Not Built in a Day

December 30th, 2018 marked ten years for this blog.  That first post was only two sentences, which established this as a travel blog for my semester abroad in Rome, Italy, in spring 2009.  Somehow, I've continued to post here more or less monthly for ten years since then, except for a break in 2011 when I posted only twice.  Let's also not forget that embarrassing, but fortunately brief, time when I thought I would try using this as a food blog... which was, as we say in my house, "not good eats."  Anyway, time went on, I got back to the good stuff (architecture, obviously), and here we are.  As it's now January 2019, it's time again for that most hallowed of traditions: reviewing how I did on last year's resolutions, and dedicating myself to some new ones for the year to come. 2018 was noticeably better for me than 2017, which was a year in which I felt frustrated and directionless.  2018 was not without its stress, and in fact much of it was very st...

My thirtieth birthday was  last week    a few weeks ago   last month, and I seem to have missed New Year's, so here is a recap / resolutions and look back over the last decade all rolled into one. This blog is now coming up on ten years of posts -- my very first post was in December 2008.  Since then, I've graduated from college, then from graduate school, become an urbanist, done some  traveling, moved across country to California, gotten my architecture license, and worked my way up to managing my own projects.  Now I'm a project architect with nearly five years of experience, and I'm trying to figure out what's next. Last year around this time, in the throes of the aftermath of the election, I was feeling lost and  made some general resolutions  to take better care of myself.  I was hoping to exercise more, take up piano again, and plan some trips.  I was successful in planning the trips, and went to AIA Convention in Orla...

It's taken me until Lent to try to write about what's been happening since January.  The last month-plus has been an emotional rollercoaster as the new Voldemort administration -- I've decided to refer to the new president as President Voldemort until further notice, to deny him his branding and keep my blog free of his name -- has released an unending stream of horrifying craziness upon the country.  There has been so much to complain about that I haven't even been able to keep track of it all.  Even as I recognize that my privilege will insulate me from many of the worst decisions coming out of Washington, I grieve for all those directly affected.  Meanwhile, the stress within my family has risen with the level of exterior crazy, while my work hasn't been exactly stress-free either, with major deadlines last month and in late January.  To put it mildly, I haven't been in the mood for New Year's Resolutions, starting new projects, or hauling myself off of ...

Maybe it's because I live in the hippie San Francisco Bay Area, or because there's simply no escaping it, but no conversation among friends here can fail to come around to climate change and the environment.  (And also the cost of housing and lack of decent public transit, but I digress.)  It's a big topic, and one that cannot be addressed without systemic change in our agriculture, industry, and transportation policies, but there are at least symbolic things one can do in one's own life to show that living smaller and greener is the way to go.  The newest hurdle we've tackled:  achieving carbon neutrality by buying carbon offsets.  This was something I'd considered and discussed here before , but this year (for 2014) we finally made the decision to do it.  We bought them through a program for Google employees that allows you to buy the same offsets that Google buys, so we knew that the credits would go to reputable groups and actually be used as offsets. ...

How much has changed since we moved here in July?  Let's find out! We've been in California for over 6 months now, and the biggest change is that we've become a two-car family, as of today, January 12th.  Yes, we held out for half a year, but ultimately decided that we each needed our own car.  I fought it for months, starting when the weather turned cold and dark (see: Biking to Work ), although not yet rainy - apparently we've been having an unusually dry year , which has allowed me to bike more than I probably would have during a normal year.  We'll see what happens during the rest of the winter.  At any rate, my dismal attitude toward and fear of biking, combined with the impossibility of scheduling separate evening activities with only one car, conspired to convince us that we needed to go for it.  So with some reluctance we began the search, starting with craigslist and ending up at a dealership near Santa Cruz.  Our actual experience with th...

We've had a whirlwind couple of months since my graduation, and have finally settled down now in Mountain View, California, a town as suburban as they come, and a new challenge for me to navigate as a fledgling urbanist.  Three years in New York has changed the way I see urban environments, and so as I figure out how to find the grocery store, get up to speed on my new job, and finish unpacking from our move, I'm also trying to figure out how to grapple with our new environment.  I can't feel smug any longer in my relative lack of carbon footprint.  Our new circumstances mean that we are now car-owners and I have been driving to work every day.  But I think we've been successful in at least a few areas, so far, to reduce the impact of our new less-dense lifestyle. While we do now own a car, we plan to have only one, in an area where almost everyone drives alone.  We chose our new apartment carefully based on location: Justin can walk to work (15-20 minutes) a...

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by scientist and geographer Jared Diamond was not a book I intended to read, but it was sitting around the house after being lent to us by a friend, so I picked it up to read on the plane.  Collapse describes how different factors have contributed, to different degrees, to the collapse of various human societies across time and around the world, with a focus on the role played by environmental degradation.  Diamond is better known for his bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, and has a journalistic rather than academic style, addressed to educated laymen.  While I wasn't very impressed with his writing style or his overly pedantic presentation of the material ("Now we will discuss X, then we will discuss Y"..."As we saw in X, we will now see in Y," etc), I was interested enough in the topic to make it through all 500+ pages of the book.  In short, Diamond lays out how human impact on the environment, especially d...