Autumn always seems to arrive and depart quickly. It’s officially still summer, but kids are back to school, and it is much cooler.

This week I began my tidying spree, following the Marie Kondo method, which I learned more about from a book I found in little free library. My relationship with clothing is strange; maybe I’ll write about that later. For now, suffice to say, the way I decide if I really love something, is if I’ve ever asking myself _where is my ___ when it’s gone missing under a pile of other clothes, or is in the dirty laundry. I don’t have many clothes like that. I pretty much cycle the same few things that I absolutely love.

Work was intense this week, as expected. It was my first week of really experiencing what being a parent + working feels like. So, that was humbling.

In the 1001 albums project, I was exposed to The Doors and The Stooges, as well as a favourite I already had: Lost in the Dream by The War on Drugs.

This week I read a book called I who have never known men. It seems to be making waves among people in my circles, right now. It was a haunting, reflective book, and it was excellent.

Also, I found a new fount this week that I really like. I'm using it to write right now, zoomed in and taking up a large portion of my screen. Averia Serif Libre.

Work picked up for me at the end of this week, and it’ll be even hairier next week. I’ll be jumping into a high velocity Node.js backend yellow-field application. Hopefully it will go ok.

To be honest, there isn’t much time between work, eating food, child care, and trying to keep our home from looking like it was tipped up-side down. I have found the time to write a few blog posts, which I’ll publish at some point. For now, it just feels good to write.

I finally finished my cargo bike video, and posted it online. This will be my last YouTube video for a little while, I think. I’m not entirely convinced making videos is something I want to keep doing. But we’ll see, the spirit might capture me in a few months when I have a more normal schedule.

For now, I plan on chipping away at all the projects I’ve started. No starting new ones. All ideas will go into the "Project Ideas" list, from which I will someday pick something; it’s my hope that the good ideas will stand out from the riff-raff after some time has passed.

This week: Parties, working again, painting, etc.

This week was my first week back at work. It was good to see coworkers again and get back into this way of things. In my downtime I made progress on my painting which I documented last week. I added quite a bit of green in the bottom left corner and for a moment considered that I didn't actually know which was the bottom left corner and tried looking at the painting from a few different sides. I still like it the way it's been going and I don't plan on changing that.

I also did some more research on traditional american style tattoos, and tried a few more designs with acrylic ink. I learned about spit-shading. Not sure how I feel about it. Seems toxic.

We threw a shindig for my partner’s birthday, which went almost entirely according to plan, minus a swarm of bees that enjoyed the food alongside us.

I also made it to a significant wedding for a beloved, old friend of mine. Words fail me to describe how special it was.

I started considering moving my site to Ghost (again), now that Ghost 6 was released. It has it’s own fediverse features in it now. By migrating, I could host my own blog and fediverse solution. I really liked Ghost, too, although there are trade-offs for both it vs a standard SSG. Either way, I’ll be doing some more writing soon.

This week: the end of parental-leave, bike stuff, tattoo-flash, painting.

I’m returning to work tomorrow; this is my last week of parental leave. I’m feeling very grateful to have gotten 8 weeks off. I think the transition will be challenging for us, but we will adapt.

This week I got out for an evening ride / errand-hang. I picked up a Wald 157 basket off marketplace to attach to my Clydesdale fork. It’s a massive basket. The seller cited that it was too big for their wife whom they had bought it for. I got it for $60, regularly $120 + taxes new, so I was pretty stoked about that. Since getting the clydesdale, I’ve been rocking a standard milk crate on the front fork, but this basket is wider and longer. I biked to the east end with my friend Chad, bought the bakset, zip-tied the thing to my crate, and then went to check out the new Portlands park in the east-end of Toronto and get some ice cream. It was nice to have an evening out riding my bike after weeks of staying in parenting. The new Portlands park is gorgeous, too.

Yesterday, I put the basket to the test and loaded it up with 3 12-packs of sparkling water and some groceries. It was slow handling but it worked really well. I’m seeing that cycletrucks/short-johns definitely have place in my bike shed — they fill the gap of being both a commuter and hauling medium-sized cargo when getting out a full-sized cargo bike is not necessary.

