My first big event with Catherine’s family after we started dating was to accompany her to her brother William’s and sister-in-law Debbie’s wedding in 1992. Coming from a tiny family as I do — both my parents are only children — it was an immersive short-course in large-family logistics. I survived, though, and have felt a welcome part of the clan ever since, even if, technically speaking, we’re still “dating.”

Seventeen years later and we’re back in Napanee for another family wedding. Both of Catherine’s grandmothers have since died, along with her Grandpa Joe, her Uncle Hilton, and her Aunt Lois. Niece Patricia and Nephew James have been born and grown up into mature teenagers, cousins Pam and Wendy have both had children, and wee nephew Allan, who was four years old at that first wedding, is now engaged himself. And he drives a pick-up truck and is very, very tall.

Saturday it was niece Valerie’s turn to get married, and this was the first time in a long time that everyone in the immediate family was able to sit down in one place and share a meal together. And what was once foreign and daunting now feels familiar and even, dare I say, comfortable.

Spending time with your partner’s family is like turning up the volume. Take everything you love about your partner, and everything you can’t stand, all their endearing qualities, and all the things you’d edit out if you had the chance. And then amplify them across a swath of relations.

It can be a shock to the system.

For the longest time I thought there was something unique and particularly demanding about all of this, but this weekend I realized that this is just how it is: what’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh. So much of what I love about Catherine comes from this place and these people, and while swimming around in the undiluted extra-strength version of this ethos can be challenging, it’s also an immutable aspect of being part of this coalition.

And then, as I write this, comes the final piece of the puzzle: after 17 years, I am now part of this place, part of this life, part of the cacophony, as much responsible for what it is and what it means as any other. That’s both comforting and completely daunting.

Off to a final dinner (I’d say lunch, but that’s not what they call it here) with the family before heading off to the Rukavina version of same where Catherine can reach her own conclusions about its virtues.

Oliver has posted a brief video of the wedding we were at last night to his blog. Yes, Oliver has a blog.

The lads were talking on Thursday about how Ford is going to emerge from this automotive debacle as a winner, and suggested that Ford cars today are not, um, your father’s Ford. I was suspicious, but the lads seemed so sincere that I was willing to keep an open mind and when I was offered a Ford Focus as a rental car option this weekend I said yes instead of my usual “do you have a Corolla” response.

Well, if our experience over the last 24 hours is any gauge, the lads were right. Our brand new Ford Focus — 240 km on the odometer when we left Pearson Airport — is a comfortable, peppy, feature-rich automobile that seems light years from Found On Road Dead.

Confusingly, my favourite feature is a Microsoft one: the car has the much-touted Microsoft Sync. I never thought that having a car that could make Bluetooth love to my phone was a big deal, but then I synced (Synced?) my Nokia N95 with the car and 30 seconds later we had podcasts streaming from the phone over the car’s stereo system and I was ready to place calls to my mother by holding down a button on the steering wheel and saying “call Frances.” It all worked well enough to seem like magic.

Sync-aside, the car has nice fit-and-finish, seems more spacious than our VW Jetta, gets great gas mileage, and is fun to drive.

While I continue to think cars are fundamentally evil, and hope to be car-free soon, it’s hard not to be impressed with whatever Ford did to go from Fairlane to Focus (and whatever GM didn’t do at the same time).

There are many galling aspects of the Murphy Group’s plan to staff their music festival food concession with unpaid labour, but here are the three most egregious:

First, by securing the concession by bidding low on the contract (what with having no wage costs and all), the company acted in an anti-competitive fashion, leaving more public-spirited businesses that actually put value on workers out of the running.

Second, the company insults the thousands of volunteers doing actual volunteer work every day across PEI by using the word volunteer to describe unpaid workers: volunteering isn’t about “doing work without getting paid,” it’s about contributing to the community in a meaningful way. It is a matter of the heart, not of the pocketbook.

Finally — and this galls me the most — businesses often do stupid, ugly or disingenuous things based on the notion that they are, at least, creating “jobs and opportunities for islanders.” And more often than not we citizens blindly look the other way: it’s hard to argue with putting food on the table of our friends and neighbours. By removing the pesky obligation of wage costs and other annoyances of being an employer from the equation the Murphy Group is simply engaging in a bald-faced money-grab, and is revelaing, perhaps, that they view their of actual employees is as a inconvenient but (sometimes) necessary obligation on their road to self-aggrandizement.

They should do the right thing, pay employees a fare wage, and apologize for this bungle.

Revealed here:

Although many consider the Red Oak to be the tree on the Provincial Coat-of-Arms (adopted in 1905), this has never been formally recognized. The acorns visible on the largest tree appear to be those of white, rather than red oak.

