squwetchy Back in my own backyard I tried sketching the #garden bed and my tomato plants. This was a multi-step #sketch with first laying down a rough big picture, then painting, then adding shadows, and finally after it dried deciding I wanted to add a bunch more ink detail into to central subject, the bed itself, which definitely makes it pop…

adventuredog Sunshine and Saturday walks make this hot dog happy as a pupper.

More adventures in creating stuff outside ended with a quick #watercolour #sketch in the trails and a new #video to profile the whole thing. With a million big ideas in my empty days it’s also nice to grasp onto little projects that I can share in a moment of effort.

8r4dsfeets The theatre beacons but since the doors didn’t open for a few minutes we wandered around and crossed the #train tracks a couple times.

8r4d A Friday evening out on a double date with friends took us to Fort Edmonton and the theatre where we watched a pretty good musical put on by a local company…. plus we got to putz around the park after hours which was kinda cool.

squwetchy In my quest to do more quick #pleinair #sketching I’ve been attempting to think about the idea of the #10minutesketch … which is pretty self-explanatory I think. What can you get on paper in ten minutes? Can it capture the mood and the vibe of a place, in quick and messy wonder? The non-framed picture was painted in a park in about ten minutes.

8r4d Over the river and under the train. When I first ran over this #bridge it was a simple but popular footbridge but a few years ago became a train crossing with a suspended pedestrian path below. We ran across it last night and it’s weird because every time I’ve crossed this bridge in the past I seem to be in the cusp of some kind of huge adventure… a big trip, a physical recovery, a career change. It’s like there are symbolic places in our world that span the points between moments and simply moving through them becomes a mental marker for our soul to latch onto. Weird huh?

8r4d One last #downtown meetball run before I sign off. It’s been a minor blast having an excuse to revive some adventure #running in the middle of our marathon training season, but it’s a heckuva drive back and forth after a long day. #runcrew

8r4d Change is inevitable, and we can either change ourselves or be changed by the hands of fate. I've officially chosen the former. If you haven't already heard, I have given my notice at the City of Edmonton where I've worked for over 12 years and I will be moving on to something new at the end of this month. What that new thing is, looks like, feels like, turns out to be, all of that is up in the air right now. A few months to decompress. A few months to reinvent. And... then change happens, right? I have created a plan that is simultaneously fulsome and promising, yet open-ended and full of a hundred unexplored paths.There is some travel in the very near future. There is a lot of running to be done before the Chicago Marathon. Writing, definitely. But I've also left a lot of space to be filled with digging into my hobbies, reconnecting with people, and simply following the white rabbit into the wonderland of opportunities that I've been ignoring for years. It's an amazing privilege to create this space and I have an amazingly supportive wife whose shoulder has been there all the way. So? Onward. And stay tuned.

8r4d Sure, you’re looking at a photo of a tree that’s toppled over in the wind and giving it an indifferent shrug. But this tree held a weird and unique spot in my mind. It was a damn near perfect tree. I mean that it was almost a prototypical tree, like a kid’s drawing of a tree made real, a slender trunk with a cartoon shaped orb of foliage atop, exactly what the tree in your mind’s eye looks like, and it was in a storm drainage park and was not clipped or groomed or trimmed to get that way. It just was there accidentally perfect. And it fell over and died completely this week, snapping off at the base of the trunk and not even leaving a stump behind. So so so weird.

#rain in the #downtown got me into a meditative mindset this afternoon…

8r4dsfeets #publicart is commonplace #downtown #edmonton especially if we stretch the boundaries of what many consider “art” … my definition is obviously very flexible in that regard

pixelazy A view from the #commute out the window of the #train car, a blur of cars and people rushing to work and school in the #rain on a random Tuesday morning.

8r4dsfeets the #commute from door to desk took 80 minutes today and involved a bus, train, #rain and a lot of stairs!

pixelazy Puddles in the path make for impromptu spots for personal #reflection, both literal and otherwise.

adventuredog somebody made a big wet mess on this sidewalk, guys! #reflection

8r4dsfeets How can you spot a spoiled dog? Check out her #shopping basket!

8r4d I guess the kid was feeling a bit nostalgic when she picked out a #fathersday gift for me this year. When she was younger I bought us matching #tshirts off the internet of this “velociraptor riding a velocipede” which we both thought was hilarious at the time. Still do, but those shirts wore out and disappeared from our wardrobes a half dozen years ago. Well, she hunted down new ones for me and herself so that we could once again have matching shirts. A selfie with both of us, tho, was pushing it a little too far.

8r4d On this particular #sundayrunday the skies opened and we found ourselves #running 19k in the various waves of #rain and fluid #weather conditions as we wove thru the creek and looped along the trails. You can’t save your training for fair weather days or else you’d be hard pressed to find any days to train at all, and while we can run inside when the air is smoky (dangerously so) rain , as they say, is best avoided only when one is made of pure sugar and sweetness, a description that I’d not say applies to myself.

8r4dsfeets In the parking lot, as usual, for a #sundayrunday but the spitting rain was just a prelude to the downpour we’d eventually encounter about half way thru our #running adventure.

castironguy Almost every week for the last decade we make family #breakfast on #saturday mornings. Usually that takes the form of my epic chocolate chip #pancakes with all the fixings. But routinely we switch it up and alternate in either waffles or — in the case of today— #french #crepes (which I learned to cook while #volunteering at the Heritage Festival. It all adds up to deliciousness no matter how you do the math

castironguy Calling our #garden this season “the best one in years” is a low, low bar, but even so the investment we made to turn our backyard dirt patch into a raised bed is turning out to be a positive win. The slightly better access to putting the weeds in arms-reach has turned out to have a massive effect on the overall health of the garden itself. So it looks better, grows better, and is already producing!

pixelazy Random functional or artistic objects in public places to me always make those places feel lived in and loved. Whole.

8r4d What a view!