The Song Remains the Same

Well, every time I say that I am going to write more frequently on here, and every time I wait a month again until posting. Why is this?

-I am busy. 12 hours of my day is dedicated to work, and when I get home I relax for a few hours, watch some tv and go to bed.
-I have a girlfriend. I spend several evenings each week and most of the weekends with her, which doesn't really leave me much of a chance to "blog."
-I live in NYC. When I am not w/my gf or working I am usually out and about in the greatest city in the world.
-What is the point of "blogging" anyways? Do I add any useful information this bloated and cumbersome internet? I'm not particularly eloquent in my statements, and never feel as though I have the time to edit them, because if I saved them as drafts, it would be two weeks before I actually read them again.

Anyways, the holiday season is upon us!!! This is an exciting time of year for many reasons, one being that on Thursday evening I head back to Kansas City for a week of relaxation and non-work. It will be much needed, as the job is super stressful right now, with clients and bosses and contractors all pressuring me to get things done. Plus, many of my CAPD friends will be in town for a few days, and I'm sure that we will have some good times. I was told by my father that there is a good art collection in the JoCo, so I might have to stop by that over my break as well as hit up the Bloch/Nelson and/or/maybe the Kemper. My visits to KC are always so hectic! Anyways, that is life.

And just a warning, I will NOT be posting my "best of 2007" albums. With one exception...

You Are Not Really Here

Vacay

After a very stressful fall, it's now time for 8 days of rest and relaxation in good ol' Kansas City over the Thanksgiving weekend. As I'm sure all of my very few readers can understand and relate to, this working thing is stressful! Ten hours a day of dealing with contractors, clients and bosses can really start to take its toll after a while and every now and then you just need a break!

The great thing about going "home"[as many of us still refer to it as...and indication of things to come?] for a vacation is that it usually can save you money! If you're staying at your parents house, that means a week of free meals ["Oh, we haven't seen you in forever, lets go out to eat!"], lounging on the couch reading and watching TV and drinking coffee, playing with pets that you'd like to have yourself but have no time/space/money for and raiding the pantry for snacks that you're too cheap to buy for yourself.

I am, however, fortunate enough that my dad bought my whole family tickets a while ago to go to the MU/KU football game at Arrowhead this Saturday. With the teams being ranked #3 and #2 repectevely, it is going to make for quite a game, that's for sure...let's just hope that MU can pull it off, because I'd rather have Iran win than KU. Yes, these are bold statements, but KU is the root of all that is evil, the spawn of Satan...you get the idea.

New York City is starting to get into the spirit of the season, as only New York can. Walking around the city you are start to notice the lavish decorations, from the giant Christmas tree being adorned in Rockefeller Plaza, to the delicate and luxurious window dioramas in the department stores of Bergdorf's to the lighted garnishes that hang over all of the streets in Astoria. Tis the season and nobody does it better.

Oh yeah, it's also the time of year for some pretty amazing sunsets:

Forget about your house of cards*

A very stressful week of dealing with bosses, contractors and clients and listening feverishly to the latest Radiohead album have caused me to do a lot of thinking. And one question has kept reoccurring in my mind, today especially:

What truly warrants being a good architect?

No one is perfect, but what causes a person to design Fallingwater and what causes a person to design the local 7-Eleven? It is a vision of perfection and design genius, a "Howard Roark" among men? Is it a good client? Is it luck? Or is it the fortitude and persistence to tough out the hard times, and fight for what you believe in? Even though you may mess up the location of a steel beam, or caused the fireplace to be off-center by a mere 3 inches, is it enough to be considered good? Am I good enough? What will my "videotape"** be? When I am gone, how will people remember my work, and me as an architect?

Or is my work irrelevant? Perhaps my stature as a "good" architect has more to do with the relationships that I make with clients and contractors and that bringing a quality of happiness and satisfaction to a life that was previously not there before. Perhaps it is not about whether or not I detail a baseboard flush or recessed, but it is more about the way I can make a client feel when she sees the tarp pulled back, the full height of her two-story glass wall seen for the first time, it's massive span striking us both speechless.

