Rowe, Rowe, Rowe my boat...

Well now! So I have finished my first week of employment at Rowe Inc. and boy am I excited!

I know it's still just the first week of work--I'm working part-time, Tues. - Thurs.--but wow is it ever great to be doing something constructive! I worked half a day on Friday so I could meet with the rest of the LA dept. and get work for next week. They had me work on a revised conceptual plan for a project we're working on that came back with some architectural revisions that required the landscape to change great deal. This week I'll be moving on to another conceptual project involving a local sports park. This is a new one, so I'll be doing much of the initial conceptual work.

Anyway, I hope everyone who's still popping in to read this [and even those that aren't] are having a good holiday!
All the best,
Shaun

Goddamnit!

I just fell down the staris...

That really frickin' hurt!

This is one of those blog posts...

You know the kind. The ones full of self-absorbed references to lyrics by the Nine Inch Nails or Linkin Park, and links to gothy, overly drawn, half-naked angels with black wings and single tears running down their faces. I'm sick with who knows what--probably just my 'nerves'--my stomach in constant and ulcerus turmoil between shots of Pepto, my body achy... It's getting better, I guess, but god am I ever miserable.

There is some good news, though! I've been offered a temporary position as a landscape architect intern at Rowe Incorporated, a local engineering firm. They aren't a firm anyone would have heard of outside this area, but that's alright. They 're mostly enigeneers and surveyors but they do a great many infrastructure projects which interest me and the majority of their work is both fairly hands-on and located throughout the region. They've even done several projects for the fair Village of Byron. They're also directly engaged in the "revitalization" of Flint, as the head office where I'll be working at will be moving into a renovated building downtown during my tenure there.

So I hope y'all are doing well, and your holidays are all very festive!

BLUE STEEL!!

Wow! This is my first legitimate blog entry in quite some time!

I hope everyone had a wonderful and festive Thanksgiving Holiday, full of overbearing and uncomfortably difficult family memebers as we all know that this is the time of the year when we give thanks for having 364 other days when we don't have to deal with them... Unless you're Anne. Sorry, Anne. You're SOL.

Anyway, I'm absolutely missing my uncle's deep fried turkey. My god. That stuff is better than crack! I miss that turkey even more than the pie. And I ate the equivilent of half a pie on Thursday too...

Other than that, things are pretty slow. I'm been spending a bit of energy on the whole 'finding a job in a state with America's 49th worst state economy and 50th worst unemployment rate' thing. Lots of fun. However, I do hope that I will have some positive news to report back on this upcoming week!

Attending a pretty nice dinner banquet for my Alma Mater. It's UM-Flint's 50th anniversary this year, so my former dept. invited all the former students, staff, and faculty back for a party. It was really good getting to talk about the last 4 years with some of the old crew. Really very theareputic. And, of course, Will Marsh was in attendence and it was good to see him, even though it hasn't been that long. As the founder of our dept. the man is absolutely--and deservedly so--revered. It's amazing.

Also, I thought it'd be fun to get out the winter gear today and do a little photoshoot. Despite the fact that it was over 50 today and not a drop of snow was in sight. It's been downright pleasant the last week. Unfortunately, this'll probably be the last time this stuff gets used this season...













My GOD I'm cute!
And humble!

What is the greatest invention of all time?



I can't tell you what the greatest invention of all time is... Soap? Antibiotics? Agriculture? Impossible to say. In my lifetime, though, it's obviously the personal computer.

(From Consumating)

What is the scariest thing you've ever seen?



Oh, there's been plenty of things. In the traditional sense of the word, I've got to go with anything that sick bastard, H.R.Giger produces. That man's "artwork" and the horrors it's engendered are nightmarish and disgusting. His damn xenomorphs from the Alien series are what haunt my nightmares.

However, most recently there's this political ad [and partisan politics in general] that's kept me up at night. The worst, was I was focused on the words and small print and didn't notice the actual graphics until almost the middle of the ad. Nothing's scarier than a rich, corporate, God-fearing, Bush loving, closet organizer manufacturer telling me that he knows what's best for me and the state of Michigan...

