My Mississippi Playlist
Certain songs seem to resonate with my time here; others just happen to be flippin’ great. Without any ado, here’s a rough draft of my Mississippi playlist: Old Crow Medicine Show, “Wagon Wheel” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2vJUadjdmo] Rehab, “Sitting At A Bar” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_0pw-LeloU] Bruce Springsteen, “My City of Ruins” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8xJpnnBZ-4] There’s more…
Vignettes of the Coast
So there has been a lot going on lately but I haven’t been very good about taking pictures or anything. Here is basically what it all is: Act I: Bike Tour & Homemade Wine Tasting Party We have some new folks here at the studio: Andy and Katharine, who are architecture students from the University of Tennessee, and Chris, who is from the University of Kentucky. Well, to introduce them to the place a little bit, we went on a bike ride last Friday evening to Ocean Springs. The bridge across the Biloxi Bay is about a mile and a …
June Madness
Here’s a go at catching up. As I hinted at in my previous post, this month has brought some pretty big changes. New car! I bought the car I was looking at (a 2001 Mazda 626); I’m still biking to work, but the car will be good to have for trips and for hurricane season. New house! After a couple pretty tedious months, I moved to a new house at the beginning of June, making my living situation infinitely better. The roommates, Doug and Phil, work for Habitat for Humanity and are great guys. The house is a classic Biloxi-style …
Biloxi North 40
I took my new Trek out on its maiden voyage this morning, doing a route called the Biloxi North 40 with my friend Anne. The land here changes pretty quickly as you head north of the coast. Biking just a couple miles inland, the cities of Biloxi and D’Iberville morph into a rural landscape interspersed with concrete distributors and uninspiring subdivisions. The coast’s southern live oaks are replaced by scrubby forests of longleaf and slash pines. We headed out around 11, so we had a hot and sunny two-hour ride. The bike was a good choice; it’s a hybrid road …
Just Keep Biking On
Since my car met its end a couple of weeks ago I’ve been riding my bike. It’s not a great bike — an old, heavy street bike with two functioning gears that I found ownerless behind Hands On — but I’m enjoying it inordinately. At the distances I typically go, there’s no need to drive; the bike is hardly much slower, uses no gas (in Mississippi, where the majority of vehicles on the road are pickups or SUVs, bringing down the average a little doesn’t hurt), and costs barely anything. Plus, there’s something that biking does to reconnect you to …
Tax Day
It’s been quite a few days. The weekend was great — beautiful weather; haircut, bike shopping, Mockingbird Cafe and Rock Band in Bay St. Louis on Saturday; brunch at Jessie’s, football on the beach, and bad movie fest with Will and Jesse on Sunday. (Ninja Condors 13, Yor, the Hunter from the Future, and Fantasy Mission Force, if you’re curious). Now it’s cold – down to 48 tonight – and work is getting pretty intense as we prepare for the second Oak Street community meeting tonight. It should be a pretty good session as we get down and dirty with …
La primera tertulia fue un éxito!
Por varios meses, he intentado de empezar un grupo de conversación en español, y estoy muy satisfecho que hoy hemos hecho el primer “Tertulia” de Biloxi. KC, Yvonne, Dylan, y Will han venido y fue muy interesante de hablar con varias personas con varios niveles de español (incluyendo mi español podrido…). Creo que vamos a hacerlo cada viernes aldredor de las seis de la tarde; esta vez lo hicimos a Kokopelli’s y era muy bien. ¡Que exciting!
Boston & Structures for Inclusion Part 2
This is mostly a picture post – click below for more! I also wanted to quickly elaborate on some of the themes that came out of the conference: Top-down vs. bottom-up: There was a lot of discussion about top-down (centralized) versus bottom-up (grassroots) approaches to planning and architecture. One strong point of view held that bottom-up work best engages the community and produces the most useful results. However, I think a large number of people also realized that architects and planners are uniquely able to mediate between top-down and bottom-up approaches. This theme came out in Teddy Cruz’s talk as …