Edward Wedler and I were both instructors at COGS in the 1980s. Edward was teaching Remote Sensing. I was teaching GIS. Eventually, the uncertainty of contract employment forced us to move on. Edward and his wife, Anne, purchased The Inside Story in Greenwood. Heather and I disappeared, with family, to Indonesia, California and beyond. And yet, we still managed to keep in touch.
Edward and Anne both have a passion for Plein Air Art. This takes place in Nova Scotia from Spring to Fall and Florida in the Winter.
With the changing technologies, Edward has kept on top of the new online mapping tools. This allows him to map the location of Plein Air sites. Currently, he is trying to engage COGS in the links between Google and his online Plein Air maps. Again, opening up the possibility of collaboration between the college and the community.
Edward and Anne belong to six plein air art groups; three in Nova Scotia. Each year Edward publishes “paint-out” locations (50+ sites) for the season (PAAAV and PAAHRM).
He has also created a map at tinyurl.com/PleinAirMap to keep artists, art-lovers and tourists connected — locally, nationally and internationally. 
He uses Google products as these are more readily accessible to him and to the art community. The map currently has 5,000+ map views. Google also has loose connections between its many Google Drive products (eg Sheets, Forms, Calendars, Maps) that lend themselves to exciting R&D opportunities for an Innovation Hub. He feels that, with greater community college collaboration, students would gain by technical exposure to and training with Google Maps and related tools. The community would gain through local, shared incubator-projects in an Innovation Hub. The Hub would gain by scaling locally-developed solutions and building intellectual property.
Mapping Art can also be seen as the Art of Cartography. There is an excellent local example in the Valley. Marcel Morin, COGS graduate, has established the business, Lost Art Cartography.
For myself, mapping the landscape is fundamental to any decisions related to land use. It continues to astound me that the Municipality of Annapolis County does not avail itself of the resources at COGS to make ‘evidence-based’ decisions on land use planning in the county, on behalf of its citizens. This is relevant to Forestry, Agriculture and any climate change strategy.
Yet another reason for the ‘community’ to be actively involved in the research and development agenda at the Innovation Hub in Lawrencetown (I noticed today that we are seeing the framework for the new multi-storey structure). The clock is ticking……..
Footnote
In retirement, many elders find their passion in the arts, science or a combination of the two. Edward and I appear to be examples of this growing trend.
Acknowledgements
Edward for his passion for both art and technology.
References
Plein Air painting sites.
Marcel Morin. Lost Art Cartography.
“The writers from whom Dark Mountain has taken inspiration are grounded in a sense of place and time. In the deep time of geology and myth, in the rooted relations to the place of a tree or the navigational feel for place of a migrant bird.”
Sandra Barry forwarded to me an event notice, featuring Rita Wilson and Emma FitzGerald ‘
I had the opportunity to attend the Geoff Butler celebration at the Kings Theatre. It was a full house. The first half included a short film by Tim Wilson ‘
The book includes forty-six lullabies, from ‘At the Tiller’ to Wherever the wind blows’. Each lullaby has a painting and a musical score.
Afterwards, there was an interview with a psychiatrist about narcissistic behaviour fostered by Facebook and other social media tools.
From England, an old school friend, excellent cricketer and sitar player, Viram Jasani, mentioned that he is writing an autobiographical novel. This week, I finished reading Jane Smiley’s 
In response to my 
This weekend, we stopped in Truro on our way to New Glasgow. At the 
Heather had a full day Buddhist retreat in Annapolis Royal. With early morning temperatures of -20C, she walked from our house on Hwy#201 in Paradise to the CRIA gas station in Lawrencetown. She caught the 3W bus to Bridgetown. In Bridgetown, she changed to the 4W bus, and continued on to Annapolis Royal. This evening, she will catch the 4E bus at the Annapolis Royal Fire Department at 5:31 pm, I will pick her up at CRIA around 6:11 pm.
In my conversations with Edward Wedler, this relates back to the time when we decided to walk from Yarmouth to Georgetown, PEI, as part of our 
Today, I received a second book from my brother Peter. It is called ‘Maureen’ and is a collection of historic photographs, commemorating the life of my younger sister; thus, indirectly, our lives too.
It shows thirteen pairs of images from 
I reciprocated with photographs of two maps from my study. Polar Knowledge Canada and The Earth from Space, signed by Tom van Sant, from California days, 12/12/90.
With the storms, I have been catching up with my reading, especially the work of David Adams Richards. In Harry Thurston’s book 
The difference at COGS is that we have a specialized suite of technologies: Geomatics or Geographic Sciences, and we live in a more rural environment. (This rural environment provides a likely explanation for the residency component).
I found the following quotation from 
We live in changing times. This week, Nova Scotia Power inspected the solar panels on our roof. As part of the installation by 
From the bookshelf, I selected David Orr’s 
Ernest Blair Experiment 