My old doorbell was predictable, easily understood, and never broke. It chimed when someone pressed it. It was ugly, though, and when it came time to fix up our sadsack front porch, it caught my critical eye.

My new doorbell is much smarter, and can see, but is seemingly an unstable paranoiac. I suppose it would be happy to chime when someone presses it – and the chime is Big Ben or some shit – but it will absolutely not stop there. It will scan for human faces and alert you if one gets remotely close; not only the mailman, but someone pushing a stroller along the sidewalk will earn its suspicions. It will then send your phone a panicky notification entitled “Human Alert - Doorbell”.

Not “Neighbour Detected!” Human Alert.

It’s also quite suspicious of one of our neighbours’ car’s wheels, periodically sending “Human Alert - Doorbell” with a little picture of a wheel.

My daughter and I both get the notifications and we have taken to yelling out “HUMAN ALERT!” when we get them.

It’s not easy to find out how to disable the preemptive paranoiac “alerts” without turning off notifications when someone RINGS THE DOORBELL, yet this was a very well-reviewed “smart” doorbell, a situation that beeps loud alerts about how my attitude towards new technology has become decreasingly enthusiastic – and also sounds a loud klaxon about the informational value of the current-day Internet – and even squeezes a little, follow-up clown honk about my interest levels in said Internet.

All that said, I found the setting to toggle to turn off these alerts, and hovered my finger over it - and left it as-is.

Yesterday I went with my kids and some of my extended family to High Park. My sister got my daughter interested in catching leaves. Catch a leaf, have good luck for the year, so they say. The mid-November winds were stirring up quite a number of leaves, and my daughter caught so many that we wound up having some questions about luck. Did leaf luck stack? Would two leaves mean you’d have two years of good luck, or one year of double good luck?

Later, I thought to myself: I don’t believe in luck. I do some superstitious and/or OCD things - always putting my left shoe on before the right. But deep down I don’t believe in it.

Today I biked along the beach. We are enjoying a warm spell; the scene was remarkable. Clear sky, ripples of reflected sun sparkling on the lake, wind rustling the leaves, warm enough to skip the jacket. I decided to meditate near the water and as I did so, a gust of wind dumped about ten leaves all over me.

Was that lucky? I thought. I hadn’t caught any and, goddammit, I’m meditating, I shouldn’t be fussing about leaves. So I got back to it and ignored the follow up leaves that continued to alight briefly on me during their gravitational journey

When I was done I felt a hit of regret: I had missed a chance to be potentially very VERY lucky for a year or more.