It wasn’t perfect, but imperfection at this level means “as good as anything you’re going to find in Charlottetown otherwise.” And they’ve an eager drive toward coffee perfection that you’ll have to look hard for elsewhere.

They’re open, to start, from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. daily. I suggest you stop in.

Some challenges still to work out. Not much to be done, using borrowed type, with the lack of A-V kerning in “HAVE” (if it was my type, and abundant, I could take a hack saw to it). Still working on the makeready issues with OBLIGATION. I’d like to eventually print the EXPLAIN in red.

Picked up my new eyeglasses today. Whoa, momma — hard getting used to the new “progressive” lenses. Everything’s alternately blurry and clear. They say you get used to it: I hope so. My patience for spatial discontinuity is not great.

The Visual Communications program at Holland College is essentially a digital program these days — when you visit their facilities in the basement of the downtown campus you find workstations and sophisticated printers — but there are vestiges of the program’s analog past still there, chief among which are the drawers of metal type tucked away in the corner. Thanks to the generosity of the program this is a resource that I’ve been able to borrow from over the last couple of years (I set my first business cards in type from their collection, and this Pecha Kucha poster).

I returned to the well this afternoon, and decided to spend some time organizing the typeface that seemed to have the most promise of forming a complete alphabet, a face that I’m assuming is Akzidenz Grotesk after walking through the helpful typeface identification tool Identifont.

After an hour or so of shuffing letters around drawers and plumbing the depths of the drawers of odds and sods of type, I managed to assemble a good collection of the face in alphabetical order, with several of each letter:

Once I’d organized things, I pulled out the letters in the best shape to use in a new project that’s been rattling around in my head for a while:

Watch for more on this project in this space in the days and weeks to come.

I was also lucky to meet another printer at Holland College this morning, a student who recently acquired an Adana Five Three, which is the junior of the Adana Eight Five I started out on. I’m hoping our paths cross again.

In a recent blog post Stephen Fry relates, in compelling detail, several “Twitter firestorms” he has inadvertently set off. He begins:

Every now and again, what with me being what I am (a human), I find myself hurled into the teeth of some sort of twitterstorm. Either I get a bit cross with someone ( or “throw my toys out of the pram” and “have a hissy fit” as some would prefer to put it) or I tweet an opinion or experience that for some reason turns into a “story” with all the distortions, Chinese whispers, misunderstandings and embarrassments that “stories” generate.

This afternoon I’m experiencing my own version thereof, admitedly a much smaller one.

A couple of days ago I began to see tweets in my stream, hash tag #bringQtopei, advocating for the CBC Radio One program Q to visit Prince Edward Island.

I am nothing if not a cynical bastard, and among my great aversions are pandering and civic boosterism. I’m also not a fan of the wheel-and-spoke nature of the CBC that divides the country into Toronto and “the regions.” And so I’m averse to anything that seeks to enhance and celebrate that — like anthropological Royal Visits of CBC personalities out to the periphery to eat lobsters, heap praise on the local band of the moment, and then hop on the plane back to HQ.

Hence the tweet:

What’s the hash tag to use to ensure that @jianghomeshi is prevented from ever visiting Prince Edward Island?

To which Jian Ghomeshi, host of Q, good-naturedly replied, 15 minutes later:

@ruk ha. well played, sir. but two decades too late. my fam would make summer trips to PEI when i was a kid. and i loved it. (sorry!)

Touché, thought I. And then I went on with my life.

This afternoon, however, something happened: my iPad started lighting up with @reply notifications every couple of seconds, and as my original tweet spiralled further and further into the viralsphere, I became an ass, a goon, a hater, and an idiot. All of which only got worse when Jian himself tweeted:

Ouch. #StayAwayPersianBoy ? RT @ruk What’s the hashtag to use to ensure @jianghomeshi is prevented from ever visiting Prince Edward Island? 

Which others misread as coming from me. And so I also became a racist. 

As Stephen Fry summarizes: “Well, what does that all that tell us or teach us? Not so very much really.”

What an interesting day.

Back in 2008 I posted a photo of my eyeglasses prescription in this space, something that, the following year, stood me in good stead when I was away and needed to purchase a replacement pair of eyeglasses. In that spirit, here’s my latest prescription. If you compare to the four year old one you’ll see that I’ve moved into “progressive” lens, which I understand to be “bifocals without all the downsides.” And there are prisms and bumped up strength in one eye. In other words, it’s getting worse. But my optometrist assures me that, even if the trend continues, there’s no point at which my vision will tip beyond the ability to be corrected.

As we get used to working here in the Reinventorium, we’re getting better at adjusting the office climate. Ye olde office up on Fitzroy Street varied between too-cold and too-hot over the years, but the humidity was always pleasant. Here in the new place the heat varies betwen too-hot and much-too-hot (there’s a service call about this imminent), and the humidity is airplane-like.

To attach to metrics to this, I invested in a thermometer hygrometer combination over the weekend ($9 at Canadian Tire) and what I found was this:

That’s about 23 degrees and 24% humidity (and the temperature was lower than usual because I’d had the window open for a while).

I went back to Canadian Tire on Sunday afternoon and bought a Honeywell humidifier, one advertised as being good for “medium-sized rooms” (with no definition of what that meant), for $46 and left it running overnight. When I came into the office this morning the humidity was up to 30%, but with no signs of going any higher. The office was more pleasant, but the hygrometer was still in the “very dry” zone.

So I returned the humidifier, and found another Honeywell across the parking lot at Future Shop, for $49, that was advertised as suiting “large rooms.” It’s been running for the last 3 hours, and the humidity is now up to 42%:

It’s not quite as high as I’d like it, but 42% humidity is much, much more comfortable to work in than 24% humidity, so I’ll leave the new humidifier in place overnight and see where we’re at in the morning.

If I can get things to 45% humidity and down in the 20 degrees range, I’ll be a happy worker.

Apologies to my father for mocking his seeming obsession with humidity when I was a kid: our house was full of hygrometers and humidifiers and dehumidifiers and I believe there may have been graph paper involved at times. I had no idea what the fuss was all about. Now I do.

When I was in Boston a few weeks ago I found a small tube of gold letterpress ink at Cambridge Paper Source at Porter Square. It was an accessory for a hobby printing kit, but I saw no reason I couldn’t use it a la carte so I invested. And tonight I took it out for a ride:

I printed up a couple of dozen on 4”x6” ruled index cards I bought this afternoon at Lawton’s. The effect was less “oh my God, I printed solid gold letters!” than I would have imagined in my dreams but it was still satisfying. I was surprised to find that there’s more black in gold than I would have thought (which probably doesn’t surprise anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of colour theory, which I lack).

It was pleasing to see the ink disk in its seeming solid-gold glory, if only for an hour or so:

With a larger typeface and some meatier paper, I think I could create something really interesting with the gold ink; letterpress being letterpress, I only used about a fingernail’s worth tonight, so there’s plenty left.

If you need your memory jogged as to the source of the quote, see: