After lollygagging for almost a month, I finally got around to packaging up and mailing the ill-fated “Concentration” cards out to a random group of 22 Mail Me Something subscribers yesterday. I wrapped each set in strips of acetate (purchased from the discount bin at The Scrapbook Studio) and then slipped them into invitation-sized oliver-coloured envelopes (from the discount bin at Rugg Road Paper Company). Even with the thinkness of the cards, the resulting envelope was still within the standard lettermail specifications, so to mail them all was only $20.

The packs are now off to points in Germany, Denmark, Taiwan, the USA and Canada.

Every Tuesday morning Michael Pendergast, aka “The Music Man,” has a session for young kids in the theatre here at The Guild, right next to our office. The walls are thin here, and so this means that every Tuesday morning we are treated to the sounds of happy children and accordion music. You might think this would be annoying and would interfere with being in the zone. But it isn’t and it doesn’t. I think Jane Jacobs would be happy.

My eyes were first opened to the wonders of Bánh Mì by Peter Bihr, who pointed to Babanbè in Berlin, which happened to be just around the corner from Betahaus where I was working last summer. I enjoyed several excellent sandwiches there, and in the process got hooked on the spicy goodness in a way that stuck deep in the recesses of my head.

And so in Boston over the weekend I resolved to seek out some local Bánh Mì, and, with the help of the web, this ended me up at New Saigon on Washington Street in Chinatown. Without the backstopping of the web-ravings, New Saigon is a place I’d never organically wander into; but looks deceive: the $3.25 tofu sandwich was full of all the snap and crackle I remembered, and the pineapple bubble tea I got along with it was a perfect accompaniment. Recommended.

“I scanned a QR code on the back of David Weale’s car to go to his website.” (Said website is here).

On the wall at Beijing Restaurant in Charlottetown are two facsinating charts: on the left is a chart showing foods you should eat together; on the right is a chart showing foods you shoul not eat together.

So, yes to “pineapple and pork,” yes to “mushrooms and cauliflower,” but no to “bananas and sweet potatoes,” and no to “carrots and parsnips.” I think the right-hand chart also suggests that you shouldn’t eat garlic-flavoured dog, but I might be misreading that.

Other than what shows up every night in the bookbag, the “feedback loop” that we’re all used to as parents of kids in elementary school mostly happens at the two parent-teacher interviews that happen each school year. We might see the teacher in between these interviews, especially if there’s something of particular concern, but for a lot of parents information about how things are going in school is packed into those often-all-too-short meetings.

At least that’s the way it used to be.

Here’s what happens these days: Oliver and I will be walking to school in the morning and he’ll mention something to me — “I lost my gymnastics sheet!” or “What’s the difference between a homophone and a homonym anyway?” If it’s something I know is going to affect his school day, or that’s going to confuse his teacher when he mentions it in class, I’ll send off an email when I get to my office 10 minutes later, and I’ll often get a reply back later in the day.

This is a feedback loop that happens 2 or 3 times a week, not 2 or 3 times a year, and I know, from talking to Oliver’s teacher this year and from our own experiences, that it’s been a big help in maximizing opportunities for learning and minimizing potentially stressful issues.

We’re lucky, of course: Oliver’s classroom teacher is open to this communication, has the tech-savviness to figure out how to handle her email efficiently, and we have the sense as parents to know where the line between “effective communication” and “teacher harrassment” lies. 

I know from talking to other parents and teachers that our experiences are by no means universal: there are teachers in the system who simply don’t know how to use email, or at don’t care to. The Groupwise email system provided to teachers by the Department of Education is generally acknowledged to be too slow to be practically useful (smart teachers route around it). There are parents whose sense of the help-harrass line is different than ours. And many families without computers or the Internet at home.

But the upsides, if we can figure out the technology, access and etiquette parts of the equation, are tremendous: parents are more engaged, teachers have a “rapid response” way of working on issues with parents, and because home and school are each more aware of what’s happening in the other, the opportunity for the curriculum to spill over into the home, and for home to spill over into the curriculum is much enhanced.

The problem is that the “technology, access and etiquette parts of the equation” aren’t something that anyone’s paying particular attention to. The capital budget for education technology for 2012-13 has been reduced to $0. Absolutely nobody is talking about how to solve the “digital divide” issue and get technology into every home. And teachers and parents are left to ourselves to work out the etiquette (which, truth be told, we might be able to do, with a few loose guidelines in place).