(From Consumating)

If you could roll back one hour from your life, which hour would it be?

Well, if I could roll back time from my life, it would have to be more than one hour and encompass the time I've spent watching the worst movies ever made [i.e. French films]. And I'm talking the 'make you a lesser person by simply viewing' kind of bad movie, not the 'oh my god, not another Baldwin/Travolta film' kind of bad movie. This would include Twentynine Palms, Ma ma�re, Cache�,Le Temps du loup and far, far too many more...

I swear to god, even thinking of these films makes me want to stab myself in the neck with an X-Acto knife and if I EVER see Isabelle Huppert in real life, I'm taking that woman down hard.

(From Consumating)

If you were in politics, what would your career ending scandal entail?



The dubious details of the month I spent having fun, learning, exploring, partying, and living in Cuba would get out...

(From Consumating)

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

Well folks, there you have it. The first snow of the season. That was the state of affairs at about 9am this morning. Now, an hour later, there's basically no indication of the dastardly white stuff at all, which is good, in my opinion, but just serves to make its permanency during the winter all that more brutal and foreboding.

Also, you can now see what my parent's house looks like from the front [south]. Quite the contrast in comparison to the north elevation. The small, glassed in projection in the very front of the house is the solarium--the heart of our passive heating system. It used to have 4 large skylights, but those were taken out in an attempt to fix a leaky solarium roof [which, we found out the expensive way, had nothing to do with the skylights]. Even without the skylights, the house is oriented in such a way that the south elevation--the solarium in particular--achieves the maximum amount of incident solar radiation in the winter. It can be well below freezing outside on a sunny day, but well over 80F [27C] or higher in the solarium. It sits between the half basement and the 2nd floor and is connected to the former by a small window in the hobby room and a pair of large french doors upstairs. When those are open, the hot air naturally ciculates from the solarium to the upstairs and cooler air is drawn from the basement. Of course, it's still a 3600 sq.ft. monster house [bigger now that we've added the adjoining garage, entry room, and loft] but I'm still really proud of that central bit of ecology designed into a home built in 1984!

In other news, I'll be meeting with the Director of the Landscape Architecture dept. at a local engineering firm at some point next week. Keep your fingers crossed!

Holy crap... It's now almost 11am and a very strong wind has kicked up and there is a great deal increasingly larger and larger flakes of light snow being driven nearly parallel to the ground... *sigh* It's quite the sight to behold, but I hate Michigan winters.

Kim Jong-il has the bomb. How do you grab someone's attention?



I stand up and point at them.

(From Consumating)

One bad JASPER

"Shaun, your answers indicate that you are a Visionary when it comes to your overall work personality. Your JASPER type is a combination of your most prominent work traits and a good indicator of what you're like at work."

"I like thinking big. If you're going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big."
-Donald Trump


Interesting career test that Monster.com offers.

"You take great pleasure in brainstorming creative ideas and having discussions about abstract concepts, which are activities that often involve collaborating with your colleagues. Not overly concrete, you'd rather be the one who comes up with the ideas than the one to figure out how to implement them. With a preference for creativity and theory, you probably have little desire to work with numbers or data.

Although you may not currently be in an occupation that involves working with ideas, being good at thinking creatively and channeling different theories and concepts into actionable ideas will help you excel in this area. You may want to explore Idea-heavy occupations such as an advertising copywriter, architect, a software developer, or a writer."

A space of my own...

BEFORE:


DURING:


AFTER:


Here it is. Still need to get the PC setup and I've got no pin-up or layout space but those are problems I can deal with when I get to them. I'm pretty excited about being able to sit down and getting to work on the thesis.

I'll be taking it easy this weekend though. My cousin [who used to live across the driveway as we were growing up] and his wife are visiting from California and there's a BIG family get-together and turkey dinner at my grama's place [which is also right across the driveway] all day tomorrow. And Sunday I think I'll look into seeing if I can't whip up a solution to computer/layout space out in my dad's workshop--even if it's just setting a door on a couple sawhorses.

