Something with a toilet flush sound effect for a name is coming to 104 Street.

By "here", I mean "The Quarters". Five Oaks holds quite a bit of vacant property here (The Quarters), including the re-vacated GWG building which has been supposedly being redeveloped for decades.

Well, it's something, and if it works, it could be a good start to things, but I'm taking anything involving Dub with a huge grain of salt nowadays. He's made a lot of noise over the years about doing things here, but not much has come of it.

So, I've officially moved in. It's an interesting experience because of all of the memories I have of the place as an airport. Given that my first word that I spoke was apparently "airplane", my dad used to bring me to the parking lot by the terminal or the observation area at the end of Runway...

Ahhh, I remember bringing my brother and his girlfriend in there to get a dozen back when I lived in the neighbourhood. The usual crowd of older dudes were there with their coffee and conversation, and the girlfriend stopped, looked at me and remarked, "I kind of feel like I have to be some kind...

Most Edmonton thing you can do.

They'd been around since the 1990s, hadn't they? I wonder if it's some kind of retirement with lack of succession case.

One of those places I used to go all of the time, and did good business, but I don't think I've been to a board game cafe since COVID came along. Not sure there's really a way to make that kind of venue safe without some serious ventilation.

Yeah, since they only count incidents and make no adjustment for population and they don't map crime severity indexes.

Bland suburban neighbourhoods as a driver of gang activity. We have a lot of the city where what there is for young people to actually do if their parents aren't up for chauffeuring them to team sports (or they're just not a team sports kid) basically amounts to drugs. If I'd grown up somewhere...

Our hotel landscape seems to have been largely set in stone back in the 1980s, leaving AirBnB and the like to actually contend with any shifts away from that pattern.

We do fall into an unhappy middle ground of "too built up for suburbanites" and "excuse me but is that a strip mall with a big box store and a large surface parking lot"?

This was an area that used to have a lot of gang activity back in the 1990s-early 2000s, including at least one gun battle over the cocaine trade. The environment seems to invite it. It's kind of on an edge of things, and more of a car space than a people space.

I was out doing a bit of recce before riding to the downtown market, and took a lot of the exact same pictures yesterday because of course we're all looking for the same sorts of things. At night I've noticed that there's a whole line of approach lights that actually light up along the approach...

When the other half and I were looking, we liked the Landmark homes and it was down to them and Encore. The Landmark home was nice, and very reasonably priced, but we got more of what we wanted out of the Encore. The basement suite, for instance, was finished from the get-go and has a fully...

Well, we do actually have subsurface infrastructure there now, and a MUP connection to the station.

We do indeed have a template for pedestrianized spaces with comparable setbacks.

That's really just the Mews, though. The houses are aligned with the ones just up the block where there's an actual street with on street parking and sidewalks. The actual setback from the municipal right of way is no larger. The front yard of the Landmark homes on the right is roughly from that...

High density development around a station that wasn't there yet would've been a bit of a hard sell. The station did arrive a year early, leading to something of a rush to build out the associated subsurface infrastructure, which now appears to be complete.

So, this morning my cat was quite insistent that it was time for a trip to the catnip patch. I let her out, and she dove right into it and is rolling around paws in the air. I go to look for my sandals so I can come out and supervise her and make sure she stays in the yard. Then I start to hear...