I Passed My Exams!

Back in April, I took my General Structures and Lateral Forces exams, working towards getting my architecture license.

Read all about it here.

Well, the letter finally came yesterday; I passed both!

Today, therefore, I am slightly feeling the effects of a fabulous celebration at Typhoon restaurant at the Santa Monica Airport last evening. Not really hung over, but a vague cloud floating around the front of my brain [thank the sake] and garlic infusion that seems to permeate my entire body. Mmmmmm, garlic.

Four more exams to go; I think I'll hold off on any more major exam-related celebrations until I finish them once-and-for-all and finally get the paper.

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Just for kicks, here's a pic of a shop window in Chinatown, in San Francisco from Thanksgiving weekend, 2003. Not much connection to my exams, but I hate to post without a picture of something.

Composite Photos from the Jobsite

Here are a couple of photos from the construction site, the day the steel stairs arrived from the shop and were craned off the truck.

I love it when the big heavy equipment shows up and performs superhuman feats!


Here's the flatbed truck with one stair of three, waiting its turn.
You can see one other stair in the background, dangling from the crane.



This shows where stair #2 will get bolted into place.

That day I was photographing like mad, just high on the excitement of it all.

Too bad every day isn't as much fun!

Architecture Lesson #1

Let us take a break from the gripping Tales of Adventure in San Diego for a brief discussion in the history of architecture.

Consider the Pantheon in Rome, photographed here during my trip to Italy last summer:



The Pantheon was built by Emperor Hadrian, around 120 a.d. As it was converted into a catholic church sometime around 609 a.d., it survived antiquity intact. The marble interior is mostly the original Roman marble [except for the upper portion, which was re-done in the rennaisance, in an effort to improve it. Funny.] The huge bronze doors are believed to be the only ones in the world to have survived since antiquity. Almost all of the bronze from the ancient world was melted down in the aptly named Dark Ages for re-casting as weaponry.





The tremendous thing about the space itself is that the interior height of the dome is equal to the diameter of the great round chamber.

San Diego Part I

Well, friends and readers, here is a brief Part I of the trip to San Diego to visit my cousin, Ed.

I pulled out of Los Angeles on the mid-afternoon Amtrak Surfliner.

I love taking the train; they have a bar and everything! Plus, you can knit the whole way while all those jerks on the freeway are stuck in their cars. I'm usually one of those jerks, so the train is a real treat.



Here's the 6th Street bridge over the L.A. River. Its one of my favorites of the old downtown bridges. I love the combination of steel and concrete. Most of them are just concrete. The steel arches are really elegant.



Downtown L.A. and the L.A. River as I leave behind the city I love and love to hate.



I took a lot of rapid-fire pictures of passing freight trains thinking I would paste them all together as an experimental abstract collage of colors and shapes. This is about a third of them.



The train at the Santa Fe Depot in downtown San Diego.



The Surfliner has an upper and lower level.



Santa Fe Depot is quite lovely inside. The tile work is especially nice. Don't you hate seeing those vulgar no smoking signs messing up that beautiful tile panel? That's a major pet peeve of mine: the endless government signs, posters, and billboards bombarding us constantly these days, all of them warnings or behavior-modification propaganda messages.

Makes you wonder how the human race survived the preceeding thousands of years when people were just expected to think for themselves. But, I digress.

More adventures to follow, including knitting content! Stay tuned . . .

Blue Hat I: Not My Best Knitting

Since I can't seem to get it together with all the photos I wanted to blog from last weekend's trip to San Diego, I will just throw together a few shots of Todd and me modeling the blue and brown beanie that I finished on Friday night at Ed's. I still hope to get the photos up sometime tomorrow afternoon.


Later this summer you'll witness the transformation of that mess in the background!

I did accomplish some worthwhile goals with this hat. I finally figured out how to work a stripe in the round and then bring the old color up one row so the stripe doesn't stagger when you join it back together. That had puzzled me for a some time and I'm glad to have figured it out.



Look how hard I worked to get the decreases as uneven and random looking as possible!

Also, even though this is just crappy acrylic yarn [Patons' Canadiana, to be precise] and not my best knitting, I'm extremely happy to have knit myself a beanie with a good overall look and fit. I've hardly had the thing off my head all week! I have a drawer full of store-bought beanies, and I am very excited to gradually replace them with better, hand-knit versions.



At the last second I decided to add a 4th stripe.

I swear that stray blue stitch wasn't there the other day! Where'd that come from?

So emboldened was I from the success of my blue and brown acrylic hat, that I bought a skein of dark blue alpaca yarn at a shop in San Diego, along with some other goodies, for my next hat! Stay tuned for updates.


"Woof!"

Wanted: Flippy, Summery Pink Scarf

My big sis Emily has the blahs, and writes, "Any suggestions for a pattern for flippy, summery, pink scarf would be appreciated"

Anyone have any ideas? Speak up, then!

Meanwhile, I'm trying to get a big post together on my adventures last weekend with my cousin, Ed, in San Diego. Stay tuned, I should have it up by tomorrow afternoon.