I woke up this morning to this view:

I then went for a swim. The water tends to be on the cooler side in the Georgian Bay, but with the weather we’ve been having it’s pretty perfect right now.

At this point I’m thinking about a beer and some reading. I have Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty sitting in my car. It’s next in the queue.

I am telling you all of this simply to be transparent. 

Recently I had someone caution me that I should be careful about being too public and too open. I won’t get into specifics, but I was told that sometimes it’s better to just fly under the radar.

I recognize that there have to be limits to transparency, but as a rule of thumb I subscribe to the opposite approach. When possible and when appropriate, I would rather be more, rather than less, transparent. 

This blog is who I am. It’s indicative of how I think. And it discloses what I’m doing. So I don’t see a lot of downside. What you read is what you get. You’ll know if we should be friends and/or do business together.

After I wrote about what I’m doing next I had a bunch of emails come in from various people telling me what they’re doing and, in some cases, suggesting that we work together. Some people had development sites that they thought I should take a look at. And some people immediately asked if I was hiring.

I am grateful for each of those emails. But I also know that they’re an outcome of openness and transparency.

I woke up this morning at 5:30 am in a hotel in Ottawa.

I then drove to Brébeuf, Quebec to meet some friends for a ski and snowboard weekend. (It’s beautiful here.)

Upon arriving I was faced with a large hill that my rear-wheel car with all season tires was absolutely not prepared for. So that sucked up about an hour of time.

After we unstuck my car, we then spent the day skiing and snowboarding at Mont-Tremblant. (First day of the season for me.)

At this point all I can think about is a good night’s sleep, so I’m afraid that there won’t be much of a post today on Architect This City.

But please feel free to hijack the comment section and talk about whatever you would like. Maybe we can get some action started there.

I would actually be really curious to see what topics interest all of you.

I just got home from a weekend up at a friend’s cottage. It’s an annual birthday tradition and it’s always a great time. A good cottage weekend can do wonders to reinvigorate yourself. I am ready for the week.

But since the Pan Am Games closing ceremony fireworks are about to kick-off and I want to go watch them from my sun deck, I don’t have a lot of time to write a post. So instead, I thought I would share a few of my photos from the weekend.

The first photo is near Shelburne, Ontario. The wind turbines are from the Amaranth Wind Farm, which is the largest wind energy installation in Canada.

This is the Georgian Bay. I love swimming in this water.

Cottage reading: Monocle.

The wood shop. There’s a lot of creative talent at this particular cottage.

Creemore = cottage.

All of these photos were also posted to my Instagram if you’d like to follow me there. The last photo was from Snapchat (donnelly_b).

Regular scheduled programming will resume tomorrow. I have a great guest post queued up on road pricing. I can’t wait to share it.