Early, early, early this morning we arrived in Iceland (our plane from Halifax touched down at Keflavik at 4:55 a.m.). With hours and hours to go before we could even begin to think about a hotel check-in, we took things easy: found Hertz, got the rental car keys, grabbed a coffee, parsed our new road atlas (best 2000 krónur I’ve ever spent!). So it wasn’t until 6:58 a.m. that we hit the road:

It was 5 degrees C and raining when we left Keflavik — just a light drizzle. Because our first night’s lodging, in Hveragerði, was only an hour’s drive away, we took the long way round, heading down to Grindavík and the east along the coast, taking our time.

After curling up to die in a grocery store parking lot in Grindavík for a few hours — lack of sleep, jet lag, etc. — our first real stop of the trip was at Selatangar, an abandoned coastal fishing village about 12 km east. To get there we made our first transition from paved to gravel roads, and then a further transition to “gravel track” when we turned off the highway at the tiny marker that points the way.

Selatangar wasn’t exactly on the tourist track — we didn’t pass a single car for the entire journey there and away — and the rain had increased to a steady downpour by the time we arrived, but it was certainly worth the visit: the houses of the village, last occupied in the 1880s, were constructed of lava bricks, and many are still intact, albeit missing roofs:

One odd thing about Selatangar was the amount of garbage we came across strewn over the area: everything from fishing nets to deodorant bottles. At first I thought this was a result of rowdy Icelanders driving out and dumping their refuse on the site; then I realized that it was all coming from the ocean. I had no idea there was so much floating around in the water waiting to wash up in the middle of nowhere.

From Selatangar we continued east to visit Strandarkirkja, a tiny perfect church right a stone’s throw from the ocean:

We grabbed a coffee at a little place just up the road to tide us over, and around 1:30 p.m. we headed toward Hveragerði in earnest. Our journey was slowed somewhat by some hard-edge road construction: they don’t seem to bother with flag-people on road crews here, so there was some harrowing “oh, that’s a front end loader about to drop a load of lava rock” driving to be done. We emerged out the other end and hit pavement once again, and were in Hveragerði 10 minutes later.

Following the advice of Rough Guide, we had lunch at Cafe Kidda Rót in the plaza on the edge of town: turned out they make an excellent burger and a serviceable asparagus soup and we left happy.

Frost and Fire Guesthouse, our home for the night, was a quick drive through town up the hill. As with road crews so went hotel check-in: reception was empty so I picked up the house phone and the woman on the other end promised to be right there. She arrived two minutes later, walked me to our room, and then disappeared: no credit card check, no “what’s the license plate number of your vehicle,” no passports or ID required. Her only instructions: “you can use the pool and hot pot whenever you want.” I could get used to this laissez faire approach to service.

And after a long soggy day, we were ready for a swim and a soak:

The air was 7 degrees C. The walkway to the pool from our room froze our feet. But the 38 degree water cured whatever ailed us and we spent a good hour lolling about.

For supper we headed up the road into Selfoss to eat at Menam, a Thai restaurant. Very, very good Thai food too: coconut ginger chicken, spicy beef, deep-fried shrimp all served over rice with a salad on the side.

As I type Catherine and Oliver are fast asleep and the rain continues unabated. Tomorrow we’re going to walk up the hill across the river to see the new geothermal action created by a 6.5 earthquake they had here in May, and then we’ll do the Golden Circle, or at least part of it, before heading northwest to Borgarbyggð where we’ll spend the next two days exploring western Iceland.

Four or five times a year I call my credit card companies to tell them I’ll be travelling overseas. Without fail the reaction from the agent taking the call is “we do appreciate you taking the time to letting us know.” Always: Visa, Mastercard, business, personal. There must have been some sort of credit card industry study that suggested that thanking customers for calling encourages them to call back the next time.

For more credit card fun, see How Not to Renew Your Expired Credit Card from Steven Garrity.

The whY Condos, at the corner of Prince and Euston in Charlottetown, have a new website, a new weblog and a curvy new sign out on the front lawn:

This weekend was the weekend of the 70 Mile Coastal Yard Sale, a seemingly endless opportunity to acquire mouldy books, stuffed animal characters from cancelled kids TV shows and souvenirs from Branson, MO. So G., Oliver and I headed out as usual along the Trans-Canada toward Wood Islands, battling more traffic than in previous years, in search of elusive bargains.

