Remember Act Quickly Summer is Almost Over? 

(Could that really have been 11 years ago?)

I’ve been trying to cultivate a different attitude about summer of late, more “be present, and enjoy the summer” than “ACT QUICKLY!” Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Lisa marks her birthday as the halfway point of summer, and as her birthday was this week, it seems like a good time to reflect on the presence or lack thereof.

The Gathering of the Rukavinas

The Gathering of the Rukavinas has come to an end for 2025: my little brothers brought their families to the Island, the first time we’d all been in the same place since forever. We were 17 at Peak Rukavina, and while I would have liked more time with everyone, I consider it a success that we managed to wrangle all 17 of us into Salt & Sol for supper (great service and great food; I’d take a large group there any time!).

Home Exchange

We’ve decamped to the shore for much of the summer, which lets us host home exchange guests downtown (we have had a few days open up in August if you’re looking). The shore (Lisa prefers “the beach”) is quieter, involves more swimming, a much smaller space, and considerably more languid afternoons. We are privileged.

Lunch with Thelma and Steven

We had lunch with Thelma and Steven at The Cork & Cast. They rode the bus in from Foxley River for the day! It was a delight. 

(Thelma wrote a beautiful tribute to her late mother; please go and read it.)

Golf Caddy

Lisa’s parents gifted her an afternoon of golf at Red Sands, and I came along to drive the golf cart. It was my first time on a golf course in about 20 years. I sunk a few off-the-books putts, and learned a lot about the game from Lisa’s father Hoss. I’m not turned, but I am sympathetic.

The Dice Game

We were hosted by our shore-friends (“beach-friends”) Alison and Walt, and were taught a complicated after-supper game called simply “The Dice Game” that involves a heavy emphasis on ones and fives. For the first 30 minutes I was dumbfounded, but I caught on.

Back to Owl’s Hollow

I was pulled into Owl’s Hollow for the first time in forever by the promise of “tasty ices lattes” on their outdoor sign. The ices lattes, I can confirm, are indeed tasty. And the store has never looked better. Somehow, despite there being 8 foot high letters painted on the side of the building that spell out TOYS & GAMES, I was somehow surprised to find they sell games. I bought two: That’s Not a Hat, and Really Loud Librarians. So far my latte-to-game purchase ratio is 1:1.

Neurolens Eyeglasses

The biggest transformation in my life—I’m burying the lede here—is that, after months of dithering and scheming, I have a new pair of eyeglasses, with Neurolens lenses in them. 

I’ve been dealing with a basket of symptoms for more than a decade—vertigo, dizziness, fatigue, neck pain, general ennui—that seemed eye-misalignment-related. I’ve talked to my doctor, my physiotherapist, my osteopath, a concussion specialist; nobody was able to help.

Last fall my optometrist, suggested I might look into Neurolens as an enhancement to the standard-issue prism correct she’s been putting in my prescription for many years. I was skeptical, afraid it wouldn’t work and the setback would be a blow I didn’t need, and put off by the cost (about $1500, all-in, all out-of-pocket, as we’ve no insurance). But, with Lisa’s nudging, I made a last-minute appointment at a Halifax optometrist that has the Neurolens diagnostic machine, got a prescription, and then returned last month to order frames and lenses.

The Halifax optometrist recommended that, in addition to the lenses, I get a clip-on blue light filter, to help me address possibly-related issues with fluorescent lights (Sobeys has always been my number one symptom trigger). This clip-on requirement significantly reduced the choice of their frames I could choose from, and this paucity of choice led me to throw caution to the wind and choose a pair of bold red frames:

I’ve been wearing the lenses for almost two weeks now. My first note, after a day, was “I find it very difficult to focus on the text on my cell phone. It’s not blurry, but it does feel like my eyes are misaligned.” and I’ve had a variety of “acclimation” challenges since, all of them, I’m told, to be expected.

What I haven’t had are any of the symptoms I sought out to address: no vertigo, no dizziness, no fatigue, no neck pain, no general ennui. This despite a lot of triggering situations this week: shopping, dinner parties, night driving, computer use.

