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.