I have a selfish interest in the success of school breakfast programs: I want all the kids in my son Oliver’s class to start the day well-fed, because well-fed students are better learners, and a classroom full of well-fed students is easier to teach.  When everyone wins, everyone wins, in other words.

Both Prince Street School, where Oliver is in grade 4, and St. Jean School, just down the street, have active well-used breakfast programs. The programs, which work to provide a free healthy breakfast to any student at the school, are an important part of the life of the school, and while they receive financial support from many corners, always need more resources than seem to be available.

To this end, an ad hoc committee of teachers, staff, parents and members of the community-at-large are organizing a fundraising concert for Sunday, May 15 from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at Murphy Community Centre in support of the Prince Street and St. Jean breakfast programs.

There’s a great line-up of performers, all of whom are donating their time:

• St. Jean Choir
• The Chaisson Family
• John Connolly
• Prince Street Rock Band
• Joey Kitson
• Patrick Ledwell
• Bridgette Blanchard
• The Blueprints

It’s an all-ages, family-friend concert and admission is by donation (you decide how much you can afford). The folks at Trinity United Church will be providing scones, tea and coffee at no cost. It promised to be an excellent way to spent a late Sunday afternoon. Please join us, and please spread the word!

Last week I learned that we spent $13,457.99 on electricity for our house at 100 Prince Street over the 11 years since July 2000, or about $1200 per year.

Today I asked Coop Energy, where we buy the oil that heats our house and our hot water, for a similar summary. What I learned was that from January 2002 to May 2011 we’ve consumed 37,989 litres of oil for which we’ve paid $26,258.23, or about $2900 per year.

That means that our total energy cost for our home is about $4,100 per year.

Coop Energy doesn’t have an online customer system yet, but they tell me that one is currently in the works.

From Island Imagined, a Robertson Library map-scanning project, here’s a page from the 1903 Fire Insurance Map of Charlottetown. Our house, at 100 Prince Street, is in the bottom-left corner in the 53rd block.

There’s city-wide map that acts as an index to the individual map pages; my favourite part of that map is the legend:

Back last September I had a new wrist brace cast by Barry MacKinnon at Island Orthotics. The first time I went to use it I found a fatal flaw that prevented it from working: the “squeegyness” of the newly-cast space-age material the brace was cast from preventing my wrist from easily gliding back and forth on my desk.

A quick call to Barry produced a quick solution: he told me to go and buy some baby power and dust the brace with it. I did this, and it immediately solved the problem (although it introduced a new “office smells like baby nursery” problem; I could live with that, though).

I recent months I’ve been noticing that my otherwise-amazing Apple Mighty Mouse wasn’t smoothly gliding about my desk as it used to, and I reasoned that the awesome power of baby powder might help here too, so I washed and thoroughly dried off the mousing area of my desk and then sprinkled a small amount – about 1/8th of a teaspoon – of baby power on the desk and swooshed it all about.

I’m happy to report that the mouse glides about as never before.

Oddly, I have no recollection of using baby powder on actual baby Oliver when he was young; perhaps we did and I wasn’t aware, or perhaps the maladies it cures were solved otherwise.

My meeting at Maritime Electric this week afforded me an opportunity to shoot a photograph of Prince Street from a new perspective. That’s our house, barely visible, on the left-hand side in the very centre of the photo.

A Saturday afternoon father-and-son letterpress experiment.

I’ve been involved with the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust, in one capacity or another, for more than a decade. Our non-profit group is working to preserve a stretch of coastal agricultural land stretching from French River to Sea View, Prince Edward Island free from development in perpetuity, leaving it without development pressures so that it can continue to be farmed as it has since the time of L.M. Montgomery and before.

The “crown jewel” of this stretch of coastline is a property variously known as “The Sims Farm” and “The Ash Property” depending on how hold you are; it’s a 135 acres that sits at the end of the Cape Road near New London Lighthouse. In this one undeveloped property you can experience almost everything that makes the Island’s north shore so special, from sandy beaches to towering cliffs, green fields, forests and rolling hills. It is a truly remarkable property. And, as such, it’s been our wish at the Land Trust that it be preserved as it is for future generations to enjoy.