Being an architect is much more complex that I had ever imagined. Even those who at one point seem all knowing and infallible show their weaknesses sometime, and you are left alone, searching for an answer that is nowhere to be found. Never would I have thought that I would be figuring out how to build a complex chimney and dealing with needy clients and contractors in the same day.



*I apologize in advance for the scattered nature and briefness of my post, as I am still reeling from the days events. A more coherent post will hopefully follow.

**reference to "Videotape" off of the In Rainbows album by Radiohead.

An Open Letter

Dear Chicago Cubs,

You just got swept by one of the worst teams in the National League. You had a three game lead with 6 games left to play. Your lead is now 1, and is dwindling by the minute. I love you, but the way you are playing, you don't deserve to go to the playoffs. Why oh why do you let a mystical curse control your destiny? Take your future into your own hands. I wish you the best, but because of the results I have seen, I prepare for the worst.

Your loving fan,
Sam

An Ending

Last night I finished one of the longest, greatest novels that I have ever read, Leo Tolstoy's unforgettable War and Peace. Everything that can possibly be said about the book has already been done, so I'll spare the novice critique. All I will say is that I laughed, I cried and I really got to know the Rostovs, the Bolknoskys and the Bezukhovs. And right now I am experiencing a feeling of melancholy and regret, wishing that I did not have to say goodbye to my beloved friends and damning myself for reading the book as fast as I did, somehow hoping that my slower reading would have somehow postponed the inevitable.

One of the great threads in the novel is the conflict of life and to somehow defeat death so as to live on in eternal happiness. Towards the end of the book I was wishing that Prince Andrey would somehow discover this magic token so that we both could live together another day and continue to share our intimate secrets. When once our moments together were temporarily postponed by the clatter of an arriving subway car, now our time together is done, his life doomed by the shrapnel of an errant grenade, mine to be inadequately replaced by the next character who fails to reveal himself so completely to me.

Pierre, Natasha, Andrey and Nikolay:

I will never forget you.

Tolstoy

And again he was saying the same words; but this time Natasha in her imagination made him a different answer. She stopped him, and said: "Awful for you, but not for me. You know that I have nothing in life but you, and to suffer with you is the greatest happiness possible for me." And he took her hand and pressed it, just as he had pressed it on that terrible evening four days before his death. And in her imagination she said to him other words of tenderness and love, which she might have said then, which she only said now..."I love thee!!...thee...I love, love thee..." she said, wringing her hands convulsively, and setting her teeth with bitter violence...

And a sweeter mood of sorrow was coming over her, and tears were starting into her eyes; but all at once she asked herself: "To whom was she saying that? Where is he, and what is he now?"

--Natasha Rostov

Summertime in the City

Lost in Boston

...
Drinking rum and chocolate
A hundred thousand blinking lights
Making me exhausted

This past Labor Day weekend I was fortunate enough to visit my cousin and her boyfriend in Boston, MA. Previously, my only visit to Boston has been a weekend after my senior year of high school in which I was forced by my overzealous father to walk the entire Freedom Trail, reading almost every plaque along the way. There is nothing worse than struggling through a humid August afternoon listening to your father point out every minor piece of American history while your sister complains that she's hot and tired and your brother complains that he hates family vacations and while his mother yells at him that he should not say such things about his family.

Fortunately, hanging out with differently family members in Boston the second time around turned out to be much more fun! After an extremely impressive performance by Battles Friday night, I awoke with a spring in my step[more so than normal!] early Saturday morning to board the 8am Greyhound bus to Boston, MA. It had been a long while since I had seen my cousin, and when she picked me up at South Station 4.5 hours later I was still in high spirits. I could go on about every little thing that I did while in Boston on the last weekend of summer, but instead I will limit it to just the highlights/disappointments[dum dum dum!].



