In January, I wrote a letter to a colleague who is rejoining to our team. Selfishly, I’m excited that she returned.
This was my first tiny poem-calligraphies to leave the house. It was also one of the last ones that I wrote.
It’s been a long 2024, and we haven’t even started the biennial budgeting season—that hits tomorrow.
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Unfortunately, my publication schedule will continue to be sporadic. After we get our budget season assignments, it’s off to the races through June.
Beyond the increasing workload, it has been a tumultuous time for our team. Hopefully things will settle down, but it’s not surprising that my Commute Music project has stalled on Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult over the past month.
I just started moving again with Blue Mitchell. Yes, I’m slightly out of alphabetical order. It was a necessary fudge.
Hopefully I’ll get another post out in May, and then June, but frankly it’s been all about work for the past quarter. I’ve already told my supervisor that I’ll try to keep up the pace up through July 1st, but after that it stops.. (He’s the best boss I’ve had, but we’re all going through it together). Maybe I’ll breathe again.
When buying the house we agreed to address a few minor plumbing issues. Easy enough to do during the negotiations, but the work still had to be done. We changed the innards for two of our toilets, switched faucet stems, and installed a new kitchen sink with our own RO filter.
That sink took three days, five trips to Home Depot, and a couple angle stops.
Yes, hiring a plumber would have been more sensible but I learned stuff and enjoyed the challenge (aside from multiple trips to the hardware store!)
Shoutout to YouTube…there’s no way I would have started this project without all those tutorials. That site is the greatest DIY reference library ever assembled. It has so many videos for every task, with a myriad of angles and opinions.
I hope more folks make use of this empowering free resource. Simple repairs are one of the easiest ways to earn a feeling of accomplishment on a weekend afternoon.
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David Auerbach, Carols in the Caves
The sound engineers tried to capture the essence in being a massive cave, but the whole album sounded distant. Everything felt flat.
This might be a good holiday background album, but does not have presence as the central audio feature for a drive.
The album cover looks great.
Babyland, You Suck Crap
Last week, I complained about noise. This one is all about noise, but I had fun.
Sampling a multitude of instruments (and implements) gave the audio palate an enjoyable richness. I suspect growing up with electronica and hip-hop makes me prefer variety when getting bashed over the head.
I wish I had detailed memories of attending that concert with my landscaper colleague. Sadly, I just don’t remember much from such events. A few visual flashes and a plastic disc is all I have from 20 years ago.
Elevate, The Architect
While looking up this album last week, I learned about the genre “Math Rock“. I had to give it a second shot now that I know “It is characterized by complex, atypical rhythmic structures (including irregular stopping and starting), counterpoint, odd time signatures, and extended chords.”
Still very noisy. Most likely still not my thing, but the architectural cover makes a lot more sense with the music behind it.
Am I enjoying this album more because I’m now aware that it’s supposed to be sophisticated? Is the emperor clothed or nekkid?
The first week of the commute music project started well. I listened to Aceyalone twice before slogging through a lot of guitar noise.
Aceyalone, A Book of Human Language
I don’t know enough about hiphop to judge the rapping.
Clearly catered to art school nerds who want deep subjects and big words over late 90’s gangsta bling.
Love the sonic landscape, especially the bass riff in “the Hunt” (sampled Coltrane’s Ole).
Aerosmith, Classics Live!
Following the complexity of Aceyalone, this was a wall of noise.
Lots of electric guitars and distortion. Is this rock? I’m listening to too much jazz.
Thoughts of youth culture, what will my daughter think of the pop characters of her childhood when she’s in her mid-40’s?
Al and the Transamericans, Analog
Plenty of electric guitar, but not as frenetic.
More melodic and borrows from old tunes and instruments. Very Americana, the banjo makes an appearance.
Slightly awkward, in a likable way.
Elevate, The Architect When writing this post, I found I had swapped the band and the album title. Oops, but I like having it on the first page of the binder.
More noise. I’m not built for rock.
I do buy things for the cover. In this case, the cover and the title. I’d do it again, even though this will be my one and only listen through this album.