I’ve been trying my hand at drawing traditional tattoo flash. I watched a few videos to understand how artists approach doing fades, linework, and what materials they use. Other than maybe acquiring a speedball b-5 nib, I’ve got pretty much everything I need: abundant watercolours, acrylic ink, india ink, and lots of paper. Most of my sketchbooks go neglected right now; I only have time to draw one thing a day, and that goes directly into the hobonichi journal where I also write up the day.

I started up an abstract painting at the beginning of the week. With painting, I usually have a mental block in preparing materials and your palette that can be a bit hard to get over—it really doesn’t take long, but I find it hard to get over that. Once I do, however, it’s bliss.I’m not sure what it’ll be, but I’m enjoying just playing with colour and brush strokes.

It seems the only markers of time passing right now are my nails growing and my repeating todo tasks telling me that another week has passed. Didn’t I just clip my nails? Didn’t I just balance my budget? The heatwave has returned and so it feels like we are in a cycle.

My latest fascination in stationary are isograph pens and glass dip pens. I’m wanting to start mixing my own inks using acrylic ink and need to find an appropriate non-fountain pen means for dispatching ink that also won’t get clogged up.

It was a week of good records in 1001 albums land. I’ve recently really enjoyed To Pimp a Butterfly (never listened to it before!), Red Headed Stranger, You want it Darker AND The last broadcast. Outside of the daily albums, I’ve been enjoying the latest release by Wayfarer.

Other notes:

• Went on our first family road trip
• I continue to wake up in the middle of the night delirious, semi-freaking out about where my child is
• Still running, but less frequently due to the heat.

The heatwave finally broke and things have cooled off here. Running has gotten much more pleasant, and I’ve been able to get out on the pavement and get more runs in.

I finished reading Akira—I’ve gone through all six volumes in the last 3 weeks. I still can’t get over the incredible detail in the background design, especially the panels with drawings of buildings.

Lately, I'm thinking about time management and prioritizing things. I was thinking a lot about this before we had a kid too. For the month of August, I'm trying something new: I pick one main project and one secondary project to advance for the month (and I'll try not to start new things or get distracted from these two.

I've been playing around with using Bear as my notes app instead of Obsidian, despite it's subscription fee (I'm happy to pay a small fee monthly for good software, right now). I like having an iOS/mac native app with out of the box syncing, widgets, and a simple, effective UI/UX. I think I'll give it another month or two trial. Having my notes in two separate places isn't the plan; I'm more using Bear for things like blog posts and project notes, whereas Obsidian is more of a comprehensive personal wiki + day-log.

Other notes:

• Sleep deprivation is the new norm
• I got a lesson in sharpening knives from my pal Frank
• Squirrels have chewed through our ceiling; they haunt me at night.

Another week of finding our footing as new parents. A few friends have asked what that’s like, but I can’t really describe it. There is a lot to do, and that is good in itself, as I don’t think my mind could process this big of a change if I had idle hands. Does that make sense? I slept three hours last night. There is love, joy, challenges, and sleep deprivation.

We did something called a Meal Train so that our friends and family could support us. So many people signed up to bring us meals. It really made us feel loved and supported.

With my limited time, I’ve taken refuge in paper journalling. At the end of the day, I write up what happened and try to squeeze in a drawing. Lately I’ve been drawn to traditional american style tattoo flash and have been practicing drawing them.

Projects

• Slowly chipping away at a video for my bike youtube channel.
• I bought Affinity’s universal licence and have been playing with doing some book design. It’s very satisfying. I’ll make a photo book for a recent trip to Ireland and have started working on one for our baby’s first year.

Media

• I joined a listening group for "1001 albums you have to hear before you die". Lots of fun, and having something I can consume in a controlled / intentful way during newborn days is nice. It pushes you to listen to an album a day.
• Been listening to non-fiction podcasts and audiobooks about space.
• I finally watched "The Rehearsal" with my partner and it’s great.
• I’m re-reading all of Akira, and am about half way done it. I’m constantly in awe of the attention to detail, pacing, and the story as a whole.
• Been playing a new game called "Peak" with a friend, which is a good low-stakes game you can chat and catch up over.