Clean Your Plate Billy!

My parents were not clean your plate kind of people. Why is it then that I feel compelled to eat everything I'm served. Even when I know its too much. For instance I love Jimmy John's number twelve Beach Club. It is turkey breast, provolone cheese, avocado, sliced cucumber, sprouts, lettuce, tomato, and mayo on a white roll. One tasty sandwich. Add salt and vinegar chips and a coke and I'm in heaven. The calorie count on this concoction is overwhelming. I was trying to do weight watchers a few months back and I calculated the points value at around eighteen for just the sandwich. That's about half my allotted points per day. So I'd eat half the sandwich and save the rest for the next day. It was a little soggy and less than tasty after twenty-four hours in the fridge so I stopped doing that.

Now I eat the whole thing. My waistline be damned. What I want to do is eat half and throw away the rest. I just can't bring myself to do it though. It feels like such a waste. I paid for the whole thing I should eat the whole thing right? What if I thought about it like this. The point of eating is to not be hungry and get enough calories to continue at my level of activity. If that is half of what is typically served to me at every single restaurant in America so be it. Half the meal served its purpose. I'm not wasting my money. I am wasting food though. There are hungry children in Africa after all. My other half of a Chuychanga is going to be pretty nasty before it gets to them though. If I eat the whole thing it's not going to help them anyway and its going to make me fat. Where is the sense in that?  

A Hardwick Lesson

I really have no idea how many people read this blog or if anyone gets anything out of it. Sometimes it feels like I'm talking to myself. Or at most to my wife. Which is lovely but what's the point? I think Chris Hardwick would say the point of doing the blog is doing the blog.

I've been totally obsessed with Chris Hardwick's Nerdist podcast lately. So much so that I had to stop listening at work because I wasn't getting enough done. I'd just sit there listening to Chris, Jonah, and Matt laughing as quiet as possible so the bosses wouldn't catch on to what I was up to. The Nerdist podcast is three guys just talking about whatever and bringing on people to talk about whatever. The whatever seems to focus a lot on the creative process which is just fascinating to me.

Chris H. started the podcast because he wanted to. It interested him. He had no idea it would turn into the giant thing it has. I imagine his biggest hope was it would bring out a few more people to his standup shows. If the Podast has a main point other than the creative process it is to do what you love just because you love doing it. If you get it out there you will eventually find an audience.

While its not terribly important to me that I have a huge audience I would like people to read my blog. The fact is though I just love writing it. I'm not pretending to be anyone else here. This is really the stuff I think about. I have no agenda. My favorite subject is religion and particularly what Jesus taught. I struggle with motivation and getting stuff done. This is just me thinking things out. This is the stuff I would love to talk about at a coffee shop with friends

I have decided that even if my wife is the only person that reads this blog I will keep doing it until I don't find it interesting anymore. So thank you Chris.

The Pain I Have Inflicted

When Kay was sixteen years old she ran away from home. Not the I'm going to a friend's house for one night cause I'm mad at my parents kind of running away. The fuck you I'm moving to another town and not coming back kind of running away. At some point during that time she called her father, Don, who lived in Ohio and asked him if she could move in. Her Dad had remarried and his new wife had been a single mother of three. She did not want to raise another child. So Kay's father said no. Kay has made her peace with this. I have not.

This crossed my mind the other day and I wondered if Don, who recently passed away, had gone to his grave regretting that decision? Since he never brought it up I would have to say no. To him it was most likely just another decision he was forced to make due to circumstance beyond his control. What was he to do? Force his new wife to take in a child she did not want? Never having faced that monumental of a moment in my life I would say yes and he's a evil man for not doing it. Anybody got some stones?

At a truly honest level I don't know that I would be strong enough to do the right thing. Admitting that I have to think if I've ever caused that kind of pain. Has there ever been a choice in my life that I felt forced in to that was the wrong decision and someone else felt the consequences even more so than me?

Some Words of Wisdom From Steve Jobs

When Steve Jobs passed away the other day I watched the commencement speech he gave in 2005. It was good and motivational like a commencement speech should be. One of his main points was:

...for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Live life like it's your last day on earth. Really? I love my job now, but on my last day in the world I certainly wouldn't go to work. Does that mean I should change something? How you would live the last day of your life is a bad metric to judge your life by. Maybe you could use how you would live the last couple of years of your life, but not just the last day.

I think Mr. Jobs is right though that we should live the live we want. Life is short. We don't have forever here. We should be doing something we enjoy and find worthwhile. Even that though is hard to judge. For years I didn't really enjoy what I did on a daily basis in Architecture. I was learning the field though and those years were instrumental to me being able to do the job I enjoy now. Should I have abandoned the field?

How about children? There has certainly been several days in a row where I didn't want to be a parent. Where I didn't want to go from five in the morning until eleven at night. Should I have bailed on my kids? My previous choices in life have informed the circumstances of my life. Sometimes life is doing what you have to do.

In both my examples there is a sweet spot. I'm in the sweet spot with my job, and pretty much so with Mackenzie. Years of work dealing with all the many stages between zero and five have given us a awesome little girl that if today was the last day of my life I would certainly want to hang out with her.

The Unforgettable First Year of Grayson's Life: Part 2

I was unemployed for almost seven months. The first few months I had a lot of close calls with employment, but nothing would stick. By May of 2011 I had conceded that I was going to be unemployed for a very long time. Then one random Monday when I was going about my stay at home daddy business I got a call from William Massingill with Polkinghorn Group Architects. They wanted me to come in for two weeks of contract work. If that went well they would most likely offer me a full time position.

