Simon has been sick all week. Fever. We think it’s the 3 huge molars that are pushing through his gums. Gotta hurt. It doesn’t help that it’s also hot outside. I made the mistake of wearing jeans today. Panini on a patio on Sparks Street was decidedly unpleasant, aside from sandwich, the company (JD) and the yummy kidney bean side salad. Suzy and I both awoke this morning eager to talk about our intermittent nocturnal nightmares. Intermittent because Simon kept waking up. Nightmarish? You decide. Suzy dreamed she had to pee so badly that she did so in a public place, only to discover mid-squat that a surveillance camera was…

Tooth brushing escalated to a full-blown water fight with Jasper the other night. I just couldn’t resist tossing a cupful of cold water at his belly as he was struggling to pull his t-shirt over his head. I loved his reaction: Utter shock, followed by the most amazing laugh, and then a thirst for revenge. Within minutes the bathroom was soaked. Then Suzy arrived with little Simon. The Monk wanted in. Water flew everywhere, even out in the hall as the theatre of battle expanded. What can you do to top “soaked?” Apparently Suzy thought wet wasn’t good enough. Just as I thought the waterfight was winding down, she dumped…

Lush is a great word. Alcoholic implications aside, it implies air thick with lilac, and long wet grass. I love May and June best of all months, but I also feel I do a lot of jumping around missing things like the peak of the peonies. And that’s not conducive to deep meditative lung breathing or soaking up the dew. And writing in the Blog? As you can see, it falls down the priority list somewhere below plucking the crabgrass from between the walkway tiles. That said, I love writing. I don’t do it enough. It’s one of those things my psychiatrist used to say I should just give to…

The cabin and cottage are open for the season, and another family week in PEI is behind us. It was a great time. We were in swimming, even Simon, and had some delicious seafood treats. I’m a bit tired now, largely because of the work involved in managing two properties in a different province, but also because the transition from PEI to Ottawa always takes a few days. I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to spend a longer period of time at either Walden or Plover Dunes, or between them. There’s something more real there, something hard to describe. I guess it could just be the…

The photo at right was taken in late May of 1995. That’s my mom and cousin at the top of my hill here at Walden. They were planting the chestnut tree that Mom and Rod had given me for Christmas in 1994. I’d asked for trees that year because I had just bought the clearcut that would be Walden, and I thought it was my job to reforest it. It was my personal mission. I couldn’t imagine how a piece of land that had been so abused could regenerate and heal on its own. Silly me. Ten years later, I’d like to share some important lessons from the land: 1)…

Jasper’s in his element here at the cabin. He has Megan (7) across the road, 10 acres of trees, a wood stove and no official bedtime. He also has about a dozen black fly bites along his hairline, but he doesn’t seem to mind. It’s Megan he loves. And she seems to feel the same. It’s wonderful to see two kids having so much fun — running down the long red lane to the brook, tossing stones and occasionally holding hands. Megan’s not too impressed with Jasper’s generous exuberant mooning, his little stick legs and butt bared above sweat pants bunched up over rubber boots. She’s got two years on…

“I did not have sex with your father.” The conversation had started innocently enough. I was at the cash paying for gas and a Globe at the Hunter River Irving, when a woman next to me commented on the evil eye stare of Karla Homolka on page 1. “I wouldn’t even rent one of my cottages to that one,” she said. When I turned to reply, she cut me off. “You’re Hickox, right?” She looked like she’d seen a ghost. Or maybe it was the lingering Homolka effect. I knew who she was immediately. “You’re Linda, aren’t you? You dated my dad before he married mom.” “That’s right. We were…

It can happen without warning, like on a Thursday morning on the way to work. The only sign is a slight tightness in the leg, then sudden release. It happened to me this week, twice. CHF — Catastrophic Hem Failure. Two pairs of pants let me down on successive days. The tailor on the ground floor of my office building’s got it coming. If this happens to you — actually, not if but when — there’s a quick solution: Staple along the seam. Turn the stapler so the claw side of the staple faces out, and click along the seam of the pant leg. Then lift a dry erase marker…

Jasper knelt down on the driveway and swept up two fistfuls of fallen crabapple petals with his hands. “This is joy!” he said, and threw them in the air. He’d just written and read his first word on the sidewalk, in chalk: Bad. Soccer practice hadn’t quite tired him out. His Burgundy Bears beat the Mellow Yellow’s by one goal. Jasper got an assist. Simon had his first ice cream this past weekend. Maple walnut. He approved. The Monk will be 1 on June 15. I’m mourning the end of lilac season, but am looking forward to reliving it, as I do every spring. Jasper and I fly to PEI…

I’m exhausted. And I was just going to go to bed but I checked my Web stats for this site and discovered that more people read Walden today than any day over the past 2 weeks — which is odd; I haven’t written here since last Thursday. So I’m a slave to you, reader. Henry David Thoreau would be ashamed of me. The holiday weekend was a wash-out. Despite a sunny forecast, it rained for 3 days straight on my family camp site at Murphy’s Point. Suzy woke up in the middle of the night Friday and was so panicked about the kids being cold that it scared me. It…

What a week! If the House had fallen, Project Porchlight might have ended even before it began. We have a plan now, 20 pages of great details on how to distribute 60,000 compact fluorescent light bulbs. The Member of Parliament now suddenly doesn’t have to campaign for the next five weeks — so maybe we can move ahead quickly. Dan has made a nice little button to put on supporter Web sites. I’m so lame I haven’t even put it here yet, but it’s on his site. Thanks, Dan! But this weekend I’m taking a break. Thoreau would be pleased. I’m going to sit outside and watch the trees grow,…

Seeking value and pleasure in external things always leads to unhappiness. It’s a basic principle of Buddhism, and just common sense. Everyone knows, deep down, that the new car won’t make you happy, or the old Queen. So why do we cling? The car I can kind of understand, but a doddering old foreign monarch? Please. It’s time we put Terry Fox on the paper money. Instead of indulging in some artificial and useless sense of pomp and grandure, we can celebrate qualities that can inform and motivate our actual lives here and now. Clinging to the royal robe is is just timid. If you really have to, here’s the…

So Belinda Stronach has crossed the floor to the Liberals. Thank God, there may not be an election this Spring! But as the dust settles, the focus turns to Peter MacKay, Stronach’s boyfriend and fellow Conservative MP. Some say Peter feels “betrayed.” What comes around, goes around, Peter! David Orchard is probably smiling today, and there was no sex involved in that relationship (that we know of, anyway).

My brother told me tonight to stop writing about my vasectomy. “I only did it twice,” I said. “Yeah, and then you did the follow up part about the soldering bits.” It’s true that there’s only so much mileage you can get out of a little bit of spaghetti-like tubing–though I have to say I was amazed last week at a dinner party when a senior doctor (female) family friend leaned across the table over her pasta and asked me, “Is it dry now?” She’s been a doctor and psychiatrist for 30 years and never had the nerve to ask about this before. I was touched. “No, it’s still wet.”…

I have an idea. It’s consuming me. And for the first time since a few friends and I tested it last year, it looks like some seriously big partners just might buy into it and make it work on a large scale. I’ve been working on a proposal for the idea for two weeks, reading, researching, writing, obsessing. I get more excited, and more sure I’m just fooling myself. If the gap between awareness and action can really be bridged by giving out one free light bulb to every house in Ottawa, how come it’s not being done. But the evidence is striking, the business case strong. It’s almost a…