This is #ProjectNomad

January 14, 2018: There would be no foaming today. Lucy and I woke up in Fredericton, New Brunswick, just over three hundred kilometres from our final destination at the family farm in rural Prince Edward Island. And frankly, I think we were both really ready for the trip to be over. It was a beautiful sunny day, no real lingering trace of the harsh winter storm that had chased us to the motel the night before. We let ourselves sleep in, and after checking out hit the Sobey's

Y'all, this is a post about sexual violence, so if that's a trigger for you, best not to read any further. I caught up with a guy I know over lunch the other day, and the conversation turned to a mutual friend of ours, a woman he used to date. She'd recently been sexually assaulted in her workplace, and she'd been pretty public not only about the trauma she'd endured, but about her struggle trying to go back to work in this environment. "She's doing okay," my friend said. "I

I had a conversation with a friend of mine the other day, and it got me thinking. My friend is about my age, mid-thirties, and he's already accomplished a hell of a lot in his life. He works in the corporate world, in a management position. In his twenties, he was something of a rising star, a prodigy. But lately, he said, he seemed to have plateaued. He'd risen as high as he could rise in the foreseeable future, and he was having philosophical differences with the people abo

Is this just an excuse to post lots of pictures of my dog? Read on to find out! This dog has changed my life in so many wonderful ways. Both Laurence Gonzales and Victor Frankl write about how one of the keys to resilience is in finding someone or something to care about outside of yourself. My partner and I adopted Lucy nearly four years ago. She was a California stray who'd been given five days to live in a kill shelter, and was rescued by the Raincoast Dog Rescue Society o

My summer in the wilderness has officially begun! On Friday morning, I picked up a UHaul from North Vancouver, loaded up my bed and couch and some kitchen supplies from my storage locker and with my friends Arthur and Megan in convoy, headed north to Pemberton, British Columbia, the closest town to our new summer home. Before I left the city, though, I collected my brother Andrew from the Seabus. Andrew had booked his visit from Toronto before it became apparent that this wou

This was one of the first creative projects I tried in the kitchen during #ProjectNomad. One of my go-to things to cook has always been pasta with chicken, pesto and Alfredo sauces, and a bunch of bell peppers and maybe some broccoli thrown in. It's simple and hearty (that describes most of the things I cook!), but when I started #ProjectNomad I wanted to find an alternative to the store-bought, heavy cream Alfredo sauce I'd been relying on. I suspected that if I could make m

January 12, 2018: We'd made the right decision by bailing out on Syracuse yesterday and driving late into the night to get to Boston. That road-stop McDonald's dinner was paying off; on the TV in the Motel 6 that morning, the news showed footage of a hellacious winter storm battering Syracuse, while it was still about twelve degrees Celsius here in Framingham. We'd stayed ahead of the storm, but it was coming. Today's agenda would see us drive north through Maine to the Canad

I'm intending for #GetOutside to be a recurring series of posts about my ventures into the wilderness. Cogburn Beach on the east side of Harrison Lake, about 150kms northeast of Vancouver, BC, has become my go-to three-season camping destination. I've camped here from April to December, and while it can get crowded in the summer, in the spring and fall it's practically always empty, and it's not so far away from the city that you can't make it an overnight getaway. Plus, if y

By the time you read this, I'll be on the move again. Lucy and I spent three lovely weeks in Vancouver. Our friend Sassy May very kindly offered her couch to sleep on, and we made full use of that couch and the rest of her apartment, too. I even got to cooking again, which was a tremendous relief after more or less a solid month of road food. And it's been wonderful to be back in Vancouver. The weather has been hot, and Lucy and I have spent a lot of time wandering along the

So things have calmed down a little bit on the whole 'stealing babies' front. A little bit. Maybe. Trump hadn't signed his Executive Order when I was thinking about what I wanted to say in this post. I recognize the situation is still dire and reprehensible but, hell, it seemed like we were on the brink of something even worse. And I suspect we still are. The spark that ignited #ProjectNomad was my breakup last summer. (Indulge me on this.) It came out of nowhere. In the span