Bimbo Nebo

The 15-minute drive to and from daycare is where Scout and I often get some serious talking done. She'll plead for me to recite an animated Sesame Street clip in which a gorilla with a penchant for the letter G looks for a job at an employment agency. And I comply, repeatedly. I plead to her to keep her boots and socks on; she refuses, daily. I ask about her day. We scour the streets for buses and 'diggers' (any type of construction equipment). This week's conversation revolves around who can shout HELLO the loudest – easier done in winter with the windows rolled up.

Scout hit me with a knuckleball yesterday that took the duration of our commute home to untangle. At a red light, while glancing up at an idling bus beside us, she spoke thusly: BEE EMBO NEBO. 

A second time. And again. Once more, this time a questioning tone. She's burning a hole in the back of the headrest. I need to say something. Seconds tick by. I try my best. I turn it back on her: "Nebo?" Smooth one, Dad.

NEBO. BEE EMBO NEBO. She begins to repeat it, in a sing-songy way. BEE EM BEE O! BIMBO NEEEBO!

Traffic is molasses on Portage; I'm aching to get home. She's rolling over the line like it's gospel. It strikes me, with moments left before reaching the house. Bingo Was His Name-O. I sing the line to her.

YEAH, she says. AGAIN.

Crossing The Line

Few things baffle me – and now, as a father, terrify me – as highway accidents on the bald prairie on which I live and drive. Those ever-present two- or three-graph news reports of a driver who crosses the centre line and lays terrible waste to a life, or lives. No reason why, and never is one granted. I will save for another time those who careen, not braking, into the rolling thunder of mile-long freight trains.

A September weekend in 2013. We're leaving the city to visit the Cornell Creme operations as part of Open Farm Day. Navigating is one of my finest skills – I'll navigate circles around you and your GPS unit using the sheer power of my brain – but the directions to the farm are convoluted. The highway is ramrod-straight as we near our first turn, but it does not present itself among the hay fields and thickets.

A truck is approaching in the distance. I have time to look over at the map in Kerry's hands, pointing out the road we're traveling on. Peer up. The truck is two metres across the centre of the road. A nanosecond. Lock eyes with the driver. His eyes become saucers, and he corrects his course without a screech, a honk, any noise. No time to swallow my breath – and it's finished. I blink twice – and Kerry, head still in the folds of the map, asks me if we've passed highway number this-or-that. Scout, in her rear-facing bucket seat, bats at a dangling toy, sees the power lines swoop down and up, down and up and down. I say no. I say nothing at all.

Skills, Set

"Nunchaku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills… girls only want boyfriends who have great skills." – Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

Are you looking for an ever-evolving career in a fast-paced environment on the vanguard of the creative industry? Great. That's super. Me too… once in a while.

I wage a daily internal battle with my chosen career path. I absolutely adore its bare essentials, its sense of order. Structure. Hierarchy. Common sense, unless not needed. I realize now, sixteen years in, that's never going to go away. Neither is the push/pull of constantly nagging change.

I can accept change, pick and choose morsels of it I can use and enjoy. I wouldn't say I naturally embrace it. I anticipate it, but I have a pace I like to maintain. I'm a clinical thinker; I weigh and consider options before proceeding. I wish that was still perceived more as a benefit, and it may be in some circles. Just not mine, where expediency is fast becoming king and thinking things through can be a luxury. It's only with as much experience as I have, that I manage this balance and produce as quickly as can be required on any given day, from years of learning how the rules can be bent and shortcuts discovered and followed.

Look, I have discernible skills. I can differentiate vocalizations of a red-breasted nuthatch from a white-breasted nuthatch, eight or nine times out of ten. I can make pretty authentic farting noises by squeezing my palms together. I've made French toast. But it took time to learn those skills. Time that today's lifestyle doesn't often wait around for to develop – and that's not always fair.

