I’ve always had problems keeping my moccasin laces tied.

But now I don’t, thanks to this helpful video that demonstrates a double-knot that stays tied (hint: using YouTube’s half-hour speed playback feature makes it much easier to follow along).

Bryan Alexander is one of those people I don’t know, but to whom I seem to be connected in myriad ways.

I was first pointed to him by my Dutch friend Ton.

But through another route entirely, Islander Bonnie Stewart is, I believe, a member of his virtual book club.

And since coming to know him–and follow his blog–I’ve come to find that he’s engaged with the issue of rural Internet access, which is a topic I’ve been dipping my toe into for the last 6 months.

Bryan turned 50 years old today, and wrote an essay to memorialize and consider the implications of this.

I grew up expecting my life and everyone else’s to be incinerated in global thermonuclear war.  As a kid I was reading more books than anyone around me, was often bullied, usually shy.  Then I got older, fell in love, become a professor, had children, saw the 20th century somehow give way to the 21st, and –

Like I did–albeit with considerably less scholarship and depth on my part–when I walked through the same doorway last year.

It would be an interesting exercise to collate a bunch of bloggers-turning-50 posts into collection. Any other recommendations?

When Oliver was a student at the Holland College Child Development Centre, one part of his day was spent in an area called “daily living.” I always loved the idea of spending part of your day doing “daily living,” as though a everything else was, well, not that.

One thing that Oliver and I share a passion for is anything that affords a “behind the scenes” look. This is part of the reason why I love having my office tucked away here in a corner of The Guild: every time I use my special key to unlock the special door to go up the special staircase to the hidden mezzanine beside the theatre it feels like I’m going backstage.

It’s the same reason that makes one of the best fringe benefits of being Hacker in Residence at Robertson Library the fact that my ID card affords me 24/7 access to the building. There are few cooler things than wandering the darkened empty aisles of the library after hours. It’s like Career Opportunities, albeit without Jennifer Connolly.

My daily living today included making this portal to the outside world after a blizzard:

I shouldn’t be as proud of that as I am. But I am.

When I took the portal through to the city and walked up the street to the aforementioned Guild, I found that part of the reason the blizzard left no snow on our roof was that it left a lot of snow in the front entrance there:

Around the corner along Richmond Street there was even more snow, formed into the most intriguing pointy drifts:

One of my favourite posts I’ve ever written here was, in fact, named after daily living; one morning in 2009 I detailed the first two hours of our morning. More so than any picture, that minute-by-minute diary of our morning routine transports me back to that time (several years later I met the “woman with the salmon-coloured hat” face-to-face and found that she’d read the post; that delighted me). I read:

Sometimes he turns around and says “Or have a good day at the gym. Or at your meetings.”

And tears come to my eyes.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the digital revolution as it now lives is that, despite Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest et al, we seldom find ourselves gaining any insights into the daily living of others in our broader community. Social media is more of a pithy highlight reel of life than any reflection of the delights and mundanities of everyday life.

I miss this. And for entirely practical reasons.

I watched a video yesterday on the website of Dr. Ross Greene (Explosive Child, etc.) that shows him walking two parents through an “ALSUP” process–the “Assessment of Lagging Skills and Unsolved Problems” that’s one of the building blocks of his Collaborative & Proactive Solutions model. While the video was helpful to me clinically, it was even more helpful in an “oh, wow, that family works a lot like mine” way.

It’s the same feeling, I think, that Oliver had when he cracked open The Survival Guide for Kids with Autism Spectrum Disorders for the first time and read about other people who shared his diagnosis.

And the same feeling I get when I have a chance to talk to other spouses of women living with metastatic breast cancer.

It’s good to know we’re not alone.

And not in a spiritual sense or a psychological sense or a cataclysmic sense, but simply in the pace of our daily lives.

Where we buy our milk. How we shovel our snow. How we sharpen our pencils. The people that we meet when we’re walking down the street.

Not the social media highlight reel, but rather everything else.

I had coffee with my good friend Bruce earlier this week and he asked me why I blog.

