LDS Account Setup - "About Me"

So they have this new thing on the church's web site.
You can fill out basic information about yourself to use it as a tool for missionary work.
Their hope is that people around the world can find someone in the church they can relate to who understands their view of life. Then, if they are interested, we can share the gospel with them. I'm not very good at sharing the gospel with others sometimes. (I have wonderful grandparents that I have never dared say anything to because I'm too worried that I might offend them.). . . so hopefully this can help me get more in a missionary mood so I can share what is most near and dear to me rather than hoarding it for myself. :)

So this will take a few blogs to cover. So I can't do it all today.
Today I uploaded a picture of myself and wrote a short description about me.
Here's what I wrote. There are other sections that I'll work on in day's to come:

I grew up in Utah County.
I was involved with scouting a lot as a youth.
I traveled to Russia during a summer while in high school to attend the First International Russion Jamboree.
I served as the senior patrol leader for the group from Utah on that trip.
I enjoy travelling and hope to travel to more places around the world.

I served a mission for the church for two years in the Pennsylvania, Philadelphia mission. I served as a Spanish speaking missionary.
I still get to use my Spanish every now and then. . . but it is pretty rusty.
I would love to learn more languages, especially ancient Hebrew, Russian and Chineese.

I worked at a family business all growing up.
It is a skating rink, for the most part.
I enjoyed working there. . . and now that the economy is not going so great, my wife and I have picked up a shift on the weekend to earn a little extra cash and spend some time away from the kids.

My wife and I have been married for just over 10 years and we have three boys and a girl who keep us very busy.

Like a lot of architects, I work a lot. I do anything from programming to construction administration. The last project I worked on was three years long, starting with a study of the building, design, construction documents and finally the construction administration. There are many times that I work late after helping my wife put the kids to bed. I always manage to eat dinner with my family when I'm in town and we enjoy reading scriptures together as a family and singing songs from the hymn book and childrens' songbook before tucking them in bed.

My favorite places are:
1. Wherever my wife is.
2. Northern California in the foothills between Tahoe and Sacramento.
3. The Temple
4. The mountains of Utah
5. Lake Powell

Big cities are fun. I love to see the cool architecture that you can find there. But I always enjoy coming home to the slower pace where I can enjoy time with my growing family.

Stay tuned for the next post which will be entitled, "Why I am a Mormon."

Thursday, July 15th - New York City

So this was like Philly's famous sign. . . and it was right around the corner from our hotel, so we took a picture. . . actually a couple of pictures and photoshopped ourselves together.

We were walking down toward the museum of Natural History when Norman Foster's building caught my eye. . . so we closed in for a closer look.

This is a project where they gutted a historic building and put the skyscraper inside the historic building, only saving the facade.

The building had its LEED certification by the door. . . I think it was Gold. So that is pretty good for a skyscraper.

The next building on the way to the museum of Natural History was the Time Warner Center by SOM. We didn't go inside yet.

Another fun building across the circle from the Time Warner Center. Part of it was a museum.

So the Natural History Museum was. . . not so interesting. . . but they had a really big canoe. . .

The Whale reminded me of Hello Dolly . . . I can see why Barneby wanted to see it.

Had to take a picture of the dinosaurs. . . they were probably the coolest part of the museum.

After that, we walked back through Central Park. We stopped at the Bethesda Fountain. It was pretty cool.

We took a ride of the carousel.

Then we went back and walked through the Time Warner Center (mostly to cool off).

The lobby was pretty cool.

And it had a great view.

Later we went to the Museum of Modern Art. . . It wasn't quite as disturbing and wierd as the Guggenheim. There were some fun things to see such as Van Gough's Starry Starry Night.

Mondrian . . . very cool.

The building itself was pretty impressive. (Our hotel was across the street to the north.) It wasn't much to look at from the street side on the north side, but inside was what I would call a fun Julio project (Julio, being one of our architecture instructors).

Marthe wanted me to take this picture because it is in one of our favorite Olivia books we read to the kids. . . "I could do that in about Five Minutes!"

In reality his paintings are pretty impressive. . . and he was the first to really do it.

If anything, you got to hand it to the guy for waisting so much paint. . . paint is not cheap, and you can see that some of the blobs of paint are pretty much an entire tube's worth of paint.

