Last year after reboot I had coffee with Thomas and one of the ideas I floated was a parallel conference for kids that could be called rebootkins. I think the idea of “conferencing with your kids” has a lot of appeal, at least for we in the “I’d rather travel with my kids” set.

Well, there’s no rebootkins yet, but in today’s reboot email from Thomas comes the note, under “a couple of the changes you can expect…”:

kids friendly with hilmar, the icelandic babysitter, that can watch your sleeping baby or play with your kids if you bring them along

Sadly, wee O (who’s not so wee anymore) is staying at home this year, so they’ll be no hilmar for him. But with reboot’s new DIY spirit, I’m up for a full-on rebootkins for reboot 10.0 next year.

Another cause for excitement in Thomas’ email: it looks like the DIY T-Shirts idea I floated took off and is going to happen. This is very cool.

No, I wasn’t consumed by The Ghost of Robb Sagendorph; I’m still alive and thriving. It’s been a good, and very productive, week here at Yankee and I’m about to pack up and drive down to Boston. I’m in Boston for the night, and then back to PEI tomorrow morning.

The rest of this week, and over the weekend, I’ll be focusing on Elections PEI-related work and then, after polling day on Monday and the results posting on Monday night, I’m off to Montreal for the day on Tuesday, and then to Copenhagen, via Zurich, on Tuesday for reboot, which starts Thursday.

I’ll be back on the Island on June 7, after a brief stopover in Berlin to see my friends at Plazes. Oliver “graduates” from kindergarten the week after that, and then he and Catherine are off to Ontario for a couple of weeks. The last week of June I’ll be back here at Yankee.

Be careful what you wish for, they say. I wished for constant motion, and it’s happening. It will be nice to stop for a moment come July and spend languid afternoons on Victoria Row sipping sangria and discussing Descartes.

It’s 10:00 p.m. and I’m borrowing a desk here at Yankee to work a second work day. My first work day was concerned with travel databases and the moon’s place in the astrological zodiac; tonight’s work day involves a little fine-tuning of the system we’ll use to present results of the provincial general election next Monday.

I’m on the second floor of the Sagendorph Building, named after Robb Sagendorph founder of Yankee magazine. The building, began in 1805 and evolving ever since, is an architectural rabbit warren.

Around one corner you might find an old 128K Mac that used to run the company library. Around another the many mysteries of “Jud’s Museum,” the office of Editor-in-Chief Jud Hale, where you’re as likely to find Lee Harvey Oswald’s chicken’s head as anything else. Somewhere hidden in here is the Black Box that holds the secret formulas the underpin The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

In the library just down the hall from where I write you can find a copy of The Save-U-Money Book and The Pilgrim Way. Looking for the washroom just a minute ago I mistakenly walked into a room containing a nut meat grinder, a pair of tin candles sticks, a pair of eyeglasses and a manila folder labeled “Churchill, Sir Winston.”

In other words, if any walls can talk it’s these ones.

Once I finish up here in 30 minutes or so — and I’ve been putting this off — I will have to exit the building, turning the lights off behind me. The last leg of my trip to the car, after the last light gets switched off, involves a fumble in the dark through the mail room, past the cache of canned pop, through the lunch room, and out the front door.

The path will also take me past the door to the basement. I have never been to the basement. But last fall, on a night just like this night, as I walked by I saw an unearthly glow emanating from the deeps. Thoughts of Robb Sagendorph immediately flooded my mind, and I high-tailed it out down the hall and out the door.

As long as I keep writing this post, I can avoid a similar encounter.

One of my favourite things to do when visiting Yankee was to eat lunch a couple of times at the Harrisville General Store. Harrisville is a small village just 5 minutes up the road from here in Dublin; it’s an old mill town, with the red-brick mill buildings forming the spine of the village along the river that drains from Harrisville Pond.

Harrisville is a strange mixture of an effete enclave and “back to the lander” service center, and at is heart has always been the general store:

The store, in recent times, was always a place to go and get an excellent sandwich and a drink and sit out front on the porch enjoying the spring sunshine. When Catherine and Oliver and I borrowed a house on Harrisville Pond several years ago the store was the place we bought all those American indulgences like Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and exotic iced teas and micro-brews.

A few years back, however, the longtime operator of the store moved away, and the new operators, veterans of a Dunkin Donuts it was rumoured, took over and, well, ruined the place. They turned it into something worse than a Kwiki Mart. And all Harrisville was sad. After a while I couldn’t even talk about the store to my Harrisville friend because it was like talking about a child that had wandered away.

I’m happy to report, however, that it looks like the Harrisville General Store is back: I took a leap of faith and drove up for dinner tonight and, to my surprise, some of the old spark was back. There was veggie chili in the crock pot, artisanal iced tea in the cooler, and excellent chocolate chip cookies in the cookie jar. Dinner cost me $6. It was excellent. The spring sun on the porch was warm. Harrisville gleaned.