I’m not ready to proclaim victory yet, but signs are very positive that these new lenses are going to make a very real and dramatic improvement in my day to day life.

Instructions for Myself

In May, when I read James A. Reeves’ post Instructions for Myself, I felt called to turn it into a chapbook. James kindly agreed, and over the course of several early-summer weeks I set and printed the pages, bound a small edition, and shipped it off to James.

James replied with a very kind thank you post.

I love everything about this.

Keith Milligan’s Beech

One of Charlottetown’s hidden gems is Premiers’ Grove, on the Experimental Farm, about here, where a tree has been planted in honour of all premiers of Prince Edward Island since Walter Shaw.

Wade MacLauchlan’s tree is the most recent,  a red oak planted in 2016. 

The grove includes a beech tree for Keith Milligan, who was Premier for just 50 days, back in 1996. It’s my favourite.

The Queen Square Press Shop

Lisa and I are having a lot of fun expanding our printing and printmaking skills. Sometimes we put what we make up in our little online store. Often we forget to announce that. Here are some of my favourite things we have for sale:

• Nanny’s Vase, a reduction lino print that Lisa carved and printed for Sally Caston’s print exchange.
• Shipping Tag Letters. Perhaps a product I’m the best customer for (isn’t that the best kind of product?). A to Z, plus &. $2.50 each.
• Furiously Curious. Lisa framed this in a bold red frame and hung it on the wall in our stairway, and seeing it every day has transformed my relationship with this broadside. It might be my favourite of all the things I’ve printed.
• Chicken Rocket. It’s all in the name.
• Terms of Union Flash Cards. I printed these a decade ago. I’ve gifted them to every new Premier as a handy reference. They may be a product of no interest to anyone but the most esoteric constitutional/letterpress wonk. But I love them.

Cat Camp

Lisa is off to Montreal for a week to catch up with old friends. L. is off to the Valley for a week to meet new friends, at summer camp. 

Meanwhile, I’m moving from the shore (beach) back into town for 10 days to look after Mike and Karen’s cats, and to support my mother. I will miss the swimming; I’m looking forward to spending time with Mom; I’m daunted by the cats. 

Wish me luck.

If Lisa and I had a formal relationship agreement, there would be a clause like this:

3.1 Peter agrees to monitor the zeitgeist, and to supply Lisa with a consistent flow of interesting reading material, including material related to topical issues and works of contemporary fiction.

3.2 Peter agrees that, even in situations where Peter appears to have secured materials for his own consumption, Lisa will have “first dibs.”

I write this without malice: it is one of the great joys of this chapter of my life that I have a partner who is as curious as I am, a partner with a broad intellectual palette, and a willingness to dig into seeming tangents and make them our own.

One example of this came last month, when I brought home the book Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, after reading this brief review by Rishikesh Sreehari in his 10+1 Things newsletter:

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been slowly reading and digesting this beautiful book called “Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World” by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I’ve been following Anne via her newsletter for a while now and was excited when she released this book. It challenges the traditional linear approach to goals and instead proposes treating life as a series of small experiments guided by curiosity rather than rigid outcomes. What I love most is how she reframes uncertainty as an opportunity rather than something to fear, and shows how to use tiny experiments to discover what truly matters to you. 

Lisa glommed onto the book immediately, read it from cover to cover, and started mulling how to inject its lessons into our daily life.

One of the concepts that author Le Cunff focused on is that of the “pact,” something she described in a blog post:

Make a pact. Trying to force a specific outcome in chaotic times is like trying to herd butterflies. However, just like chaos theory has its attractors orienting a system in a particular direction, you can orient yourself by defining a pact with yourself.

Make a commitment to dedicate a certain amount of time or a certain number of repetitions towards a project you care about. Similar to a compass, a pact encourages you to show up and surf the chaos, letting a new self-organization emerge over time. It needs to be purposeful, actionable, contextual, and trackable. Examples of such pacts include:

• Writing for one hour every morning before everyone wakes up
• Publishing one newsletter every week about a topic you care about
• Studying for a JavaScript certification for two hours every Sunday

As you can see, there is no finish line; no success metrics except for whether you show up or not. Each pact is simply a little experiment, a chance to learn about the world and about yourself. Focusing on your output rather than the outcome will rekindle your sense of agency without falling prey to the illusion of control.

