Regular readers will be aware of my longtime appreciation for Laurie Brown and her Pondercast podcast.

A part of the Pondercast feed I’d been in the habit of skipping over is the weekly guided meditation, released every Monday. That was folly, as they are fantastic: here’s today’s, for example, Hands Off the Wheel.

If you’re in the habit of practicing guided meditation with an app, I suggest you complement it with Laurie’s effort, as it’s an entirely different and more personal experience.

We made an expedition across the bridge to MacKenzie’s Farmstand on Saturday to attend the launch of my friend Ann Thurlow’s My PEI Cabbage Cookbook, which is a laudable effort on many fronts (cabbage, self-publishing, proceeds to the Little Free Pantry).

You can purchase copies at the Farmacy on Great George, at MacKenzie’s, and through the new Veseys catalogue.

By coincidence the launch happened to bring together three people with smart yellow shoes, Olivia among them:

Two of my favourite artists have released versions of The Parting Glass recently, Henry Jamison and Karine Polwart.

They are as different as different can be, but they are both lovely in their own way.

Of all the money that e’er I had
I spent it in good company
And all the harm I’ve ever done
Alas it was to none but me
And all I’ve done for want of wit
To mem’ry now I can’t recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be to you all

While The Parting Glass is “often sung at the end of a gathering of friends,” the song Wild Mountain Thyme is one of three songs traditionally played to close out the Winnipeg Folk Festival.

And, at least in my mid-1980s teen dance experience, Stairway to Heaven was always the last dance of the night.

From The Guardian, 105 years ago today. I’m feeling connected to the little surge of joy that the editor who wrote that hed must have felt: alliterative opportunities like that don’t come along every day.

When you figure something tricky out, write a blog post about it. Maybe a decade later it will help someone out of a jam:

You are f*cking amazing. I was pulling my hair out in Germany trying to figure this out. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

See alsoe A Triumph for Blogging.

A rendering over coffee today of a useful piece of advice offered by a fellow widower in the Widow Wives Club on Facebook.

You’re Not Alone, from Our Native Daughters, is a good way to start the week.

Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell reinterpret and create new works from old ones, shining light on African-American women’s stories of struggle, resistance, and hope

I have been listening to Bruce Cockburn’s 1996 album The Charity of Night today, and remembering how much I love it.

The album opens with Night Train, a song that, as Cockburn explains in this live set, was written under the influence of absinthe. It is among my favourite of his canon.

My personal experience with absinthe, somewhat predictably, lies in Olle’s kitchen in Copenhagen. Unlike Cockburn, I didn’t get a song out of it, but it was a good day.

Pomplamoose’s Extreme Ways ft. MOBY takes ft. to a whole new level of recursive minimalism.

From the liner notes:

There’s nothing quite so surreal as covering a Moby song WITH Moby.

For reasons I don’t completely understand, Centennial Nissan in Charlottetown has just opened an on-premises carwash. And it’s not one of those new-age touchless ones, either: it has real 1976-style spinning brushes that attack the dirt off your vehicle.

By far the biggest innovation, though, is that the vacuums beside the carwash—vacuums that have the power of a jet engine—are free to use, on the honour system.

I now have a very clean car.