My cousin lives just a few blocks away from Fenway Park, but we still got a chance to walk through the lovely Beacon Hill district of Boston, famed for housing many famous people, John Kerry, David Lee Roth and Robert Frost [in no particular order] to name a few. Walking through this quiet and serene part of the city I started to get a sense of the easy-going way of life that differs so much from the stress of my daily grind in New York.



Shortly after Beacon Hill we took a lunch break along the beautiful Charles River. Looking out across the water one could see Harvard and MIT in the distance, with a throng of sailboats playfully darting back-and-forth in the lazy summer afternoon, a crisp breeze keeping their sails taut with excitement.



Since I was with my cousin and girlfriend, I did not want this trip to be solely about architecture, but the one building that we had to go and see was the new structure by the always controversial, sometimes successful duo, Diller + Scofidio. Their ICA building in Boston received lots of attention in the media after it was opened, so I figured that I should check it out and try to form my own opinion about it. Sadly, as you can see from above, the building did little from the outset to inspire one to achieve greatness, as you approach the ass-end of the building across a broken-up piece of asphalt parking lot, trying to zig-zag your way through a myriad of chain-link fences and parked cars. Upon turning the corner though, one really sees what the building is about.




A giant, cantilevered platform extends out from the ass-end of the building and into the harbor, and it is clearly apparent that D+S had one thing in mind when they were designing the ICA: what the building would see/be seen in the harbor.



Upon entering the building, you are whisked up 4 stories via a large, glass elevator, a view of the harbor always visible between floors as you ascend. When you reach the top you are briefly lead through several small art galleries before fed into the room-with-a-view, the moneyshot of ICA, an uninterrupted viewing space of the harbor that you have been glimpsing throughout out your visit. It's a tried and true technique, one that seemed to be much more impressive at the deYoung, yet it seems as though something was forgotten here. Perhaps is is the miniscule amount of art the one sees beforehand, and the instant gratification of the view, or perhaps it's due to the fact that looking out over a blank canvas of water is not as visually stimulating as looking out over a hilly urban city, but I felt quite let down as I turned around to walk back to the stairwell that led me down and out, and a quick scam of $12. Sure, the Louis Bourgeois spider was pretty cool, but I still can't help feeling cheated by the lack of substance behind the ICA. A project similar in scope, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art seems to be much more successful, largely due to the fact that they don't just rely on the view to sell the building.

Anyways, I didn't mean for this to turn into a rant on the ICA, but so it did. I had a great time in Boston, spending quality time with my cousin and co, and would recommend that everyone take a trip there, if not so you can see this famous piece of brutalist architecture, the Boston City Hall:



[oh yeah, the rest of Boston is pretty cool too!]

A quick update

Well, this past week has been intense. I've got a big deadline this Friday at work [drawing set is due], but tonight I had to take some time off to see an old professor who was visiting the city with his students. It was a good break, but now it's time to prepare for tomorrow night, which could be very long. The goal is to have all of our drawings plotted off by the time we leave the office Thursday night, so that Friday all we will have to do is send the set off to the copy company and deliver them to the site.

Plus, Friday night Battles is playing a free show, one that I have been looking forward to. And it is also Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of summer here in NYC, and I will be celebrating it in Boston. Any recommendations on things to see and do?

Wow, it's been a while

It seems like every time I do post on this blog, I apologize for not posting in a while. I don't really have any excuses, except for maybe the fact that by the time I do get on here to post something, I feel like I never really have anything to say other than posting about the mundane triteness of my everyday life. I am not the greatest story teller like my boy Easy-E who gets to be in movies, and I don't have the cynical old man rants like Corpo Corbo, and part of me wonders what the point is? What is my blog for?

My title says "a place in space for the thoughts and musings of me." I guess my thoughts never transfer very well into print. I have thoughts, as we all do, I just never seem to be able to deliver them in an effective manner via the world of the blog. One of my personal shortcomings has always been my inability to "Express [My]self," both in my architectural discussions and in my everyday interactions with people. I guess that I get nervous about what people may think and that they may not like me and what I have to say.

