Best Music Video

aaaaand I don't like cats, especially ones that jump in front of bikes, but this...

Autocad + Saturday night = boring blog.

I'm mostly just writing because Autocad is frustrating and I needed a break :)

The last couple weeks of school is a little more intense than the rest of the semester has been, but not by much. It's all over in a week and a half. It's stressful but good. I usually always get everything done, I don't let myself not turn something in, but now it is coming down to time. I don't know if there is enough of it.

Listening to Bright Eyes, 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,' almost just made me cry. I like Christmas, mostly because I love my family. I'm glad school is almost over so I can relax and spend time with people that I love.

But it will be weird not to see any of my classmates for almost a month. We are like a big family now. It's pretty incredible. Nice little support system.

I slept in 'til noon thirty today. Alarm was set for 9. Ha. But I stayed up until 2:30 cleaning a bathroom. I was medium sad to see that it was snowing, I sort of hoped global warming was going to keep it from snowing at all this winter :) But it was the nice dry kind of snow so riding my bike was just fine.

I've learned a lot this semester. I need to take the time over the break to figure out what I've learned about myself. And what I'd like to see myself learn next semester.

I think I'm going to cut my hair. I'm sick of it. Maybe I'll buzz it like Jo did that one time :) I'll let my sisters decide.

Colby Drew and I built a castle this week for History. The Krak des Chevaliers in Syria. We made it of foam. Just a section of it, actually. It is cool, we kind of sculpted it really. I put a picture up later.

I have bored myself. Seeeeya.

Ponies

For some reason I love this.

Architecutral Communications

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have a three hour class called Architectural Communications. It's half digital half good old fashion hand made. I've liked the hand drawn things the most, just because I'm more comfortable in that area. It is frustrating having an idea in my mind that I can't translate onto the computer screen because I don't know the program well enough. We've only worked with a few programs, the adobes like Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, a movie editing program called Magix which is pretty cool, but not as good as other editing programs, Sketchup with podium and idx rendering, Piranesi, and Autocad. I haven't ever posted anything, mostly because don't end up liking any of it. One of my pieces was hung on a wall upstairs the other day and I erased my name because I didn't want to claim it. Ha! But I might as well blog it, right?

First we did a pencil drawing. This is of a building near the governors mansion on South Temple (and G street, I want to say?)

We made a brochure using High Dynamic Range Imagery (HDRIs) of anywhere around town that we could make some sort of commentary on. I photographed the silos and the run down structures around it on 9th South. To make an HDRI you take 3 or 4 or so photographs of the same frame at different exposures and digitally combine them.











My professor, Toni, is an interesting guy. He's really good at what he does (he recently had an exhibit at the British Museum on over 20 years of research on the Aztec Templo Mayor) but he has a lot to teach in one semester. All he can really do is drown us in all the programs and ask for some crazy explorations to see that we can do enough with them. It's an interesting but sometimes frustrating process. I'll do something that looks good but that hasn't explored enough options so I have to make it more extreme. Which is sometimes too much. But it is good to push the boundaries while we can. So we took the HDRIs and messed around with photoshop to make some "cool" images.







We had to choose a few images and make a brochure that folded in an interesting way and that presented our commentary in a logical fashion. I liked mine in the end.

We made a huge (3'x6') drawing with a graphite stick of a human figure or droid. There were some pretty cool drawings. Then we made a three minute video that ended up being a lot more work than I expected.

We did some charcoal drawings. Bananas,


crumpled paper,



and an impressionist copy, mine is of this.



We had to mess around with sketchup and piranesi for a few weeks, I had a hard time at first and ended up starting over on my project half way through. Some images from that project:


















Then a colored pencil drawing (of my old house).


We started learning autocad a few weeks ago. We were just working with solids, so we had to create all the shapes and pieces of our "buildings" ourselves, rather than simply typing "wall" and inserting a wall. It was a good exercise to start learning the basics with autocad. (In the field, Autocad is basically being replaced by a program called Revit. My professor is a bit old school in that he won't teach revit, only autocad. Oh well.) I was supposed to make a coffee shop. I did my project to make one of my other professors (Joerg) mad, he hates donut shops shaped like donuts. But I knew Toni would love it.








Then an ink drawing. This is of a cool old shed in Green River.

That is basically everything for this class. We are working on a final autocad project right now, due in a little over 2 weeks. It has been a good class. A different learning process. I look back at projects and feel like I could redo them in a quarter of the time it took me originally because I understand it more once it is over. I don't know if there is a better way to learn so much information in only a few months. It can be really frustrating but pretty rewarding. And only two and a half weeks until winter break! Then it starts all over again! :)

Tiny House!

Froot Loops and Blenders

I kind of want to move to Chicago. I have a list of thoughts as tall as me but have done poorly at writing them down. Not even in my own notebooks. Which makes me very sad. My number one goal right now is to manage my time more efficiently. But I am happy. And that is important.

I like school.

"Cheese IS mold." -Lauren
"That's so it stays on top. Until someone out-exclamationpoints me." -Jeremy
"Can we borrow a mountain?" -Joerg
"Hawaii was underwater, wasn't it?" -Lauren

School.

I took Colin's advice and am letting my schoolwork consume me.

But I'm feeling a bit lost.

I like being at school, I feel in control here. But as soon as I leave the rest of life files in and is overwhelming. Or underwhelming.

And I'm afraid.

I don't know who I am right now. It happens sometimes with me. But I can usually find myself. A new self.

School is redefining me. It changes the way I think, the way I see, the way I feel and how I am able to feel.

Lately, though, I feel I haven't been able to feel much at all.