Design is the first sign of human intention.
William McDonough
The New Neighborhoods
Neighborhoods like the one you, or your parents, or your grandparents probably grew up in are still alive and well but are in high-rise buildings, the suburbs, urban renewal, and housing complexes. Our old neighborhoods were, where our grandparents and great grandparents lived, were relatively stable with generations of the same families living on the block, and if not on this block the next one over. It was a place […]
I don’t think I need a birthday this year. I seem to be quite tall enough.
A rather tall 3 year old on her upcoming 4th birthday
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Sir Barnett Cocks (1907-1989)
Clerk of the House of Commons
About Pass the Olives
In my junior year at Abraham Lincoln High School in Des Moines, Iowa, my art teacher, Larry Hoffman, drew a caricature of me in my year book. I was dressed in the Helen of Troy costume I had worn to our Grand Beaux Arts Ball (a picnic in a city park by the Des Moines Art Center) and using a long-handled brush to paint a single perfect olive in the […]
When my thirteen-year-old daughter complained that her friend was being rude, my ten-year-old son asked, with no trace of irony,
“Then why don’t you just be rude back?”
“Because I’m not going to sink to her level.”
“Why not? You sink to mine all the time.”