Back when I was younger, my parents called me Silent Sam, so one can see that this has been with me all throughout my life. Sure, now I talk a lot more, but as many of you have witnessed, it's not always quality, and even still I always seem to be holding something back.

I think that maybe I am going to try and start using this blog as a way to get over this shyness, and hopefully it will be updated much more frequently, if not daily [that may be stretching things a bit, I am a busy NYC man afterall!]. Ok, now a quick update about my life:

This summer has been one big blur. Ever since Memorial Day, I have had something to do almost every weekend. I went to San Francisco for a mini-CAPD reunion which was a blast, I had a private flight up the Hudson River corridor by a great pilot-friend of mine, I have had my parents visit me, I have had my girlfriends parents visit me, I have visited my family in KC for a family reunion, I have seen the Bloch Building [fantastic!], I have had several sets of friends visit for the weekend [KC and STL], I have gone to free concerts [Spoon! Animal Collective! etc], I have had my brother visit for a week after spending a year in Germany, and I have just returned from a weekend in Philly.

Whew! See what I mean, I don't have time for the likes of you, Mr. Blogger, I'm a busy man! [see tongue in cheek]

However, not to sound pretentious, but I have also been very involved a reading a long, yet engaging piece of literature, War and Peace. I feel that this book is teaching me patience, something that I desperately need in my life, something that will help me both professionally and personally [I've been reading for about 6 weeks now and am a little over halfway through]. Ok, that's it for now, I leave you with a few photos, hopefully more soon!


Let's go flyboy!


Hazy view of NYC from the Cessna 172


If you read the fine print you can see KSU CAPD on display @ the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum!


Serra at the MoMA


Waddup Yo!!!!


Yes, that's a parrot on that guys shoulder at the Spoon concert...only in NYC


Gabe was just in town for business, one night only

...

There's nothing here but empty space...

a pathetic end to a long night[yet strangely satisfying]

Those of you who know me know how big of a Cubs fan I am. When I was living in Kansas City I never really had many opprotunities to see the Cubs play, as the Royals are in the AL and the Cubs are in the NL. Now that I live in NYC I have the once a year chance to see the Cubs play the Mets for a three game series at Shea Stadium. Needless to say, when I found this out several months ago, I immediately went to the Mets webpage and bought tickets to see the game that took place this past Wednesday night. For the past few weeks I had been anticipating the game, hopefully to see my Cubbies take on the surging Mets.



After a day of rain, I got to the stadium to see this view from my seat, where I sat for three hours waiting for the rain to stop. It was 10pm before the rain stopped, and I was quite depressed at the thought of not getting to see my team play in the one opprotunity I would have all year. At 10:15pm the game finally began in front of a very empty Shea Stadium. I only paid $9 for my ticket, which on a normal day would have allowed me to watch the game from the nosebleed section, but due to the misfortune[or luck] of rain and a delay, I took a chance and ran down to the lower section of the stadium and took my seat 7 rows behind the Cubs dugout! I could not wait to see the Cubs pound the Mets after destroying them 8-1 the night before.



But of course, the game was a typical Cubs disaster. Into the 7th inning they had only one hit and were losing 4-0. Being that it was 12:30am and I had to work the next day, I took my tired and weary Cubs soul and headed for the #7 train, content that I had gotten to see my Cubbies play, but disappointed in their poor performance at my one time this year to see them play. They ended up losing 8-1 with only 2 hits.



Another exciting experience that I had recently was a trip to the NYC Ballet to watch the performance of Romeo and Juliet. Now before anyone makes a smartass comment, my main reason for going was on a date with my girlfriend who loves ballet. Anyways, The show was pretty good and I had a great time. It is always fun dressing up and watching all the people out enjoying a wonderful spring night in New York City.


