Every summer I have the distinct (if somewhat disconcerting) pleasure of having regular readers of this weblog “from away” showing up here at the office to say hello. This morning, just as I was returning from my Breakfast at Barristas, I ran into Valerie Bang-Jensen coming out of the front door of the office with her daughter. You may recall that Valerie is the official grammarian of the weblog; she’s also got Copenhagen ties and lives in Vermont, two things that always raise someone’s stature in my world.

In addition to learning how to prounounce Valerie’s last name, I’m also the happy recipient, on Oliver’s behalf, of some wonderful postcards:

The postcard is an advert for the book The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman, a book the School Library Journal calls “A fresh, unusual tale.”

Who will show up next?

Barristas is the new wrapping put on the space formerly occupied by the Downtown Diner and, before then, by Checkers and, before then, by a furniture store. Word on the street is that it’s also the new home of the former Cora’s franchisees, something the 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. opening hours would seem to support.

Inside the space has lost most of the faux 50s feel it gained during the Checkers days — only the black and white tiles on the floor recall this time. They’ve constricted the large counter that used to run the length of one side back into a far corner, removed the smoking room, and done everything over in an aubergine colour scheme. There’s lite rock on the turntable, servers clad in black, and Island art on the walls. Overall the effect is sort of like “Timothy’s meets Linda’s”.

The menu is more Linda’s than Timothy’s (or Cora’s), albeit tuned for a higher income bracket ($9.50 for waffles!?). Eggs, omelets, french toast, etc. Precious little if you’re not an egg lover, alas. I reconciled myself to ordering from the sides section and had a bagel with cream cheese and hash browns; both were well-prepared. I pulled the old “pot of tea and glass of ice” trick to get myself an unsweetened iced tea; I didn’t make a fuss about it, and got exactly what I asked for, which was nice.

For a place called Baristas, they serve coffee in a surprisingly limited fashion: basically, they have “coffee.” Albeit from a large menu of varieties. If you like your coffee straight and unadorned, you’ll be happy here; if you’re of the “low fat latte with a double shot” set, go around the corner or across the street.

In the end Barristas appears to target the “everyday Islander” who’s looking for a regular everyday restaurant with a thin veneer (and only a thin veneer — no earrings in the lips here) of urban hipness. I wonder, however, whether this “everyday Islander” exists any more — is Beanz really too drenched in funk that some are scared off.

Staff — free of earrings as they are — are incredibly friendly (there were four servers for two tables this morning). Wifi is free and plentiful.

The Little Mac Shoppe, Charlottetown’s Apple dealer, is moving out of its basement location and into the space formerly occupied by Jumbles and Gems (and before that by a dizzying series of restaurants-that-failed) on Victoria Row.

The shop’s corporate cousin The Buzz newspaper, is making the move too, meaning that Peter and Nancy will be working above ground (and without the constant danger of office flooding) for the first time in 15 years.

I walked by the new space yesterday and it’s looking terrific; a wonderful new home:

Word from my friend Peter Lux is that there is one mother of a yurt going up this weekend in South Melville, PEI. He’s promised to take pictures.

I am hiding out inside the Confederation Centre of the Arts. It’s 40 degrees C outside, they tell me (at least with the humidity factored in). In here it’s about 20 degrees cooler. I only wish they would rent out little bits of the floor and pillows: I’d happily sleep here tonight.

Later: laptop ran out of power (the Centre has free Wifi, but no power outlets) so I’ve moved upstairs to the equally cool Confederation Centre Public Library. The only downside up here is the very annoying buzz of the lights high above. But I’d trade cool for buzz any day. Open until 9:00 p.m.

At long last we have our very own craigslist for Prince Edward Island.

To the uninitiated craigslist can appear confusing; I can tell you from personal experience that it’s worth wading through: we found our rental houses in France, Portugal and Denmark all through the site, and they were good experiences all.

Right now the craigslist pei site isn’t exactly filled to the brim with amazing listings — indeed because it’s so new it’s mostly spam-like postings or paid “small biz ads.” Take a look at craigslist san francisco to get a sense of what the site can be when it’s humming along.

As reported here back in March, Tommy and Lina Ko have taken leave of The Noodle House, the restaurant they founded up on University Avenue in Charlottetown that’s arguably always been the best place for Chinese food in the city.

Fortunately a new family has taken up where they left off, and last night Catherine and I had our virst visit to the restaurant’s new incarnation.

It’s hard to match the kind of customer-server bond that builds up over 13 years — Lina always knew what our “regular” was, and always brought chopsticks to Catherine, but not to me, and gave us an extra dish of hot sauce, and knew exactly how spicy we wanted our food. I’m pretty certain that she raised a bar that will never be reached.

That said, the service remains warm and efficient, and perhaps with time we’ll build up a relationship with the new folks too.

