Here’s what’s showing up on the Reinvented consumer products radar these days.

Toothpaste: If you ignore the propganda (like “Showers your whole mouth with rich Micro-Active Foam”), the new AquaFresh Extreme Clean is actually pretty exciting toothpaste. Who would have thought that “orange” and “toothpaste” would ever be a good combination. But it works. And the space-age stand-up tube is the first useful innovation in toothpaste tubes to come along in a long while: not only does it clear deck space on the sink, but it somehow removes the need to squeeze and curl the tube.

Furniture: In his latest move to control all aspects of Island Life, Tim Banks’ empire now extends to furniture: the Southport Home Hardware has an new mezzanine devoted to beds, couches, and chairs. While the design sensibility isn’t exactly breathtaking, it is a cut above the “colonial pine” aesthetic that so infects most Island furniture stores. Catherine found a very nice orange easychair that would be perfect in the new DataBunker. Unfortunately, it sells for $1620, which is, by any reasonable measure, too much to spend on an easychair.

Dust: The Swiffer revolution continues. Catherine and my mother both report that the new Swiffer-Red Devil combo unit is great. My claims that “I don’t know how to run that Swiffer thing” grow weaker and weaker every day.

Air Travel: There appears to be a move by Air Canada to switch traffic that would have once gone Charlottetown - Halifax - Somewhere to go, instead, Charlottetown - Montreal - Somewhere. I’ve noticed this particularly with Boston routings: the early morning flight that puts you on the ground at Logan around 9:30 a.m. Eastern now flies through Montreal. Conceptually this is hard to grasp — it feels like doubling back. The gulag like Air Canada Jazz waiting room at Dorval (Gate 46 et al) doesn’t make this any better, although the opportunity to pre-clear customs in Montreal (which I’m only assuming exists) is attractive, as it saves time on the Boston end.

Aeroplan: After grousing about how hard it is to find last minute Aeroplan routings, Oliver and I ended up flying on points to Montreal this weekend, reserving only a couple of days in advance. While we would have preferred a Friday-Sunday trip, the compromise, which was Saturday-Tuesday, suited us well enough.

Yoghurt: I’m sensing a resurgence in the yoghurt market. Dan James reports that “putting yogurt on your cereal/harvest crunch/oatmeal is WAY better than milk. For so many years I have been lied to. Honestly, you think it weird, it’s not.” This parallels my own discovery of yoghurt, over the last six months, as the core of my morning meal. I’m particularly partial to the blueberry Danone, but I’m finding new and interesting flavours and textures are available in other brands, so it pays to experiment. While my environmental sensibilities would see me buying big containers of the stuff, I’ve become enamoured of the little one-serving sizes to the point where I cannot conceive of the tubs as a delivery vehicle. Hint: a small container of blueberry yoghurt at 4:00 p.m. will leave you feeling much better than a Coffee Crisp.

Chocolate Bars: After a good 25 years of diehard chocolate bar consumption, my exciting gallbladder adventure, which rendered all sugar and chocolate like poison, weaned me quite effectively. I tried a Coffee Crisp yesterday, and found it much like eating sickly sweet flavoured cardboard. Why bother? Even Zero bars hold little allure. Although I gotta say that a good hunk of Scharffen Berger is still quite delightful.

I’ve been having a debate with myself lately (I have a lot of debates with myself) about whether or not to provide a blow-by-blow account of Reinvented’s audit by CCRA (aka Revenue Canada; think IRS if you’re in the USA) in this space.

In mid-July, at our regular yearly meeting with our accountant, we learned that CCRA planned to audit the company. We didn’t actually hear from CCRA ourselves until earlier this month, and the details about their areas of interest didn’t get spelled out in detail until last week. So I’ve had a lot of time to think about this issue.

On one hand, I realize, from immediate personal experience, how stressful this experience can be.

It’s not that we have cash stashed in Cayman Islands-based shell companies are are worried about being found out.

It’s simply a matter of being faced with the scrutiny of an antagonistic (by nature, not personality) force with infinite resources: in the back of my mind there are worst case scenarios where they come and take Oliver away, charge us $50,000 to get him back, and make us ride bicycles down endless paths while rabbits and donkeys try and knock us off.

In other words, irrational fears.

In this climate of paranoia, the notion that I might antagonize my overseerer, directly or indirectly, through what I write here, is a little daunting. And there’s always that I might accidentally blurt out some fact that, in the wrong hands, might cause them to say “oh, you design websites, well then we need to double your taxes for the last 10 years.”

In other words, irrational fears.

Counterbalancing this is the notion that by writing about the experience here in a a workaday way I might take the edge off the same experience for others who might experience it. To be honest, I’m not sure whether being audited is stressful, to this point, because of anything that’s actually happened or simply because whenever I mention that it’s happening people universally emit this weird kind of gasp, the same kind of gasp they might admit if I told them my foot had fallen off.

So maybe being audited is stressful only because everyone says it is.

I’m still debating this with myself. Stay tuned to see what I decide.

Oliver and I arrived YYG last night at 11:00 p.m. (that flight from Montreal and I are becoming fast friends!). Exhaustion prevails. This morning, it’s off to Revenue Canada for the first meeting of their audit of Reinvented. Back when my head rises to the surface.

Back in Charlottetown. Five hours to sleep. Then back to Montreal. How do the shuttle diplomats manage it?

Having just spent three months immersed, in addition to my normal everyday immersions, in the world of Prince Edward Island elections, our visit this week with our colleagues at Elections Canada is kind of like being called up to the bigs after playing minor ball for a season. Or at least invited to coffee with the bigs. A really involved coffee, where everyone talks about address matching, geocoding, PDs and FEDs and CRTs.