My big finds of the year were the Amazing Race DVD board game ($5 - paid too much, but it was my fault) and a set of artistic Crumpler alphabet fridge magnets (25 cents). Oliver was convinced to buy a candle for Catherine by a former classmate who did a very effective selling job, and G. made his usual book and ephemera purchases.

The shopping ended in Murray River where we had lunch on the patio at Finnan Haddie Bistro (where they make a very nice onion ring and a credible BLT, but need more than just one washroom).

We circled back up through Montague to check out the new bridge and were back in town around 4:00 p.m., each of us more exhausted than the other.

As the Tuesday forecast for Iceland makes clear, we’re not traveling there for the good weather/

Oh, and apparently they have frequent earthquakes in Iceland.

As we enter week 271 of the Canadian federal election I thought it might be useful to do a quick review of the situation on the ground here in the Charlottetown electoral district.

I’ve a feeling that, if I were allowed access to the Conservative Party demographic profiling database, I would find our neighbourhood coded as “Bolshevik.” At least that’s what the evidence would suggest, as their candidate Tom DeBlois has no presence down here whatsoever: nothing’s appeared in the mail, I’ve yet to come across a campaign sign, the campaign HQ is way out at Oak Tree Place, and, short of a brief sighting at a party on Friday night, I’ve yet to lay eyes on the man. Of course this may just be prudent use of campaign resources on his part: if there is a centre of Bolshevism in the city, it’s probably centred in south-east Charlottetown, and maybe his time is better spent in the tonier suburbs.

Contrast this to the campaign of incumbent MP Shawn Murphy: there’s a big four-by-eight campaign sign up at the corner of Prince and Grafton, we’ve received two campaign fliers in the mailbox, Shawn’s headquarters are two blocks over in the heart of the downtown, and it’s hard not to run into Shawn making the rounds in the neighbourhood.

If the Murphy campaign literature is any gauge, the Green Shift is not playing well with the local electorate: there’s only a brief allusion to the plan in the latest flier, and the campaign home page contains neither the word “green” nor “shift.” This is a too bad: no matter whether the plan is the right one or not, the Conservative response to it — childish attack ads and “Stéphane Dion is going to take your children and send them to green energy tax camps in Uzbekistan”-style rhetoric — demands an impassioned, forceful defence.

The NDP has officially nominated a candidate, but haven’t yet gotten around to updating the party website, which is a metaphor for the party’s presence in the district (non-existent). It doesn’t help that their opening sound-bite of the campaign from their candidate was “I was hoping it wouldn’t be called because I knew that they were going to ask me to run, but when the election was called, all of a sudden it occurred to me that this could be the one that the NDP wins,” a statement with a perfect mix of regret and delusion. Makes me pine for the fiery partisan passions of Dodi Crane (the only federal candidate whose campaign ever prompted me to make a political donation).

To date the Green Party doesn’t have a Charlottetown candidate, which strikes me as being weird, as you would think that if there was a natural concentration of the Green constituency, Charlottetown would be it. Of course in a province where running for the NDP means you must reconcile yourself to a life on the fringes of polite society, I can’t imagine what running for the Greens would do. So recruitment must be an issue.

Oh, and there’s Christian Heritage Party and their candidate Baird Judson, someone who, if nothing else, deserves credit for tenacity. For tenacity and also for being the largest single financier of the democratic process in the district in the last election.

On a national level, the campaign has been reduced, in my ears, to a daily barrage of “Leader X today promised to immediately inject $700 billion into issue Y if elected.” The names and issues are interchangeable, and the amounts of money are so divorced from my reality as to be meaningless.

So whether it’s the Liberals (“A new Liberal government will double the budget of the Canada Council for the Arts to $360 million annually”) or the Conservatives (“Providing $100 million over the next five years for geological mapping focused on Canada’s North and our polar continental shelf.”) or the NDP (“Layton said the New Democrats will commit $100 million a year for an expanded Canadian Training and Apprenticeship Tax Credit.”) it just feels like a meaningless nightly pummelling by Peter Mansbridge.

Makes me pine for the fiery passions of Pierre Trudeau.

As regards the local punditocracy, Kerry Campbell’s my man: he’s the radio news reporter covering the election for CBC Prince Edward Island, and his weekly roundup of the campaign is witty and wise.