But I also appreciate consistency, or a semblance of it. That can be the death knell for someone in my field. I think of my sister (the dentist) and brother (the teacher) and think, there's always going to be teeth and students. Probably even roughly the same number of teeth and students, year in and year out. I think, during sourer times, why didn't I think of that. There's so much variability in design, so much flux. Differences of opinion: paper is dying, paper is dead, paper has never been more in demand. Here's the Next Big Th… wait, here's the Next Big… wait, here's the Next Big Thing. 

Technology trickles into all careers. Certainly mine. It's a bitch goddess, giving with one hand and taking away with the other (I can't take credit for that nugget; it's an old Kids in the Hall line). Too much of the change in design is change for the sake of change. Chasing technology, as opposed to using it smartly. It's easy to get swept up. Even I do, on rare occasion. I have a cellular 'I-Phone 5-S' that I like to play the video games on. But I also take comfort in that those bare essentials of design, the skeleton, the nuts and bolts – will never change. And so long as they don't, I'll have a place and relish in it.

Dear Diary: January 1-4, 1985

When I was nine years old I got a diary in my stocking for Christmas, which I then used to half-assedly document the year 1985. A lot of it was spent chronicling the lives of my ookpiks and other plush animals, likely a case of suppressing traumatic moments in my childhood. I stuck with it for the whole year, which covered the back end of Grade 4 and the first months of Grade 5. I present to you, a curated look at This Day in Jeope, 30 years ago this week…

January 1, 1985

Dear diary: Today I read my book from page 104 to 131. My book makes me fall asleep. Brian Adams song was at 11:53 p.m. That is the song that was on when I was writing to you. Tonight I will read from page 131 to 151. Good night diary. See ya tomorrow!

I'm not positive what book I was reading; books were awarded in my Grade 4 class for acing pop quizzes. My best guess is either Underground to Canada or Anne of Green Gables. And I'm not sure which Bryan Adams song I was listening to, either. I'm hoping it was "Run To You" because damn, that song kicked ass. With the video? Of him running through the woods, finding his guitar under a pile of autumn leaves and then just laying into that solo? Come on. Kick ass.

January 2, 1985

Dear diary: It is the second day of 1985. Today was very busy. It is 11:35 p.m. We went to a movie called "Dune". We had hot dogs for dinner. It is warming up. It is minus 14°C today. Tomorrow it is minus 5°C. I will read from page 151 to 176. See ya tomorrow!

Dune was the only film I ever saw at the Met when it was a functioning movie theatre. My mom took us; she was a fan of the book, and though I felt it was just the best movie, what with those giant worms, and a greased Sting in his underwear and all, she thought it was an abomination. A year later, a friend and I snuck into The Living Daylights there and promptly got the boot. We went to the North Star to watch Adventures in Babysitting instead.

January 3, 1985

Dear diary: I almost fainted over vacuuming. I hate vacuuming. It was very warm. It is 11:51 now. I am wide awake. What should I do? Good night.

My brother and sister will tell you I never had to vacuum. I was usually tasked with wiping down the bannister and cleaning telephones and my mom's ashtrays.

January 4, 1985

Dear diary: Today was very warm. We deserve warm weather Sharon says because it had been freezing. Jacob made me feel terrible today. Sometimes I could just pound him. Bye! Good night! It's 11:41, see you tomorrow night.

Sharon is my mom's name. She preferred we called her that, until I got old enough to think it was weird – probably early in junior high or so, I'm guessing.

