Category: Life

As an designer I’ve always been a bit of a lost soul. I have my opinions of course, and I enjoy visiting works in person, but I’ve never derived any great pleasure from looking at architecture in books or magazines.

Instead, I’ve gotten my aesthetic kicks from novels, short stories, and comics. Akira and Sandman are my epic lodestars. Calvino and Borges are on my Mount Rushmore.

Or even wider, I’d rather frail on the banjo or toot on the harmonica. And lately I’ve been geeking out on bread. I did have a two year run of playing into architect stereotype and being into photography, but that is countered by my lifelong affair with boardgames.

I doubt such random interests have been good for my career, either professionally or academically, but I hope they have made me a more well rounded person.

When I was in college, I used to assert that everything was worthy of study since everything feeds into architecture. I am no longer so bold to make such an assertion, but I still hold out hope that all the time chasing these random trails do feed back into the work. I’m not so sure how, but one can hope right?

I just saw a meme that brought up the fact that Martin Luther King, Anne Frank, and Barbara Walters were all born in 1929.

It boggles the mind how much the world has changed in the past 90 years. As the meme says, we feel these people are from different eras, but not really.

Similarly, the Civil Rights era feels like forever ago, but not in context. Rosa Parks’ protest was in 1955, twenty four years before I was born. Twenty four years ago from today, I was a sophomore in high school.

If taking the PSAT’s felt like yesterday, then the civil rights era only two and a half days ago!

I’ve been reading and listening a lot to Seth Godin, the marketing guru / daily blogger. After all he’s the one who got me on this 3+ month blogging kick.

However, I wonder if some of his thoughts are for higher level stuff while I’m still trying to get my own craft locked down. Between the new gig (which uses a lot of old skills but still feels fundamentally different), and the fact I still haven’t gotten the work / family / exercise practice down, there’s some fundamentals I need to work on.

Even so, I think there’s a value to looking out past the horizon. I’ve always been a proponent of slow and steady growth in the profession, but also of constantly strategizing for the future.

Maybe delusions of grandeur aren’t so bad, as long as you remember it’s for the future and you don’t assume it’s happening today, right now, right now.

Yesterday evening, my boy did something cute and amusing. It tickled me so much I thought I’d write about it today.

I woke up this morning and I can’t remember what on earth it was.

But I still have the warm fuzzy feeling, amplified by the thought I’d share on the blog.

So instead of sharing the instigating incident, I decided to share this warm fuzzy feeling instead.

Have a good day!

I’ve noticed this odd dichotomy between how I write about work versus family.

Now that I’ve achieved a certain level, I feel generally confident about knowing how to get a decent living in this profession.

But with the kiddos, it’s all about unknowns and questions.

Admittedly, work is much less dynamic than raising children. There’s only three key variables for work – compensation (money), effort (hours), and experience (projects).

Then again, maybe it’s just a function of time, I’ve been playing at this architecture game for about twenty years now, and only in the kiddo game for about five.

So there’s still a chance I’ll also start waddling around as a parenting know-it-all in fifteen years.

Exercise.

Stretch.

Walk a mile.

Blog.

Read a book.

Quit social,

And caffeine.

I had heard a rumor that each state employee has multiple licenses to install Microsoft Office on their home computers (beyond the web app). So last month, I took a moment to download the program, installed it, but ran into an activation problem. I still had access to the Office 365 webapp so I just forgot about it, until we were sent an email confirming the rumor.

The key was knowing for certain that I had a legitimate rights to the program. I’m not an IT guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I can mash keyboards, and I’m not scared about nerfing our home laptop. I went back at it, messed around with some settings, deleted some stray items, and got it to work.

Like kids in the 50’s grew up working on cars, I’m of the generation that grew up messing around with our PC’s, those 286’s and 386’s. There was a lot of time spent sitting in front of the computer inserting one floppy disk after another for a big installation. The computer is a black box, but not a scary one.

Once in a while, all that time in front of the CRT is validated. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the highest and best use of my time, but at least it wasn’t a complete loss.

The hard part is social has crafted themselves to be a great feed of a interesting tidbits. Eating candy isn’t the best thing for one’s brain, but it’s awful hard to quit.

As I’ve been spending less time on Facebook (the New York Times article about how they were letting partners read messenger PM’s was a kicker) I noticed that I transitioned to Twitter, a platform I previously didn’t use outside of major national events.

So last night I took some time to dumb it down a bit. Partly to shape it towards Nevada politics (I’ll find out about big events in DC soon enough) and partly just make it less exciting.

The next problem might be that I will also have to stop mindlessly revisiting and refreshing the same websites as if it was 2004.

Ultimately I suspect it is a battle to train myself to prefer more substantive fare over the quick hits of news, gossip, and superficial interaction.

Our boy is a happy little guy. He doesn’t hesitate to beam with pride over the smallest little things.

With a baby, it’s easy to watch them level up. Each little incremental improvement is quite obvious. Even with our daughter it’s still noticeable with all she’s learning from the world around her.

But for us growed up folks, how do we find our own little victories? And when we do, then we should celebrate them with a big toothy grin!