OK, so that last post (below) is a bit grim. Thanks for calling. Maudlin and self-indulgent fall far short of suicidal. Besides, I’m too busy to be self-destructive; I’ve got 100,000 more bulbs to distribute! One e-mail this morning was different. It seems I’ve inadvertently restored a part of my old Walden site that is popular and shocking. It’s definitely sweet, and hot. Old Sister-in-law (see also below) is single. On the prowl. And she’s threatening me unless I take down the offending web page. So it’s coming down tonight! See if you can find it! Big prizes! You have 10 hours. Go-ogle! JD has sent some alternate photos (one…

Tonight I remembered Aberfan. Not sure why. I’d had a couple of beers, some meatloaf and laughs with the in-laws and then came home mad. It’s been like that since I was a kid, except for the beers that is. It’s a grim wisdom, finally coming to terms with never being really happy, despite everything, even surrounded by abundance, and love and beauty. Simon was screaming, fighting sleep after snoozing through the meatloaf, when I remembered the date. Forty years ago this week in a mining town in South Wales an entire school of kids was wiped out when a 40′ tidal wave of coal sludge slid down a mountainside…

Someone commented here recently that she senses spiritual growth happening in my life. I hate to say this, but she’s wrong. I just spent nearly two hours trying to figure out how to restore some gems from the old Walden Cabin site to this “new” one. Why? I haven’t written a bloody thing in nearly a year, and I’m grouchy. So I resurrect some old Maclean’s pieces I published, and pop up some Jordan or Alaska photos from press trips, and I have this sense of accomplishment. Meanwhile, all the software I used to play with to edit this site since I started blogging in 2001 (yes, five years ago!),…

I noticed this evening that the leaves are largely gone. Summer is a blur. The water’s still on at the cabin; it’s time to get some bales for around the bath house. And now I find myself clicking through Alaska pictures I took four months and a lifetime ago. With Porchlight in full swing, it’s great to have the distant touchstone, even if the irony of flying around the world to watch glaciers melt isn’t lost on me. These pictures just don’t capture the scale. Three hundred feet of thousand year old ice pinching down between two mountains to the sea, chunks the size of bungalows busting off and falling…

“Climate change is the greatest all-round threat this country faces,” he wrote Oct. 16, “and … my nation’s government should not let us down with half-measures, a curtsy to junk science or a sell-out to the tar sands.” Independent MP Garth Turner. “We don’t think that energy efficient lighting is appropriate for Official Residences.” So sayeth the all-powerful National Capital Commission. Last spring I tried to schedule a photo shoot at Rideau Hall with the Governor General changing a bulb at the Head of State’s Official Residence on Sussex Drive. And why would that be so crazy? After all, it’s a home in Ottawa, and we have a mandate to…

I’m a pessimist. I’m a writer, but I have doubts about whether or not I even spelled that right. Or correctly. But I’m also changing. Two years ago I started a job at an Ottawa marketing company, after years and years of running my own business. I was scared sh*tless about working at an “agency.” It didn’t take long to discover that people hide in jobs where there’s structure and false formality. One of the partners at my old employer is single-handedly keeping that good company from being Great. And nobody will ever do anything about it. Back in April, one of the partners of the same firm told me…

I’ve made my YouTube debut, just days after the two 20-somethings that invented it sold it to Google for $1.6 billion.

Every now and then things just feel right. I finally bought an iPod, after a whole lotta wasting time fretting about it. See, I’m the kind of guy who can order and pay for a cedar porch or outdoor shower and grape arbour from 1200 km away, but spending $160 on a digital music device paralyzes me. The iPod rocks. I’m running again, and now I can toss the old Sony mini-disc playlist. The disc in rotation features In-flight Hungarian, the Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir and The Petshop Boys. Even my mother noticed how I have less stuff around the house. I’ve been downsizing for months. I LOVE IT. Last…

I love my electric bike. But it’s no longer cool. It’s now legal to ride. Mine was duct-taped and bungied all summer to get me to work on the daily road to resurrection for my light bulb project. I loved the informality and uncertainty of a one horsepower motor strapped precariously to the frame of my 1989 hybrid Bianchi, still showing scars of a crash that nearly killed me in Gatineau in ’90. I’m pro helmet. Look closely at my right eye for the stitches scar. Jasper is taking karate. Simon wishes he could too. He’s a real swinger.

