Monday, December 10, 2007

Dallas 2007 - Day 3 & 4

We had breakfast with some reindeer at the plaza of the Americas.


Of course, you need an ice rink inside your hotel/mall.


It must be fun to be so beautiful.


Come take a ride on the trolley. . . It's free.


Yep, that's an HKS project.


Nope, not an HKS project. Philip Johnson, famous architect.
HOK ripped off the idea and used it for the RLDS Temple in Missouri.
Still a cool idea.



We had a blast at the Saturday evening party. . . as you can see, Sadie was into it.

This was the result of the party.
(Or maybe she was just excited to get back to the room)

Friday, December 7, 2007

Dallas 2007 - Day 2

Day 2 in Dallas was fun. It is hard not to miss the kids. Marthe got a bit bored in the morning, but we had lunch together and then they had a shuttle to the Dallas Galleria Mall for the afternoon. She and Sadie walked around and had fun there. Below are some pictures of the 4-story christmas tree and the ice rink at its base.


I had meetings in the morning and in the afternoon. The last meeting of the day held quite the surprise. A lot of awards were given out. Two awards were given out for excellence in sustainable design. I was surprised when they called my name. I'm not designing much, but I'm doing a lot of nagging about how we can design green in the firm. I have been working on a tracking/navigation system for projects that may help in the way HKS decides to direct its future. It is fun to be involved even if none of my ideas are used. Anyway, they appreciate the help. I guess I was surprised to see how much they appreciated it. Another guy I've been working will from Dallas won the second of two awards for excellence in sustainable design. Hopefully in the future it will be very hard to pick winners for this award because everyone is excelling at sustainable design. That would be the real achievement.



Thursday, December 6, 2007

Dallas-2007 Day 1

Traveled to Dallas today. Sadie came with us. The boys stayed with Grandma Lael. . . they're having too much fun to miss us.
Anyway, Sadie slept through the plane ride and we're now staying at the Fairmont hotel in downtown Dallas.

We had some time to do whatever we wanted to today. Tomorrow will be my company training stuff and an evening party. Saturday will also be a free day with a party in the evening. We'll be coming home on Sunday.
The Dallas Museum of Art is right by our hotel. We enjoyed looking at pictures you read about in textbooks. This one is by Jackson Pollock. It is similar to one in an Olivia book that Tommy likes to read before bed every once and a while. Olivia says she just doesn't get it and that she can do that in about 5 seconds and when she gets home she tries.
I enjoyed seeing some of Piere Mondrian's (spelling probably wrong) work.
Very simple, yet interesting.
There was some work by Kandinsky and others of a simlar time period too.

Kristen wasn't here to see some great paintings by Monet. We enjoyed them for her. The are quite wonderful. The photo of the painting tends to make it look more like the scene than just looking at it in real life.

The one below is a Van Gough. It was also very good. There were lots of interesting things including a mummy coffin that they took out a peice of the coffin so you could see the mummified feed of whoever was in the coffin.

Anyway, we're having fun. We had dinner with some of the people from the office. We ate at a mexican restaurant. We ordered things that we would typically order in Utah, but they were way to hot here. . . so Marthe had some oatmeal when we got back to our room. Good thing we're prepared.
Stay tuned for tomorrow's post.

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Funny Elves


My friend Maasa at work showed me this web site.
It is great fun. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did.