Lisa came to me a few weeks ago and proposed that she assign me a pact. I can’t recall whether I had to pre-agree to the pact without knowing what it concerned, or whether I got to hear about it first.

The pact was simple: agree to drink 1½ litres of water every day.

I’m notorious, at least inside the confines of our relationship, for not keeping hydrated. For whatever reasons—false bravado, exceptionalism, laziness—I’ve never been a water bottle carrier (and may have, in my private moments, looked askance at those who were).

I certainly was nowhere near drinking 1½ litres of water every day.

I said yes.

I just took a swig of water from my water bottle. “Pact drinking,” I call it.

Between the water I engulfed during our morning workout, the water I had at lunch out, and the water I’ve had from the bottle, I’m probably near the one litre mark already, and the day isn’t half over yet.

The utility of the pact isn’t statistical, though (output, rather than outcome): it’s been a nudge toward building a habit, and that nudge has become linked to being thirsty, and feeling the positive effects of drinking nearby water (and learning to withstand the more-frequent-peeing needs).

Meanwhile, as Lisa writes in more detail in her own blog post about pacts, Lisa agreed to take on a pact assigned by me, blind, as a counterpoint. 

The one I assigned her—to write, vulnerably, on her blog every day for two weeks—was several orders of magnitude more involved than “drink some more water,” but she rose to the challenge, and I’ve been delighted to read what she’s been writing:

• Rings of Fire (27 June 2025)
• I’ve Changed for the Better (29 June 2025)
• The Pesticide Showcase (23 June 2025)
• Funkitude (24 June 2025)
• A Bias Toward Action! (22 June 2025)
• I Was Angry (20 June 2025)
• Yoga to Guide My Way On (18 June 2025)
• Recipe for Frustration (20 June 2025)
• Hedging Against Death (17 June 2025)
• Resisting Writing (16 June 2025)

I am, it should go without saying, a huge proponent of the practice of writing introspectively in public, and in reading what others have written in the same spirit (there are 94 RSS feeds in my RSS reader; words from these authors are the bulk of what I read online every day). 

To have a partner who’s a talented writer, whose words challenge me, delight me, and sometimes confront me, how great is that!

Lisa finished the pact yesterday with these words:

And so, I have completed this particular pact. I’m grateful to Peter for buying the book and saying yes to a pact of his own. It feels like a big success, as I feel more capable and less resistant. I intend to continue writing, but what to do from here? Just write blog posts everyday for the rest of my life? Hardly. Clearly I’ll need a new tiny experiment so I can pact it up!

Pact it up, my darling, pact it up.

Some helpful advice from the postmistress at the Charlottetown Post Office this morning. If you have standard stamps, which right now are $1.44 singly or $1.24 in books, these can be used like this:

• Mailing a standard letter in Canada takes one.
• Mailing a standard letter to the USA takes two.
• Mailing a standard letter internationally takes three.

Using this mnemonic means you’ll overpay for the letter to the USA (by 73 cents), but having a way to remember the postage without thinking about it is worth that to me.

Ten years ago I installed an Ikea Digniet wire in our dining room to provide a place to “hang my collection of ephemera.” When we got the dining room painted a few years ago, it got taken down, the wall repaired, and the ephemera went back into the archive.

But I saved the wire, and today Lisa and I hung it back up, this time in our front hallway:

From left to right, the pieces we’ve hung to start:

• A whimsical and very detailed drawing by Halifax artist Bruce Roosen.
• A bright, colourful monotype from Lisa’s recent experimenting in the print shop.
• A print I found in my archives from the late artist Sandy Hunter, a friend from my Peterborough days.
• An experiment in printing with wooden type that I printed in Serrazzano last spring.
• A colourful alphabet-on-black that surely must have come from Jackson Creek Press.