I was excited and sad all at the same time. I loved being a stay at home dad, but Polkinghorn had the potential to be a dream job for me. I had long ago given up on the idea of finding that mythical job we were all deluded into believing we would have after college. Every single architect in the world is not going to design skyscrapers or fabulous houses for fabulously rich clients. I had come to terms with that fact fairly quickly after starting work. I still liked the profession though and I was kind of good at it. It was definitely better than working at Target or going back to college. So I stuck with it.

After a few years I had really come to like architecture and had found that I was good at producing construction documents. Being that this is most of what the actual day to day work in an architecture firm is I was pretty happy with my career choice. I wasn't completely satisfied though. That first firm was not doing much ground up work where I could point to something big and say I did that. I wanted to build stuff.

Since I wanted to move to Austin anyway I left my first firm and started work for O'Connell Robertson where I met Kay. ORA does ground up work and some cool stuff at that, but I was so far down the totem pole it didn't feel like I was really doing it. Then I fell in love with Kay and the dream died. Not in the oh agony your dreams are crushed kind of way, but the it doesn't really matter kind of way. I had found the love of my life and I could go after the really big dream I've always had. A wife and kids. After our honeymoon I took a new job with a friend's firm. Again there wasn't much ground up work, but I had a job that paid well. I generally enjoyed what I was doing and the people I was working with and for. I would have stayed there for the conceivable future if not for the great recession.

So Polkinghorn is not a dream job in the I love everything about it and everything is perfect kind of way, but it is the job I wanted when I left my first firm. I have been and will continue to be intimately involved in the process that builds a really cool addition to a really cool building. I'm building stuff. So within the first year of Grayson's life I went from a struggling firm to stay at home dad to working at my dream job. A year to remember for sure. 

The Unforgettable First Year of Grayson's Life: Part 1

When Grayson was two months old and Kay was about to go back to work there was no way we could afford full time daycare for two. The great recession was killing the architecture firm I was working for and the entire staff was only getting half pay. Kay and I had survived up to that point by pulling Kenzie out of daycare sometimes and doing part time at other times. We had also received many well timed blessings.

I was faced with what may have been the toughest decision of my life. In retrospect it was an easy call, but there was so much uncertainty then. The architecture field was devastated and I thought I would never find a full time job in the field if I l left. I was also afraid to put myself out there. I don't have a great portfolio. I haven't worked on many big projects. I thought it would be hard to convince someone I could do anything besides small remodel projects. Besides I knew the firm would recover eventually.

We had borrowed some money from my brother and I was planning to use that to pay for daycare for a couple months. Then the first of the month came. We were not going to get paid until more money came in and that was a few weeks out. I took a hard look at where the firm was and decided it would be at least March before they could recover to full pay. In architecture the Christmas season is always slow even in good years. We only had enough money to cover daycare for three months. So shaking and crying I decided to have them lay me off.

The next day I packed up the kids – it was an off day from part time daycare - and headed in to the office to get laid off. At the time I just thought that had to be the strangest day of my life. Kind of still do. How surreal is it to tell your employer to lay you off. My bosses were completely understanding and just like that I was unemployed. Having gotten through the fire I started to feel better immediately. Things would be good. Besides I was going to be the thing I had wanted to be for at least five years – a stay at home dad.

Being home with the kids was completely awesome and exhausting. I can't say I loved every minute of it, but now that it's over I loved every minute of it. I would have liked it to go on for a few more months. I have so many good memories from that time. Like the time me and Kenzie sat on the kitchen floor with Grayson beside us in his bouncy chair and we snapped green beans for supper. I missed them both very much when I went back to work. I'll tell that story in part two.

beingbill2.0

I've had many starts and stops on this blog, but this was by far the longest time without writing. My last blog was on November 16, 2010. According to timeanddate.com that is nine months and 18 days or:

• 291 days
• 25,142,400 seconds
• 419,040 minutes
• 6,984 hours
• 41 weeks (rounded down)
  

The reason I was not blogging? Grayson James Page. Who incidentally turns one year old today. The first year of Grayson's life has definitely been memorable and not just because of my awesome little boy, but I'll get to that later.

I was so excited when we found out the baby was a boy. Good thing too. We'd mentioned the name Grayson James to Mackenzie and she ran with it. The baby was Grayson James. She always said both names.

I didn't think I would be that excited about having a boy but I was. I walked around saying boy boy boy for at least a week. He entered the world at nine pounds. I think Kay wanted to kill me when she heard his weight. Probably the only thing that saved me was my insistence they do a second epidural. Because of that she had in her words her best labor ever and I was forgiven for the whopper of a little boy that had to come out of her.

Gray has grown fast his first year. They always do. I called him melon for the longest time because his head was enormous compared to his body. At twenty five pounds plus he's grown into the thing now. He's already walking, has six and a half teeth and enough hair for two kids his size. He has a big laugh and laughs all the time. He loves his sister and the dogs. I am just happy and blessed to have such a great boy.

So does this spell a nice steady stream of blogs from this point forward? I have a wife, two kids, a job in architecture, two dogs and I'm about to start studying for the Architectural Registration Exam. Next Year's blog will be titled beingbill3.0.