Structure:

Modesty

A few weekends ago I was fortunate enough to be offered two free tickets to go and see Modest Mouse perform in Harlem. Of course, I took the tickets and embarked on an extensive voyage into the nether regions of New York City, a place that has always been stereotyped as drug ridden and dangerous.

Upon reaching the venue, I was surrounded by a variety of hipsters, some old and some young, some granola and some corporate. While on one hand the crowd was very similar, it was also quite diverse. I guess I would attribute that to the recent popularity of Modest Mouse, starting with their last album and expanding even more so on their most recent, and quite good, album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank.



Sufficed to say, the show was brilliant. They played a mixture of tunes, some old and some new. Early on in the show Issac Brock [lead singer] said that he was sick and had been throwing up for the past three hours and for us to bear with him. After he finished the next song, he put his guitar down and ran backstage. The rest of the band covered for him, jamming out for about five minutes while the crowd restlessly stood awaiting Brock's return. Soon though, a familiar bassline broke out and Brock burst on stage with the most heartwrenching and emotional live performance I have ever seen. He absoulutely blew the crowd away with his passion as he sung Tiny Cities Made of Ashes and gave me goose bumps.



After a successful encore, the curtains closed on stage, leaving an emotionally battered yet elated crowd to find their way home from Harlem at 11:30 on a Sunday night. That's another blog post in itself.

Pecha Kucha

This past Wednesday I had the opprotunity to go to an up and coming event in the architectural field, Pecha Kucha. For those that don't know, Pecha Kucha was started by a small firm in Tokyo who wanted a forum for discussing new ideas and seeing new work in the design field. Not just limited to architecture, Pecha Kucha has had graphic designers, product designers, fashion designers and fabricators all present in their unique format, and has quickly spread to dozens of cities across the globe. I attended the third one in New York City, this one located down in the Lower East Side after the previous two were held in Queens and Brooklyn. The basic premise of the event is that each presenter is allowed to show 20 slides and each slide will only be up for 20 seconds before switching to the next one. This allows the presentations to be brief and succinct, something that us architects are not well known for.

Overall, I thought that the event was pretty interesting. Some presentations were better than others, Joe MacDonald from Urban A&O seemed to have an interesting idea, but the microphone wasn't working and he spoke very softly so no one could hear what he was saying. It was so quiet, in fact, that you could actually hear the toilet flushing in the bathroom which was quite amusing to the slighly buzzed crowd.

My favorite presentation was by a graduate student at Columbia, Nader Vossoughian, who had an excellent, comedic presentation on pictograms and their impact on society today. Others such as Marc Simmons from Front just showed pictures of their work without any sort of idea determining the course of discussion, and my least favorite was Peoples Architecture who basically were just advertising their company for the entire time. There was a fashion designer there, Mary Ping who my girlfriend liked the most [naturally, being that she is in fashion], and who's work I enjoyed as it was very architectural in idea and asthetic.

I would say that I enjoyed the night, but I don't know how long the series will last. To me it seems like an event that could become very tired very quickly. But such is the way of New York City today.

The Office

I have never been the kind of person who has been addicted to TV shows, and with the exception of a a brief stint with the paranormal investigations of Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, I just haven't ever been able to keep interested long enough. All of this has changed in the past month or so however, and I am not hooked on NBC's hit comedy, The Office. I don't know if it's because I have recently entered into the every day working world or that I have a soft spot for British humour [albeit now transformed for US audiences] but something about it just keeps me in stitches for a half an hour every Thursday night at 8 or 8:30 [they like to vary the time slot on me.] Here I sit in my IKEA chair, eating macaroni and cheese and sipping on a Pellegrino all while laughing my head off at Dwight spraying a co-worker in the face with pepper spray.