Meanwhile, around the corner at the bottom of the stairs, Lisa hung a framed version of my Furiously Curious print, using an inexpensive red frame from Ikea that complements it well:

And, while we were on an art-roll, Lisa suggested we retrieve a large painting from storage and use it to fill up a large empty space on our kitchen wall:

Behind all three of these hangings were slight eruptions of internal discomfort that I needed to quell.

I don’t like drilling holes into walls (it seems so permanent).

I don’t like that the fridge door can slam into the kitchen artwork.

That the front door opening can rustle the art-on-a-wire makes me nervous.

But what trumps those discomforts are the inarguable facts that they improve our living space significantly, and they allow us a place to see our own work, and those of our friends and familiars, out in the open.

(Lisa wrote a post—a much better one—about the same thing!)

Spotted in my friend Shannon’s bathroom in Kingston earlier this week:

Wendy Luella officiated at my friend Stephen’s mother Carol’s funeral.

Ton reminds me that it was 20 years ago this week, in June of 2005, that we were all at reboot7 in Copenhagen. 

That conference—and those that followed in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009—changed are changing my life, in ways that I continue to discover.

Some of that change was obvious at the time. 

In reflecting on the closing day—exactly 20 years ago— I wrote, in Shy:

And of course I’m just plain afraid. Terrified of the unknown, suddenly left frozen at the thought of freeform social contact.

Given that the interesting part of conferences happens during the “hanging out in the coffee room after the speakers” part, this fear / awkwardness / terror leaves me at something of a disadvantage.

Halfway through reboot, I decided that, fuck it, I had to just jump off. Pretend I wasn’t terrified, and see what played out.

(It worked.)

In other  ways I’m only now able to understand why reboot was so important, what role it played in my life, how it saved my life.

Reboot was my gateway to cultivating a love of Europe, an easy facility with Europe, and a network of European friends. Denmark, Sweden, Germany, The Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, and the friends thereof, have proved a wellspring of ideas, inspirations, opportunities, connection. 

What a privilege it is to have a magic place to go, long over the horizon and far away from the everyday, that serves as a kind of off-site for mind, body, and soul.

But time has shown me more.

In recent months I’ve been working with a counsellor schooled in the ways of Internal Family Systems, and through that practice I’m becoming more aware of what IFS calls my “self” and my “parts.” And through that, I’m starting to learn more about how elusive my “self” has been, for a long, long time.

IFS associates “self-leadership” with “eight Cs”:

It is also a way of understanding personal and intimate relationships and stepping into life with the 8 Cs: confidence, calm, compassion, courage, creativity, clarity, curiosity, and connectedness.

Those are all qualities that, to one degree or another, have been absent from my life, obscured behind a thicket of parts—fear, anger, loneliness, overwhelm, disconnectedness, shame, avoidance. One of the great gifts of plucking up my courage to go to that first reboot conference, and the opportunities that followed from it, is that I was gifted a glimpse of “self,” a creative, courageous, curious version of myself. 

I love that guy, and it’s no wonder that I was, and am, drawn to Europe to rekindle my relationship with him.

So, yes, reboot saved my life, let me connect to myself.

But it also delayed my life, stunted it. 

By rooting access to “self” off-shore, I remained content, or at least resigned, to allow my everyday life at home to be “parts-led.” 

Historically, I felt this most acutely on the transitions back to home from Europe, where it felt like a fog descending over me, like going through a glitchy version of the Star Trek transporter that filtered out access to some important parts of myself.

This is difficult to write about, in part because it appears that I’m throwing a huge swath of my life under the bus, a swath rooted in a partner who died, a child I’m continuing to raise, myriad work and volunteer projects and relationships. 

I don’t want to suggest that my life has sucked, with brief respites when it didn’t, because that’s both not true, and over-simplifies the ever-changing presence of “parts” and “self” in my life.

But I do find myself understanding how much I have been holding in for so long, how shallow I’ve allowed my relationships to be, how I’ve used fear as a guard against vulnerability.