This is the sort of question we used to talk about all the time during the heyday of blogging–I once dragged brother Johnny to an event at Harvard where this was all that was talked about. But now that we’ve reentered the Dark Ages, such talk seems tantamount to discussing the mechanics of fountain pen piston converters.

Returning to the question today, though, I find myself coming up with much the same answer as I gave on that cold winter night in Cambridge:

Oliver, hello, it’s me, your father, thinking of you here in the past

But also, in writing about the snow drifts and shopping lists and hospital victories and strawberry socials and Icelandic swims of my life, I hope, perhaps in vain, to encourage others to do the same.

In other words, if indeed it’s good to know we’re not alone, I write here as part of an effort to make that more possible more of the time.

Please, find a way to tell me about your daily living.

The shopping list feature may be what endears our family to the Amazon Echo most of all. That, and “Alexa, turn on the living room light.” Oh, and “Alexa, tell Spotify to play Talking Heads.”

One of the more interesting side-effects of the election of President Donald Trump is that Oliver has become a devotee of Robert Reich and his Inequality Media project.

Update: The head of our Vermont operation forwarded a link to the Indivisible Guide, which comes from a similar mindset. Oliver listened to the the beginning of the audio version of the guide over breakfast this morning, and this precipitated a conversation, en route to school, about the differences between federal governance in the U.S. and Canada.

Much of my writing here of late has been blogging-by-email, writing posts on my phone in Markdown.

It turns out that the Google Keyboard, while good for a lot of things, is not very useful for writing in Markdown, mostly because inserting links required the [, ], ( and ) characters, and there’s a lot of shifting required to type these.

So I’m experimenting with the open source Hacker’s Keyboard, which lets me stick these characters, along with some other characters useful for Markdown, in a 6th row of the keyboard.

It’s taking some getting used to, this new layout. And I do miss the ability to type-by-swiping dearly, so this might not stick. But I wrote this with the new keyboard and at least the Markdown bits were easier.

Jennifer Herrema, interviewed in The Creative Independent, on her retirement plan:

But it’s not like I have a family to take care of. I own my house, I bought it. I was broke after purchasing it but I don’t have a mortgage, I don’t have car payments, so whatever. Fuck retirement, I don’t care. I always knew that that’s the way it’s going to be. I’m just gonna keep making my shit and whatever happens will happen. Hopefully it will be cool.

Minus the no-family part, that’s about as close a description of my retirement plan as I’ve come across. I also hope it will be cool.

The FAQ for Saturday’s PEI Writers’ Guild Erotic Writing Workshop is almost enough to make me sign up.

Q: Aren’t you worried about attracting, you know, weirdos?

A: Well, Writers Guild members tend to be a well-behaved bunch, so no, not really. But if anyone is disruptive, a 500-pound cow will fall on their head, they will be asked to leave, and UPEI campus security will see them out. Plus we’ll take away their chocolate.

I said almost. As someone who blushes beet red at merest mention of the possibility of canoodling, I’m fairly confident that I don’t have the fortitude.

Oliver was getting ready for bed tonight.

“I watched this episode of Black Mirror today that you wouldn’t be able to watch,” I said. “It was very scary, with horror and a scary mansion, and spiders and fighting.”

“I already saw that episode,” Oliver replied.

Discussion ensued: Oliver’s always expressed a strong aversion to anything of this ilk.

“Was watching that episode sort of like how you ate all the kimchi at Seoul Food the other day, even though it was very spicy?”, I asked him.

“Yes!”, he replied enthusiastically. “It’s quality content, that’s scary. Kimchi is quality food, that’s very spicy.”

We looked up the Common Sense Media guide to Black Mirror and we agreed with its advice: good for older teens, too much for kids. Your kid may vary.

Oliver and I were sitting in the car in the high school parking lot yesterday, waiting for his EA to arrive.

I noticed that there were still insect wipes stored in the dash, leftover from summer.

“We won’t be needing those on a day like today,” I said. “Any mosquito that’s outside today would have to be a pretty special mosquito.”

“An extremophile,” replied Oliver, as though it was the most natural thing in the world to say.

Extremophile was the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day on Monday; that’s a website that’s on the school agenda for Oliver every morning. Obviously it’s of some utility.