I think part of the appeal is that they have been so able to show how varied relationships between co-workers can be. Being freshly released from architecture school, I have brought my passion for design and dedication to following through on an idea into a world that doesn't always reward one for putting for the extra effort. Some people really are there from 8 to 5 and can only count down the minutes until the clock hit 5. I think that everyone at one point has felt like that at work, and that is what makes The Office so appealing because we can all sympathize with one of the characters. Everyone has got a story about a crazy co-worker who collects bobblehead dolls and sucks up to the boss, or a story about a boss who wants to be so hip and cool with their employees that they schedule a booze cruise as an office team-building exercise and end up getting drunk and dancing like a fool in front of everyone. Throughout all of this the pressures of our jobs are lifted from our shoulders and we feel like our job is great compared to Toby, the poor guy who as to listen to the office couple nag at each other all day long.


All that, and Steve Carell is just so damn funny!!!

Thoughts of the future

For some reason I have been thinking a lot about grad school this past week or so. I have only been out of undergrad for less than a year, but something about the creative, thorough investigation and camaraderie of school has been causing my mouth to water like a Pavlovian dog. Maybe it is due to the fact that I am going to San Francisco in May to visit some old friends from undergrad, or maybe because of the flurry of posts on the archinect.com web forums about people getting accepted/denied to their long dreamt about ivy-league schools, but the seed has been planted. I do not know where I would like to go, and it would still be a few years before anything materialized, but this past week has definitely started the ball rolling.

My undergraduate education was a very enlightening and positive experience, and only in my last semester did I feel like I was starting to realize the potential behind a quality architectural education. I felt like my studio with Alberto and Matt was only a taste of what graduate school would be like, and I have been left thirsting for more. K-State gave me a great practical education and a great foundation for the pragmatic art of building, but I feel like I did not get the theoretical experience that is needed to be a well-rounded and provocative architect.

Well, the Oregon/Florida game is getting down to the wire now and I am having trouble focusing on typing this post, so I think that's all you're going to get today. Still, two posts in a week, good, no?

Slacker

Ok, I've been slacking. It's been two months since I last posted, and for that I apologize. I've had some sort of virus on my PC which will not allow me to access blogger.com, so I have been forced to use my reliable Apple to do any blogging.

The past two months have gone by rather quickly. At the beginning of February I moved up the street just one block, as my old landlord forced me to move out of my old apt. My new place is much bigger and closer to the subway, but it has taken a bit of work to make it seaworthy. I have had to paint and clean incredulously, and after a mild roach problem, I believe that things have subsided. It is still a mess and doesn't have much stuff in it, but that's what happens when you make no money, live in the most expensive city in the US, and moved there by shipping 6 boxes of stuff. I do have a dining table from DWR and some imitation Jacobsen Series 7 chairs arriving this week.

Over Memorial Day weekend I am flying out to San Francisco to have a mini-reunion with some of my friends from KSU and I am looking forward to that [as well as checking out the DeYoung Museum, a
project I played a minor part in].

Work is going well. I am wrapping up a project that I started when I first started my job, and it has been very educational to witness a project from start to finish. I have attended weekly site meetings, dealt face to face with clients and consultants, and gone to battle with the contractors; there were many mistakes made, but I have come out a much more knowledgable architect-in-training.

Before:


After:


Currently, I am doing a lot of work on a residence in NYC, and I am taking my knowledge from my last project and applying it to my current one. I still do not know much, and I have help via another green employee, but I feel much more competent than I did 6 months ago. I can now go to an active job site, know what's going on and actively engage the contractor and explain what needs to be done. We are now in the process of demolition, and I think that in some respects this is the most beautiful part of the project.



One other work related thing that I should note is a competition that my firm entered and I worked on for a majority of January. Last fall we entered the Czech National Library competition in Prague, and out of over 400 applicants, we were one of the eight schemes chosen to move on to stage two. Several weeks ago we found out that we placed 5th out of 8, the winning design being a rather hideous blog of Futurama that can be seen here. Our scheme is #262, and the winner is #297...don't ask me, everyone at my firm thought it was a joke when we saw the winning entry.