Google image search led me to the Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. When it works, the internet is amazing. Fun fact, the Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper took 21 years to restore (1978-1999).
Bonus (?) Last February, I shared Ruthie Foster’s rendition of “War Pigs” to mark the first year of Russia’s latest invasion into Ukraine. October brought further horrors with Israel-Palestine. Let’s hope for better in 2024.
I’ve mentioned it before but thought this is worth repeating. I’m no fan of AI, but it’s appearance has unlocked my acceptance of imperfection.
It wasn’t a coincidence that I started drawing after two dormant decades after Dall-E and Midjourney hit the mainstream in 2022.
Before this happened, I would have guessed that generative AI images would finally smothered the last embers of my interest in drawing.
Instead, I was freed from the self induced constipation of accuracy. I picked up the pen and started laying ink on paper again.
They’re rough. There’s no undo button. No edit function. All you can do is start over, again. Try not to mess it all up with the last few lines on the page.
These aren’t perfect, but I can vouch for their provenance. My hand was there when each molecule of dye nestled into the fibers of these pages.
Here’s to many experiments in this year of the Dragon!
I wasn’t super happy with the purple, but it was “good enough”…until I messed up the last two letters of this page. Lettering in ink demands full attention. The simplest mistake can be catastrophic. This was on a good track, and then I got cute with his beard and ruined the dragon. Again, the last thing killed the whole page.At this point, I didn’t even try to outline the dragon. I didn’t have energy to try a fourth time. I kind of like how the dragon is a bit atmospheric on the page…but that might be a total rationalization for wimping out.
We went to the Clark County Museum’s historical park for their annual “Heritage Holidays” celebration. It’s been four years since our last visit, a completely different world ago.
I presume he enjoyed it a lot more than when he was twenty months old!
This photo was taken in a tiny two bedroom house, originally constructed in Henderson, Nevada around the Second World War.
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We have been extremely cautious about the pandemic so we still aren’t eating out. As such, much of this info is out of date, but I wanted to mention a few favorite Vegas places, but please do your own research.
Vegas Restaurants
Ramen was just becoming a craze and hadn’t made it to Houston before we left. So when we arrived, we went straight to Monta. It was still our favorite before the pandemic hit, though I’m not sure it’s totally worth the long wait.
Pacific Island Taste was a favorite at my office. My co-worker still vouches for it and we had them cater our holiday potluck a month ago. Get some Hawaiian flavors at the 9th island!
If I was going fancy on the Strip, I guess I’d pick the Bouchon at the Venetian. Strip restaurants are usually money grabs by celebrities so it lacks the passion you find with chefs at their original passions. But we’ve had a couple memorable Easter brunches with friends up at the top of this hotel.
Vegas Coffee Shops
Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project wasted a ridiculous amount of money, but one of its legacies is the sunken courtyard with Mothership Coffee Roasters in the old Ferguson Motel in Downtown.
Nearby is Publicus, an independently owned coffee shop that has maintained a stellar reputation.
Le Paris Coffee and Pastry is an off strip gem on Decatur and Desert Inn. It was the place I’d take folks to show them the “real Vegas”.
Quirky Places in the Desert
The Clark County Museum is a great deal with general admission at $2.00. We should go there when the sun is out, I’ve heard there is more there to be enjoyed.
Cactus Joe’s is a nursery and variety store. Given that it’s primarily outdoors, this was one of our first visits when we started coming out of our shell. It’s a fun shop, even if none of the stuff matches our aesthetic tastes.
Calico Basin is on the outside of the famous Red Rock Canyon. It’s free and won’t involve a long wait to visit.
If you want to check out a big piece of civil engineering, the Hualapai Lot Trail Head gets you right there. It’s wild to hike in the hills overlooking the city, turn a corner and feel like you’ve disappeared into the desert.
Las Vegas Books is a used bookstore that opened a couple of years ago by owners who moved here from Minnesota. This is the quintessential Las Vegas story. Come here and work hard, and you will establish a reputation in no time.
And if you want decade-old tips for Houston (we left in 2013) here are few highlights.