Soup cans anyone?

This was an interesting study of solid and void.

This exhibit reminded me of the 80s. . . why?. . . You'll see.

This is what I saw in my head.

This room was an exhibit. . the art was the dimensions painted on the wall. I told Marthe that is what I look at on my screen every day. Big dimensions on interior elevations of walls.

Ok. . . so this one was wierd enough to comment about. It was a series of flat speakers suspended across from each other. As you walked between them, there were different voices saying the days of the week back and forth from one speaker to the other and in mostly the right order, but enough of the wrong order that it was more odd than it would have been otherwise. Aparently that one was worth a whole room to somebody.

We ate dinner in time's square again. This was a pizza place. It used to be a church and had some great stained glass above where we sat.

We stopped in to St. Pattrick's Cathedral later to take a looksy. These buildings are always impressive.

Oh. . and this building reminded me of a cheese grater.

That was pretty much it for the day.

But we had a lot of fun. The next day we'd be getting ready to go home and going home. . .

Wednesday, July 14th - New York City

So Wednesday was a museum day. But the day started off at the Dunkin Donuts in the subway beneath Rockefellar Center. It was an interesting experience. . . let's just say that if you don't know what you want, you better get out of the way. . . which makes it all the more fun to take your time. The Rockefellar Center is probably most impressive because it is such a simple space. It isn't really big and it isn't really fancy. No crazy building geometry. . . but in a city where everyone is about maximizing profits, this space is a gift to the city that people from the city and from around the world enjoy every day.

St. Patrick's Cathedral with the Seagram building in the background.

After we ate breakfast, we started walking up the street toward Central Park.
It started to rain and even though we had umbrellas, by the time we got to the Guggenheim museum. . . well. . . Marthe was wringing lots of water out of pretty much everything.
We enjoyed walking through the museum. . . especially because our shoes were going squish squish every step of the way. The big skylight was covered, so the interior was not as impresive as it should have been with natural light streaming in.
They had a great Kandinsky exhibit, but we couldn't take pictures, so you'll just have to take my word for it.
By the time we finished (which was pretty quick, because some of the exhibits were pretty psycho) it had stopped raining. So we started walking back down the street. I turned around to get the shot of the building.


Approaching the Metropolitan Museum of Art. . . the only think I could think of was "don't eat the pictures, no! no! no!. . . don't eat the pictures no! no! no!. . . . don't eat the pictures NO! when you go to museums"

The MET was interesting because the rooms themselves were decorated and themed to house the art that was inside them. We walked to the back of the museum and down to the cafeteria to eat some nice and bland food before enjoying the museum.

Some rooms had pieces of whole buildings in them.

Some rooms were basically replicas of other buildings, like the one below from one of Frank Lloyd Wright's residential designs. Imagine having this for your living room. Parade of Homes, eat your heart out.

The egyptian exhibit was cool. They transported and reconstructed a small temple complex from egypt to this room in the museum.

We made sure to take pictures of the mummies for the kids.

Below is the main lobby in the museum. . . it was one of the better spaces in the museum.

This is the sculpture court in the greek exhibit was pretty cool.

Here's a corner detail of the greek sculputre court.

This was the Roman sculpture court, patterned after the Roman courtyards.

Monet paintings are always fun to look at.

Van Gough paintings have such wonderful texture.

More Monet

And some Degas

More lobby. . .from the balcony

Suits of armor are always fun too.

Wednesday evening we went to the Broadway show Lion King. Of course I couldn't take pictures, but that is what the Google Image Search is for I guess. So here are some images from the show. We really enjoyed the show. It was really well done and it made me realize that I could be happy with seeing Broadway shows all the time. Musicals are in my blood. This one was a good one to see. I do wish we could have seen more shows, but they're pretty pricy.

Rafiki

Scar and Mufasa

The costumes were part of what made the show great. I couldn't help but wonder if the Disney imagineering crew came up with some of them.

Zazu was one of the great characters in the show. Excellent comic relief.

Pumba and Timon were great too. Timon had a great Brooklyn accent that was really fun.

We walked around some stores at Times Square after the show. . . because I don't think they ever close. . . then we went back to the hotel.