Speaking of the office, it has been really cold the past month or so. It has been so cold that the Hudson River had started to freeze over. Apparently it has been so cold for so long before that you can see ice completely covering the river, but as you can see below, it only reached a little ways out. Still, a cool view from the office.



Well, this post has just been more of a catch up with me, so hopefully soon I can get into more stimulating subject matter, but for now I will leave you with this image of Astoria [check out A Guide to Recgonizing Your Saints] during a snowstorm. New York can be quite magical at times, and this was one of them.

Some Loud Thunder

On January 30th, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah officially releases their sophomore album, Some Loud Thunder. You can listen to it first, by clicking on my little link to the right.

It's good stuff so far.

Life, 007 style

Once again, it has been a while between posts, and I apologize. It is strange, I don't know it 'adult' life [postcollege] is more boring in comparison or what, but it just seems like I don't have much to 'blog' about anymore. Maybe I never really had much to 'blog' about and I am just now realizing that I should quit wasting peoples time.

Anyways, I have now been up here in NYC for over 6 months, and soon I will be moving into a new, yet to be defined, space. I've been looking for an apartment rather intensely the past week or so, with no fruit to display. I toil away at work all day and make phone calls to see apartments after work that inevietably end up being rather lackluster and only continue to discourage me in my hunt for a new dwelling.

I guess that raises another question, one that I and several of my colleagues have researched rather extensively; when I find a new apartment will I actually dwell there? So far, I have never really felt like I could call my current arrangement a home, it has just really been space that I have occupied. It could be due to a lack of interest in my part to engage my current space, or just a premenition that I knew I would not be here long, but I have always felt so temporary here. Could it even be that I feel that I am not going to be in New York for a while and that it is not my home? I have never intended on living here permenantly and have always thought of New York as a city for the young and engaging, as it is not a place that I could see myself raising a family. But I do plan on staying here for a while, and hopefully this next apartment that I inhabit will actually be one that I can live in long enough to be able to dwell in.

In other, more light-heated news, today was the first day the snow was spotted in New York this season, even if it was only a brief few minutes of flurries. It has been an unseasonably mild winter thusfar; this past weekend it was over 70 degrees!

I have been quite busy with work, and I feel very fortunate to have found a job that I enjoy going to every day. I have been involved in all aspects of the profession so far; for example today I did everything from redlining shop drawings, arrange tech support for our plotter to a site meeting w/contractors, clients and engineers. I feel that I am gaining very valuable experience at my firm and have nothing but good things to say about working here.

Over Christmas I went back to Kansas City and got to see several friends that I had not seen in a while, and missed a chance to see several that I would have liked to see. I had a nice relaxing time back, and strangely it didn't really seem as ackward as I thought that it was going to; I know that upon my return from England, where I had been away a similar time length, I had lots of adjusting to do.

One thing that I have noticed over the past seven months since graduation is the lack of critical investigation that occurs outside of the field of education. I have seen it in others and have even noticed it a little in myself, and it has begum to alarm me. The only thing that we have to negotiate this world is our intellect, and I feel that the working week and the consumer lifestyle that accomodate it are very quickly draining our last crucial resource from within. America once thrived on its individualism and ingenuity, and now it it suffocating on the smoke of its own burning flesh. Where we once used to solve problems, now we only create them. Instead of creating and thinking in our free time, we now only seem to dissolve into a puddle of our own cellulite, drowning the television remote at the base of our recliners in the process. We must remain committed to engaging the world around us and to keeping an active and sharp mind so that we can live life to its fullest, never wasting a day. I have seen too many tragedies this past year to stand idle on the sidelines, and feel that there is still so much out there to experience...

Ok, wow, sorry about that, that just sort of shot out.

Anyways, here are some pics of the past while:

A project my firm has almost completed:


A job site that I visit weekly:


A view of Manhattan from 53rd and Lex:


Crazy cloud/fog formation on the Hudson River seen from my office desk:


A little part of Astoria that I've been known to frequent:


What happens when you let women throw a party: