Treehouse Update! November 29, 2007
Posted by Vincent in Architecture, Design/Build.Tags: 145 rosetti
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We’ve made a lot of progress on Patty’s house. Thanks to the efforts of a number of volunteer groups, particularly First Presbyterian, the exterior of the house is more or less finished. It finally looks like a real house, it’s great!
A couple more pictures below…
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Cookies and Turkeys November 21, 2007
Posted by Vincent in Life.add a comment
Getting into the culinary swing of the holidays by making gingersnaps for a Thanksgiving potluck lunch at work today (which I see as a training session for dinner) and planning my first attempt at making orange rolls, an excellent family recipe, for dinner with studio friends tomorrow.
Aside from all of that, there will be Guitar Hero. Oh yes. Let there be Guitar Hero, and there shall be much rejoicing.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Rehab November 21, 2007
Posted by Vincent in Architecture, Residential Design.Tags: 273 Fayard
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No, not that kind. Unless these houses are going into rehab for their terrible, terrible addiction to being in disrepair. This is a house in East Biloxi for which we’ll be drawing up rehab plans, and it’s one of the many that have sat mostly untouched for the past two years.
Sorry for the crappy quality, they’re cell-phone pictures. They show it well enough though to see the ugly stucco job (why you would take a beautiful wood siding and put this over it, I do not know) and the state of the interior. The second picture shows the view from the front door down through the oldest part of the house, a traditional “shotgun” style in which the rooms are single-file and you walk through one to get to the next (no hallway).
Pretty cool! Quite a job for whatever volunteer group ends up taking this on. Still, it’s balloon-framed and obviously strong, having not fallen down in Katrina, and it has a lot of beautiful old materials we can hopefully reuse.
New Orleans, and Things November 14, 2007
Posted by Vincent in Explorations, Life.add a comment
The weekend before last I took my second trip to New Orleans and my first since moving to Biloxi (the other time was with Peter Waldman and other architecture students in early 2006). Not so much a high-minded humanitarian trip, as I didn’t make it out of the French Quarter, stayed in the fancy Holiday Inn Du Moyne, went to lots of restaurants and bars, and generally spent a pleasant weekend, way outside my budget, hanging out with Price and his friends from up north.
Trips aside, life’s begun to settle into some routines. Lunch at the fantastic Le Bakery (a Vietnamese-French bakery and sandwich shop) is a highlight, as is Tuesday night Frisbee at the Salvation Army. Thanksgiving’s coming up, and though I won’t be flying home, there will be people staying here and we should have a good time. Other than that, it’s mostly work, cooking, spending time with friends, developing foolish crushes on lovely short-term volunteers who will go unnamed, and generally enjoying Mississippi.
I wish everyone well, back home and elsewhere; I miss Virginia and my family and friends and I think about you (yes, you!) constantly (constantly!). One of my flaws is that I am terribly bad at keeping in touch, often with even my closest friends. But once I’ve developed a friendship, I never consider it more than ‘on hold’ until resumed spatial proximity can compensate for my retarded skill with long-distance communication.
Finally, I’m reading “The Kid Who Climbed Everest”, by Man vs. Wild host Bear Grylls, which is a fun and spirited book if you can read it without trying to imagine Bear reading it out loud (dramatic British accent, “I’m so thrilled to be writing this book, it’s such a great experience…”).