We loved walking through the Menil art collections. It was our last stop before leaving the city.
The quirky Orange Show is an inspiring testament to what one determined person can make.
The Port Authority offers a super cool, free 90 minute boat tour of the shipping channel.
If you have time for a full day detour, run up to the Kimbell Art Museum at Fort Worth. This building is a required visit for any architect.
Houston Nostalgia in Restaurant Form
Cafe Brasil is where I started a Friday morning caffeine and contemplation routine, with a shot of espresso and a scone.
Wandering around the neighborhood, we discovered La Guadalupana and fell in love with their pastries (almond croissants!), vampiro (beet, carrot, and orange juice), and their mojarra frita.
Our favorite breakfast plate was the migas (Mexican style egg scramble with tortilla strips) at Baby Barnaby’s. This American posh fusion took it this TexMex breakfast plate to another level.
In Bellaire (Chinatown), we would get the Spicy Fried Tofu at Star Snow Ice in the Dun Huang Plaza. It paired great with their sweet Hot Tofu soup. Sometimes we would start a meal run with Fried Tofu as an appetizer, go to another restaurant for the entree, and return for Hot Tofu as dessert.
Hopefully I didn’t steer y’all wrong in with the food, but I can vouch for the other stuff. And I’m always happy to chat about my towns. I hope you have fun in the desert (or swamp!)
Tangents from a few books about money. I heartily recommend the one by Harry Browne; the rest are OK.
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Fail Safe Investing, Lifelong Financial Security in 30 minutes, Harry Browne, 1999
If you’re a wimp (like me) this is the best book on investing. And if you get interested in Risk Parity style portfolios, check out Frank Vasquez’s “Risk Parity Radio” for up to date opinions and advice on this style of portfolio construction.
If you want to speculate, look elsewhere. Harry Browne advises that your profession will be your primary source of wealth and warns against taking risks like investing on margin.
Clean, clear advice. Some specifics are outdated (such as how to purchase investments) but his conservative concepts are solid.
I plan on revisiting this book every year. I’ve taken a more aggressive approach than his “Permanent Portfolio” (more stocks, less gold and bonds). Still, I thank him for introducing me to Gold. It’s a controversial asset but a game changer for me. It added a third uncorrelated asset class to ballast the portfolio, which made me more comfortable with investing heavier in stocks.
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Explore TIPS, Harry Sit, 2010
Gotta start somewhere and I was curious about Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities when I started my investment journey in 2022. I’ve gone with a different investing strategy.
TIPS are bonds with inflation insurance. Harry is a fan of going heavy on TIPS relative to nominal bonds. (I believe a properly diversified portfolio will compensate for inflation with the other asset classes, so I don’t like the extra cost of the inflation insurance).
Purchase them at auction, the secondary market or via ETF’s. Harry Sit is open to all investment avenues.
I-bonds are more like CD’s since they can’t be sold on the secondary market. Harry Sit is not a fan.
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Value Averaging, The Safe and Easy Strategy for Higher Investment Returns, Michael E. Edleson, 1993
An optimized way to pour cash into the investment market.
“Value Averaging” is setting a goal for how much you want an investment to increase over time and purchasing accordingly. Unlike “Dollar Cost Averaging”, Value Averaging pushes you to buy more when the markets are down and less when they’re up.
If you want to be awesome, the book gives a bunch of math to optimize the investment curve.
As a retail investor playing with small sums, I believe optimization is a waste. After learning the basics, the smallest edge requires a ton of study. Any such such bet will be overwhelmed by the capricious whims of the gods. Better to enjoy the finer parts of life.
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Die Broke, Stephen M. Pollen and Mark Levine, 1997
I found the book in a random giveaway pile in Berkeley, maybe in lower Sproul Plaza. Two cities (and decades) later, I finally read it.
Great title and interesting provocation to reevaluate our relationship to money, work, and retirement.
I love books with unique structures. Part 1 is a short self help mindset manual. Part 2 is an alphabetical list of chapters with practical advice. (Since this book is almost thirty years old, I lightly skimmed the second part since I presume most of it is out of date.)
