Not Built in a Day

Yes, friends, it's time once again for me to show off some stuff I made, having accumulated enough stuff to constitute a post. I have been thinking about doing this for literally years.  Why didn't I do it sooner?  Who knows.  Here they are now: These are super easy Harry Potter-inspired wands, via this tutorial .  Next up I need to make a wand holster, via this tutorial, to make it easier to carry the wand around!  (If you're super ambitious and want to make a wand that lights up, try this tutorial instead .) To ensure you don't think that everything I make turns out well, I present to you, unfinished & abandoned Christmas ornaments of 2017: The laser cutter melted the edges so they were sticky and gross; the engraving was impossible to read; I couldn't figure out the paint job.  Sorry folks.  You'll have to wait til next year for ornaments.  But I did manage to cut out a bunch of squares of cardboard that may yet become something,

My thirtieth birthday was  last week    a few weeks ago   last month, and I seem to have missed New Year's, so here is a recap / resolutions and look back over the last decade all rolled into one. This blog is now coming up on ten years of posts -- my very first post was in December 2008.  Since then, I've graduated from college, then from graduate school, become an urbanist, done some  traveling, moved across country to California, gotten my architecture license, and worked my way up to managing my own projects.  Now I'm a project architect with nearly five years of experience, and I'm trying to figure out what's next. Last year around this time, in the throes of the aftermath of the election, I was feeling lost and  made some general resolutions  to take better care of myself.  I was hoping to exercise more, take up piano again, and plan some trips.  I was successful in planning the trips, and went to AIA Convention in Orlando; visited friends in Washington