Wood-fired pizza. From a truck. 30 seconds from my house. We thought ice cream-proximity was amazing; this kicks it up a notch.

A window of opportunity opened in space-time to allow L. and I the chance to spend a night by the shore together.

We arrived mid-afternoon, and after some now-expected “oh shit, the fridge stopped working” distractions, and some (very buggy) tomato and dahlia planting, we got our bathing suits on and walked down to the beach.

That we had our suits with us at all was due last minute trips back into our respective houses, and even as we were walking to the beach I think both L. and I thought there was a snowball’s chance in hell that we’d actually go in the water. It’s June. The ice just left the harbour, what, two weeks ago?

When we got to water’s edge we put down our sundries and ran toward the water with carefree abandon. She dove in, head first. I followed.

We then spent a remarkable 20 minutes floating down-harbour with the current. The water was crisp, but not inhospitable. We glowed with the feeling of having defied probability, of having followed each other into the unknown.

Relationships can be subtractive—“I thought that love meant, if I go down, you go down with me.”, as John Kim wrote in Single on Purpose—or they can be additive, a gateway to places inaccessible individually.

L. and I took a leap into the ocean.

Whose idea was it?

I don’t know.

But we couldn’t have gone there alone.

Cutting room floor during wedding prep (not mine!). Words by Christy Moore from The Voyage.

On the way back from a lovely summer solstice party in Belfast we stopped to take sunset photos at the church in Cherry Valley and were gifted a bonus rainbow.

Stan Rogers sings Down The Road by Mary McCaslin at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, CA in May 1983.

Five days later he died in a plane crash. He was 33 years old.

Chip Scanlan interviewed Jeff Pearlman and asked the question “What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?”. His answer:

My dream from boyhood was to become a Sports Illustrated writer. It was everything I wanted. The goal of all goals. Then I achieved it at a fairly young age (I got to the magazine at 24) and sorta kinda came to the surprising realization that chasing a dream is oftentimes more engrossing than the dream itself. I arrived at SI in 1996. I left in early 2003. I loved it—but after a while, it grew sort of stale and repetitive. The dream was 50 years of SI bliss. The surprising reality: It lasted a mere six years.

Personable CBC Radio host Matthew Rainnie and I, both fans of WKRP in Cincinnati, are fond of reminding each other of the episode where Howard Hesseman’s “Dr. Johnny Fever” character returns to the station after a hiatus and is given the overnight slot, taking on the nom de guerre “Heavy Early.”

Matt has more than passing familiarity with the heavy early, having been up before the dawn for many years as host of Island Morning.

I have never been a morning person: left to my own devices, free from school runs and other exigencies, my natural tendency has been to sleep in as late as possible. A decade ago, once the walk to school was over for summer, it wasn’t unusual for me to get up at 11:00 a.m.

This has all changed of late: L. and her daughter are an up-with-the-sun family. Religiously. And, on the other end, asleep-well-before-10.

There was simply no way my languid hours were going to work in this coupling, and so I changed. In the end it wasn’t that hard: I simply cut out the 2-3 hours of television watching every night that took me to the edge of midnight, and started going to bed at the same time as Olivia, around about 9.

On the other end, I have been using the Sleep Cycle app to both track my sleep and to wake me up at the theoretically-optimal time in a given half hour window, generally between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m.

It was a struggle at first, but I’ve managed to exorcise the Heavy and it’s now almost second nature.

The effect has been dramatic: I’ve traded in 3 dead late nite hours for 3 bright early morning hours. I’m not running marathons or cooking griddle cakes with this new time, but I am having much less rushed and frantic mornings, enjoying my coffee, doing some reading, heading into the day rested and ready.

And, on occasion, I’ll be up and out the door earlier than I ever thought possible: we’re amidst week one of an experiment renting out L’s car on Turo, and so are sharing my car for the week. This morning it was at her house and I was at mine, and I needed to run Olivia to her day program, so I walked over to L’s for breakfast at 6:15 a.m., and was back home, car in hand, for 7:45 a.m., ready to parent.

Beyond the new spring in my morning step, this re-engineering job gives me a tremendous sense of agency, a realization that being a “nite owl” and not a “morning person” was as much a story I chose to tell myself as it was a natural truth. That realization is a gateway drug to discovering what other inexorable aspects of my life are similarly so.

My talented neighbour Doug noticed that our garden table was languishing away against the fence in our back yard, and offered to rescue it.

This week he returned it, freshly sanded, with the legs repaired with threaded rod set in epoxy.

A great gift from a generous man. And one that will be deployed as we host L’s family and mine later today for a barbecue.

I had a curious conversation with one of my favourite authors last month, a privilege and a joy. It was a conversation about work and creativity, and he pointed me to Chip Scanlan as an important influence on his writing.

Scalan’s 33 Ways Not To Screw Up Your Journalism is free for the Kindle (Canada | USA) today, a promotional effort that, witness this blog post, is working.

From the introduction:

Journalism uniquely has the power to hold up a mirror and show us all who we really are, regardless of ideology, identity or place.

It is a discipline that, at its best, breaks through walls of deceit to shine a light on solutions to our world’s most complicated problems. Using timeless storytelling techniques, journalists illuminate the human condition.

Anne Janzer says in her book “Writing to Be Understood, “We need people who communicate across chasms in beliefs and understanding, healing the divisiveness that characterizes current public debate.” That’s the job of the journalist.

There’s a Pride window baked right into the St. Paul’s Parish Hall.