Saved files: the best of Wolfson College

These are among my favorite pictures from Cambridge taken during June 2006. Above is a great photo of the Scoobies because Terry Jones is in the picture and James is not scowling! Clockwise: Bill, Terry Jones, Anna (they are expecting a child later this year), Ryan (the intrepid Antarctic scientist with a Ph.D. in math), James (Becky's husband who has a Ph.D. in English), me, Simone (currently in the graduate program at York in English), and Becky (the English major and cake baker married to James). Becky and James now live in Australia.



Here I am all dolled-up for the June event at Wolfson College. I'm wearing a necklace that my grandfather gave to my grandmother.



I love this painting. The photograph doesn't do it justice.



The Wolfson June Event begins with a formal dinner. Throughout the evening you can buy alcohol. Here the guys are taking a little break. Notice that James is scowling because I am taking the picture.



This is Virginia. She's an M.D. working on a Ph.D. on brain imaging. She's the one who needed an "older female specimen" for her study; I was the specimen.

Now the great thing about the Cambridge balls is that they have a variety of forms of entertainment. Bumper cars in ball gowns and tuxedos--you can't beat that!



There are swings, too.



Here is Simone on a bull ride.



Here's Bill on the same ride.



I had gotten out of my skirt and into some silk trousers at this point. Neveretheless, I unable to hoist myself onto the bull to get my picture taken. Maybe I should have gotten rid of the Kleenex in my right hand! Even if I had been able to get up on it I wouldn't have ridden it because it had been less than six months since I had broken both wrists.



I'm very glad I have these pictures again.

Oops! My bad!

Before Mass this evening I was reading the bulletin. Just in case parishioners couldn't figure out the Gospel message, a synopsis was provided in the bulletin by Jude Siciliano, OP. Beneath his name was a website: Preachersexchange.org. Now I got quite tickled because I read it: preacher-sex-exchange.org. I showed it to Bill who pointed out to me that it should be read: preachers-exchange.org. My bad!

15. Gator Golf

Bill and I had a wonderful date last night. We went to Gator Golf to play putt-putt golf.



This putt-putt golf place actually contains two separate 18-hole courses. I like to play the one that starts at the top of the hill. The other one starts at the bottom of the hill and you have to walk up the course.



It was an unusually cool summer evening in the 80s, so there were lots of families playing golf.



It's a little hokey, all of the faux safari animals, but, you know, there's still a little kid in every adult.



Here we are as the sun is beginning to set.



Bill is watching his putt.



More safari animals.



Faux wildlife and a real sunset.



I beat Bill 40 to 42, coming in with a par performance. I also got a hole-in-one on the 18th hole which entitled me to a free game of golf!



Anyway, if you come to Fayetteville, this is definitely a fun way to spend a summer's evening.

More on the Japanese beetles

Here is proof that the Japanese beetles are destroying my lovely pond lilies. In the background is a pink water lily getting ready to bloom.



I'm not sure I like the name spider lily; spiders just aren't very pretty. In the above picture, the flowers resemble shuttlecocks.



Maybe I should call them stella lilies. That has a nice ring, and they do look like little stars.

Squirrel on a screen

This is what I saw the other day as I passed by Billy's room--a squirrel on the screen.



Look at his claws! Never before have I seen a squirrel on a screen. One of our students in Roma commented that she had never seen a squirrel in Roma. After that we began to look for squirrels, and she was right, there were no squirrels to be seen. Since the Romans don't have screens on their windows, maybe it's a good thing that they don't have squirrels. I would hate to have one of these land on me in the middle of the night. I sure hope this little guy wasn't rabid.

Eventually, the squirrel got off the screen and walked on the roof like other squirrels before him.

Restored memory: a random look

Not long ago, I was lamenting the premature and unexpected demise of my hard drive. It fell off the coffee table as I was picking up my laptop. It's death also coincided with a realization that my home access to Revit which should have lasted 12 months was about to end after only a month's availability. Throw in Billy's ACL surgery that week and you can imagine that it was a pretty lousy week. The hard drive contained a lot of pictures which were not backed up by either hard copies or discs. However, about 90% of the files were able to be retrieved. So this blog is about what was lost and is now found.


I am very happy to have my college work available again. Above is my logo. It's actually the only thing I could do for myself while my arms were in plaster casts.



These are my senior boards. The school kept the original. And while I did print a second copy of the main boards (white on black), this is the only good image of the materials boards (black on white).



