Grizzlypear Weekly • Dec. 30, 2023 • Buttondown

This week's written snapshots.

happy holidays

Instead of the usual everyday magic, here is the holiday card that I posted onto Facebook for my friends.

For the past two years, I’ve been hassling the family to take a hike in the hills above our house. Once you get up the slope, it’s an easy jaunt down the old mining road.

About a half a mile in, you come across the foundation of an old building. I have no idea about its original purpose, but it’s now a canvas for graffiti artists and a delight for the occasional wanderer.

The kids jumped around this colorful place as the sun set behind our heads, bathing the Las Vegas strip with a golden orange aura.

While cleaning up our PC desktop, I found a photo from our visit to Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego at La Jolla last March.

This was quite the treat because Vegas regrettably is short on art museums.

It wasn’t easy to wrangle two young kids around high priced pieces of art; the guards were not amused. But after years of not seeing high art, it was so totally worth it.

With a location a block away from the Pacific ocean, this museum was magic for sure, though hardly “everyday”.

Here’s to finding magic throughout the new year!

A five year old dangerously close to a Peter Alexander sculpture

30 Dec 2023

A History of Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays! 2023! (to 2007!)

Sixteen years ago, I was trapped in the studio over Christmas because the master’s thesis was presented in early January. During a sleep deprived break, I slammed together a silly holiday email to friends and family.

That started a personal tradition of sending a physical postcard at the end of every year. After the kids arrived, I went digital with three cards — for work, family, and social media.

Each December, I comb through our photos and clean up my contacts. It’s a great way to re-live the year and still a lot faster than handwritten postcards.

Please enjoy this selected history from my post graduate life (minus the family mugshots!)

2023

After the completing the building, we discovered that it did not have enough safety factor for the fire sprinkler system water pressure. We spent half a million dollars replacing the backflow prevention devices with low pressure loss units. It was an incredible headache, but the team worked hard together, and it could have been much worse.

2022

The stucco exterior wall of an building for mental health services. This was originally built as an outdoor stage. It’s now a mechanical room and the seating area has been fenced-in as a yard for the chiller. One of the highlights of 2023 was when the architect on this project joined our division. *I’ve been blessed to work with great people.*

*Same photo with a giant holiday greeting in the sky. We decided to play it safe. As a government worker, it’s prudent to be slightly boring.*

2021

*A partially ground concrete slab where the polishing was stopped where the future carpet finish would be installed.*

The transparency glitched as I was picking the font, inspiring a this frenetic postcard with lots of words and some strange bars on the sides. As with 2022, we stuck with the moderately stale option for final distribution.

2020

*A construction photo of the central stairs at the new Education Building at Nevada State College. During the pandemic, I would visit the jobsite on my own on Sundays. It was a meditative activity.*

2019

An odd clerestory (without windows) in an administrative building for a agency serving disabled clients. I have no clue what the original architect was trying to do, but the best perk of being an architect is discovering into oddball conditions like this.

2018

A pit toilet at Valley of Fire State Park foregrounded by red desert sands and scrubby bushes. This photo has been the wallpaper on my work phone ever since. It was so hot that the Ranger’s station had a giant sign warning against hiking in the park.

2017

A flash of lights from the Cactus Garden Christmas display at the Ethel M Chocolate Factory in Henderson. At the time you could just walk up and meander. They now charge for entry and it takes an hour to get in.

2016

*Looking up at the ceiling and the queue monitor at the Clark County Building Department. Now, everything is submitted digitally and the building is a ghost town.*

2015

Blurred lights inside a bus. The readable neon is written in English, but it was taken in China. I pray for peace between these two superpowers. A few leaders will “win” while the rest of the us suffer greatly. I’d almost feel sorry for ourselves, but then I remember we still have the great privilege of being inside the empire instead of being among those outside looking in.

2013

*Our loaded truck for moving out to Las Vegas. The compartment is only half filled because this was the smallest truck that could tow our car.*

2012

*Two rabbits chilling underneath a coffee table, Peppercorn is splayed out on the floor while Badger is washing his white face.*

2011

The dining area after the bookshelf had an unfortunate reckoning with gravity. The homemade shelving system was based on something my dad used years ago in from a Sunset book, but Ikea is too cheap to beat now.

2007

*An eye-bleeding page with horrific fonts married to diagrams and preliminary renderings from my master’s thesis project. I’m awful at graphic design, but I have fun making bad graphics.*

And with this, I am finally, fully done with “work-work” for the year! What am I going to do with myself next week (and how shall I survive the tsunami of delayed tasks in 2024)?

28 Dec 2023

Merry Christmas!

Woke up early.

Checked my phone. Post a comment on a blog.

Realize it’s Christmas!

Wrote a tiny poem.

I don’t
believe
in Baby
Jesus
no more
so I
Christmas
all the
Harder

I grew up conservative Christian. And Asian-American. My parents left Hong Kong and Taiwan and met here in the States. With the clarity of immigrants, they sensed that Christmas was a frivolous, secular holiday.

When my sister and I were teens, they gave in. We started exchanging small gifts. My mom added small decorations around to the house but never bothered with a tree.

We still drove down to LA from the Bay Area on Christmas because traffic was lighter. We’d eat at my grandparent’s favorite dim sum place in Monterey Park. (My aunt suspected that they liked that spot because the tea was brewed extra strong.)

We didn’t buck the holiday, but we never gave it religious significance. For a real Christian, every day is Christmas and Easter. Picking out holy-days still feels kind of pagan.

I drifted away when I grew up. It didn’t do much for me emotionally, and I finally bailed when George W. Bush co-opted the religious establishment to support his optional war. Even so, I always planned on taking my kids to church on Christmas, so they could feel the religious origins of this season.

That notion died with the election of the Trump. My wife (never religious) was so disgusted with white evangelicals that she didn’t want our kids anywhere near such cruel hypocrites nor be tempted by the pomp and circumstance of their celebration.

Instead, every year I put up a plastic tree from Ikea on Thanksgiving, buy a few toys, wrap the last six months of library book sale finds in old architectural printouts, watch a Christmas movie, and clean everything up on New Year’s Day.

Last year ago, I told my daughter the myth of Jesus. It blew her mind. I might as well have grown a third head (or narrated the nsfw story of Lot and his daughters).

An all-powerful deity came down to this filthy planet to be born in horse shit, grow up as a carpenter, start a small cult as a wandering sage, only to be executed in excruciating fashion. All to pay the blood penalty for the evil committed by his own shithead creatures.

So here I am, suddenly marveling at the magic of Christmas. Say what you will about the religion, that’s an awesome story.

25 Dec 2023

Thanks for reading!
Justus

Dec. 30, 2023, 6:11 p.m.

Grizzlypear Weekly • Dec. 30, 2023

Grizzlypear

happy holidays

A History of Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas!