In She’s Letting Go (Again) Lisa writes eloquently about her decision to go exploring.

But it’s only by entering that uncertainty that I’ve been able to find a new path: learning to surrender, to do small experiments, to sometimes be played by life instead of conducting it. It’s been messy as I learned to trust myself. And while experience has shown me I’m trustworthy, I still have plenty of self-doubt each time I decide to leap.

“What kind of person would be right for Peter?”, one might once have asked.

“An explorer!” a sage might have replied.

What a joy it is to be alongside for the leap and what follows.

Stephen Fearing, in February, on pulling his catalog from Spotify:

What a relief! After years of holding my nose from the stench of @spotify. I’m taking down the music that I own. We must all pick our battles and I’m a very small player, but it feels good to take a stand alongside those I admire.

You can now find much of his music on Bandcamp.

I interviewed Stephen for the radio when I was 22 and he was 25. He was an up and coming folk musician with a new album; I was a squeaky community radio volunteer who’d never interviewed anyone before. We survived it. And we’re both still here.

Red Lights in the Rain.

Our Haviland Club improv troupe moved north to the Irish Cultural Centre tonight for a real show on a real stage with a real audience (of friends and family). And thus our private silliness became public silliness. And public silliness, I gotta tell you, is a whole different kind of silliness.

Much like writing a blog in public is different from writing a journal in private, performing on a stage with an audience is very different from practicing improv in the relative safety of the rehearsal hall. It’s both more terrifying—you can’t stop, the show must forge on no matter what—and more thrilling—you can’t stop, the show must forge on no matter what. Add to this that we are fledglings, who’ve only played together half a dozen nights, and had only ever done a full “Harold” from start to end a couple of times, and it was a risky high-wire act.

As with all improv, there were moment of sheer delight, moments when everybody suddenly forgot the rules and things went off the rails, and a lot of going way way out of the everyday comfort zone for all of us.

And in that shared vulnerability is where the real joy of improv lies: we live and die on the stage together. We make each other shine. We trade gifts. Our divine moments and our fuck-ups are shared equally. 

The show ended two hours ago and I’m still buzzing.

Me and Patrick Trainor walking with our chests way out, part of the introduction to the show. (Photo by Mike Rukavina)

The entire improv troupe on stage: Bridget, Berni, Me, Ann, Patrick, Sue, Pam and June. (Photo by Laurie Murphy)

There are some really interesting things happening in lightbulbs these days, and if you haven’t taken a look at lightbulbs lately, it’s time.

Last month I bought a Merkury Smart Wi-Fi LED Bulb Dimmable White at Walmart for $10 and put it in the front vestibule. Because we already have a Ring doorbell there, and the Alexa app can respond to sensors in the doorbell, I’m able to have the light come on when anyone enters the vestibule, and then off again after 2 minutes of inactivity.

The bulb is also dimmable via apps or voice speakers, so I can “Hey Google, set the vestibule light 30%,” which was nice when we had a vestibule dinner party.

Today at Home Depot I bought a Philips WiZ LED bulb for $20 that has IoT integration, and changes colours on command. So, variously, “Hey Google, change the lamp colour to blue” (…red …green):

What’s technologically interesting about these bulbs is their low price, relative to an earlier generation of IoT bulbs, their ease of setup, and, most of all, how it’s now possible to squeeze enough smarts into the base of a lightbulb for it to be communicated with via Bluetooth and wifi.

The inconvenient thing is that every brand of bulbs comes with its own app that needs installing on my Phone to support setup and integration with speakers and other devices: at present I have—let’s count… Apple Home, Google Nest, Google Home, Wemo, LG ThinQ, genie, Amazon Alexa, Ring, and WiZ—9 apps in total in the “Home” folder on my phone, each controlling a different but overlapping set of devices. Setup of these devices has gotten much much easier with every new generation, but the requirement for each brand to have its own app doesn’t scale much further.

As a result of this foolishness, my home wifi network presently has 30 devices connected to it, ranging from my EV charger to my laptop to my phone to my electricity meter reader.

What a great time to be alive ;-)

Why is it that my Google Home speaker can understand “Meh Groovle” and “Fey Rupal” from 100 feet away, and spring instantly to life, but its reaction to “Hey Google, stop,” when I want it to stop playing something, is to completely ignore me repeatedly.

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.