If you've got any creative pin-up, layout, or workspace ideas, leave a comment!

I am not a slutty cowboy...

Well, I've recently been inspired [by the fear that the dragging of my feet through yet another project might possibily alienate someone i care about] into busting my obsessive-compulsive, overly meticulous, easily side-tracked, ass on getting the room clean. I'm no longer obsessing over what old toys to stick up on eBay. Not looking up their relative net value to collectors. Not reading through old love letters. Not going through the photos of past trips.

I'm just.

Frickin'.

Cleaning.

Now don't get me wrong, the process is still slow. I DO have to take the time and sort through things so I'm not forced to do it at a later date. But it's not as slow as it has been. It also helps that I already had the vast majority of it done already. Anyway, that's all a lot of boring, blah-blah-blah, lameness that you don't want to hear...

On to the good stuff! Pictures of me in slutty [thanks mom!] and not-so-slutty cowboy hats [I found my old cowboy hat today!]. With tiaras!




Okay, so this one is obviously way too small... This is actually my hat. I got it on my first trip to Texas in... Uhh... 1987 or something like that. I was 9 I think. It was the only trip to Texas where I didn't break something of my aunt's. Ahh... Good times!

This hat is one of two that my mother owns. I believe she got it in Hawaii when the sun proved to be a bit too much, even in the winter. It looks better on me, than it does her. Also, I like making funny faces.













Best cowboy hat. EVER! The weight, texture, and flexibility are perfect! It's comfortable and fits far better than the other two. Do I care that it's pink and has a tiara? Hell. No.













I'm completely out of 'bull auction' t-shirts. So I figured that the shirt advertising my unicorn breeding program would be the next best thing for a slutty cowboy to be wearing...

So we met on the internet. Now we need a cover up story. What crazy tale do you tell people about how we met in real life?



What's so wrong with meeting on the internet? I'm not embarrassed one iota by the amazing women I've met online, especially the ones from Consumating! I'd be a fool to cover it up!

(From Consumating)

Random crazy picture Sunday...

A rather amazing rainbow that came out yesterday afternoon. It was actually a double rainbow and the inner rainbow was also faintly mirrored so that it went ROYGBIVIBGYOR.
Me and my sister's cat, Poopy Kitty. Well, that's what I call him. His actual name is Hobbes Gir. But he's usually called "Habu Dahby," because he's a bit of a terrorist, in his mannerisms. His full terrorist name is "Habu Dahby Pin-Pin Poohla Achmed-Yomomma-Jackson." My mother invariably has several other names which range from "Hobby Bobby" to "Hey Cat" depending on her mood...
My cat Lulu Ann on the left and Poopy Kitty on the right, fighting in their own curious way...
I'm very excited to be taking my picture with Poopy Kitty.
Even more excited to be actually holding my own cat...
Tree frog!
Poopy Kitty, sleeping underneath a pillow. After waking up about half an hour later, he proceeded to launch a random assortment of attacks upon my person, biting and wacking my arm, before retreating back to the saftey of the pillow... He's weird...
Me, sorta dressed up, and looking damn sexy!
Goofy grin...
Lula Ann HATES being picked up...

It's that time of the year again...

I actually forgot all about it. With everything that's been going on with the move and clean up and life and whatnot, the last thing on my mind has been my impending birthday. But, it's fast approaching, and at 1:44am on October 1st, I will turn 28 years old.

And boy do I have a lot of grey hair! I blame the hundreds of all-nighters I pulled in studio. And the women in my life... Ooooh, those women... *shakes fist*

Here are some people with whom I share a birthday:

1903 Vladimir Horowitz
P i a n i s t

1920 Walter Matthau
A c t o r

1921 James Whitmore
A c t o r

1924 James Carter
P o l i c i t i a n / U . S . P r e s .

1924 William Rehnquist
J u s t i c e

1935 Julie Andrews
S i n g e r / A c t r e s s

1945 Rod Carew
A t h l e t e

1950 Randy Quaid
A c t o r

1962 Dale Hibbard [Doesn't have his own wiki...]
U n c l e

1968 Cindy Margolis
M o d e l

And here is me in my birthday suit. For some of you, this is going to be...

