There are two Traffic Logix SafePace digital radar speed signs on North River Road in Charlottetown, one near the corner of Waterview Heights, just south of Ellen’s Creek, and the other in the heart of Brighton near the corner of Green Street.

These signs detect and display the speed of oncoming vehicles, showing the speed in red if it’s in excess of the posted limit (50 km/h for the first, 40 km/h for the second).

These signs log their readings, and it occurred to me that having data in aggregate might be a useful tool for those interested in transportation in the city, especially walking, rolling, and cycling, where speeding vehicles are a particular safety issue. So I made an Access to Information request to the City of Charlottetown, which was fulfilled in short order.

Here’s what I received.

Waterview Heights

The display at Waterview Heights and North River Road logged 476,774 vehicles travelling south on North River Road between January 14, 2021 and May 19, 2021 (125 days); this is an average of 3,814 vehicles per day.

42% were driving at or below the posted speed limit of 50 km/h.

58% of vehicles were driving in excess of the speed limit:

• 28% were going 51 to 55 km/h
• 18% were going 56 to 60 km/h
• 8% were going 61 to 65 km/h
• 3% were going 66 to 70 km/h
• 1% were going 71 to 75 km/h
• 0.2% were going more than 75 km/h

Here’s the CSV file for this display.

Green Street

The display at Green Street and North River Road logged 270,903 vehicles travelling south on North River Road between January 14, 2021 and May 19, 2021 (125 days); this is an average of 2,167 vehicles per day.

47% were driving at or below the posted speed limit of 40 km/h.

53% of vehicles were driving in excess of the speed limit:

• 32% were going 41 to 45 km/h
• 16% were going 46 to 50 km/h
• 4% were going 51 to 55 km/h
• 1% were going 56 to 60 km/h
• 0.13% were going more than 60 km/h

Here’s the CSV file for this display.

Your neighbourhood?

There are other digital radar speed signs in Charlottetown for which similar data is available; to request this data, submit an Access Request to Charlottetown Police requesting the data in CSV form (mine was provided to me on a CD-ROM). There is a $5 fee per request.

From Bruce MacNaughton, a story of the time he met Mr. Rodd, of Rodd Hotels:

While in the airport’s waiting area, I spoke with Mr. Rodd of Rodd’s Hotels, an Islander on his way to the big city as well. He asked what I was up to and told him my dream to learn French cooking to preserve fruit and the jam-making tradition on Prince Edward Island. 

When we landed, he asked where I was going, “just downtown,” I replied. He said, “I can give you a ride; I have a car waiting.” I thought, what is a car waiting?  It ended up being my first ‘limo’ ride.  

We drove to First Canadian Place at the corner of Adelaide and Bay.  We got out of the car and looked up. I had never seen a building over six stories before, and here I was, a kid starring up at 72 floors. 

I thanked Mr. Rodd for the drive, but before we parted ways, I asked a question, “Sir, I am going to go into business for myself and wonder if you have any words of advice for me?” He took a minute and responded, “systems, it’s all about systems.”  He walked into the building.

It is all about systems. Everything.

Bumblebee Road is a mere whisper of a road that connects St. Mary’s Road with Reid Road, just southeast of Stanley Bridge. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

After I enjoyed a snack at C & B on Thursday, I headed across the street to Willow Bakery for a cappuccino and a piece of carrot cake (a second snack, in other words). 

Never one to miss an opportunity to visit a new public library, I popped into the Kensington Heritage Library when it opened at 2:00 p.m. and was reminded that, when browsing, a smaller library affords more opportunity for happenstance finds: I emerged with a book about grief, a book about happiness, and a book about letterpress. 

I found the same thing at the Kent Building Supplies in Kensington: while the Kent here in Charlottetown is a vast airplane hanger of confusion, the Kensington store was compact, filled with helpful clerks, and I was in and out, with solar-powered deck lights, in 5 minutes.

With the car fully recharged courtesy of the EV charger at the old train station, I headed east toward Stanley Bridge, destination Jane & Sue Chocolate. Their chocolate peanut butter cups kept us in the peach during lockdown mark one, via a weekly pickup at the Farmacy & Fermentary and I was excited to visit HQ for the first time. Their tiny chocolaterie, located in the back of a farmhouse, was filled with all manner of chocolate delights; I left with a selection. 