Technology in education is a difficult issue overwrought with funding, policy and infrastructure issues. At the very least, though, focusing on the simple ability to get email back and forth between home and school seems like a good place to focus some attention.

My go-to place for coffee when I’m down here working with my colleagues at Yankee Publishing is Countryhouse Corner, down the road in Dublin. It’s an unassuming little place, built into an old barn, that serves good coffee, breakfast and lunch.  It’s family-run, and the family in question is incredibly friendly.

I didn’t realize quite how friendly until this week.

I’m generally down here in southern New Hampshire about 4 times a year, but this visit is my first since last June so I haven’t been here for a while.

Nonetheless, when I stopped in for breakfast on Monday morning, I was handed a small plastic bag of Canadian spare change, which they’d been saving for me. There’s probably $2 or $3 in the bag, so it’s not a great cash windfall, but the thought that goes into remembering that I’m Canadian, that I visit a few times a year, along with the logistics of setting aside the spare change and remembering where it is is staggering to me.

Needless to say, they have a customer for life.

A brief update from the home and school front, a little corner of my life that, when you combine activities at Prince Street School locally with the crazy projects I’m working on for the provincial federation, seems to consume most of my spare moments these days. Against character and probability, it’s work I love doing: it’s grounded and productive and, by times, involves handing out popcorn, buying several gallons of apple juice, and working with people that, in the regular course of my daily life, I’d never meet.

Two items of note on the calendar right now:

1. Prince Street School is in the middle of an ambitious fundraising campaign to raise the money needed to resuscitate our condemned school playground (gory details here). There’s a big event coming up on February 24 at the Murphy Centre, a fashion show and silent auction. If you’d like to attend the event itself, call 902-368-6950 to buy tickets: $25 each, $150 for a table of 8. But you can bid online right now in the silent auction. You’ll find everything from an hour of ice time at the Civic Centre to two hours of a luxury limosine rental to a Blackberry Torch up for bidding.
2. Together with home and school associations at West Kent, Spring Park, St. Jean, and Parkdale, Prince Street is organizing a program of informal recreational activities for parents, students, teachers and staff this winter and spring.  With $4,400 in funding from the PEI Home and School Federation, we’re looking to bring people in different neighbourhoods together for fun and fellowship. You can read all the details on the home and school site, including the results of a family activity survey we did to gauge interest in different types of fun (punchline: swimming, bowling and movies are very popular; charades, broomball and bike repair are no).

If you happen to find yourself saying “you know, I’ve really got too much money right now, and I’m really concerned about kids having a safe outdoor place to play at school,” then please send some of your spare cash Prince Street’s way; if you’re an elementary school family in downtown Charlottetown, watch your child’s backpack in the months to come for fun activities you can do together.

I’ve decided that unless I block out regular times during the week to spend at the printing press, the seemingly endless digital task list will always win out, and the press will lay fallow. So every Friday morning and all day Sunday are letterpress days now.

This Sunday I decided to make use of a nice little collection of Swedish wood type that Luisa gave me when we were visiting last summer. It’s a random collection of letters and numbers, with nary a word to be made from them, so I needed to come up with something wordless and decided to make a “concentration” card game using some of many boxes of business card blanks I inherited from Campbell’s Printing.

I selected my 9 favourite pieces from the Luisa collection and printed 48 copies of each on pale yellow business cards so as to end up with 24 sets of 18 cards each.

There are a nice variety of shapes and sizes and type styles in the group; the pieces of type were a little shopworn, but still in relatively good shape, and I was really happy with the results:

There emerged, however, a standards issue. North America and Europe use a different standard for “type high,” which is to say “the thickness of the metal or wood letters use to print.”  In North America it’s 0.918 inches; in Europe it’s 0.928 inches. It’s not a huge difference — about a quarter of a millimeter — and it didn’t prevent me from printing. But it was enough of a difference to do this:

Which is to say, it made a visible impression on the reverse side of the print. Martha Stewart notwithstanding, this is a crime against letterpress humanity in many circles, and though it’s possible to consider it endearinly concrete evidence of the process, in a game of concentration it presents a serious functionality issue, as the whole point of concentration is not being able to see what’s on the printed side.

So now I have 24 sets of “Concentration” that can’t really be played. I’ll still send them out to a random collection of Mail Me Something subscribers, as the cards are beautiful in their own way. They also serve as a cautionary tale for the value of standards, and the value of turning things over before you print 432 of them.