I started this newsletter off in the spring by talking about my favourite word: fecund. Boy, does it sure apply this week, simply teeming because Alberta leadership has been flooding the zone. And the rest of us are left to clean up the mess. The forced reversal on the zoning bylaw and the referendum conversations are essentially the same but at different scale. We are at a crossroads on who we are becoming; a welcoming city and province or one that pulls up the drawbridge and only allows...

After years, no decades, of waiting for a non-chain coffee shop to open in the north east, imagine my surprise at discovering two in ward tastawiniyiwak in the last 4 days. I hear there is actually a third, which I haven't visited yet. When I first moved to Edmonton as teenager in the 90s, my parents wouldn't let me drive south of the Yellowhead. My sister and I scoured the Yellow Pages for any place with "cafe" in it's name, to only find a bar right off Yellowhead Trail. Then in the early...

I recently got a new basket and reinstalled my saddlebags on my bike. Without them, there was an additional friction to using my bike for errands. Even so, I still had to convince myself to ride to the store and back when we were running out of bread last week. The total trip took only 29 min but even more important were the human connections that I made in those short 29 minutes. I met and chatted with a junior high student from my workplace, who was unlocking his bike at the same time as...