Never name your brigantine True Friend.

A fresh box of Using Her Marbles–the book I published last year chronicling the six years Catherine lived with metastatic breast cancer–arrived in the mail yesterday from the printer, and I’ve restocked The Bookmark with autographed copies, which you can pick up in person at the store, or via their online shop.

If you’d rather a e-book, I can help you there too.

Similar But Different : A Christmas Poem.

Noting for posterity that (a) we are expecting our first significant snowfall tonight and (b) my appointment to have my winter tires installed is tomorrow morning.

I might not know much, but I do know there are 1,440 minutes in a day. 86,400 seconds. Such are the things one commits to memory over a half a life in service to North America’s preeminent periodical concerned with matters of time and dates and the heavens.

If I ask a computer the time(), it will tell me the number of seconds that have passed since January 1, 1970 (don’t ask). As I write this number is 1638967256.

If I want to know what this number will be tomorrow morning at the same time I simply add 86,400 to it: 1639053656.

I can double check that by asking my computer to turn that into a human-readable date:

print strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M", 1639053656);

To which it dutifully replies:

2021-12-09 08:40

But this isn’t a post about coding, it’s a post about how Beau Miles set out to plant 1,440 trees in a day.

In an unfortunate but understandable echo of last year, New Years levees have been advised against for Prince Edward Island.

I sent out this note to the unofficial list of levee organizers that I unofficially maintain to compile the unofficial list:

Hello Past New Year’s Levee Organizers,

With the announcement from Hon. Antoinette Perry that there will be no New Year’s Levee held at Government House on January 1, 2022, and advice against holding levees from the Chief Public Health Office this afternoon, I wanted to let you all know that I will not be maintaining a list of levees for New Year’s Day 2022.

Best wishes for 2022 regardless, and I hope to see you all back on the levee circuit in 2023.

Peter Rukavina
Keeper of the Unofficial List of Levees

There’s a new shop offering Japanese products in the Shops of St. Avards in Charlottetown, Sumikko Market.

I read a CBC News story about it back in October, but driving by St. Avards in the time since I could never seem to find it. On Saturday I decided to double down, and found it is, indeed, there, right beside “Everything IT.”

While the shop sells all manner of Japanese sundries, from candy to iced coffee, the standout for me is that from Monday to Friday, over the lunch hour, they serve onigiri–Japanese rice balls–something that heretofore there’s not been a source for in Charlottetown. They have two types, tuna and grilled salmon. And they are lovely: just the thing for a quick lunch or snack.

It’s only nine days until the Halcyon Days begin!

It’s a longer story but let’s just say that it ends tragically with Ceyx drowning at sea. Grieving Alcyone was about to throw herself into the sea to join her beloved husband. But the gods took pity on the pair, transforming them into halcyons, with the power to still the stormy seas for 14 days near the time of the winter solstice while they hatched their young.