Category: Essays
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Drawing By Hand
From “Working Stiff” , an upcoming recollection of career adventures ……..and misadventures. There was a wing of our high school that was way off by itself. It was, for lack of a better term, the “Vocational” wing, and housed an auto repair garage, wood and welding shops, and photography dark…
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Roadkill-Ode To The Summer Job
From the Series- “Misadventures of a Working Stiff” Having recently retired, I am temporarily, staying near where I grew up. And I find myself reflecting on the early days of my working life, and in particular, the dreaded summer job. My favorite year of college was my sophomore year. The…
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Collections – A Salute to the Branch Library
They sit quietly on tree-lined neighborhood streets. Often surrounded by single family homes , small apartment buildings and bits of retail, the branch library tucks itself gently into these neighborhoods, elegant public buildings at home in these more modest settings. San Francisco and The Bay Area are blessed with many…
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Moving Day- Packing Up The Family Home
Awhile back, I figured out I have had 16 different addresses since leaving for college. A long time ago to be sure, but I was still surprised that there were so many. Sure it counts a different dump each of my college years, and episodes like house sitting for 3…
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Welcome to The Dollhouse- In Praise of the Bungalow Court
Back in the late 80s, I was living in Colorado, having just received my Master’s Degree in Architecture. Colorado was in the grips of a terrible energy related recession , and it really couldn’t have been a worse time to hit the job market. My first job ended after…
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Two Modernists In Connecticut.
As an Architecture student way back in the 80s in Buffalo, one’s introduction to contemporary Architecture had two threads. First, the late 19th and early 20th century’s seminal works, many of which were in our back yard thanks to Buffalo’s incredible treasures of Wright, Richardson, Sullivan, and Burnham. The second…
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99 cent dreams
After a long layoff with the blog, I have some things to say again. More to come, and more frequently ! Among the many changes encountered in moving from San Francisco to West Berkeley a few years back was the extraordinary range of places to buy food. Berkeley is world-famous for…