• Just Us Girls + Gelato = Mmmmm.
• Tai Chi Gardens “Rice Combo” = Most interesting dish in town. Tasty.
• Urban Eatery: got the down-low on Phase 2 this morning from Chef Bailey; you ain’t seen nothing yet.
• Casa Mia: new restaurant on Queen Street beside Woolworths? Who has the scoop?
• COWS - Iced Cowpuccino = sigh.

Everything I know about education I learned from Venus Flytrap:

It’s opening day at Café Diem on Victoria Row in Charlottetown. This will be my first opportunity to experience the place as a bona fide coffee drinker. Not warm or sunny enough to sit outside, of course, but exciting nonetheless.

Update: Showed up for coffee this morning; sign on door said that opening is delayed, due to weather, until May 21st.

Well, okay, this isn’t really “day two” at all — it’s more like day 12 for us in terms of our work with Elections PEI on the Provincial General Election. But this is the first time I’ve had since “day one” last week to come up for air and report on what we’ve been up to.

Back last Monday when I last reported in, we were about to launch our big data entry effort. The next night we gathered in our bunker in the basement of the Shaw Building in Charlottetown and managed the process of having over 90,000 electors updated in the registry of electors by a team of 112 data entry staff.

The night went very well — there were none of the browser-compatibility and network access problems we’d encountered back in 2003 — and because the confirmation process, for the first time in a provincial election, involved working from “pre-filled in” confirmation forms — using information gathered in 2003 and in subsequent municipal elections and provincial by-elections — the whole province wasn’t being “entered in from scratch” so things, relatively speaking, flew by. By 10:00 p.m. on Tuesday night the majority of the data entry task was completed and with a little clean-up on Wednesday we were ready to print the Preliminary List of Electors on Thursday morning.

Once the Preliminary List was out the door, work began on processing any new information that came in from Returning Officers about changes, additions or deletions to the list. The deadline for changes was this Tuesday night, and with that information updated in the database we were ready to generate the Official List of Electors this morning. I burned the CD to go to the Queen’s Printer this morning just before lunch, and their giant super-capable steam-powered Xerox machines are busy churning out the lists as I write.

They’ll be put to use for the first time on Saturday when Advance Polls open for the first time.

With that CD out the door, our job is done for now. At least in terms of hard-edge data management. Our focus now turns towards polling day — May 28th — and the system we built first for the 1996 election (but that’s evolved heavily since then) that delivers unofficial election results. More on that later.

Tonight was “Parent Orientation Night” at Prince Street School for the parents of kids, like Oliver, who will be starting Grade One in the fall.

I have had two excellent sources of wise counsel in preparation for all of this.

My friend Ann offered the advice that, in essence, I shouldn’t try to play out my own educational issues at the expense of Oliver or his teachers. In other words the “homework’s for bores — go make a volcano” parenting that I might wish for will only lead to Bad Things for all concerned. So I’ve decided to channel the old “all formal education is evil” Pete into new-style “do everything you can to help, but don’t be a jerk” Pete.

And my friend Tom, who has a large brood of Prince Street alumni in his family, has been saying only good things about what a good neighbourhood school Prince Street is. Tom’s opinion of things goes a long way in my books, so I’m walking in with a Good Attitude to begin with (Tom also runs the dairy that fuels my morning cappuccino, so he obviously has vast influence on my life…).

So tonight’s mission for me was to sit there, take it all in, and resist the urge to stick my hand up and ask something like “so what’s your condom policy” or “do you include anarchist thinkers in your Grade One political theory classes.” So I whispered quietly to myself “Don’t be a jerk. Don’t be a jerk.”

The school itself, as you can see from the photo above, is very evocative of early-1960s Canadian institutional architecture, right down to the multi-coloured bricks cemented into its front. Inside it’s actually quite interesting: while the old Prince Street Elementary was an imposing behemoth of a building built two centuries ago, the “new” Prince Street is built sort of like a split-level house. I’ve been driving by the school for 15 years, for example, and I had no idea there was a gym tucked inside there somehow.

Grade One orientation was quick and to the point: get your kids to bed early, we’ll be watching for lice, we’re pretty sure they’ll know how to read when they come out the other end. The Principal, the Public Health Nurse, the School Counselor and one of the Grade One teachers all made a short presentation; they were all very pleasant and seemed very unlike the evil manipulators that I’d been casting for their roles in my head in the 36 years since I was in Oliver’s place, and the 6 years that I’ve been anticipating this next jump. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t be a jerk.

Enrollment is down at Prince Street — where there were once 400 kids, there are just over 200 now. For Oliver this means that it’s an open question right now whether there will be two grade one classes or one; they’re losing a staff position for next year, and there are 30 kids registered for grade one right now, so a lot will depend on what rearranging happens between now and then. We were assured that we won’t end up with one class of 30 kids, however.

Next exciting step on this adventure (Don’t be a jerk.) comes next month when the current Grade Oners stay home for the day and the new crop comes in for a beta test. We’ve been instructed not to cry when dropping our kids off for that event: apparently seeing parents cry suggests to kids that school might not be all sweetness and light. Pluck up. Don’t be a jerk.