SHOCKING!!!

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

Well, I'm beginning to feel rather unproductive and sloth-like, despite the time spent cleaning my room, helping around the house, taking care of the animals, and searching for jobs. I think it's because despite the progress I've made, I'm still not done. I've got real problems with finishing things...

But anyway, I found a great little piece of work today. My journal from 1989! I was ten at the time. It's incredibly brief and only spans between June 29th and July 23rd, but the entries are delightful. I'm going to include a few of them here, as accurately as possible:

June 29, 1989 [First Entry]:

Blaines [Blaine is my cousin] last day here. We ate pancakes for breackfast. Went up town and to ambleaens staition. Man came to work on house. I think were going to Tawas Mi. We played in the mud. The recipy for mud soup is:
6 cp. of white dirt
2 cp. outside sandbox dirt
1 cp. water
I just got an ax and baseball cards from Grandpa. I made a birdfeeder, and helped dad.

July 3, 1989:

Tonight we are going to see "Honey I Shrunk the Kids. I just got a letter from my cousins the Hankinsons, the letter had a picture of a mouse on the front. Dan and Penny came over with baby Justin.
We are now leaving for the movies.
After the movies I got a Bubble gum Flurry.

July 7, 1989:

At 9:00 mom goes to get her nails done. After breakfast we go to Melissa's house [my aunt]. Then we went to town and got groushrey's. After we had lunch we went swimming. For dinner we are going to have Pizza Bread. I didn't get the Nerf Ping Pong set but instead I got a G. I. Joe that I've wanted for a long time, and four Meudiam sized sweet tarts. I hope I get my picture of the Titanic done so I can hang it up. I had half of a sub for dinner. Before bed I had a samdwich.

July 14, 1989:

I did not do much exciting things ! ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!! !

July 16, 1989:

This morning I still had the pain in my stomache. I told mom and she said that I had a tempresure of 100.2 F. So I had some Tylanoll and I had to have a slush and some crackers, after that I felt better. Around lunch we went to the Heritig House [an up-scale restaurant], there I had some Sprite and SHerbert. Then whem we went out to the car threw up. So we stopped at a Party Store and got me some coke. But tonight I still feel sick.

July 23, 1989 [Last Entry]:

Today is the Ani [short for Anniversary, which I obviously couldn't spell, Party]. I hop I get a Lego set or computer game. Last night I went to bed at twelve o'clock. I've mainly stayed in where it cool. I finished my paint set.

What skeletons live in your closet?



There isn't any room for skeletons in my closet...

















Yet!

(From Consumating)

Things I like about Michigan

* The way that on some days, the clouds go screaming across the skies on wind so strong it seems as if the world outside my window is set on 'fast forward.'

* The way folks get geared up and excited about things at very large scales. I'm particularly speaking of football. I watched the Michigan vs. Wisconsin division opener with my grandfather yesterday and after the game he was getting calls from friends and family as far away as Texas to talk about the game. The Wolverines did hand Wisconsin a lost, but neither the coaching or the playing was as clean as it should have been. Not like it was in their route over Notre Dame. [And the Spartans handed the Fighting Irish a brutal lashing in the torrential down pours in Lansing last night, setting up what is sure to be a marvelous battle between themselves and Michigan in the Big House--that's what Michigan's stadium is called--two weeks from now.]

* That brings me to another like: College Football! I'm not much a sports junkie. I keeps tabs on the Tigers, Redwings, and Pistons, but not much more until post season play starts. But man, do I like to see these college games. Especially from my alma mater, Michigan. It's just one more fun, positive, enjoyable reason I'm proud to have gone to that school.