I now have again important images from my four years at the UA. That's important if I ever choose to assemble a new portfolio. The above picture was created using SketchUp but the portfolio is made using InDesign. Without the links to the original images, InDesign won't let you print either a hard copy or a pdf. Anyway, I'm happy to have my work again.

This was our dog, Corbie, who died two years ago from lymphoma. She was the best dog ever. We found out on a Monday about her condition and expected to have her around for another month or two but the disease took its toll very rapidly.



Corbie did not like to have her picture taken, and she looks rather pensive here.



Daisy is checking on her best friend.



On Saturday morning we decided the time had come to have Corbie euthanized. Look, she's smiling for me.

This was the last picture we took of her.



Here I am right before Christmas in 2006 with Kikka. Kikka was with me the night I tripped on the cobblestone in Roma. The following day I went to the hospital where both wrists were casted. I love this picture because it explains why Bill had to do so much for me for the first three weeks.



This is how I slept each night for a while.



After three weeks in the Italian plaster casts (each one weighed three pounds), I got fiberglass casts. I chose black because it hides soil and architects and designers wear a lot of black. Remember the days of wearing chic 3/4 length gloves?



Speaking of Rome, below are the three professors--Emilio, Davide (wearing black-he's an architect), and Bill. Among the pictures I thought were gone forever were those taken after our first visit to Roma. The picture below cracks me up because they all look so happy, like little boys. Since Bill has the shades and a walking stick, I think he looks like he ought to be blind. With that in mind, I look at the picture and think "hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil." That cracks me up more.



The above picture and the one of Billy below were taken at the Tivoli Gardens. I really like the shot of Billy based on artistic criteria--the colors and the composition. More than that, I'm glad I have that picture again because Billy had asked for paper and pencil that day so that he could sketch like the students.



The picture of Billy is a good segue to family. I have lots of family shots that I wouldn't have wanted to lose. Below is proof that the reason I can't (easily) touch my toes is not because I am lazy but because of genetics. Three of my four cousins can't touch their toes either!



Here we are with Bill's family for his mother's 80th birthday.



Michael, Grandma, and Billy.



Kristen (who's getting married this fall), Grandma, and Catherine.



And then there are the graduation pictures. This one was taken at Billy's graduation in the spring of 2006. He spent the fall semester of his senior year with us in Roma.



Here I am all duded up for graduation last year.



And here's a shot of the family. Bill gave diplomas to both Catherine and me.



Lastly, I have lots of pictures from Cambridge that I would hate to lose. The only glitch to Dave's restoration work is that I couldn't open up a picture of all of the Scoobies who made Bill and me feel at home in Cambridge.



Cambridge is lovely. Here we are at the start of the Cambridge Ball. This is the only time I've ever pulled an all-nighter in college. The port at 2am and the ferris wheel ride at 4am probably had something to do with it.



So that's my very random look at the images that had been lost but are now retrieved.

P.S. Here's my new setup. My computer and the new hard drive are now on a proper desk with a not so proper desk chair!

The house that Tricia built

To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving.

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

Of the many things I learned in Roma were the following: always show the context in the drawings and never show the plan on the internet.



Here is a site plan of our house. In Interior Design we don't learn how to do site plans, so this is my first one ever. I had to get rather creative in figuring the changes in grade. I was able to take accurate measurements around the house but the back fence was another thing. Since I knew the both the height and the width of the fence planks, I used the muntins in Billy's room as a constant and figured the geometry from that. It also helped that Google Earth provided a ruler so that I could get the general dimensions of the yard without resorting to my tape measure.

As for Revit, I love it! There is no second guessing when it comes to line widths or text heights: small, medium, and large seem to work just fine. Another improvement over CAD is the ease at which the actual construction document sheets are created--a right click on "Sheets" and then you simply drag the view over to the newly created sheet. Another plus is that Revit automatically cross-references section cuts and elevations to the correct page numbers in the construction documents without having to be told.



While my course in Revit was introductory and did not address rendering, per se, building the construction documents--plans, elevations, and sections--leads to rendered images in 3D views.



And that's another thing about Revit that I like. As you build your plan in 2D, you are simultaneously modeling your building in 3D.



If I had only known Revit my senior year, it would have been a relative breeze to sail through both the presentation and the construction drawings.

As for the excerpt above, it seemed most appropriate. You see, I spent the better part of spring working on the landscaping in the backyard. The little footpath you see at the top of the site plan I actually built myself. It's edged with rocks from our yard--"hard muscles from the lifting" is no joke. I moved each of those rocks myself!