If you read this blog in a web browser (and not, say, via RSS, or, in the future, via a mind meld with my petrified brain), then you’ll notice that I’m doing some experimenting with Google Web Fonts for styling headlines and body copy. Right now there’s OFL Sorts Mill Goudy TT in the body and PT Sans for headlines. Only an experiment for now, and may disappear or change. Bear with me.

Oliver and Catherine leave Tuesday for a couple of weeks in Ontario. Then, in mid-July, we all rendezvous in Halifax to fly to Berlin and we’ll not be back from Europe until August 26th.

Which meant that yesterday was the last father-and-son Saturday of summer for Oliver and I. It was rainy and chilly and not really all that summery at all. But it was all we had, and I resolved that we’d try to squeeze a whole bunch of our summertime activities into a single day.

We started at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, as we usually do on Saturday mornings, having our smoked salmon bagels and saying good-bye to all our regular vendors and friends.

From there it was out the Brackley Point Road to the Brackley Drive-in; it was the daytime, so no films to be seen. But I took the opportunity to shoot some new photos for the drive-in’s website, so it was sort of like going to the drive-in.

Next stop was a walk through the gardens at The Dunes and a look around the shops.

Then along the north shore through Oyster Bed and Wheatley River for a stop at the PEI Preserve Company for an unsweetened strawberry-kiwi iced tea on the front porch (where we watch untold hundreds of visiting cruise ship passengers pass through the doors in amazement) and a walk through the Gardens of Hope next door (if you’ve never walked those gardens you should; it’s a truly magical place).

Down Route 13 into Hunter River and Hartsville and then the back way on the red clay heritage road to the Appin Road and out onto Route 1 to Victoria by the Sea where we had an excellent meal at the Landmark Café (I had the meat pie, which was fantastic, and Oliver had a grilled cheese sandwich, which he gobbled up quickly) followed by dessert across the street at Island Chocolates.

By 3:00 p.m. we were pulling into the driveway at 100 Prince Street happy and exhausted.

After 10 years, the owners of Formosa Tea House are packing up shop and moving to St. John’s, Newfoundland to start the next chapter of their lives.

The Formosa has been important to Charlottetown in so many ways: it was the bellwether of so much of what’s happened in the city’s restaurant scene in the last decade; it’s hard to remember that when they founded the tea house on University Avenue back in 2001 most everyone thought they were crazy – a tea house… in Charlottetown!?

But they persevered until customers found them, and then expanded into the bright yellow house on Prince Street where they found an even wider customer base. Along the way they created the kind of “third space” that was almost completely novel for Charlottetown: a peaceful, comfortable place with low prices and a welcoming attitude where you could just go and hang out for a while.

Rumour has it that the last day of operation in its current form will be this Tuesday, so if you’ve ever been a Formosa regular, you have two days to stop in an pay your respects.

As Chien and Fen move on, a new group of owners – monks from The Great Enlightenment Buddhist Academy in Little Sands – is gradually reshaping the place, and today was the day to start the repainting.

I’ll be operating the 1890 Golding letterpress at Kwik Kopy this afternoon from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. as part of the open house at their expanded facility at the corner of Queen and Euston in Charlottetown. Please come along and see the press in action, pick up a letterpress-printed something and see behind the scenes at Kwik Kopy.

Later the same day…

I did some letterpress printing today, taking the things I acquired last weekend at the Printing Arts Fair out for a ride.

A caution to those of you who might someday have cause to transport metal type in your carry-on luggage through airport security: when the security agents look at it on their X-ray machine, like Superman being protected from Kryptonite, it shows up as an impenetrable blob and makes them them “hmmmm….” and proceed to disassemble the carrier’s luggage, the packaging around said metal type, re-X-ray and so on. The TSA agents at Logan Airport who did this on Tuesday were extremely careful and pleasant about this, and although I was delayed 20 minutes, it was about as pleasant a 20 minutes as you can imagine spending at a TSA checkpoint.

When I came to pass through security at Trudeau Airport in Montreal on the next leg of my journey I removed the type from my luggage and placed it in the tray with my liquids and my laptop and the security people didn’t bat an eye or ask a question.

A few weeks ago I got an email from Bob Gray, bon vivant, man about town, and summertime restaurant reviewer for The Guardian newspaper: he wanted to write about the burgeoning Asian restaurant scene in Charlottetown, and wondered if I’d serve as a guide. Always willing to shed more light on this less-discovered slice of the city’s culinary landscape, and always eager to accept a free meal, I agreed.

Which is how I ended up across the table from Bob and his wife Earlene at Tai Chi Gardens at 11:30 a.m. this morning, on stop number one of a four-restaurant tour of the scene.

It’s odd, having lived on Prince Edward Island for almost 20 years, and have a good portion of my friends and acquaintances who are also friends with Bob and Earlene, that we’d never met. But we hadn’t. And so today’s adventure, for me, was a short course in them as much as it was a short course in Asian food for them.

After snacks and drinks at Tai Chi Gardens we headed over to Ta-Ke Sushi for sushi and tempura, then to Sushi Jeju for vegetable samosas, Indian fried rice, and teriyaki salmon. The plan had been to finish off with dessert and Korean tea at SeoulFood, but when we showed up at 3:00 p.m. there was a “closed until 3:30” sign, so our tour finished without a final flourish. But we were full and happy nonetheless.

Earlene and Bob were excellent dining companions, and I’m looking forward to reading what hits The Guardian from Bob’s pen the Saturday after next.

I’ve been driving a Nissan Versa for the past 5 days – I rented it from Hertz at Boston’s Logan Airport when I arrived in New England on Wednesday. It’s a nice little car – dead basic minimal in terms of features, but nice nonetheless – with one tragic flaw: every time I get out of the car it gives me a whopping electric shock.