Not Safe For Work

We got this big-ass, arcing floor lamp years ago. Weighs a ton, costs a ton, that sorta thing. A couple weeks ago I used it to test whether another lamp's bulb was working, and the dealie – the housing, the goddamn whatchamacallit – goes right on ahead and snaps off in my goddamn hand. Like, right the hell off. And this thing, this fucking thing, it's just the flimsy aluminum doodad the bulb twists into, but it's like it's the fucking nexus of a whole goddamn million-dollar lamp. It's as if the International Fucking Space Station was held together by a goddamn 25-cent screw. Nothing functions without it. And so this doohickey, this thing in my hand, has a cracked hole-punched jobbie with a twisted little pellet-esque whatever missing. The socket – I know this word, at least – holds this fucking tinfoil housing with these custom pellet doo-bobs. Not screws – that would make too much sense. Not an adhesive. Not by twisting or clicking Part A and Part B together. No. It has to be a complete and total fucking jerk about what it's been put on Earth to do. Now we stand around like idiots in the dark because this bumblefuck whatzit refuses to be a sensible and inspired piece of engineering. A goddamn bulb-holding, tin-scrap, ass-faced… whatchamacallit… standing between us and a sufficiently-lit living room.

Resolve This

I hardly ever make resolutions. When I do, I'm certainly not going to be so cliché as to start them on New Year's Day. 

Resolutions so rarely eke their way into my consciousness enough to become regular habit – the lofty end goal of any Day-One promise to one's self. I think back to some of the few times I held myself to task for changing myself in one way or another. The first example, as I so often bring up, is this site. Go ahead: look back to the initial post on Jeopopolis and see. It was Resolution City. I made three, and would up with a solid C average, holding myself fairly well to one, and kinda sorta meh to the others (and if you could see me now, I'm wavering one hand side-to-side in a meh gesture).

A Twitter companion coaxed folks last December to perform 30 pushups, 30 crunches and 30 squats each day of the month. I did that. Scout would climb on me while I struggled with crunches in the early going. My shoulders would pop during pushups. But on New Year's Eve, I executed my final day's exercises at work – at the foot of my desk – when no one else was around, and whooshed through them like a warmish knife through a tub of margarine. On January 1, I stopped. Again, a solid C student, putting in the work required.

The best example of a resolution conquered would be a 365 photography challenge, which started inexplicably in mid-February of 2010. Everyone with a phone and an Instagram account does it now, but I'm proud of my mantra during that year of snapping a picture a day: No Crappy Photos. No shots of my feet. Nothing without forethought. And I survived days in which nothing eventful happened, days sick, days with my camera having been stolen.

OK. I make resolutions here and there, when I choose. It stems from one of my mom's fabled teachings: Just do it. But she'd never say it in the sloganeering Nike way. More of an exasperated, on the verge of cursing, I'm-telling-you-for-the-last-time way. It's how I would tidy my pig-sty of a closet, how I got my job as a paperboy, how I decided what to do after high school (since I'm not going to sit around on my ass doing sweet-tweet).

Later in life, my mom – the career smoker, sun-worshipper, red wine drinker, red meat eater – was sublimely impressed by a decision of mine to stop chewing my fingernails. In hindsight, perhaps moreso than my ability to land a good-paying job or father a child. She took my hand in hers and looked it over, saying – and I remember this clearly – "Jeope, that's amazing," and asked me how on Earth I did it. I told her I just decided to. I began with telling myself one hand was off-limits. Then, I allowed myself upwards of two fingers at any one moment; I could not have another until total nail regrowth was achieved.

I still don't do it. Kinda sorta.

Three Little Words

My daughter Scout is achingly close to telling me she loves me. I was fooled yesterday into believing she had spoken the words, while I clutched both her and a teddy bear and reading books before a nap. But it was there, in my mind, for a fraction of a moment: I LOVE YEW DADDIE. She said it. I heard it. It came out of nowhere. I had not mentioned first that I loved her. I was reading one of her stories (The Big Brag, the third of three tales in the classic Seuss opus Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories; she refers to it as BEARBUNNYBEARBUNNY, spoken in a pleading, read-this-or-I-freak tone).

But instant replay does not lie – she was talking to the bear. Like this: I LOVE YEW TEDDY. Nuts. 