The menu remains the same, although a few dishes have been excised and they were out of simosas last night, which is always the highlight of any meal there (they’re still on the menu, so I hope it’s just temporary). There’s a new soy sauce/hot sauce management system at every table, the chopsticks are green now, but otherwise things seem to be much as we left them.

Without Lina to guide the chef as to our spice level preferences we ended up with food with about 50% more “kapow” than we were used to — who knew we could have been ordering “hot” intead of “medium spicy” all along? — and my Hot Szechuan Noodles with Tofu were truly excellent, as were Catherine’s Singapore Rice Noodles. The only disappointment of the night was the Satay Chicken, which was tough an essentially inedible; its the anchor of Catherine’s appetizer experience, so I hope this improves.

Perhaps the biggest change of all is the new hours: they’re open to 10:30 p.m. every night and they’re now open on Sundays too, which was never the case before. Oh, and there’s the big green sign on the front too:

Longtime readers will recall my detailed survey of the Nicholson family four years ago, in which I revealed how the various tentacles of the family surround us in a warm Island embrace.

Well yesterday, for the second year in a row, we got to see the entire clan gathered in one place. The occassion was young Shaw Nicholson’s birthday, the place was King’s Castle Provincial Park, that anachronistic enclave of concrete nursery rhyme characters in the verdant barrens of southern Kings County. And, like last year, it was the highlight of our summer social calendar.

Aspiring to truer Islanderhood, we pulled off the main highway to Wood Islands just the other side of Orwell Corner and hit Route 23, a straight shot to Wood Island that avoids all the twisting and turning of the shore route:

This would have been fine, of course, if we’d actually been going to Wood Islands. But we were headed for Murray River, and so as our L-shape route clearly demonstrates, we shouldn’t expect to be hearing from the Islanderhood Commission any time soon. On the way back we hugged the shore, so as to not accidentally end up in Souris.

Words cannot do justice to the effect of so many Nicholsons, and Nicholsons-by-association, and members of the Nicholson entourage, all gathered in one place. They’re all extremely generous people, and the effect for us was less like invading a sacred family ritual and more like being invited on in to join the family itself.

And they make a 3-bean salad that’s to die for.

The afternoon was taken up with various birthday-related festivizing, punctuated by mandatory trips into the woods to visit the nursery rhyme characters:

The characters have been spruced up this year after some unfortunate vandalism; I’m happy to report that the sprucing didn’t diminish their maniacal charm.

The delightful thing about Kings Castle is that, far from the centre of the tourism universe as it is, the park suffers from a very pleasant sort of neglect; nowhere else, I think, could you get away with a children’s playground that includes attractions like this airplane:

And yet attractions like that make the place so endearing.

Back at the party there were games for kids — the “everyone’s a winner” kind that are in vogue these days — and food on the barbecue and birthday cake and presents. And an unusual number of small dogs. Even Rob Lantz was there.

Catherine told me that this is the second generation of Nicholson kids to have their birthday parties at Kings Castle (it was probably still called Fantasyland back then, before the big Disney crackdown). We were happy to be part of it.

So our friend G., who likes to stay well behind the technology curve, up and bought a DVD player this afternoon. They cost less than $30 now, and he was finally ready to take the plunge. In doing so he managed, at the same time, to completely miss the complicated “video tape” era altogether, thus saving himself years of waiting for tapes to rewind.

As it turns out his television is from the 70s, or at least the 80s, and is missing the interface required by modern cheap DVD players, so we had to head out to Wal-mart and invest an additional $22 in a little box that bridges the gap (kudos to Wal-mart staff for being helpful and knowledgeable). So now he’s got lots of wires running around the room, but he can rent DVDs.

Which is how we ended up standing in front of this thing at 9:30 p.m. this evening:

This is a robotic DVD dispenser, recently installed under a “Niko Video” banner, in the little plaza behind Source for Sports on University Avenue. Once you sign up for an account (you just need photo ID), and add some money (minimum $5) to a stored-value card, you can use the robot to rent DVDs 24 hours a day.

Besides the “no interaction with artificially peppy Blockbuster kids” benefits that the faceless robotic system affords, their prices are cheap and you can rent for as little as six hours ($1.83).

The whole “six hours” thing is a little deceptive: it seems like an awfully long time, but when I brought Proof home I realized that I had to have it back before 3:00 a.m. to make it under the 6 hour window. Even 12 hours — the next plateau — would leave me with 9:00 a.m. Still, it’s nice to have the choice, and you don’t need to decide your rental window when you rent — the robot just adds it up and deducts the appropriate amount from your account when you return the DVD.

The robot isn’t completely in control, actually: the new account process involves real human interaction (humans present until 10:00 p.m.) and, in fact, it helped to have said human around to explain how to interact with the robot, which is a little complicated and could use some UI work (i.e. the button you press to scroll “down” actually points “up”).

No word on what G’s first rental will be.