Category: Life

On Monday, I heard that local artist Alexander Huerta had passed away.

It was crushing.

He was one of the first people I met in Vegas. My wife and I went to the Arts district for a first Thursday, his studio was open, and we had a long conversation that night. I was taken by his Vintage Urban pieces on black scratch board, as well as his earlier, brilliant explosions of color. For the past seven years, I’ve followed his work with its twists and turns. Always unique, he never settled.

But beyond the paintings, I deeply respected him. He told me of his first life as an alcoholic, and how he discovered painting on his own. Painting saved his life…and so thoroughly enriched ours.

Life and kids got in the way so I didn’t get to hang out with him very often, but every time I’d drive by his second story studio on Charleston, I’d think of him. More often than not, his window was open. He was legit. He put in the work.

He was a pillar in this small town, an institution who showed up every day and gave us his true art.


Dude. I miss you.




Coda. A groundbreaking ceremony was held at Nevada State College for their new School of Education building this Wednesday. One of his pieces is displayed on the third floor of the Roger’s Student Center. It was comforting to say hello before and after the event. He left us some great work, but damn I’d rather he stayed.

I was going through a bevy old photos that had been stuck on a sundry of devices and found this old shot.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this particular photo has already been uploaded here. But I thought I’d post it again as a reminder at how quickly four years has passed.

One day you’re halfway through the decade, and in a blink of the eye you’re thinking about writing a retrospective on your blog.

My wife took this lovely photo in the parking lot a few months ago.

My girl came up with a fun silly game at lunch.

If she said GO, we would race to raise our left hand. If she said STOP, raise our right hand. Whoever raised it first got a point.

Naturally the person calling out the word would normally win the point, but not always. And it a bit mind bending when you’re facing each other so the opposite side is shooting up.

I added another level of difficulty by changing the words to LEFT and RIGHT, but mapped onto the wrong hands. That one was just a total train wreck.

The “Ping Pong” comes from passing “serve” after 5 points with the winner at 11 points.

And here’s an easier holiday version: HANUKKAH and CHRISTMAS. In this case raise up both arms when HANUKKAH is called (like a menorah), and clap your hands above your head when CHRISTMAS is called (like a tree). The clap adds a nice sound element to the game.

One year ago, after some prodding from Seth Godin, I started a “daily” blog. Ultimately I wrote about four days out of seven, making up the missing day with various binges of multiple posts.

After a month, I decided to reassess every solar event, and upon one full trip around the sun, at the autumnal equinox, I decided to call off the experiment.

It has been an enjoyable run, a nice written record of my first year as a public architect, and of the first year of life with the boy. However, continuing this blog just isn’t worth the effort entails.

With two little kids, the biggest issue is a lack of time. As have been noted multiple times, I have a habit of waking up early, and this is the only alone time I have outside of the office.

This blog is a good use of such time, far better than my usual demon of surfing the web, but I have become increasingly aware of how little exercise I do.

Over the past year, I’ve learnt that I only get one priority every morning, and with a regular blog it means I sit down in front of the computer as the first and often only thing. That just isn’t physically sustainable since I am not getting my exercise in later in the day.

Before I sign off of regular blogging, I pulled up an old post I wrote two weeks into the experiment but never published. It still encapsulates what I hope to get out of the exercise, but sadly, I don’t think the potential gains were realized. My writing has improved slightly (albeit at a much slower rate for than at the start), but I’m still always fighting the demon of Facebook and I’m not sure I’m getting any better at thinking than before. I have some nice slice of life observations which is nice to have on record on my own platform, but I never really got around to doing much with web publishing.

Now that it has been a couple weeks into my newfound hobby, I thought I’d do a quick assessment on the few things I think I’m getting out of messing around with this blog for an hour every morning.

The most obvious thing is that I am getting better at writing.  I guess that should be obvious, especially I am at the start of the cheap and easy steep part of the learning curve, but the payoff of this increase is not to be seen on this blog.  It is found in my work emails.  I find myself typing up those memos faster and editing them better. Unlike these blog posts, where I’ve been saving a draft and then polishing and posting the second day, these things have to be written and sent at a moment’s notice.  And the leisurely practice here is definitely helping in those pressure moments there.

To make time for blogging, I have indeed drastically cut down on my Facebook time.  The main way I’ve accomplished this is by very rarely actually typing anything on that website.  Aside from being the product on that platform (each of my keystroke is ends up in for Zuck’s bank account), I’ve become disappointed in how few deep conversations really get started on that platform.  When I type out something deep, I usually find that I waste a ton of time refreshing the FB page and in the hopes getting the rare thoughtful response back.  It just isn’t a good ROI on my time.  Furthermore given how ephemeral and unsearchable any single comment is in that universe, I am convinced that it is much better to just spit in the wind by myself to my self here instead.

The main goal of why I started the blog is to think better.  And I believe that is also happening.  Partly because I have gotten off of the worst of the FB hamster wheel, but also because I’m now having to publish every day, I now have more brain space to just ponder.  This blog is currently unfocused, and I suspect it will stay this way for a while, but having to produce (even for my current audience of one) does sharpen the mind for the task at hand.

And finally, I get to poke under the hood of how the internet works.  I just signed up with mailchimp and added a facebook page. I’m not sure if I’ll do any real campaigns, but it is interesting to experience “social” from the other side of the looking glass.

I had tried to do a regular blog six years ago with a focus on the industry.  As such I felt pressure to produce at a respectable level of quality, which resulted in the attempt fizzling out in a month or so.  Now with this government gig, I essentially have tenure as long as I don’t screw things up.  So we’ll see if this run can last as long as that previous month long run, but so far so good, two weeks in and I still enjoy waking up every morning and typing away.

I won’t lie, if a following had developed over the past year, maybe I would have kept it up longer. Everyone has an ego, and I’m a sucker for an audience, but it never materialized and most likely its for the better. One of the recurring themes from this past year is that life is a series of tradeoffs and along with physical exercise there is a good amount of bookkeeping that I have been neglecting.

So here’s to healthier habits and getting organized, and I’ll be around only occasionally.

I know its been the hot thing for the last couple years now.

But lately I’ve been waking up at four am with my mind spinning about life or work.

Nothing particularly dark, but just revved up and ready to go.

It wouldn’t be that big of a problem if the rest of the family was ready to sleep at 2030 so we could all live on the same daily cycle.

But we don’t. And it is not good to be to be so out of sync with everybody else.

Maybe it’s time to whip out the mediation book I read a long time ago and get it on.

Or maybe rock some Tai Chi!

Yeah, something like that.

On the one hand we have so much media available to us in all forms, and yet there is a lot of noticeable discontent about the state of media today.

We have the entire world at our fingertips, which means we also have all the discontent within earshot.

It isn’t that discontented people should pipe down, but that we should occasionally take stock of what we do have.

Growing up in a pre digital age, our options were much more limited. But we also didn’t hear about the erasure that such limited options implied.

Things are looking better, even if it doesn’t sound that way.

But please do look, the passive algorithm is quite a concern.

I woke up to write a blog post.

But then got sidetracked…and sidetracked…and sidetracked.

Fifteen minutes later, a crying baby snapped me out of this “reverie”.

It’s an odd world we live in. All the info at our fingertips.

But brains that aren’t very good at discerning what’s fit to read.

In any endeavor, the folks that go all in for an extended period will say it is super duper awesome.

The quitters just anonymously disappear.

So while it’s worth hearing out the fervent adherents, it doesn’t hurt to look for the silent majority that found better things to do.

Sometimes grit is the answer. Sometimes moving on is better.