One of the amazing things I’ve learned from watching Oliver grow is how children are so adept at recognizing and embracing other children. It’s like there’s a secret society of children, and all children are members, and there are certain things — burbles, nuances, little pieces of body language — that can only be understood by members.

When Oliver and I are out in public, he can spot someone else under 5 years old from across a room, and will give a secret wave; often they’ll wave back.

While all of this is endearing, and interesting to watch, I wonder what evolutionary advantage this behaviour offers? Perhaps children bonded to other children in a world of strange self-involved warring adults have a better chance of survival?

I placed my first order from the Chapters.ca website on May 16, 2000, and my most recent order on August 12, 2002.

The order number for the first order was OR1848357 and the order number for the most recent was OR8231302. Assuming that the order number is simply a sequential number, that means 6,382,945 orders in 27 months, or roughly 236,205 orders per month and about 7800 order per day on average.

This is all just a guess, of course.

Every weeknight from midnight to 1:00 a.m. you can watch The Charlie Rose Show on WGBH Boston (and, I’m sure, other PBS stations at other times).

Charlie Rose is the consumate interviewer. This week I’ve watched him interview Martin Scorsese and Daniel Day Lewis, Denzel Washington, and Nicole Kidman. Each of the interviews were interesting and insightful — much less “so I hear your kids did something wacky on the weekend” than Letterman and Leno and less “what is the heart of your oeuvre” than James Lipton.

If midnight is too late for you, I can’t imagine a better use of a VCR or Tivo.

From the iFolk website:

House concerts are a wonderful grassroots phenomenon where world class musicians and developing local talent alike perform in the comfortable intimacy of private homes and similar nontraditional spaces. They’re fun to attend, fun to present, and fun to play. This page is dedicated to spreading the word!

This strikes me as a wonderful idea.

On a related topic, The Nields are playing at Grassy Hill on Sunday, March 16. They had a cut included on the New Music Made in New England CD that was included with YANKEE in summer 2001. Well worth a visit if you’ll be in Connecticut in March.

And, on the same folk topic, Edie Carey is worth a listen.

The Library Lookup project has received a lot of weblog buzz over the past month. With the introduction of an iPac beta-test by the PEI Provincial Library, we Islanders can now take advantage of it.

Here’s how it works: drag the bookmarklet below (see more about bookmarklets) to your browser’s toolbar. Then, the next time you’re browsing a website like Amazon.ca and looking at a specific book (like The Stone Angel), click on the bookmarklet, and a pop-up window will show you information about that book if it’s in the collection of the PEI Provincial Library.

Neato.

Note that, as far as I’ve been able to determine, the bookmarklet doesn’t work with Chapters’ website, because they don’t use the ISBN as part of the URL for a specific book. It does work with Northwest Passages [Stone Angel], another Canadian bookseller.

Here’s the bookmarklet you can drag to your toolbar: PEI Provincial Library.

Continuing the dance of procrastination this week, this website sports a new, lean look today.

Fringe benefits: site loads faster, site can be viewed on anything from a modern web browser, to a cell phone, to a 1978 Ford F100 pickup truck. And there’s a lot less to distract the eye from the body copy. A lot less.

There are still some rough edges around the periphery; these should be addressed by the end of the day.

In June of 1991, I moved into a house on George Street in Peterborough, Ontario. Catherine, my consort to this day, was my next door neighbour, and her roommate was a man named Mike Johnston.

Mike — or Mikey, as Catherine called him — was a really nice guy, and a pleasure to have as a neighbour. He was the kind of person you could equally as well engage in conversation about the finer points of Canadian poetry in the 20th century as you could share a platter of Labatt’s 50 on tap.

At the time, I was driving a 1980 Toyota Tercel; it was a good car that had taken me to El Paso and back, and between Ontario and Quebec innumerable times. One day I lent the car to my friend Stephen, who took our friend Karen out for a drive. At an intersection, Karen, for some reason, opened her passenger side door, and someone in the lane beside her pulled up beside and drove right through it. Karen was fine, but the door, well, it fell off.

Because I didn’t really need a car at the time, I opted to junk it rather than repair it. When I mentioned this to Mikey, he said “I’ll give you $50 for it.” I said “I won’t take more than $35.” We shook hands, and I signed the car over to him.

Mikey’s father was a mechanic, and the door situation was quickly rectified and he drove the car for another year until some larger calamity befell it. He then drove the Tercel to his father’s farm where, at last report, it was serving duty as a part of a complicated electric fence charging system.

We’d lost track of Mikey since moving from Peterborough, but when my friend John was here last week, he mentioned that Mikey was directing a film about his student loan.

Photo from Arthur, January 14, 2001.

For a certain group of Islanders, describing our house as “Brigadier Reid’s house” is sufficient. Brigadier Reid, his wife Eunice, and their children lived at 100 Prince St. for many years before us.

While we know bits and pieces of the Reid family’s history, most of our experience of them is through the bits of pieces of their life that remain in the house. Brig. Reid, for example, was very much involved in the Scouting movement, and you can see evidence of this in the many whistles that are hidden behind closet doors and in the very far back of drawers.

The only structural downside of our house is that its roof is very prone to generating icicles: two of the last three years we’ve had severe ice problems, the first time around enough to cause water to stream down the inside walls of the house.

Some of this is simply due to the nature and age of the house, the rest of it is oure own fault for not cleaning out the gutters in the fall.

