I actually finished finals/final reviews about a week ago, but have been decompressing and haven't even felt like typing. I have been trying to decide what to do with my summer. I haven't been a student in a long time, so my summers have always come and gone, hardly noticing from the office I was in.

I have decided to spend the next few (v.v. hot) months with my family in Texas. My dad had just purchased a boat, and I have some wonderful parents, a sister and brother-in-law, nephews and a niece that I don't get to see quite enough. I am lucky enough to have been offered work by 2 architects; work that I can do in Texas and upload to servers and not have to sit in a stuffy office. I may also try to get a job working a couple of days in a bookstore or something to get out and meet people.

A few of my studiomates and I are doing some renderings for "fun" and to further develop our skills. We are giving ourselves three weeks per project and we rotate on who chooses the building we model. We are starting soon. I am working on getting a website up-and-running for us to upload images of our progress and for online discussion etc. We are currently strewn across America, so physically getting together is not possible.

Our final review went well. I don't have pics on my camera due to a memory card error, but I am going to try to get them from studiomate Danny. It lasted about four hours and there were several guests and I said the same thing over and over to a lot of different people, but I did get a few really great suggestions to make my projects stronger.

I also went to fifth year final review and was rather impressed. I would say that I was really impressed with more than half of the work, and that seems to be a lot. The projects that seemed the most interesting to me were the ones that chose sites out of Los Angeles (though there were a few good LA ones). I would have liked to have seen a project that dealt with the rebuilding of Indonesian or Thai coasts that were destroyed by the tsunami. I think that would have been interesting, but an understandably heavy undertaking. My one critique is that several of the boards for the projects had many, many spelling errors. I understand that some people have trouble with it, or English is perhaps a second-language, but c'mon, this is your thesis project. Have someone with stronger spelling skills read over it, or press the damn spell-check button. There were some really strong projects that I couldn't get to the content because I was so focused on the spelling errors. This may just be my pet peeve, but on a project that important, it just seems lazy.

Finally. Thank you to everyone at Woodbury University. Faculty, students, everyone. It is because of all of you that I am v. content with my decision to attend this school and why I can't wait for second year. Cheers to all of you.

So. That is that. I kind of wish summer wasn't so long. I am already having studio withdrawals. Maybe getting out of town will help and focusing on my nicotine withdrawals as I am going to quit smoking this summer.

If anyone is going to be (or is already) in Dallas and would like to get together for any excursions (coffee, alcohol, museums etc..) send me an email. I need some Dallas friends.

Have a great summer everyone and I will update as much as I can.