Iceland Review magazine’s Daily News page is a good source of the main headlines from Iceland.

Remember the $30 decrease in price of our rental apartment in Iceland due to the decreasing value of the Króna? Well, it’s getting even worse: the apartment we paid an equivalent of $375 CAD for would now cost us $204 CAD.

Icelandair flies from Halifax to Reykjavik until October 20 if you’re interested in helping the Icelandic economy and taking advantage of unprecedented value at the same time.

Say what you want about Northern Telecom, they made telephones built like tanks. I never, ever had one of their phones fail: from the old beige rotary wall-mount in our kitchen when I was a kid right up to the reconditioned Maestro I have on the desk beside me, they just work. Forever.

Which is sadly not true of any of the cordless phones we’ve had at home for the past decade: we’ve been through a Panasonic, a four-handset Siemens, and a three-handset Motorola setup. And they’ve all failed us in the same way: after 2 or 3 years of use, the keypads stop working. The Motorola is the worst: it’s just over a year old, and it has become almost impossible to answer the phone or make a call. Serves us right for buying telecommunications products at Wal-mart, I guess.

So I need recommendations: we’re looking for a simple two or three handset cordless system. Doesn’t need to have any special features: we don’t need an answering machine, or the ability to hook up to Skype or play Tetris. We just want something built as solidly as an old Nortel.

(By the way, did you know there is a Telephone Museum of Prince Edward Island?)

Hardy’s Organic Products in Alberton, PEI, makes organic tofu:

Currently, Old Dock Farm grows a large percentage of the soybeans used to make Maritime Soycraft Tofu. Other crops grown include clover, timothy, and hay for the 25+ calf/cattle. Soybeans and grains such as milling wheat and oats take up the rest of the 210 acres. Old Dock Farm is the first and the only Certified Organic Farm in West Prince PEI. There’s yet another generation of John Hardy’s to grow up and farm. Twins John ‘Landon’ and James ‘Liam’ will grow up on the farm as did their father, grand-father and great grandfather and it all started 55 years ago with a man and dream.

The Icelandic króna has been dropping relative to the Canadian dollar over the last week, so that today almost exactly 100 krónur are equal to one Canadian dollar, whereas two weeks ago they were worth about $1.10.

This means that our 34,000 krónur 3-day apartment rental in Reykjavik two weeks ago at that cost us $371 then would cost us $340 today. Not an earth-shattering drop for us, but extrapolated out over an entire economy I expect the drop is rather profound.

TSX down 5.3% at close:

By the close Monday, the S&P/TSX composite index was down 572.92 points, or 5.3 per cent, to 10,230.43. It had been down as much as 1,180 points or almost 11 per cent.

Eagles’ Westbrook fractures 2 ribs:

Westbrook has rushed 54 times for 194 yards and four touchdowns in four starts this season, and caught 14 passes for 97 yards and two touchdowns.

We took Olle and Luisa up west for the day on Friday, with MacAusland’s Woolen Mill as the primary destination. It’s a wonderful place, and somewhere everyone should visit.

In a fit of educational patriotism, I’ve managed to end up as Treasurer of the “Parents of Prince Street,” the home and school association at Oliver’s school. We had our first executive meeting of the year yesterday, and the first general meeting (for parents, guardians, and others) will be Tuesday, October 7th at 6:30 p.m. at the school.

The focus of the meeting will be discussion of the Provincial Enrollment Study, its implications for Prince Street School, and how the home and school association should formally respond.

Apparently there is now “political will” on Prince Edward Island to start closing schools, and the Enrollment Study is the founding document of this effort, and of a broader effort to re-zone and rationalize the Island’s school infrastructure. It seems like most everything is on the table: closing schools, changing the grades offered by individual schools, changing the school that students in a given neighbourhood attend and so on.

It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that something significant is going to change in downtown Charlottetown, where we have five elementary schools in very close proximity:

These five schools — Prince Street, St. Jean, West Kent, Parkdale and Spring Park — are projected to have a combined enrollment, in 2012, of 888 students in attending schools with a combined capacity of 2,300 (it was noted at our meeting that the “capacity” numbers in the Enrollment Study are theoretical only, and don’t account for alternate uses of classroom space that have evolved over the years for things like libraries, computer labs and so on).

There’s no doubt that there’s going to be “school nationalism” in evidence in the year ahead as those with strong connections to their local school rally for it to be “saved,” regardless of practical concerns. But, as we’ve seen with the efforts by parents in the Souris area, this doesn’t need to be the case, and a proactive move by parents to look honestly and thoughtfully at the school infrastructure and propose plans which work will both for educational concerns, and for neighbourhoods can result in a way forward that doesn’t necessarily mean school-on-school in-fighting.

If you’re a parent at Prince Street, I encourage you to come out on Tuesday to discuss these issues, and learn more about the possibilities.

Oliver asked me what sort of music Sigur Rós plays (we bought their Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do in Reykjavik). I told him “maybe it’s called ‘electronica’ ” without much confidence. It seems perhaps that they actually play post-rock, described by Wikipedia as:

A genre of alternative rock characterized by the use of musical instruments commonly associated with rock music, but using rhythms, harmonies, melodies, timbre, and chord progressions that are not found in rock tradition. It is the use of ‘rock instrumentation’ for non-rock purposes.