Again this fall we procrastinated (see note below about our tendency in this regard), and neglected to get to this. Yesterday, however, was a Good Fine Day: warm enough to work without gloves, and not a spot of snow to be seen.

So Catherine put Oliver up for his nap, and we headed out to the back yard to get the wooden ladder that the Reid’s had helpfully left for us.

When we placed the ladder on the back side of the house and climbed up to gutter height, we were dismayed to find that it just didn’t reach quite far enough — we needed about four feet more to reach as high as we needed to go.

Reconciled to going gutter-full for another winter, I suddenly recalled that there was a twin of the ladder in the basement. Catherine scrambled down to bring it up, and, sure enough, we found that it was more a siamese twin: it was part two of an extension ladder, part one of which we had up the side of the house.

After some rearranging, slotting and sliding, we had the two ladders married, and had all the height we needed to clean the gutters and more.

And so, two hours later, we were the happy owners of a house with a spotless, free-running set of rear gutters (we’re hoping for another balmy day soon to do the front).

Eunice Reid died this fall, and we were out of town for the wake, so didn’t get a chance to pay our respects. To the Reid family: thank you for providing us with a wonderful house. And to Brig. Reid, thanks for the gift of an extension ladder.

Catherine and I, and by genetic association Oliver, are last minute people. Raised mostly rural but weaned into the instant world of the Big City, we are used to waiting until the last possible date to conduct the important actions of life.

In no ritual is this more true than in the procurement of the Christmas Tree.

I am infamous in my family for having obtained a Christmas Tree without payment one year (sometimes called “stealing” if you’re not willing to be generous). What’s worst, the source of said tree was the local Optimist Club, stealing from which is tantamount to stealing from the church, but with the added risk of turning Optimists into Pessimists.

To my credit, the circumstances were special: it was Christmas Eve, after supper, and I had left tree-getting far too late. In my naive haze, I headed up to the four corners of downtown Carlisle to buy a tree from the Optimist’s stand. But, of course, they had all happyily go luckily gone home to their families, leaving their lot untended. Just before I headed home empty handed, I spied a lone Christmas tree, someone bedraggled, leaning in the far corner of the lot. Reasoning that the tree would otherwise go to waste, I decided to liberate it from its solitude, and proudly brought it home.

In the family canon, alas, this story is always related not as “the year that Peter saved Christmas,” but rather as “the year Peter stole a tree from the Optimists.”

This year, true to form, Catherine and Oliver and I left the Christmas Tree to the Last Minute. Our normal procrastination would have seen us out this weekend, however we were all waylaid last week with some variation of the Evil Stomach Flu, and therefore were in no shape, physically or emotionally, to do so.

Finally, last night, we pucked up our Christmas Spirit and headed out.

In vain.

Our route went roughly like this: up Mount Edward Rd. to Belvedere to the a Christmas Tree stand reported to have been there earlier in the day. That wasn’t. Across to the Superstore parking lot. No trees. Out to Sobeys and Canadian Tire. No trees. Out Rte. 2 almost to Hunter River to the Silver Bell Christmas Tree farm (where Catherine claimed, they would assuredly have trees, that being their metier). “Sold Out. Closed For Season. Happy Holidays.”

Down Rte. 9 past Bobby Clow’s store (no trees) and through Kingston into Cornwall (no trees), over the causeway (no trees), down St. Peter’s Road (no trees), over the bridge to Stratford (no trees) and out to the Southport Home Hardware (evidence that trees had recently been there, but no trees).

After two hours in the car, with Oliver feeling that our promises of the delightful glee of the Christmas Tree gathering were lies, all lies, we went for Indian Food and gave up, resigned to spending a Christmas with presents gaily arranged, well, beside the couch.

When we returned home, Catherine changed tactics from “aimless wandering” to “targeted assault.”

She phoned Carol Boyles.

Carol Boyles phoned Marilyn Kane.

And Marilyn Kane phoned David Smith.

David Smith runs a Christmas Tree farm in Toronto, which is a small village just south of Cavendish. He supplies all the trees to the Sobeys parking lots in Charlottetown.

Marilyn phoned Carol who phoned Catherine and Catherine phoned David Smith. He told us we could come out this morning and cut ourselves a tree.

Which is exactly what we did.

In a little snowshower worthy of Norman Rockwell, we met David Smith at his farm, he lent us a bow saw, and we headed out into the tree patch. After quickly finding the perfect tree, we tried to figure out whether or not it would fit in the car: we reasoned that if the tree was about 5 inches taller than me, that if I could fit in the back of the car, so could the tree.

This reasoning, of course, left out the important fact that the girth of the tree was substantially more than the girth of me.

Not to be defeated so late in the game, we rearranged Oliver’s car seat, moved various piles of stuff around, and the tree fit in the car with half an inch to spare.

When we tracked down David Smith to return the bow saw and pay for the tree, we told him that Charlottetown was plumb sold out of trees. He said he knew this, being the supplier of the trees. But he’d simply figured that everyone must have had a tree by now. Obviously he’d never met our family before.

And that is how, with the help of friendly Islanders, we came to have a Christmas Tree from Toronto gracing our living room this year. Thank you to Carol, Marilyn and David and his family.

And a Merry Christmas to all.

Singer-songwriter Jane Siberry has released a demo of a striking version of Silent Night. Well worth a listen during the holiday haze.