I’m particularly averse to electric shocks of any sort since my nerve conduction study back in October, and it had reached the point last night, after a day with many stops, where I was ready to admit that the car was doing this to me on purpose, perhaps as payback for some long-forgotten slight against the several Datsuns and Nissans I’ve owned over the year (there was that blue 1978 Datsun 510 that I abandoned on the side of the road after a nicer green 1978 Datsun 510 fell into my lap).

In frustration I turned to Twitter for help and my friend Morgan in Sweden came through with something that, while not a solution to the larger issue, certainly mitigates the torture:

So my getting-out-of-the-car ritual now goes like this: turn off the car, open the door gingerly, get out of the car, touch the door with my knuckles and receive painless shock, proceed.

The car still bears a grudge, obviously, but at least I’ve taken the edge off its reign of terror.

I spent a good part of today at the Printing Arts Fair at The Museum of Printing in North Andover, MA. It was my first visit to the museum (they’ve an excellent collection of type and presses), and the fair provided a great opportunity to meet other letterpress nerds.

In particular I got to meet Ed from Swamp Press (Northfield, Massachusetts) who’s casting me some 12 pt. Bodoni to fill in some of the gaps in the job case I acquired last year, John from Letterpress Things (Chicopee, Massachusetts), a store I need to make arrangements to visit sometime soon (for what am I if not someone in need of letterpress things) and Robert from Green Mountain Letterpress (No. Thetford, Vermont).

Robert was an especially fortuitous man to meet: he had a pop-up shop set up in the front yard of the museum selling his works, and one of those was a book The Land of Evangeline and The Provinces by the Sea which, among many other things, features an engraving of Queens Square in Charlottetown facing toward our house. Also – and this was the bargain of the day – Robert sold me 17 pounds of line and perf rule for $1. A single dollar! Now all I need to do is figure out how to ship 17 pounds of lead and brass back to Prince Edward Island.

The Printing Arts Fair was well-organized and full of activities: lithography in action, a Linotype machine being operating, an old Heidelberg press running, and many chances for visitors to, well, print. 

As Catherine would no doubt attest, if left to my own devices and with no other cares in the world, I’d likely spend most of my time at the movies. Two or three a day. Okay, maybe just two, but just so I don’t run out of good movies. Oh, and I’m always willing to sacrifice my way through a bad movie for the opportunity to sit in an interesting theatre. How else do you explain The Avengers in České Budějovice in Czech back in 1998. (See also Four Movies, Three Days).

I’m spending the weekend on a furlough from Yankee here in North Andover, MA, about 30 minutes north of Boston (I usually travel down for these week-long trips over a week of weekdays, but this time circumstances necessitated a split-week). Which left me a unique opportunity, freed from responsibilities and from “we can see movies anywhere – there’s only one Milan!” protests by other family members, to go wild on the film front.

I started with Super 8, which I knew almost nothing about other than its Spielberg/Abrams provenance (enough); my proximity to the The Tempurpedic IMAX Theater at Jordan’s Furniture sealed the deal. It was, indeed, an amazing place to see a film: very comfortable – Tempurpedic! – seats, stellar sound, the usual super-giant IMAX screen. The film was the kind of well-constructed dramatic monster movie you don’t see so much – Stand By Me meets Aliens. I enjoyed it.

After a burger at Fuddruckers (along with a musical fountain and a trapeze training centre, a part of the Jordan’s “get them in the door for reasons other than needing furniture” business model; the burger was excellent) I headed up to Peabody for an Apple Store religious pilgrimage, a dose of Barnes & Noble, and then to the AMC Loews Liberty Tree Mall 20 – they like their megaplex names good and long here in New England – to see Midnight in Paris, the new Woody Allen film. I really, really enjoyed it; I’m old enough to have missed Allen’s golden era, so I don’t have a soft spot in my heart for Manhattan and Annie Hall and the like; this leaves me free to treat each new film without that nostalgic anchor, and this is Allen’s best film of the last half-dozen I’ve seen (with the stipulation that I’m a sucker for time travel movies of any sort, for any film with Owen Wilson, and for Paris).

As if two movies in a weekend weren’t enough, I’m meeting a friend at the Wilton Town Hall Theatre tomorrow afternoon for the Danish film In A Better World.

Before then I’ll spend a good chunk of Sunday at The Museum of Printing here in North Andover: it’s their Printing Arts Fair, celebrating, in part, the 139th anniversary of the Kelsey press, which is the veritable American cousin of my Adana Eight Five.

A good weekend. Back to Yankee for Monday and Tuesday, then back to Charlottetown on the late-late flight on Tuesday night. I’ll have only been on Island soil for 12 hours before I’m set to hear out on the town with Bob Gray and his wife for an Asian restaurant crawl to feed his column in The Guardian. And then Thursday afternoon it’s a demonstration of the 1890 Golding letterpress at Kwik Kopy’s open house. So a good week all-round.

Another interesting look into Charlottetown’s near-history courtesy of Pex Mackay, who’s posted a 1988 video shot by Keith Wakelin. It’s an hour long, somewhat shaky, and with some repetition, but it’s worth watching all the way through for the shots of things that are no longer now as they once were: you’ll see the old Montage Dance space on Pownal (destroyed by fire just before the video was shot and still in ruins), the Irving station at the corner of Prince and Grafton, the waterfront full of oil tanks a derelict railway buildings before Confederation Landing Park and Peakes Quay, and Kent Street before the Royal Trust Tower.

Around 48:55 there’s a brief clip of the house on Longworth Avenue that’s been the centre of the SidingGate controversy this week.

We moved to Charlottetown in the winter of 1993, just 5 years after this video was shot, and it’s amazing both how much changed in those 5 short years, and how much has changed since.