This proved to be a harder, more time-consuming task than you might imagine: the property was owned by non-residents from the U.K. and between us and them were several layers of lawyers. Just making contact took several years, and getting to the point where the property might be sold took a few more. Several years ago the owners decided to test the property market and asked for expressions of interest from those who might purchase and possibly develop the property; without knowing what sort of response they might get, we made it clear that we wanted to work with them to preserve rather than develop the land if at all possible.

Working over the last two years, at long last we were able to come to an agreement to purchase the property from the owners at its appraised value; we arranged for a collateral mortgage to help us pay for the property, attached a non-development covenant to the deed to ensure its preservation, and today we’re happy to announce that the Land Trust has finally concluded the purchase and ensure that this breathtaking piece of the Island will be preserved.

Of course now the really hard work starts: raising the money to pay for the property, and its neighbours, which together we are calling “The L.M. Montgomery Seashore.” While it’s a Herculean task, we’re fortunate to have Hon. Marion Reid and Bill Andrew acting as our Campaign Co-Chairs, and a capable group of directors backing them up.

Here’s a video feature Hon. Marion Reid that the Land Trust prepared; watch it to get a taste of the coastline I’m talking about.

If by chance you happen to feel as passionately about this part of Prince Edward Island and its preservation as I do, and are able to contribute to this effort, please get in touch!

So I’ve been looking at my own transaction information with Maritime Electric, pulled using the code I posted yesterday and here are some of the things I’ve learned:

• Over the last 11 years we’ve paid $13,457.99 for electricity for our home in total.
• The most we’ve ever paid for a month’s worth of electricity is $202.68 in February, 2003. That was the winter of a very bad series of winter snow and ice storms that caused ice build-up on our roof; one way we tried to mitigate the damage was with heating cables on our roof, which we ran pretty-well full-time for a month.
• Later in the spring of 2003 we were in Spain from May 3 to 17, 2003; our bill for the month covering that period was only $21.13, the lowest bill we’ve ever had (which isn’t quite as “we used almost nothing” as it seems because we’d paid an “estimated bill” the month before of $148.34 which was presumably inflated by the expectations our February demand placed on the amount).
• We use more electricity in February (average of $114/month) than in any other month; in June our average usage ($68/month) is almost half of that.
• I consider myself a pretty “pay my bills on time” kind of guy most months, but I’ve managed to accumulate almost $100 in interest charges due to late payments over the last 11 years.
• We contributed just over $700 to the Green Power Program that started in 2001 (I cancelled our contribution back in August; I figure wind power has enough legs to stand on its own now).

My next logical step after discovering the treasure-trove of data available to customers in Maritime Electric’s customer portal was to create a simpler way of pulling that information out of their website and into a format that’s easier to analyze and visualize.

In an ideal world there would be a Maritime Electric API that would allow me to do something like:

wget http://data.maritimeelectric.com/transactions.xml

But there’s not. So some scripted login voodoo, followed by some screen-scraping voodoo, is required to pull the data off in a useful format.

And so that’s what I did. Over at GitHub you can grab the code and, assuming you’re on a suitably-equipped computer (a Mac works well for this with nothing additional to install), you can turn your complete Maritime Electric transaction history into a CSV file, suitable for import into a spreadsheet, in one easy step. Here’s a quick step-by-step:

1. Grab a ZIP file of the latest pei-energy code.
2. Unzip the resulting file, which will be named something like reinvented-pei-energy-2bec180.zip.
3. From the command line, move to the maritime-electric/transactions folder inside the code you just unzipped.
4. From the command line, issue the following command, substituting the email address and password you use to login to the Maritime Electric Customer Portal:

php maritime-electric-dump.php email password

The result will be a file, in your home directory, called maritime-electric-accounts.csv that lists the service addresses attached to your account, and one file, named [account-number].csv, for each service address containing the complete transaction history for that address.

You can then load those files into any old spreadsheet application to search, sort and visualize the data: