Ann Cakes hit it out of the park for Olivia’s second birthday party tonight: their tiramisu cake was delicious and expertly-crafted.

Many years ago, in a bid to carve out a place for myself at 100 Prince Street, and to lay down some of my own aesthetic tracks, I painted one of our three bedrooms orange.

Or red. Or red-orange. Or orange-red.

Whatever the colour’s name, it was bright and brash and kind of disturbing. For a while the room was dubbed “the hell room” for the feeling it inspired.

Here’s what the Hell Room looked like a few days ago:

After painting the room I acquired a smart IKEA lounger and a reading lamp. The plan was that I would retire to this peaceful oasis of calm and finally do all that reading I never seemed to be able to find time or space for.

That didn’t work out.

Orange-red-orange-hellscape turned out to not be a colour palette conducive to calm reflection. The IKEA chair was uncomfortable, and hit my reading-elbows in an uncomfortable way. The reading lamp, for reasons unknown, maintained a temperature of 500 degrees, and was most unappealing to be near.

And while all those things were true, ultimately the problem I was trying to solve—doing something to make myself feel more at home in this house—was a larger project needing broader solutions, not all of them related to paint and furniture.

This became moot a few years later when the room evolved to become a storage closet for our mountains of stuff, and then, a few years after that, when Catherine moved into the room during her cancer treatment. The red-orange-red that was supposed to calm me became a conversation starter and aesthetic irritant to all who encountered it.

Here’s what the room looks like this morning:

Don and Derek from Colonial Painters were in this week for a second round of painting—they painted the lower floor and the upstairs hallway this summer—and the result is a room transformed. 

Paint is powerful.

The relaunched 511 website for Prince Edward Island is a cavalcade of useful features, chief among which is that you can define a route, like your commute to and from work, and then set up alerts to receive by email and/or SMS, when there are delays, closures, construction, or adverse weather conditions along that route.

Here, for example, is the setup for a notification for my drive from home to Stars for Life every Monday and Thursday:

A “Tropical Cyclone Information Statement” went out yesterday and I was reminded, yet again, that the meteorologists at the Canadian Hurricane Centre write like real people, and often inject wit into their statements:

Rain and wind is likely over the Maritime provinces with very mild, tropical temperatures and gusty winds south of the track and cold northeasterly winds north of it. Parts of central and eastern Quebec and eventually Newfoundland could even see some snow, so this will clearly be a non-tropical storm and this bulletin is in effect for the ‘tropical side’ of the system.

The CHC will track this for a few days and we will issue a bulletin like this again tomorrow and likely one Thursday. 

This post is an ad, of sorts, for Lisa’s Coach to Thrive program, a two-day leadership coaching workshop being offered this month and next:

We created this workshop for leaders who are tired of spending their days in the weeds and fixing all their team’s problems. We invite you— leaders, managers and professionals—to join us in our cozy downtown Charlottetown space for a playful and profound two-day course. You will expand your leadership toolkit, and become more coach-like, in the company of other growth-minded leaders.

It’s an ad, but it’s a heartfelt one. Bear with me.

The circumstances that led me to Lisa Chandler were, as many things are these days, coloured by COVID. We “met” in early December, but our relationship was entirely textual until we met face-to-face two weeks later. As it happened, I had a counselling appointment three days before that first face-to-face meeting and my counsellor, upon hearing the news that I’d met Lisa, and that Lisa works as a leadership coach, smiled a Cheshire cat smile.

What she suspected then, and what I know now, is that Lisa’s belief in and professional practice of coaching is built atop uncommonly deep skills in communication, openness, vulnerability, self-awareness; the components of ”the inner game.”

My counsellor may have grinned; on my side of the conversation I remained daunted by the prospect of dating someone with inner-game-juju: what if, using her “magic leadership radar,” she could see things I couldn’t, resulting in a lopsided coupling where I was the emotional dullard and she the emotional savant.

I need not have feared.

What I have learned in the last year could fill a book: Lisa and I, together, and not lopsidedly, have crafted—are crafting—a relationship that’s built on these “inner game” foundations. We talk. A lot. About our relationship. About how we’re feeling. About how we’re feeling about how we’re feeling. We chart and conspire and conjure. I have, along the way, learned the vocabulary of coaching, of conscious leadership, and that has helped me evolve, as a leader and as a parent and as a partner.

Lisa, for example, often talks of the notion of being “below the line” — at the effect of circumstances, defensive, blaming — vs. being “above the line” — curious, open, learning, taking responsibility — and how life is a dance above and below and above and below, and how it’s not such much that we’re one or the other that’s the most important thing as it is knowing where we sit. 