Mount Allison Dendrochronology Laboratory. Interesting.

The Mount Allison Dendrochronology Laboratory (MAD Lab) was launched in the fall of 2003. The MAD Lab was formed to investigate tree-ring related research questions in Atlantic Canada. The first priority of the MAD Lab is to establish extensive tree-ring chronologies in the region. These chronologies will form the foundation of various projects, from researching annually-resolved proxy climatic records for the Atlantic region, to dating historic structures in Maritime Canada.

Last year was the first time in a long while that I didn’t acquire any computer gear. Well, I bought a mobile phone. That’s actually more of a computer. But otherwise the same old servers and the same old laptops have served us well here at Reinvented HQ.

In that spirit, here’s a list of the tiny bits of analog technology that I can absolutely not be without here in the office:

1. Standard-Duty Slide Lock Utility Knife (A) - I became an Olfa user when I apprenticed in the composing room, back in the day when the tools of the trade were a knife and a line gauge. I use my knife mostly for slicing open envelopes these days, and there’s nothing like it for that.
2. Gaebel 12” Printers Line Gauge - Another composing room holdover. These days I use the inches scale more than the agate lines or points; I also use it as a guide for keeping my place when going through bank statements and similar reports. It will last forever.
3. Swingline Commercial Desk Stapler - This will also last forever. Never jams and built like a tank. My world grinds to a halt when I run out of staples, so I always keep a spare box around.
4. Sharpie Fine Point Permanent Marker (Black) - For writing on CDs, on file folders, to address big envelopes, and for when I run out of pens and need something to write with (because you may lose pens, but you never lose a Sharpie).

Give me a MacBook and those four items, throw in a few Bic ballpoint pens, and you’ve outfitted my office. What are your own analog must-haves?

Sometime in 2050 a student will be tasked with writing about life in the old days in Charlottetown. To ensure that they have a complete picture of the minutiae of our daily lives, here’s how it goes every morning in our house:

• 6:50 a.m. - Clock radio goes off, thinking it’s 7:00 a.m. (it’s been running early for 2 years and we’re so used it we can’t change it now) to the voices of Karen and Mitch on Island Morning. Catherine gets up.
• 7:00 a.m. - Oliver gets up. Or at least complains about being too tired to get up.
• 7:02 a.m. - Catherine out of the shower, downstairs making breakfast and lunch for Oliver.
• 7:05 a.m. - Oliver goes downstairs for breakfast.
• 7:08 a.m. - I’m still in bed, waiting for Mitch to deliver the morning news headlines.
• 7:12 a.m. - News headlines done; into the shower.
• 7:35 a.m. - Ablutions complete, get dressed. Oliver on his way upstairs to get dressed (unless he’s running very late), and sometimes we’ll race to see who can get dressed first (“I have my underwear on, how about you?”)
• 7:47 a.m. - Downstairs for breakfast of yogurt and cereal, a six-year old habit that started with Dan’s Outward Bound trip (yes, it’s really better with yogurt).
• 7:50 a.m. - Watch first 15 minutes of last night’s Daily Show on the DVR. If Oliver isn’t dressed yet the “Oliver, are you dressed yet?” call and answer begins.
• 8:05 a.m. - “Oliver, it’s time to get your shoes on.”
• 8:09 a.m. - Out the door. Sometimes we straggle and it’s 8:10 or 8:11. 8:15 and we’re in the “late for school” region, which rarely happens.
• 8:12 a.m. - Meet the woman with the salmon-coloured hat walking her son to school in the opposite direction, usually at the corner of Prince and Kent. Sometimes we also wave hello to Gary MacDougall on his way into The Guardian.
• 8:15 a.m. - Meet the long-haired guy with sun glasses walking his son to school in the opposite direction. Or sometimes it’s the same son, but the cool-looking mother.
• 8:16 a.m. - Say hello to the retired postal worker out walking his dog.
• 8:16 a.m. - Say hello to the woman from Prince and Euston on her way back from dropping her son off at the school.
• 8:18 a.m. - Maurice is backing his Toyota Yaris out of his driveway; we wave hello. If we’re early we’ll have a chat with him about his house renovations (today we talked about his new fence and how he rounded the tops of hundreds of rails).
• 8:20 a.m. - Stop at the “Reduce Speed” sign just before the school (part of the multi-year “path to independence” project). I say “Have a good day at school” and Oliver says “Have a good day at work” and runs to be at school before the bell rings. Usually the bell rings as he’s running. Sometimes he turns around and says “Or have a good day at the gym. Or at your meetings.”

And our day has begun.