Ruk

Mom and I were sitting in the back yard the other night after supper, listening to the birds. I pulled out my phone and showed her Merlin, which will help identify birds from their song. The app identified two birds, song sparrows and European starlings: We got curious: if the starlings were European starlings, how did they get to Charlottetown.

From How to get out of bed by Mike Monteiro: There is no 28 point shot in basketball. The only way to come back from a 27 point deficit is one shot at a time. Two points here. Two points there. A few three pointers sprinkled in. Some timely foul shots. And you have to do all of this while the other team is trying to do the same thing. Trying to grind you down. You just have to score a little bit more than they do over a set span of time.

I set out to document our summer plans this afternoon in pen and watercolour (digital calendars are wonderful for keeping track of things, poor at a bird’s eye view). Before I filled in our blanks, I scanned the empty calendar—what a blank canvas for adventure!—and you’re free to take and adapt for your own needs. Click the calendar for a high-res PDF.

The Big Five is a podcast from Donovan Woods and Tom Power. Quality Canadian wry humour perfect for a road trip. Thursday, June 11, 2026 at 10:46 am

I’ve been blogging for 27 years now. Give or take, blogging has been a thing for just a bit longer than that. Over that quarter century of this new medium, we’ve developed precious few tools that assist with the things that are unique to blogging, things like “quoting and linking to something someone else wrote.” I decided to try to solve that.

From The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book by Brain Baking: This was a special experiment with a high probability of failure as I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. What should a Brain Baking book look like compared to browsing this website? How should it feel to flip through the pages? Will I be able to squeeze everything in there (nope)? Do I want to publish this publicly or just generate a .pdf, send it to the presses just for myself and call it a day?

Imprint by Duncan Major: Chance encounters can leave a lasting imprint, like ink on paper. At 13, Duncan Major met artist Tara Bryan and discovered a shared passion for letterpress printing that shaped his life. In her memory, Duncan created Imprint, a poetic animated film that serves as a heartfelt tribute. Using the letterpress and craft material she passed down to him, the film brings hand-printed art to life with vibrant animation, evocative imagery and a beautifully designed soundscape.

From The Opposite of Sameness - Lecture at Domus Academy by Gianfranco Chicco: Care is a superpower. In a world of infinite sameness, the capacity to care, to understand through making, to focus on the details that matter, and to treat each encounter between host and guest (maker and consumer, salesperson and customer, etc) as unrepeatable is the only position that cannot be averaged out. “Care” is my word for 2026. Wednesday, June 10, 2026 at 8:08 am

Midwinter this year the backup camera in my 2016 Kia Soul EV started to flake out. At first it was just Max Headrooming, but then, after a week of that, it gave up the ghost completely. I consulted with Dave, my mechanic, and he suspected that it was the camera itself, rather than anything deeper, and suggested I grab a cheap replacement from Amazon rather than paying $400 (part only) to the dealership. So that’s what I did. The part arrived Friday, and I installed it today.

About two weeks ago we were listening to Donovan Woods on the car radio, and I declared boldly “if Donovan Woods came to town, I’d 100% get us tickets.” A week passed. We were driving to Nova Scotia, listening to Donovan Woods on the car radio again. Lisa casually mentioned that she heard something about him coming to play Charlottetown. I looked it up: she was right, but, alas, he was playing Charlottetown Saturday night, and we’d be in Halifax. Sigh.