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.

gamerdad

I crossed the 100 hour mark in #fallout4 about 18 months ago just before I quit playing. Quit is the wrong word tho. The game has been squatting in my mind since then, tho rather than jump back into my #oldsave in which I made a few questionable choices in my #characterprogression I opted instead to kick off a new run thru and focus on some of the things first that triggered big gains when I’d discovered them last time, but later on.

For example, three hours in I built my first supply lines between camps and #iykyk why that’s an early game #gamechanger

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.