Which is not to say that the minor ball played in Prince Edward Island isn’t all a man could ever ask for. But here in the bigs, everything is, well, just so much bigger.

My most daunting challenge of the day was to figure out that, because of the scale of their operation here (i.e. 50,000-odd polls in Canada vs. 296 polls in PEI), there is great, necessary, division of labour.

On Prince Edward Island, Provincial elections are managed by a permanent staff of three. Plus me, the contract programmer. And, during the election, a healthy number of returning officers, data entry staff, poll clerks and so on.

But on issues of technology, there is, ultimately one decision maker, and one implementor. This doesn’t scale well, I admit. And it does tend to make life as the implementor, during the election period, rather full. But man oh man does it make things simple.

With scale comes the need to build pyramids of people, and chains of responsibility. Being used to living in a flat landscape, the world of pyramids is challenging to get used to. It’s not impossible; it simply means making my head think a different way. And it means understanding that the myriad little conversations I have with myself actually happen out in public here.

The flip side of this complexity ramp-up is that the people I’ve been meeting here are all super-smart experts on their piece of the divided labour pie. It’s thrilling (especially for an inquisitor like me) to spend time with such people, if only because it gives me the ability to talk with people who not only understand, and are compelled by, the same weird election stuff I am, but who have thought through many of the same issues, on a national level, with the resources to take different solutions and approaches out for a real ride.

We had a long and interesting day here today. We’re out to dinner tonight, and then back at it tomorrow. I’m going to try and hook up with my old friend Tim Wayne for lunch before we head back to the Island just after supper. Then it’s back in the air to Montreal for the weekend with Oliver.

Must rest my mind now…

I went out today to buy a new pair of pants. The year-old frayed at the edges pair of L.L. Bean chinos I’ve been wearing of late are fine for Prince Edward Island, but I’m flying up to Ottawa this afternoon and such pants aren’t Ottawa-compatible.

Catherine’s only charge as I headed out the door was “don’t buy pants with pleats.” She didn’t care if I bought yellow pants, red pants, green pants or wire mesh pants, as long as they were pleatless.

Truth be told, although I have passing familiarity with pleats, I couldn’t tell you which, if any, in my current stable of pants are pleated. Catherine can. Apparently when I wear pleated pants I “look like an old man.” This is not a good thing in Catherine’s eyes, so presumably it means more “disheveled louse” than “elder statesman.”

So I headed out to Dow’s, one of two remaining mens clothing stores in downtown Charlottetown, and the only one that sells products styled before 1962 (see here for details).

I walked through the $175 pants section (who buys $175 pants anyway?) to the “relaxed casual” section, and tried to find pleatless pants. In vain.

I went in search of a clerk, and he helped me search. He found two pairs of pleatless pants in their entire stock, one light beige and the other dark blue, both colours I try to avoid at all costs.

On my way out the door, I made a comment about how I’m obviously behind the times, and that the entire world has gone pleated. “No,” said my salesman, “pleats are on their way back in.”

So, apparently, I’m actually ahead of the curve on this one! Thanks be to Catherine for keeping me in the right place on the fashion calendar.

I phoned Catherine. “Are you *sure* about the pleats?”, I asked. “Yes, I’m sure,” she replied, “no pleats!”.

As a last ditch effort, I went up to the Kettle Creek, oops, I mean “K&C” store on the second floor of the Confederation Court Mall. I ended up buying a pair of Columbia-brand pants which are appointed as if I was going to use them to climb mountains, with various subtle grappling hooks and secret pockets. They’re a little to long (I have a 33 inch leg, which is almost impossible to find in a pant outside of Milan). But they have no pleats.

I’m wearing them right now. I’m going to wear them to Ottawa. And I’m equipped to climb any mountains, ford any streams that come up along the way.

Now, I’ve got to go and tuck Morley into bed, feed the dog, and make sure all the lights are off down at the record store…

Daniel Burka, resident aesthete at silverorange, opened his weblog today. It offers may intricate layers of well-positioned goodness. Welcome!

Perry Williams, videographer, designer, musician, arranger, writer, comedian and slate floor expert has a newly designed website that’s a paragon of elegant simplicity.

Between Perry’s Virtual Studios, Barrett & MacKay Photography, and Karin LaRonde’s good food, you could probably make a pleasant life in St. Catherines, PEI, and never cross the bridge to civilization.

Widen the net a little to include Herb at Meadowlaine for your home renovation and kitchen counter needs, Brian Landry for consulting services, Paul Baglole for publication design, and Kevin O’Brien for your networking needs, and you start to realize that the other side of the North River Causeway can pretty well stand on its own.

I believe I may be the world’s biggest Jane Siberry fan.

Or at least I’m in the top 100. Let’s just say that when I’m done changing Oliver’s diaper, and want him to stand up from the changing table, I say “Stand up Mimi!”

So today is an important and exciting day: her new album, Shushan the Palace (Hymns of Earth) arrived in the mail today.

This ain’t no Mimi on the Beach: it’s subtitled “Centuries-old Hymns by Handel, Bach, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Rossetti, Holst, et al.”

I’m listening right now. It’s wonderful.

The new Bruce Rainnie-Kevin “Boomer” Gallant host-weatherman relationship is in its early days, obviously — tonight was their second night together. But already there are danger signs: it’s imperative that Bruce not attempt to out-Boomer Boomer with the witty quips and awkward puns.

For the relationship to prosper, Bruce must play the straight man — the Hardy to Boomer’s Laurel, the Jerry to Boomer’s George, the Desi to Boomer’s Lucy.

There’s not room for two playful buffoons on Compass, and while Bruce need not play things dour, he’s got to play with the wry, bemused comeback, not the pre-emptive outpun.

Stay tuned.