At which point I passed the Bumblebee Road and doubled back. Because if you have a chance to drive on a road called Bumblebee, I think you should. I was not disappointed.

From Bumblebee Road I made my way Reid Road, and then east overland to Route 13, where I landed at The PEI Preserve Company, where I enjoyed a cup of tea and a chat with my friend Bruce, followed by a walk through the Gardens of Hope. Which has never looked better.

Roger Ebert is a song from the alt-country band Clem Snide inspired by Ebert’s dying words, as his widow Chaz explains here.

Merry Go ‘Round from Kacey Musgraves has a clever chorus:

Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay

Brother’s hooked on Mary Jane

And Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down

It’s also good banjo.

“Which trendy café in Kensington should I go to?” A question that, until recently, nobody had ever asked. Or considered the possibility of asking.

But here I am in the trendy C & B Corner Café, eating a gouda-pesto bagel and drinking a ginger-rhubarb lemonade.

After a Zoom in the car, I’ll pop across the street to the Willow Bakery & Café for an espresso.

Earlier this spring I found my way to Wouter Groeneveld, a Belgian polymath, via a post Ton made about a meetup they both attended.

On Wouter’s blog I read mention of his interest in fountain pens, an interest we share that was later reinforced by Ton purposefully connecting us based on it.

As one does in such situations, I invited Wouter to attend our monthly Pen Night on Zoom, and he generously agreed to do so, despite the time difference meaning our 7:00 p.m. start was midnight for him.

In addition to sharing his pen passion that night, Wouter also touched (because I asked) on his interest in bread baking, and this led to a small diversion where pizza was discussed.

The next day Wouter sent me a recommendation for the book American Pie by Peter Reinhart. Which, of course, I immediately ordered a copy of.

Tonight, as it happened, was our weekly pizza night. Finding myself without cheese, I made up my dough, set it to rest, and cycled over to Kent Street Market for some mozzarella. On the way there I remembered a voicemail from The Bookmark telling me to come in and pick up a book, so I diverted to fetch it.

The book? American Pie.

Which is how I ended up with ingredients for pizza, plus a book about pizza, in my bicycle carrier late this afternoon.

I had a session with my therapist yesterday, and we were talking about what I like to do. What I truly like to do, in my heart of hearts. I related to her my small story about finding Iona as an example of when I feel I am my truest self; the best description I can come up with for that activity is creating the necessary preconditions for serendipity, seeing what happens, and telling the story.

Meeting Wouter was an example of that. So was meeting my late friend Harold and visiting him in Thailand. And going to the Reboot conference. And spending the summer in Berlin. And organizing an unconference. And riding my bicycle to an early morning flight from the airport. Serendipity is how I’ve found every job I’ve ever had and every romance I’ve ever had. It’s how I ended up producing radio shows, and how I became a modern dance promoter.

We didn’t end up coming to any conclusions as to what might come next for me, my therapist and I, but I emerged convinced that serendipity is going to be the engine that takes me there, and likely a good part of the there itself.

To the extent that I lost my mojo in recent years, it was due those necessary preconditions not having a chance to develop: I was needed elsewhere, and happenstance was my enemy not my friend.

One of the gifts of having a blog that’s 22 years old, though, is that I’ve plenty of reminders of what those preconditions look like, and thus a helpful tool in making branching life decisions: “will doing this thing (that I am probably afraid to do) power the serendipity drive or not.”

Twenty years ago, in anticipation of the arrival of our baby, a glider rocker was secured. It proved fantastically well-suited to its task of rocking-baby-to-sleep assisting, but, as baby evolved, it became less useful, and more like an annoying tippy chair (at least in my more strident eyes).

With my stridency now unfettered, I listed it on Kijiji a month ago, where it joined many other glider rockers for sale (perhaps also victims of growing children). For weeks I had no bites, but last week someone from Wellington pinged me; they retrieved it today. $30. A good deal for them, and a little less tippy clutter at 100 Prince Street.

Johannes Kleske wrote an ode to Readwise, and, knowing Johannes to be both wise and organized, I dove in. Without bogarting his description of the app and its place in the digital ecosystem, Readwise is quickly summarized as “highlights management.”