I enjoyed Part 1, partly because I already agree with their four key maxims. I view employment as a transaction not fulfillment, believe in avoiding debt, and doubt the positive good of leaving a large bequest. I’m not totally sold on the maxim of “Don’t Retire” but I appreciate their skepticism of the modern retirement paradigm.
I’m trying a new format where I just comment on things with three bullet points. Hopefully it will help me blow through the backlog of old blog drafts. Thought I’d try it out by looking at the year in review and the year to come.
My theme this year was “catching up”. I feel like I did just OK with the theme, but the more that I think about it, it was an eventful year as we started re-integrated back into society despite our pandemic caution.
Highlights
Buying a House
Visiting San Diego (twice!)
Two great architects joined the Division
Hobbies
Reading — Homer and Tarot
Substack — finding fellow wanderers on Notes
Fountain Pens — Sketching and Calligraphy
Lowlights
Getting the house ready for move-in, renovations are still miserable.
Didn’t exercise nor eat well enough, gained weight.
Distractions, unfocused focused, especially the second half of this year.
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a year a life goodbye tomorrow smiles and sorrow hello
When calligraphing, I have to be completely focused. This morning I chose John Coltrane’s Giant Steps instead of the usual Chicken and Dumplin’s by Bobby Timmons. That slight change was enough to add an extra O to the page. Fortunately, the early mistake kept me ultra-concentrated for the rest of the exercise.
It’s been twenty years since hand drafting at the ground floor of Ron Bogley’s house. Small residential doesn’t pay well, but it was the most fun I’ve had as an architect. Graphite on vellum is a lot more forgiving so I would listen to the baseball games as I lettered.
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2024
My theme for next year is “settling in”. For the new house and everywhere else. The first half of the year will be a mess between the house and the biennial cycle for my government job. Hopefully the second half will be a time of customizing the home to fit our needs, it’s been a decade of always thinking we’re moving soon.
Settling In
At the new House
Returning to the Office (again)
Digital Places and Processes
Practices
Sketching and Calligraphy
Exercising
Reading my repeating “little library” and pushing forward on the classics
Tiny Targets (and goals)
Three deep breaths on a yoga mat every morning. (I’d love to do the 8 Brocades three times a week, but I’ll start tiny.)
Sit down and say a small mantra before eating anything, including snacks. (The big goal is to lose a couple of pounds a month, but the numerical goal failed spectacularly last year. Maybe instilling a mindfulness practice is the first step in the process.)
Do something with a pen every morning (It would be nice to finish my OPM Letters and clear out my pile of read books to be blogged.)
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new book new year new month new week new day Foundational Hand new font
I wrote this on 12/26 with a new-to-me font from The Art of Calligraphy by David Harris. I messed up the word order on the last line (working from bottom up) and kept it for the rest of the poem. But it sounds wrong so I went back to the original wording in the light blue scribbles.
I’m not sure if I will stick with Foundational Hand for a long period (as I did with Uncial) but I’ll give it at least a week before exploring other fonts.
This morning habit of writing a tiny poem for calligraphy practice has a highlight of this season to close out the year. Thanks to Beth Kempton and Nadia Gerassimenko for catalyzing the #tinypoem project! I just got Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook — hopefully her wisdom will help me write gooder before I start publishing them in earnest.
A month later, I had to get better paper. Cheap steno pads are great for work, but they don’t show inks at their finest.
Hedonic treadmill!
Rhodia paper is great (as advertised!) Love the smooth buttery slide. The colors pop. They shade.
Every morning I’d draw a hand in this book. (Whoa! Minus ten pages of doodles, that means I have about a hundred fifty hands in here!)
I barely used the dots. If given a choice I’d go blank. (Then again, it was nice to have guides for the few times I played with calligraphy.)
Absolutely love the square. I don’t have to compose a sketch for the rectangle. 1:1 simplifies the mind before pen strikes paper.
But I’m not tossing out the other sketchbooks. I’m far too cheap to abandon unused paper.
In the meantime, I hope Rhodia keeps making these Reverse Books. (I’ll be back.)
