Not Built in a Day

A few weeks ago I visited Detroit for the first time while in the area for a friend's wedding.  We hear so much about Detroit these days, as the poster-child for urban decay , that I must admit I was pretty interested in seeing it for myself, and wondered what I would find there. My impression is that it's a fairly small city, with a small, well-developed core but extensive, decaying suburbs.  We drove a short ways out to visit the Heidelberg Project , and saw some of the crazy inner-ring suburban emptiness near there (countless vacant lots, overgrown fields that used to be houses, etc), but most of what we saw in the downtown area wasn't too shabby.  We missed getting to experience the Eastern Market by arriving about an hour too late, which was disappointing, but instead got some very tasty ice cream at Neveria la Michoacana .  That was definitely an adventure for us and really fun! All around the downtown area we saw signs of new buildings, construction, ...

Thanks, NCARB. The lateral forces of destiny have continued to make my free time shear torture, as today I took the Structural Systems portion of the Architect Registration Exam (ARE).  Let me get a few allowable loads off my chest.  I had planned to write a witty review of my time studying for this massive and inflexible exam, a review that would have been full of puns about mental strain and bending over backwards to learn this stuff, but I'm just too stressed.  ( See what I did there. )  The tension of waiting for my results is practically unbearable.  (The compression isn't great, either.) When I couple the forces of failure with those of success, the net outcome seems... indeterminate, like a beam fixed at both ends.  It's like there's an overturning moment with roughly 1.5 times the dead weight of my emotions, and I can't decide if I'm more angry or more depressed at how it went. Anyway, as I've been telling myself, Structures is over now...