Sixteen years ago, I was trapped in the studio over Christmas because the master’s thesis was presented in early January. During a sleep deprived break, I slammed together a silly holiday email to friends and family.
That started a personal tradition of sending a physical postcard at the end of every year. After the kids arrived, I went digital with three cards — for work, family, and social media.
Each December, I comb through our photos and clean up my contacts. It’s a great way to re-live the year and still a lot faster than handwritten postcards.
Please enjoy this selected history from my post graduate life (minus the family mugshots!)
2023
After the completing the building, we discovered that it did not have enough safety factor for the fire sprinkler system water pressure. We spent half a million dollars replacing the backflow prevention devices with low pressure loss units. It was an incredible headache, but the team worked hard together, and it could have been much worse.
2022
The stucco exterior wall of an building for mental health services. This was originally built as an outdoor stage. It’s now a mechanical room and the seating area has been fenced-in as a yard for the chiller. One of the highlights of 2023 was when the architect on this project joined our division.I’ve been blessed to work with great people.Same photo with a giant holiday greeting in the sky. We decided to play it safe. As a government worker, it’s prudent to be slightly boring.
2021
A partially ground concrete slab where the polishing was stopped where the future carpet finish would be installed.The transparency glitched as I was picking the font, inspiring a this frenetic postcard with lots of words and some strange bars on the sides. As with 2022, we stuck with the moderately stale option for final distribution.
2020
A construction photo of the central stairs at the new Education Building at Nevada State College. During the pandemic, I would visit the jobsite on my own on Sundays. It was a meditative activity.
2019
An odd clerestory (without windows) in an administrative building for a agency serving disabled clients. I have no clue what the original architect was trying to do, but the best perk of being an architect is discovering into oddball conditions like this.
2018
A pit toilet at Valley of Fire State Park foregrounded by red desert sands and scrubby bushes. This photo has been the wallpaper on my work phone ever since. It was so hot that the Ranger’s station had a giant sign warning against hiking in the park.
2017
A flash of lights from the Cactus Garden Christmas display at the Ethel M Chocolate Factory in Henderson. At the time you could just walk up and meander. They now charge for entry and it takes an hour to get in.
2016
Looking up at the ceiling and the queue monitor at the Clark County Building Department. Now, everything is submitted digitally and the building is a ghost town.
2015
Blurred lights inside a bus. The readable neon is written in English, but it was taken in China. I pray for peace between these two superpowers. A few leaders will “win” while the rest of the us suffer greatly. I’d almost feel sorry for ourselves, but then I remember we still have the great privilege of being inside the empire instead of being among those outside looking in.
2013
Our loaded truck for moving out to Las Vegas. The compartment is only half filled because this was the smallest truck that could tow our car.
2012
Two rabbits chilling underneath a coffee table, Peppercorn is splayed out on the floor while Badger is washing his white face.
2011
The dining area after the bookshelf had an unfortunate reckoning with gravity. The homemade shelving system was based on something my dad used years ago in from a Sunset book, but Ikea is too cheap to beat now.
2007
An eye-bleeding page with horrific fonts married to diagrams and preliminary renderings from my master’s thesis project. I’m awful at graphic design, but I have fun making bad graphics.
And with this, I am finally, fully done with “work-work” for the year! What am I going to do with myself next week (and how shall I survive the tsunami of delayed tasks in 2024)?
I’m part of a small group on Post.news who posts old work under the hashtag #SundayShare. This was going to be my suggestion for a “lunar new years resolution”…until the tragedy at Monterey park. I still think it’s worth sharing, so I posted it today.
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In 2008, I planted a flag on the interwebs with www.grizzlypear.com. (We came up with the name as a twist on our bunnies Badger and Peppercorn.)
I quickly lost interest in the webcomic, but now I had a domain to build upon. It morphed into the repository of my random contributions scattered across various forums.
Even though #PostCreative / #CreativeCollective is going strong right now, who knows how things will go?
Let this new-new year will be the one when you start your own site. Build a library that stands apart from these social media bazaars that come and go.
Your place might have few visitors, but you’re the only one that counts. Maybe you be digging into for next week’s #SundayShare in 2033.
If you don’t know where to start, I recommend getting the domain name on Hover.com which I’ve really enjoyed using. I don’t know which web-host is best, but I’ve been using the cheapest plan on Hostgator for a decade with WordPress for my blog engine.
Alt Text: A black and white ink drawing of two rabbits in a rectangular vaguely urban landscape with two rabbits hopping down the street towards the vanishing point. The dot pattern for the sunset was added on the computer and I still can’t decide which is better.
This is what I shared last week in the face of that tragedy.
A simple #SundayShare diptych of Badger and Peppercorn ferociously consuming Bok Choy in our old apartment in Houston.
Alt text: two photos, showing a pair of rabbits eating veggies on the floor. The black and white harlequin steps away after she yanked a luscious green leaf out of her albino partner’s mouth.
Taken with a Nikon D40 with the 18-35mm kit lens. Fifteen years later, the gear doesn’t matter all that much. Glass and metal tubes sit in the a box while the heart is warmed by the glow of bygone days, occasionally rekindled by pixels on a screen.
Here’s to the New Year!
Let’s make many great memories and maybe some photos too.
Last month, I played around with with Instagram. I’m good for now, but here are the photos from January 2022 and from the period in 2014 when I was last on that app.
As much as I dislike social, I guess it’s not the end of the world if I pop onto that platform and mess around every few years for a limited period.
As might be assumed (given this blog), I am a believer in slightly oversharing on the internet. If anyone looks me up (as I do them), I want to control the narrative of myself if anyone looks me up (as I do them). Of course this is a sculpted image, but I’d rather have someone see my current conception of self instead of old xanga postings and photos from my college days <eek>.
The good news is that we all stayed healthy, my job is still keeping me busy (and I’m still enjoying the effort), and the kids seem no worse for the wear.
The bad news was pretty much everything outside the walls of the house.
It was a great privilege to ride out this storm in relative peace, and I thought I should list a few key items of gratitude, beyond the basics.
To start meta, I’m quite happy with the current revival of this blog. I think I’ve found a good balance of consumption and production that enriches my life with a single medium-ish effort post every week. I’ve been reading more than I’ve been posting, so I’m hoping to turn this into a twice weekly post, but we’ll see if that happens.
I also lost quite a bit of weight. Most of it was due to being evicted from restaurants – my last meal was at an In-N-Out parking lot in Henderson, in February. I still want to lose a few more pounds (and I’ve actually gained back a couple since my low in late summer) but I can’t complain about where I’m at.
Fermentation was also a nice find. I’ve gotten consistently good with making Natto, the Bread is still awesome, and the discovery of how to make Kim chi / Sauerkraut has been a revelation. I now consider fermentation as one of the great pleasures in my life (along with reading, board games, and playing music).
And the kids really do keep growing. I don’t know what we would be missing out from in-person learning in a non-pandemic reality, but we have caring contentious teachers for my daughter who are trying their best. It has been a joy to watch the two of them blossom and develop a relationship with each other.
I heard an aphorism on Jonah Goldberg’s podcast about life with children “the days are long, the years are short”. With two kids, I can vouch for the truth of this sentiment, but I’d say it also applies quite well to 2020.
This past year was just a moment, and an eternity, ago.