It’s been a good year for my hand. With the new fountain pen habit, I’ve started a morning journal / sketching / calligraphy practice. And worked through several small notebooks (random product show gifts) at the dinner table. I’m slowly getting over my old hangups about sketching.
Much as I hate to admit it, social media+consumerism sometimes hits the spot.
Postscript — I restarted my Blick 5.5″ x8.5″ sketchbook with this note:
Christmas 2023 Restarting a new-old notebook & drying up old pens. I wonder what will show up on these pages? What will be discerned in manipulating pen & ink on paper — privileges unthinkable to our ancestors of previous generations. When paper was a fucking trade secret. In a fraught time — we still owe the world our art. To much has been given — lets return this gift to the present (and maybe the future too.)
Holiday Soul, Bobby Timmons — This instrumental album holds its own beyond Christmas. Bobby Timmons is an amazing pianist, obscured due to his early death. For non-Christmas fare check out Chicken & Dumplin’s and Chun-King on youtube.
A Charlie Brown Christmas, Vince Guaraldi Trio — This album kicked off our jazz kick at home and is still great. Actually, I wonder if this album is why my current personal jazz preferences leans towards trios.
Let’s start with the biggest and most important numbers: 1,501 posts and 5,663 days.
Everything starts with the work. Do it. Do it again. And again.
But that’s boring, and let’s be real — I’m not banging out an analysis of “5663”.
Like many writers, I check the dashboard every few days and was pleasantly surprised to see that I had finally crossed the 100 subscriber mark on Substack!
Whoohoo! But this screenshot only tells the last 3.8% of the story. Here’s the rest of it.
I started Grizzlypear.com in June of 2008 with two readers — me and my dad. (My girlfriend, now wife, never reads my ramblings cause she gets plenty in real time.)
Thirteen years later, I still had two readers. I would occasionally try to increase visibility to no avail, aside from Facebook spamming me to pay for a boost to the most recent post.
In mid-2021, I started an industry related newsletter. Even though the effort fizzled out in a few months, the effort got me onto Mailchimp with ten more ten readers, including my mom and sister, friends and three folks I’ve never met IRL!
About a year ago, I joined Post where I met a great crowd but after they slow-walked critical features, I jumped to Notes this April along with seven fellow travelers.
For the first few months I posted daily and grew steadily. Then September got crazy so I dropped down to a weekly schedule and growth slowed. So here is how I got to 113 readers:
What do I make of it all?
I’m an early 21st century anachronism with a personal blog. I entered that scene as it was being strangled by Social Media™, but I kept my site because I loved having my own home on the internet.
However, if you wanna grow, you gotta do what Zig Ziglar advises “You can get anything you want if you help enough people get what they want.” Or if you forgo the self help business, then be “so good that they can’t ignore you” (as quipped by Steve Martin).
These fifteen years of blogging taught me that it’s OK to just enjoy a hobby. I have a great job. I don’t need an audience to serve. I’m allowed to be a dilettante, exploring the arts without the discipline or patience to become great at anything.
I might be a disappointment to Zig and Steve, but I’ve had fun archiving these meanderings (board games, business books, sourdough bread, sketches, poetry, calligraphy) for future reference.
And then Substack swooped in to distribute this work and connect into a network of creatives. Notes is a great place to keep me inspired and challenged. So here we are, with this email slamming into a hundred inboxes!
Yes, this is just number, but it’s cool — three digits of cool! After more than a decade of silence, it’s gratifying to know people want to see my next letter. And it’s nice to get feedback. (Dopamine!)
Would I be bummed if the count slides back down? Of course, I’m human. But it is just a number. If my interests go weird, I wouldn’t want to force y’all to follow along. I’ll keep writing cause this is my practice.
Blogging is a good practice. The world might not need your input, but you need your input. Writing publicly forces us to look carefully and to process the richness that surrounds us. Write what you see, and your soul comes into focus.
Do it long enough and you’ll find a few folks to accompany the journey.
Jump in! Five thousand days later, you might stumble upon a goldmine of email addresses!
