I have never been comfortable keeping all my information on other people’s servers, so after completing graduate school, I finally set up my own website.

It was originally conceived to be a place to practice drawing and play with poetry. That concept quickly fell away, but the website remained as a location for random posts, photos, and essays, as well as being dormant for much of the time.

In 2018-2019, I posted daily to the blog, which was an interesting but uneventful exercise. The effort was more akin to a diary, however, I had a few posts concerning architecture and work.

Currently I’ve been toying with the tagline “notes on my consumption“. I’m not sure where it may lead, but I’m looking forward to the journey with this (and future iterations of the blog).

2017, with Jing Gu

The 1,100 sf house was constructed in 1952 and needed a complete renovation.

Along with an complete update of the plumbing and engineering systems, the kitchen was rearranged with the former laundry room opened up for interior access and the insertion of a new powder room within the existing footprint.

Exterior work included a new roof, retrofitting the carport structure, and new concrete flatwork.

We performed the work as owner, architect, and general contractor overseeing the major trades. We also installed and refinished the interior throughout the house.

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2016

I was introduced to photography at Rice with Professor Frank White.

In 2015, I started listening to the podcast On Taking Pictures and participated in their weekly “assignments” for a year, responding to simple words and phrases, such as symmetry, abstraction, or parking lot.

These photographs were taken on my old Nikon D40 (with various manual lenses), iphone 5C, and iphone 6S.

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2001, 2017-present

When I was a landscape laborer, I started baking my own bread for lunch. Part of that effort included raising my own starter, which made some excellent pancakes but I was never successful at making sourdough loaves.

Sixteen years later, my wife read an article about sourdough pancakes. This rekindled the old flame, and with the help of the internet, we finally started getting decent loaves after three weeks of daily attempts.

One of the unspoken benefits with sourdough is that you are forced to bake at regular intervals to keep the starter alive and I have come to enjoy the consistent practice, as a meditative a conversation between my hands and the dough.

Over the years, I have found pleasure in constant exploration. It has been fun to experiment with different aspects of bread making, including enriched doughs and steamed breads. Most recently I have been playing with whole wheat berries, grinding them up in a vitamix for a super fresh whole wheat dough.

I’m not particularly prolific outside of work.

However, I don’t watch TV, which has given me time to play with various projects and hobbies, including a major home renovation.