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October is over. While I will be grading CRS reports for a while – and may well blog about that at some point – I want to celebrate my return to blogging by discussing more fun stuff. Last week, I was in Québec City for the Association of Preservation Technology conference (to talk about the … Read moreJ’ai même mangé un croissant
October is the spookiest month of the year. It’s also, for senior HISP students and yours truly, a very challenging and busy month. Every fall, I teach HISP405, arguably the most difficult course in the historic preservation department. The course has lots of challenging assignments, starting with surveying historic sites, and finishing with a National … Read moreThe spookiest – and workiest – month
* This is the French version of “have your cake and eat it, too”. I like it better. More snooty, of course, but also easier to understand. It means “to have the butter and money from (selling) the butter” My zealotry to lose piles of unwanted paper can easily be confused for an anti-paper stance. … Read moreLe beurre et l’argent du beurre*
You know the expression: “this is the [fill in the blank] bible”? In preservation, the bible is A Field Guide to American Houses. Sure, there are other books. Some would argue that Roth’s Understanding Architecture is more detailed and nuanced. Others – me included – would emphasize that McAlester is incomplete, since it only includes … Read moreBetter Late Than Never
When the apple announcements dropped on Tuesday I was busy working with Martha Burtis. More specifically, I was watching her show off the incredible work she’s done with the surveying the burg site. I’d match it up against professional CRM apps any day, and will have more to say about it soon. Anyway, I missed … Read moreA fan girl’s two cents
In the five months since the acquisition of the LEGO collection, rechristened the MBL (mobile build lab), I’ve been pretty busy with a number of projects. Still, I’ve started putting those LEGO to work, with multiple plans coming up this fall and into the future. First, back in May, the MBL was put through its … Read moreGetting the LEGO collection to work
My mom has instilled in me the need to sit down before every trip to make a wish. We’ve been doing it since my earliest memories, and I’ve started doing the same with my kid. This is coming to mind because today is move-in day at UMW and the academic year is about to start. … Read moreHere we go…
The title of this post is a bit of a misnomer, ’cause this wasn’t a vacation at all, really, or at least the destination wasn’t. I had a meeting and conference in Natchitoches, LA to attend. In midsummer. Yeah, think about that for a second. But I’m all for making lemonade out of lemons. Or … Read moreWhat I did on my summer vacation (Part 2)
Last week I went to Brooklyn and helped my sister settle into her new apartment. On a schoolteacher’s salary, she found a fantastic place, but it did need a little TLC. The week was beyond fun: sister bonding time, the world cup, an evening on Broadway, and general catching up with my old city and … Read moreWhat I did on my summer vacation (Part 1)
I’m not exactly the patient type, so after last week’s rant I decided to do something about my cloud storage/filing conundrum. First, I needed to brainstorm, and lucky for me Ryan Brazell came over for dinner and very graciously let me bore him to death. Then, I looked at many, many reviews and finally pulled … Read moreImpatience and clouds