I woke up in a good mood yesterday, on top of the world, relatively speaking.

And then I encountered Olivia: “I’m cold and I’m tired,” she complained.

In real time I could feel myself sinking below the line, feeling at the effect of her mood and her protest.

“Fuck, not this again,” I told myself.

I stayed there for awhile, feeling like the day was going to be a write-off: Olivia would stay home for the day, I’d feel trapped by my parenting circumstances, and things, yet again, would be off the rails.

But I didn’t stay there.

I got curious.

I gave Olivia space, and then teased out of her that it wasn’t so much that she wasn’t feeling well, but that she was worried about what would happen if she wasn’t feeling well. She was worried about going to her day program, lapsing into the illness she’s just kicked, and being paralyzed by her inability to communicate this to her support workers. Knowing that, we texted her workers to let them know about this fear, and that she might need to rest and take breaks through the day.

Olivia calmed down. I calmed down. The morning proceeded smoothly for both of us.

I could have stayed below the line, railed against my circumstances, stayed in a funk, fought with Olivia. But I didn’t, and it was only by following my curiosity that I was able to get there.

It turns out that coupling with someone with a strong inner game is a good starting point for strengthening my own inner game, an inner game that circumstances have asked a lot of in recent years, an inner game that’s been pummelled from many sides and that needed some new colours.

I come from a school of Generation X upper-middle-class white men who were raised to think rather than feel, to play the hand we were dealt, to power through adversity, to confront difficult situations by simply saying “well, he’s an idiot, so there’s no point in dealing with him.” The notion that there was a thing called “personal development,” that we could grow our game, get better at things by looking inside, that was tantamount to woo woo sorcery. I’m fortunate that adversity has loaned me the capability to see beyond those limitations: I’ve learned to seek help, from counsellors, coaches, friends, neighbours, strangers. I’ve learned that thing that Lisa calls the “inner game” is malleable, capable of evolving.

So, Coach to Thrive.

I’ve been privileged to watch Lisa and her coaching partner Julie Ann develop this new program from the ground up, distilling what they’ve learned about taking a “coach-like” approach to leadership into a compact, focused two-day workshop for leaders in business, government, and non-profits. 

It feels weird to write “hey, you should go to my girlfriend’s leadership workshop,” as I am anything but an unbiased actor. But, if you’re in a leadership role, and you want to get better at it, I can think of no better investment of your time and money than taking two days in November or December to step away from your desk and focus on your inner game with the help of Lisa and Julie Ann.

More information here. Register here.

Looking more broadly, the price we pay as a society for our toxic individualism and patriarchy is our permanent estrangement from one another. If I can’t connect to you, I can’t connect to us. Whether it’s racism, class differences, or any of myriad other social plagues, its cost is always the same: a broken and dysfunctional system that prevents us from recognizing and caring for our neighbor with a flawed but full heart.

Bruce Springsteen, in the forward to Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.

Clearly I have underestimated Bruce Springsteen.

David Cyrus MacDonald’s new Chattel Fixtures podcast is an entertaining look into real estate on PEI. His first guest is Steve Barber, impresario turned real estate agent; they had a good chat.

A coworker was having an issue logging into a website that requires two-factor authentication. We keep the authentication information for this site, including the TFA code, in a corporate 1Password account. 

While he was getting his TFA codes rejected 100% of the time, I was having no troubles, using the same account, same 1Password, etc.

The problem?

His system clock on his PC was running two minutes slow.

TFA codes are time-sensitive: the time is one of the factors in their generation (that’s why they expire every minute). If your system has the wrong time, your 1Password will generate the wrong TFA code.

The solution: he set his PC clock to the right time.

This piece by K’eguro Macharia may be the single best thing ever written about vegetables.

Or at least about beets:

I have roasted beets. I have roasted them when they are wrapped in foil and I have roasted them when they are wrapped in banana leaves and I have roasted them without any covering. I have roasted them on a bed of whole spices and I have roasted them on their own. Roasting does nothing magical. Roasted beets still taste like beet. And beets taste like dirt and despair.

Macharia has no love for cabbage either, which should cause my friend Ann, doyen of cabbage, to spring into restorative action.

All the experimenting I was doing yesterday with AI-generated images almost filled up my Google Drive. Fortuitously, Kris Howard pointed to this helpful Google tool to assist with identifying and pruning storage hogs.