I fed Readwise my Kindle highlights and my iBooks highlights, which amounted to a lot of highlights for someone who long ago rejected the very notion of ebooks.

The result has been a surfacing of much interesting material I’d long forgotten about, thoughts I once felt useful enough to note, now fed back to me, outside of the original flow, living to inform another day.

Like The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband, a book I loved. For paragraphs like this:

But that’s clubbing. At least you can stand for hours without saying a word in a club or sneak out without being noticed. But you can’t do that at a party. At a party, you have to be present. At a party, you have to engage. Mingle. This is where my game falls apart. The social situation at a party falls way outside of my normal daily parameters. Things are not on my terms; events unfold by the terms of the gathering itself. In the midst of this, I feel that all eyes are on me—my own included—monitoring and judging my performance from start to finish. Don’t do anything wrong or unusual, because everyone will think the worst of you for the rest of your life. It’s pretty fucked-up in my opinion.

Readwise is more than simple management of highlights: it’s got some light gamification built in, some very flexible highlight-sharing tools, and has proved simply fun to use.

(Coincidentally, Ton has been experimenting with highlights management too, using an Obsidian plug-in.)

On Sunday I went wandering on the web, ambling about as I sometimes do.

“I should go to a bookbinding workshop!”, I thought to myself. “In Stockholm!”

Post-COVID thoughts were afoot!

So I Googled stockholm bookbinding school.

Top search result: The Travelling Bookbinder’s Guide to Stockholm.

Well that’s interesting.

But who’s The Travelling Bookbinder?

There’s an excellent video on The Travelling Bookbinder’s website that answers exactly that: she is Rachel Hazell.

As teacher, author and traveller, books, words and the power of imagination have always been central to Rachel’s life. She believes that everyone has a book inside them, and loves sharing the satisfying experience of creating unique artwork, in the most inspiring places.

Hazell is a part time resident of the Scottish island of Iona, and in the video there’s a quote that caught my ear:

The thing about islands is there’s less space between Heaven and Earth.

Living on an island as I do, I feel that to be intuitively true.

I emailed her to ask her more about this idea; she quickly replied, pointing me to George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community, who, she related, she had paraphrased.

Here’s a passage, oft-quoted, from Ron Ferguson’s biography of MacLeod, George MacLeod (emphasis mine):

The cattle were certainly lowing in the ruins, but they were moved out of the choir as the rebuilding proceeded. By 1910, the Abbey church had been beautifully restored. A communion table of genuine Iona marble was placed in the sanctuary. The island continued to attract pilgrims, and students came for retreat. The first principal of St Colm’s College, Annie Hunter Small, dearly loved Iona and brought students to the island at least as early as 1913. George was to say later that Miss Small turned his attention to Iona. The Reports of the Schemes of the Church of Scotland for 1921 refers to a retreat held by divinity students the previous year.

The retreats had been started and funded in 1920 by Dr David Russell, who had enlisted the enthusiastic help of George MacLeod from the beginning. George was a popular lecturer at the annual Iona events. The potential of Iona for retreat, renewal and ministerial formation was obvious to him. The history of Iona and its special atmosphere – he described it as a ‘thin place – only a tissue paper separating earth from heaven’ – greatly appealed to him.

I went looking on YouTube to see if I could find any evidence of MacLeod discussing this, and found this excerpt of the 1960s film Sermon in Stone, narrated by MacLeod himself:

“We began to ask,” says MacLeod in the film, “could we make a permanent experiment of cooperation between Sunday and Weekday? ‘Come to Iona,’ a spirit seemed to say, ‘and do it in the large.’ Iona’s a very thin place, only a bit of tissue paper between things spiritual and things material.”

My relationship with the spiritual realm is weak, and so perhaps the tissue paper is more opaque for me than for others; but for reasons I do not completely understand, I am drawn the the notion of islands as portals between Heaven and Earth, and of MacLeod’s “thin places.”

Hazell finished her email pointing me to a review she’d posted of the book Thin Places, by Kerri ní Dochartaigh; here’s a video introduction to the book. Reading it is my next project.

I should still go to Stockholm–or better yet Iona–to take a bookbinding course, but I’m happy for the diversion that my search inspired.