I don’t believe U-Haul is “sharing” their truck, any more than an airline is “sharing” their seat with me.

Laura Drever sketches her Orkney landscape:

My pencil case – one I made when I was 10 years old, with Laura hand stitched on it – has been coming walks with me. For many years, it stayed in the studio and didn’t see the light of day. Now, it comes with me every time, along with a water colour palette and a sketch book.

A place to gather colours, textures and lines. And ideas.

I’ve fallen out of the habit of carrying my sketchbook everywhere I go. I miss it, and aim to pick it up again; my eyes need to start seeing again.

Wouter writes about heterogeneous hiking signage:

Here’s where things already start to go wrong. You’d think that an orange “Plus” is always the longer route, but no. This is dependent on the site you visit, so pay attention when looking at that map. So far so good, but as soon as you dare to cross the provincial borders—which doesn’t take much in tiny Belgium—the signs suddenly and completely alter face. Instead of being served symbols, you’re being served numbers on a bigger burgundy-colored almost traffic sign, in the same vein as the bicycle crossroad signs across Flanders. Why bike signs can be uniform across Flanders and hiking signs can’t is beyond me.

I like people who are unafraid of being publicly interested in interesting things.

William Denton had his letter read on a BBC show:

“Thank you. All best wishes from Toronto,” says Bill, but I was really taken by Bill’s little CV at the end of his email: “Librarian, artist and licensed private investigator.” Bill, you’ve got to tell us more about your working week, ‘cause that is a Sunday night ITV series waiting to happen, isn’t it? Anyway, thanks Bill.

I read recently that Alec Baldwin’s reboot of Match Game has been cancelled, to which my reaction was “they rebooted Match Game?!”

Surely the impulse to yank up kitsch TV from the 1970s is a cultural inflection point, a sign that we have run out of ways to distract ourselves. The train has reached the last station.

Which is to say: a series about a Toronto librarian, artist and licensed private investigator sounds pretty good right about now. I’ve half a mind to call up William and negotiate for the rights to his email signature.

The Oracle featured Melissa Wijngaarden, founder of Project Cece:

Melissa Wijngaarden is one of the co-founders of Project Cece - a platform started out of a necessity to find fashion that matched both her style, and her values of sustainability and equality. Her way to try and make a positive change in the world in both the way people consume clothes and the way the fashion industry produces them.

Where is lunch? Over there!

Designing for Different Tech Realities:

While cultural and socio-economic backgrounds sculpt different technological needs across the globe, de la O argues that many tech developers today live in a bubble where only one specific reality — one that consists of being western and wealthy — is taken into account at the ideation stage. Considering different contexts is problematically overlooked in design and development.

L. and I celebrated our six-month anniversary yesterday with supper out at Abbiocco. In anticipation of this I realized that, what with L. being a striking clothes horse and all, with my wardrobe I would, by compare, appear not-up-to-standard, which is to say schlubby.

Urgent intervention was required.

In recent years Charlottetown has not been blessed with men’s clothing shops; with the opening of Eastwood Avenue in the Confederation Court Mall in 2020, though, there was a corner-turn: an independent shop selling only menswear, and menswear, to boot, that falls in a comfortable space north of sk8erwear and well-south of Denver Hayes:

Named after the street I grew up on in England, EAM brings together European/British fashion and their North American counterparts. Offering men’s apparel that isn’t widely available on the East coast of Canada, both in brands and styles, Eastwood Ave. Menswear will provide an alternative to the more frequent haberdashery style of men’s apparel shops. We’ll continue to search for opportunites to expand our brand roster with brands that represent the same quality, attention to detail and new ideas that we already offer.

The problem with Eastwood Avenue—and the reason I’d never been in—was that its space in the mall was claustrophobic, simply too tiny to allow comfortable browsing, even if it did seem to have an intriguing mix of clothes.

But Eastwood Avenue has moved out of the mall, down Queen Street to the space formerly occupied by ColourBlind. And the difference is transformational: gone is the cave-like cramp, replaced by light and space.

So, in need to a wardrobe-injection, that’s where I headed.

I am not a comfortable shopper, and, as Olivia will attest, my fashion sense has long rested in the neighbourhood of Fred MacMurray in My Three Sons. But I was determined to break the mould, so I took my time, browsed different racks, and, after 30 minutes and some helpful guidance from Steve, the personable owner, I departed with a T-shirt from Jungmaven, pants from Albam, and a rain jacket from Stutterheim (there wasn’t rain in the forecast, but the jacket was 50% off, and I liked the cut of its jib).

I completed my outfit with a zipped-knit Matinique sweater from KC Clothing and Rieker shoes from Proude’s.

When I dressed for supper and looked at myself I didn’t recognize myself, so differently-clothed was I. But I settled into it, and feel happy to have departed the 1955 fashion orbit.

Supper at Abbiocco was notable for two things: a fantastic chocolate tart for dessert, and what amounts to the kindest request to allow our table to be turned that I can possibly imagine.

And the company of a my engaging partner of six months,

From earlier this spring, Signs of a magnetic pole flip in company ownership by Matt Web:

What if the dominant model of company ownership inverts? What if we’re at the end of an era of companies being owned by external stockholders, and at the beginning of bottom-up ownership by the people who do the work – the employees? 

The signature example of employee-ownership Matt cites is ustwo, a company—er, fampany—that I have some familiarity with, as my friend Jonas worked from their Malmö branch for some years.

Yankee Publishing, my client for more than 25 years, made the transition from 84 years of family ownership to becoming an ESOP—employee stock ownership plan in 2019:

ESOPs are a way for family-owned business to keep their business intact. Yankee, which has been family owned for 84 years, now has 17 owners including the fourth generation, with no clear successor, Jamie Trowbridge, president and CEO — and a third-generation owner himself — explained to NH Business Review.

“The family members were all in favor of this,” said Trowbridge, who has been working on the plan to transition the company to an ESOP for the last 2 1/2 years. “The alternative would probably have been to sell the assets off to different buyers, breaking up the company, and perhaps moving pieces elsewhere. That was unacceptable to us. We didn’t like the idea of good paying jobs leaving New Hampshire.”

I’m not a part of the ESOP—I’m a vendor, not an employee—but the benefits of the ESOP to me, inasmuch as they’re allowing the company to remain intact and right-scaled, are clear.

Oddments from Francli Craftwear:

An on-going project where the only rule is that we can’t buy anything new.

A collection of craftwear and carry goods entirely remade from our workshop off cuts, ends of roll and salvaged fabrics and trims.

Each piece is created with minimal pattern cutting and a build-as-you-go approach. This is our space to let go of repetition and efficiency, and give way to a sense of flow. Listening to the behaviour of the material, and how it wants to be reformed.

This collection will continue to grow and evolve over time. Each piece realised will never be exactly repeated.