My friend Robert says that self-help groups are the path to wellness happiness, so I’m turning to my readership, some of whom are experienced parents, for assistance with an entirely practical matter: getting Oliver to sleep.

When we were in Spain in May, Oliver finally twigged to the fact that he could climb out of his crib, and so when we returned home we had to retire his crib and move him to a single bed all of his own. Since the switch we’ve mostly failed at getting him to stay in bed the night through, and therein lies the problem.

The usual routine is this: we put Oliver to bed about 10:00 p.m. (he has, since birth, been a late-to-bed, late-to-rise child, and as this suits our schedule, we’ve no problems with it). Sometimes he’ll fall right to sleep, sometimes we’ll have to lie down beside him until he falls asleep.

He’ll then sleep soundly for 2 or 3 hours.

Then, around 1:00 a.m. or 2:00 a.m., he’ll wake up, get out of bed, and come looking for Catherine and I. If we lead him back to bed he won’t stay there, and if we lie down with him, no matter for how long, he wakes up and cries when we get up to leave. If, somehow, we manage to escape with Oliver asleep back to our own bed, he’ll often repeat the exercise again 2 hours later.

This all adds up to an exhausted Oliver, and exhausted parents. And the more it goes on, the more exhausted we all get, the fewer thought resources we have to apply to a solution, and the more established this broken routine becomes.

I’m sure our experiences are not unique. Can others offer war stories from the sleeping frontiers that might assist, or at least make us feel better that we’re not padding the halls alone.

Here’s the description of tonight’s episode of Access Hollywood:

Previewing “The Cooler” starring William H. Macy; going on tour with singer Michelle Branch; looking at what’s new on DVD.

A movie, called “The Cooler,” starring William H. Macy and Michelle Branch, wherein they tour together and watch DVDs. I’d go see that.

I must be doing my job: I’ve finally disturbed someone.

It’s true: when you phone the company formerly known as just “Xerox,” they answer the phone “Thank you for calling The Document Company: Xerox” (try it yourself: call 1-800-275-9376).

One of my clients has a big Xerox digital printer — it’s about the size of a Datsun 510 and prints 136 pages a minute. We’re in the middle of a project that’s pushing the capabilities of the machine to the edge, and this has meant that we’ve had to make good use of the company’s technical support resources.

So far, I’ve been very impressed: they’re taking our problem seriously, have assigned resources to it, and they communicate back to us regularly about the problem.

I’m in the middle of reading About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made by Ben Yagoda. Reading about the 1920s and the 1930s in New York, about the Algonquin Round Table, and about the contents of the Magazine during those days, I’m struck by the degree to which the New Yorker was “weblog like.” Or, to be fair, the degree to which the style and subject of modern weblogs echos the style and subject of the Magazine in those days.

Although I would never suggest any resemblance between what you read here and the missives of E.B. White, reading the internal memos of the day wherein White and Harold Ross and others describe the role of features like Talk of the Town and Newbreaks, I realize the great influence the New Yorker style, and White specifically, has had on my writing.

Just out of interest, how many of you in the Readership are regular New Yorker readers?

A week or so ago I happened to have a period where The Guardian was mistakenly delivered to my door every morning. One day I opened the mistaken paper and a tabloid titled “Charlottetown Race Week” dropped out. For a brief second, until I clued in, I thought that our fair city had been struck by a sudden expression of racial openness to the extent that an entire week had been dedicated to exploring the issues of race in modern Prince Edward Island.

Then reality struck, and I realized it was all about yachts.

If my reading of the subtleties of Island weather talk is accurate, I think that today can be best described as a “large” day. Beautiful, sunny, a nice breeze, a feeling of endless promise in the air. Better and more noticeable coming after almost a solid week of rain. Take advantage.

Perhaps this is in the “things everyone else has known about for years” class, but I just discovered, by accident, that when viewing a web page in Camino if I just start typing, the page will automatically just to the first occurence of what I type. For example, if “FOAF” is halfway down a page, by the time I’ve typed FOA, “FOAF” is highlighted and the page has scrolled down to that section of the text.

This may also work in other browsers, I’m not sure.

There are two types of people in the world: those who listen to the spiel about the Empire Theatres Stash Your Trash program and think it’s a good idea, and obey by placing their cinema trash in the containers provided, and those, like me, who refuse to act as a corporate shill, and enthusiastically leave their trash under the seats as God intended.

If the full trash cans are any indication, mindless conformity is winning, and few are profiting from the ironic delights of disobeying corporate garbage policy.

After watching David Neeleman on Charlie Rose and finding his approach to customer service interesting, I went to the JetBlue website, and used their web form to ask David to lunch.

Now I’m pretty certain that (a) I will never get a response and (b) David Neeleman is too busy and important to have lunch with the likes of me.

Which got me wondering: who isn’t too busy and important to have lunch with me, and where is the cut-off line?

For example, I’m pretty sure that if I invited my local City Councillor, Clifford Lee, to lunch, he would come. Same thing for my local MLA, Bobby MacMillan. If I made a compelling enough case, and took advantage of some connections, there are a couple of members of Cabinet that I could probably get to the lunch table. But I’m pretty certain that Premier Binns falls in the “too busy and important” class.

I’m pretty certain Dave Moses would come to lunch. But probably not Brian De Palma. And somewhere between the two of them is a dividing line that separates the lunchables from the unlunchables.

In music: Sally Taylor, Jane Siberry, Stephen Fearing, Lucy Kaplansky, Garnet Rogers, yes. And James Taylor, The Dixie Chicks, Bono and Mick Jagger, no.

I could probably swing a meal with Ian Hanomansing, but not with Peter Mansbridge. Dick Gordon, yes. Noah Adams, no.

That all said, I’m reminded of the wise words of a former teacher of mine, Judy Libman. She went to the huge University of Minnesota and took first year psychology with hundreds of other students in a large lecture hall watching recorded lectures on closed-circuit television. One day she decided to go and seek out the professor on the television, and when she found him she was amazed that she was the only student who had done so. And he was amazed to see her, and compelled by the notion of meeting a real live student. He asked her if they laughed at his jokes. They got on well. And both profitted from the meeting.

And I recall the experience a professor from Trent who got into Harvard mostly because he bothered to apply when so many others didn’t even try, because they assumed it was impossible.

So maybe David Neeleman will write back, and maybe we will go to lunch. Never hurts to ask.