* Nature. My parent's house is in the middle of nowhere. Well, it's a little closer to the edge of nowhere these days, with sprawl being what it is, but regardless, it's remote. Byron, a village of some...800 people I would imagine...is two miles south. Gaines [where I grew up the first 6 years of my life and even smaller than Byron] 5 minutes north by car, Durand, 10 minutes. And none are what you would call bastions of civilization. So, the predominant rural character of this place, so different from Vancouver, is refreshing [though, admitedly frustrating]. There's my grandfather's garden and orchard which I've been plundering most every day for apples, pears, grapes, and tomatoes. The ants, hornets, rabbits, raccoons, birds, and deer seem fine with the loss of my share. With 8 acres between the families, there's a small portion of wooded land to wander in, swales, wet areas, weeds, and thicket. Edges like you can't imagine.

* I love the stars. Being remote makes star gazing possible. I haven't taken the opportunity to do so yet, but the simple fact that it's there is quite sublime.

* I'm enjoying the family. It's been a long time. My aunt and uncle from Lansing were out the other night. We went to my cousin's son, Jackson's, 2nd birthday day party. It was a Blue's Clues Party, so everyone had to come in orange and blue [the most wonderful pair of complimentary colors, in my opinion]. It was nice to just hang out and observe and talk. I love the little kids though. They are, beyond any doubt, the most amazing people on this planet. And adorable to boot! Their innocence and gullibility is charming, though I fear I'm going to be known as "Cleatus" with far too many of them.

* Teasing! My family is a dangerous and playfully entity. We show our love and affection through a wide variety of jokes, whitty quips, and playfully malicious humor. You aren't a part of the family until you've been teased and learned to tease yourself.

* I like taking trips through time. Cleaning out my room has given me a great opportunity to look back and reflect on how far I have [or haven't in some cases, as I type with my favorite Star Wars toy--a TIE: Defender--setting close at hand] come. It's especially interesting to flip through the old college tests and essays and papers. I must say, I was a most impressive student, once upon a time and just as sarcastic, ironic, and snarky! The professors ate it up! And man I was the cutest little boy EVER!

* I like the changes. Specifically, it's obvious that fall is approaching. All too obvious. It's frickin' cold out! But the weather changes daily. Heck. Hourly. Sunny, rainy, warm, cold, blustery, quiet... And the leaves are changing on the cotton woods and ash trees.

I like change.


Change is good.

Centers...

Ah, the room... The present center of my most industrious activities these days. It's a disaster area. If you can believe it, this is a shot after two weeks of cleaning and packing. It's actually looking better today, I'll get some more pictures of it this weekend.



Shoot. The resolution on this is really tiny... This is "the middle." The center of my families' 8 acres. There's a fire pit on the ground just out of view. When the land was first purchased by my grandfather, it was all weeds. It'd been cleared and farmed at one point and I recall that it'd been pasture at one point too. In the southwest corner there was a large pit and the typical collection of rocks [glacial erractics] cleared before farming took place. In the northwest, there was a swampy swale. In "the middle" an overgrown swale that held water almost the entire year. In it was 8 large cotton wood trees and a swamp willow. We cleared it out, drained it, and it eventually became the well-shaded, fire-pit endowed, summer camping retreat and communal barbeque.

From the left to right:

The picture starts off looking west towards the road. The first house you see belongs to my aunt and uncle. Panning further to the right, behind the twin cotton woods and the poorly stacked wood pile is my grand parents house. Just to the right of that, behind the small orchard, is my grandfather's garden and pole barn. Next you will see me and my sister's playset. Then, my house! It's rather austere looking from the north [and yes, that's polyvynal siding...], but that's because the house is designed to maximize solar gain in the winter, and therefore, the north side has virtually no windows. [Actually, all the houses were either designed by--or based-on in the case of our house--a local architect who was using passive solar heating, earth berms, and natural ventilation to reduce heating and cooling costs. The garage is actually an addition we put on over a decade ago. Then there's my father's pole barn [and its new addition].



And I just really like this one...