But, because I often toss into our book-reading repertoire a hand-me-down tome called I Love My Mommy Because, she can now profess a love for Mommy – even if she is simply quoting a book (and so far, not to her face). She quotes a lot of books these days, and YouTube clips. Rote memorization. It's scary. She quotes her book Dude: Fun With Dude and Betty (HI DUDE WASSUP, DUDE WAY COOL GUY). She interjects her practicing of ABCs with random blurts of COOKIEMONSTER, like this Sesame Street snippet with Kermit the Frog and a girl named Joey. She quotes Cookie Monster (UMNUMNUM). She can sing JINGABELLS or OH BABY COLD OUSSIDE.

It's the beginning of that tantalizing and dangerous period in a family-with-a-toddler. It is fun to hear her beg for a HIGH FIVE, or echo a coaxed BUMMA DUDE. It will not be as fun to listen to her first GADAMMIT, or worse.

Well, it might be fun. The first time.

286: Inktober

My close friend Allan Lorde tuned me into Inktober, a drawing/sketching exercise created by Jake Parker and performed by illustrators all over the map through the month of October. Having drawn a grand total of four things this calendar year, I announced I was in before I even knew what I'd said/typed. I'd completed a similar assignment a few years ago, sympathetically hitching onto Kerry's poem-a-day-in-May challenge by spending time each day completing a sketch. It achieved great results; my drawing instincts were noticeably improved by the end of one month. So, why not do it again? And the pen/ink caveat laid out by Mr. Parker is as up-my-alley as anything ever will be, illustration-wise.

What to draw, though? Anything and everything. I figured I'd grant myself a maximum of one hour each day this month to come through with some sort of output. Some days, I imagine will be less. Some may be more, like this rhinoceros, where I had the opportunity to dilly-dally while home from work with a throat infection.

How come a rhinoceros? That's my own added challenge. Kerry and I are quickly losing track of Scout's ballooning vocabulary, so I've decided this month to draw 31 things that she can recognize. I finish inking a sketch, hand it to Scout, and if she correctly identifies it – I know I've done a successful job. Many of these things I'll also have never drawn before. Like a rhino. This is my first-ever rhino drawing. Scout ID'd it like a tiny boss.

285: Up, And Away

I was provided the opportunity at work recently to head out for a day of photography in the wetland and waterfowl mecca that is the southwestern corner of Manitoba. That in itself would be engaging enough – I can count the chances I've had to do such a thing over several years on one hand – but it was made all the more sweeter by a chance to hop in a plane and experience a gander from the air, snapping all the way. Those close to me know that, along with riding shotgun in a big rig, hitching a ride in a hot air balloon and a helicopter, getting a lift in a small plane has always been a bucket-list item. (Truth be told, the bucket-list item would really be in a floatplane, somewhere over the Canadian Shield, but who's complaining – and I still have years to go.)



It made for a long day. An 8:30 takeoff from the Brandon municipal airport meant leaving home before six for the 214-kilometre trip west. The flight was roughly three hours, flying over Pelican Lake, Killarney, Boissevain, Melita, Virden and back. Unprecedented high-summer flooding in the region was an unfortunate bonus; being able to witness swollen rivers, lakes and sodden fields from the air drove home what has been national headline news this week. And while I was scoping for very specific, bordering on technical, images, it was hard not to look out over the land and view the agricultural patterns as high art. (Note: the aerial pics I haven't included here, as they're for work purposes.)



The afternoon was spent on a solo mission, exploring the array of pothole wetlands near Minnedosa and gathering new images for our photo archives. Here, I got to hunker down at eye level and see the details. Sound swallowed up by roaring creeks. A great blue heron flushed from a patch of cattails. Wary canvasback broods skittering from my presence across the small ponds. An abandoned grain elevator, where I entered into a pigeon-infested darkness lit by a single window, startled by a galloping feral cat.