Someone said Margaret Atwood may not be the best spokesperson for our friendly neighbourhood bulb campaign. I read somewhere that she will only do interviews with people dressed in red; Porchlight’s colours are blue and green. Damn. So that leaves us Sarah Harmer, Jim Bryson. No reply yet from Sarah’s agent. Alanis Morisette would be great, although I betray my uncoolness when I refer to her only as Alanis, her pre-Jagged Pill self. Even I had big hair back then. Another person suggested Dan Ackroyd for his Ottawa connection, but I immediately think he’d be better at slinging drinks than bulbs. I’ve been wrong before. Many times. Suzy regularly calls…

Suzy brought Canadian Living home last month. The pumpkin pie on the cover sucked me in, but it was article on Margaret Atwood’s “no-holds-barred approach to energy conservation” that caught my attention. My heart leapt when, a few paragraphs in, the interviewer asked, “If we gave you a magic wand and you could make one change to Canadian society, what would it be?” One change. A great idea for a campaign. Someone should do that. Then Ms. Atwood said “…let’s ban leaf blowers.” Celebrities are so hard to reach. I wish I could just call Ms. Atwood up and tell her about Porchlight. I think she’d like it. Notwithstanding her…

The Porchlight launch was a success last week. Mag Ruffman was super — animated, self-deprecating, irreverent. But the media in Ottawa is taking a “been there, done that” approach. That’s fine. We got such good coverage of our test campaign last year that I can understand it if we don’t get on the editorial page again. The Ottawa campaign is just beginning, but it’s really over. The hardest part was getting it going, quitting my job, losing the first contract to get this program going, then rebuilding it within weeks. And now that we have surpassed 30,000 bulbs delivered since last week (!), more than we delivered in 8 weeks…

We’re back blogging. No more tears. It was sunny today. I planted grass, raked. Listened to the Montreal Jubilation Choir on a mini disc that Iburned 3 years ago – and have forgotten how. Then I balked again at iPod, even with Dan urging me on. Jasper hosted his first annual “Best Plane Festival.” Five kids showed up. We made paper airplanes from on-line patterns. The last new design I’d learned before today predates the space shuttle. Porchlight’s growing. 26,000 bulbs out in 10 days. About a dozen strangers showed up at the new office today to volunteer to deliver light bulbs. It’s astonishing, really. 8:15 am on a Saturday…

I went to Futureshop tonight to buy a webcam for the Boler. Funny, last time I wrote here I didn’t know what a Boler was. And then I came home and had a teary meltdown with Suzy when I remembered it was five years ago today that Dad died. I tried to distract myself by looking for a memorial notice in the crappy PEI Guardian. They don’t publish memorial notices on-line. So I Googled Dad. No hits. Five years is all it takes to vanish on-line, if ever you were even there. Heck, his name would have appeared lots of times from my self-indulgent ramblings about our complex relationship. They’re…

Our contractor at the cottage told us that we’d get through the summer with the 1980 roof; he’d reshingle in the fall. Bad idea. Suzy and I braved the tail of tropical storm Barbara on the rooftop overlooking St. Peters Bay and the Gulf of St. Lawrence soaked to the bone and blackened by four bucketfuls of tar. It’s tough to spread tar in a downpour, even a tropical one, warm. At least the bugs weren’t bad. But at one moment I looked across the roof at my squatting tarred-up wife of seven years and felt all warm. At last: We’d managed to find some time away from the kids.…