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.

Since I imploded my Twitter last month, a few strange things have happened.

First, I haven’t missed it.

This was really surprising, because while I was in the thick of Twitter it seemed tantamount to oxygen or coffee and the thought of doing without it seemed as odd as giving up either of those. But now, cold turkey as I am, I don’t miss it. At all.

Actually, that’s not completely true: in the same way that cutting back on sugar caused me to not miss sugar, but more to lament the absence of the ability of it to give me a kick, I also miss the role of Twitter in my life more for the vacuum it created.

I’m not jonesing for a Snickers bar, but I miss the role that Snickers bars once played in my life. Like an old friend who moved to Australia.

Second, it seems that I broke Twitter.

Here’s what my Twitter profile page header looks like:

Twitter seems to think that I have 1,149 “likes”, even though I deleted all of them. Indeed, if I navigate to my likes page, Twitter tells me “You haven’t liked any Tweets yet.”

Similarly, Twitter things that I’ve tweeted 30 times. When, in fact, I left a single tweet in place when I purged my archive: the first one, tweeted December 12, 2006.

On my timeline, in addition to that tweet, are an additional 6 retweets that, for some reason unknown, I cannot “un-retweet,” despite trying in myriad ways. The only thing these retweets have in common is that they’re old, and the original tweets were from simply-named longtime Twitter users (@David and @Alby). Like this one:

Perhaps these retweets were done in some earlier-era no-long-supported-and-cannot-be-undone manner. I seem to be stuck with them.

Perhaps Twitter received too much of a shock to the system by my wholesale withdrawal, and some regular re-indexing process will correct the above.

Fortunately, I don’t have to care about this because I’ll be using all the free time I have now while I’m not Tweeting to learn Mandarin or take afternoon naps.

I have been a fan of Stephen Fearing for almost 30 years, ever since Beguiling Eyes, from his 1988 album Out to Sea, soothed my tortured soul on many lonely nights in the late 1980s.

His new album, Every Soul’s a Sailor is the rightful heir to that first album, especially the title track, which is lovely.

Of the album, and that song, Fearing writes:

Musically, I have traveled consistently between the two poles of “solo” and “ensemble”. With this album I wanted to see if I could bring those two worlds together in the studio and then out on the road, touring with a trio. I deliberately set out to write the songs with an ensemble in mind and from the very start I tried to imagine how the tunes would sound played live by a trio. Most of this material was written or finished during a week-long trip into the mountains, where I holed up at a friend’s cabin in Wells BC. with a woodstove and a fine collection of eclectic roots music to listen to when I ran out of steam. I brought my Telecaster and my trusty Manzer acoustic, a small amplifier and a goodly supply of pencils and paper. Certainly the title song could not have been written anywhere else.

On the ensemble end of that spectrum are the equally lovely tracks Gone But Not Forgotten and Red Lights in the Rain, both of which feature harmony by the transcendent Rose Cousins.

I last saw Fearing play live, in Sackville, three years ago; it was a great night, a port in a storm of personal chaos that came just at the right time. If you have a chance to hear him tour this album, I recommend it.

Do you think Netflix thinks I like things that are controversial?

I had no idea that it was so easy to get VOIP chocolate in my Android peanut butter, but, thanks in part to a helpful old post from Dan Misener, I found that it is.

Longtime readers will recall that my office phone line (+1 902 892-2556) has, for many years, been a virtual phone number through Vitelity.

While most of my office communication these days is over email, Slack, Skype or mobile phone, I still get called from time to time on the office line and, 1 or 2 times out of 10, the calls are not the likes of  “can I speak to the person responsible for your office supply purchasing.”

I’ve been routing Vitelity calls through the Telephone app on my MacBook, with voicemail going to my email via Vitelity’s voicemail-to-email service.

It turns out that there’s a SIP client baked right into my Android phone; here are the steps to set it up for yourself:

1. On Vitelity’s VOIP site, create a new “sub-account” for the Android phone, with its own username and password.
2. In the “Phone” app, navigate to Settings > Calls > Calling accounts > SIP accounts.
3. Click the “+” icon to add a new SIP account.
4. For Username, enter the “Login” value for your newly-created Vitelity sub-account.
5. For Password, enter the “Password” value for your newly-created Vitelity sub-account.
6. For Server, enter sip1.vitelity.net.
7. Navigate one step back, to the Calling accounts screen, and switch the Receive incoming calls setting on.

At this point, if all went according to plan, you should see “Receiving calls” under the name of the SIP account you created on the phone. You can now go back to Vitelity’s website, and change the routing for any incoming number to go to this new client.

Everything went without a hitch for me; here’s what it looks like on my Android phone if I call my office number from my desktop (the office calling the office, in other words):

I accompanied Catherine to an appointment with a physiotherapist at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital on Friday.

As we walked from the waiting room down to her office, the physio turned, introduced herself to me, and asked me my name.

I told her.

And then I and thanked her for asking.

I’ve been to a lot of medical appointments with Catherine over the two and a half years since her metastatic breast cancer diagnosis, and this was, if memory serves, the first time that a doctor, nurse or other professional treated me as anything other than “that guy sitting over in the corner.”

I’m only a bit player in this cancer drama, and I realize that health professionals’ most precious and delicate commodity is human connection; they must, of necessity, ration it out.

But it was awfully nice to feel included, and welcome in the room. I wish it happened more often.

Oliver designed a sign to carry for this morning’s Silent Walk in Solidarity with Muslim Communities in downtown Charlottetown.