In the evening – on my eventual way home – I stopped along the TransCanada Highway at the Halfway Tree, marking the unofficial midway point between Brandon and Winnipeg. The tree has existed for eons, and can be spotted many kilometres away. I'd forever been meaning to get a shot of it, and I waited a few minutes for a brief storm to clear out to capture it under an active prairie sky.

Note: Click on any of the images to view them larger on Flickr.

284: The Phoenix

Following years of smooth sailing/status quo, an opportunity recently arrived to revitalize Conservator, the magazine published by my employer, Ducks Unlimited Canada. For years a dependable quarterly workhorse for the organization – and a staple of my workday routine – Conservator steadily adjusted and adapted over the last few years to accommodate belt-tightening. Most recently, attempts to house the magazine exclusively online eventually resulted in much internal debate to find the means to reintroduce, and reinvent, a print edition for our somewhat non-conventional (older/rural/western) readership – while attracting new readers to the mix.

The magazine has long been a centerpiece of my design career. I've had the responsibility – and the prize – of designing Conservator (and its French-language equivalent) in its entirety since 2002. Fanning out issues from those salad years through to the present day reveals a steady growth in my design abilities and sensibilities – and during the magazine's heyday of photo budgets and freelance writers I strung together spreads that evoked pride and anchored my portfolio. I explored trends, texture, colour and typography. I showed off. Sometimes I flew by the seat of my pants. The stories often inspired me, and in turn I did my best to complement them with an ever-increasing toolbox of skills and intuition.

Above: Been there, done that – the last of the red hot ice cold previous designs.

Even as times became leaner and the budget dried, I've remained engrossed in piecing together each issue. The number of magazines produced each year fluctuated and the situation trundled toward an inevitable online-only presence – a period that commenced in 2013 following one last big score: a plush, 80-page special edition highlighting Ducks' 75th anniversary that featured a cover that, for the first time, featured one of my own photos.

The online issues performed admirably enough, but there was no longer the grand prize of a paper-and-ink/flesh-and-blood printed piece in hand. I missed that, and was not alone in this sentiment. Talk began to swirl of a modest return to print, culminating in an issue released two weeks ago that showcases an new, entirely redesigned Conservator.

Above: Some guts – featuring words, messaging, and all that other non-design-related stuff.

Chief among concerns was the magazine was becoming overly institutional, and it was reflected in the design as articles became more hard-news, straight facts and concise – but less entertaining. My hands became frequently tied, as department pages fell by the wayside, swapped for a deluge of single-page articles and press releases that lent themselves to Macleans-style templating. A primary aim of the new-look Conservator is storytelling, and I couldn't be more in favour: storytelling is a key facet of design as much as it is with writing. And the better-written the magazine is, the more I want to fight for it.

Also paramount is photography. It's been Conservator's bread and butter since I hopped aboard, and I've held firm the belief for ages that for this magazine, pictures are invaluable – and as designer I'm not to stand in their way. (I know, I know, the old adage exists that Content is King and I'll tow that line, but come on: I'm a designer. Design is King.*)

To further the theme of letting the photography do the heavy lifting, I crafted a simple masthead of Garamond, tightly kerned with a custom R-V ligature, to replace the previous one that had held firm on Conservator covers since 1999. Though, only after experimenting in the concept stages with a flashier masthead (below) that I ultimately nixed. The Cabrito family and Intro, an online freebie, were selected for more decorative purposes. Two holdovers, Bembo and Gibson, remain on body copy and shorter-article headline duty, respectively.

Above: An earlier concept, thankfully felled by the wayside.

Now, as is so often the role of the designer, I quietly take a backseat and await the results, and the feedback. Early response has been promising, and if the aim of this issue is to build a renewed sense of excitement around Conservator, generate interest (and advertising dollars) and then springboard to something eventually resembling a standard, quarterly production run once again – I've done my best. 

Time will tell whether this all takes place. For now, I'm just proud of this quiet return to the game, and happy to hold it in my hands.

* OK, fine. They can both be King.