My new Brompton folding bicycle fits neatly inside the back hatch of my Kia Soul EV. The combination of the two makes for a convenient intermodal pairing, of the “how about I meet you at your place and we cycle from there,” where *there* is far away. 

We spent a delightful afternoon in Hope River at a second-day wedding party for our friends Cian and Mary. L. took this lovely photo of me and Olivia.

I’ve sped up my haircut cadence, popping in for an impromptu cut yesterday morning to Ray’s while walking home with Olivia from a Brighton visit.

I always forget that Ray’s is open on Saturday mornings until 12 noon, so it was nice to be reminded by a happenstance wander-by.

The Apple Reminders app is deeply integrated into my life: I use it for my shopping list, my monthly and yearly accounting, to keep track of bills to be paid, and to manage personal projects.

As a steely own-the-infrastructure enthusiast, until today I’d been using Nextcloud to sync my reminders across devices; after watching this YouTube video, I’ve reverted to iCloud syncing, as doing this unlocks a bunch of features—folders, tags, sub-tasks—that only iCloud supports.

The video also proved helpful for understanding a bunch of reminders features that I wasn’t using, or wasn’t using well.

Arrived by courier this afternoon. A present to myself, because, well, I’ve lived through a lot.

And I’m clearly not nearly nerdy enough yet.

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.