Pete Livingstone—who I met in Copenhagen many years ago, another byproduct of my reboot life—wrote this, in a blow-by-blow of his 2024 cancer treatment:

On the other hand I can now concede that being pushed towards an awareness of ones own mortality – coupled with a degree of illness and physical discomfort - may have some weird and unexpected effects on ones unconscious mind. In my case it feels like that the experience I have gone through has conferred on my body and mind an ability to perform, on occasion, what I want to describe as an “action”, a kind of psychic, almost physiological muscle-flexing. This “action” feels completely novel to me, but I can feel that the potential to carry it out has always lain dormant inside me, and indeed is part of how I, and I presume all other humans, are put together. It’s as if, quite sensibly, we contain an algorithm in our unconscious which lies in wait, and is specifically for dealing with suffering and death. The tentative flexing of this previously unused psychic muscle seems to set off some emotional events which I find unfamiliar in an almost alarming way.

Perhaps you could describe what Pete experienced as a “reboot,” and perhaps I could, now that I think of it, describe my life in recent years in the same way.

Like reboot the conference gifted me a taste of “self,”  going through years of life as a carer, living through the death of my partner of 28 years, nurturing Olivia through COVID, finding new love in an audacious partner (and an audacious step-daughter), leaving paid work and reimagining myself as a printer, helping set Olivia off toward independence, all of that was a portal, its own kind of reboot, that, having emerged, somewhat intact, out the other side, allows me slightly more clarity, more access to my parts and my self and how I have lived, and will live my life.

When I reflected on that first reboot 15 years ago, on its 10th anniversary, I wrote:

On June 14, I flew back to Prince Edward Island, via Frankfurt and Montreal. Exhausted but happy and very, very changed.

That’s not a bad way of describing my current state: exhausted but happy and very, very changed.

Thank you, reboot.

Since I migrated this blog to a Hetzner server, I’ve been paying attention to the “Graphs” tab of the server dashboard to see how the capacity of the server matches the traffic I’m expecting it to handle.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that there are regular periods of very high CPU usage, periods where the 4 vCPUs are almost maxed out:

These periods are accompanied by corresponding jumps in network traffic:

I got curious about what might be causing this, and, because I suspected web traffic bumps, I started by looking at the 20 most popular user-agents in my Apache logfiles, with:

awk -F'"' '{print $6}' access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20

The result:

577651 Scrapy/2.11.2 (+https://scrapy.org)
 39018 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Bytespider; spider-feedback@bytedance.com)
 23216 Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_5 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.5 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
 15561 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/117.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
 14793 Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot)
 14571 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
 12838 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36
 12306 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot/7~bl; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)
 10834 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.5 Safari/605.1.15
  9714 Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)
  7104 Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36
  7005 Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/116.0.1938.76 Safari/537.36
  6287 Wget/1.21.3
  5885 meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)
  5093 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:139.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/139.0
  4798 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.7151.68 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
  4593 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36
  4143 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
  3446 -
  3228 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0

I asked ChatGPT to normalize and summarize, which gave me:

It also gave me this summary:

• Total bot/tool traffic: ~695,940 (≈ 85% of top 20 traffic)
• Likely human browser traffic: ~102,296 (≈ 13%)
• Unknown/empty: ~3,447 (≈ 0.4%)

This log has a total of 964,802 lines in it, meaning that whatever “Scrapy” is doing is responsible for 60% of the traffic to my blog.

Ugh.

I followed up by asking ChatGPT to give me a robots.txt file that includes all of the bots, and I’ve added that to this site’s robots.txt (leaving out some friendly user-agents like NetNewsWire).

Because “Scrapy” seems particular evil, I also blocked it at the Apache level, with:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Scrapy [NC]
 RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]
</IfModule>

I tested that this was working with:

curl -I -A "Scrapy/2.11.2 (+https://scrapy.org)" https://ruk.ca

Which properly returned:

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2025 22:31:15 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.63 (Fedora Linux) OpenSSL/3.2.4
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

I’ll wait 24 hours to see what effect all this has on network traffic and CPU.