Over at Compass they’ve rolled out Dr. Ian Dowbiggin again to be one half of their political panel. It’s not so much that Dowbiggin doesn’t have insights as that it would be nice, for once, to hear insights other than his. Are their no other political scientists on Prince Edward Island that they could call on?

And then there’s the weekly political panel on Island Morning: completely free of insight of any kind, what with all the joshing and catcalling. It may be “must listen” radio, but in more of a “last episode of Survivor” kind of way than for any elucidation on election issues it might offer. The best thing that ever happened to the panel was the one-time inclusion of Daniel Schulman as the “not in the mainstream” panelist during a previous election campaign. Schulman’s considered and honest discourse showed the hollow name-calling of the others for what it was, and made me wish that a new panel could be built around Schulman and others who actually have something to say.

We’re off to Iceland tomorrow for a week, which will give us a break from all of this. Looking forward to returning for the last two weeks of the campaign.

It’s been an exciting day here at Reinvented HQ as all manner of electricity professionals have been running in and out of the building, all with the mission of upgrading the silverorange electrical system, the primary addition being the huge propane-powered generator behind my office window that will keep our collected servers running well into and beyond the End Times.

Although silverorange has done an excellent job at keeping operations humming along and powered — as I type my laptop, monitor and Internet are all being powered by a thick electrical cable that ultimately is wired into the oven plug of the apartment in the house next door — all the power upping and downing seems to have pushed the 5-year old Linksys switch that was tying together our entire operation over the edge. This meant flaky connectivity for the first half of the day, descending into no connectivity by midday. Fortunately there was a spare switch hanging around that I’ve been able to borrow (thanks Keith!), and everything is humming along smoothly now.

This morning I received a big, big box filled with 10 copies of a book I created two weeks ago using Lulu.com, the publish-on-demand company founded by fellow Hamiltonian Bob Young.

The Lulu experience was a pleasure from start to end: I used Apple’s Pages word processor to create a 346 page book, complete with table of contents, and Wordle to make a colour image for the cover. I created two PDF files, one for the inside and one for the cover and uploaded them to Lulu, used their tools to set up the page size, cover format and binding, paid for 10 copies (I could have ordered as few as one), and that was it: the next thing that happend was the box at my door.

The quality of the finished product is excellent: I ordered perfect-bound 6”x9” books on ivory paper with a full-colour coated cover. You wouldn’t know that these were “self-published” books from the look, feel and heft of them: they are every inch bona fide books.

I was inspired to do all this by my friend Steven Garrity, who achieved “The Best Christmas Presents Ever” by creating a book of Garrity family aphorisms. In my case a good friend and fellow blogger is having a significant birthday, and to mark the occasion I turned her blog into a book.

While not quite owning the means of production, Lulu certainly puts those means closer to the ground than ever before and makes creating lasting cultural objects within reach of anyone with something to say, some basic design sense, and an application that can emit PDF files.

The skycraper that’s going up two doors down from the office has finally started construction this week — I know this, in part, because they are using some sort of vibrating machine to excavate the basement that causes my office chair to vibrate as well. It’s interesting how you can start to see the shape of the new building even at this early stage:

There’s been a lot of change over the bridge in Stratford at Home Hardware over the last few years. After the Home Hardware is a co-op, and I’m just not a co-op kind of guy days, there was a brief flirtation with Callbeck’s, and now, staff tell me, the store is a corporate store managed by Home Hardware itself.

I hadn’t been in for a while, but as the store is helping to sponsor some painting at Prince Street School, Catherine, volunteer colour consultant on the job, had to go over to immerse herself in the Beauti-Tone and Oliver and I went along for the ride.

They certainly have changed things around. The second-floor furniture section has been moved downstairs, and now takes up almost half of the retail floor area, squishing out the hardware section to the back, and moving the paint section up to the front. The co-located Radio Shack is gone. The in-store Tim Hortons has a reduced footprint. It’s essentially a brand new store inside.

The newly-expanded furniture section is a sort of mixed bag: they had several really nice and not-too-expensive dining room tables that were refreshingly simple in their design, but the balance of the living room furniture seemed to fall into “overstuffed recliner” category that you’ll find elsewhere on the Island. Which is too bad, as one of the nice things about the old era was modern, non-gingham furniture.

Staff were as pleasant as ever. Worth a visit if you haven’t been over since the upheavals.