Radvent, Day 11 - DREAMING

What is your personal dream? What would happen if your dream came true?

It takes me a long time to decide on "a dream" because once I commit to having a dream, I will stop at nothing to make it happen. I often create dreams where I will expand a tangible dream into a crazy "intangible" dream.

Current dreams include:
Getting a golden retriever (crazy dream: living on a farm with hundreds of golden retrievers. I just want their furry, floppy, goodness all around me!)

Designing my own house. This one terrifies me because I would would want every "cool" thing I have seen in my own house. I might go crazy! Also, I heard that having yourself as your own client is a horrific experience.

To live an urban lifestyle. I am tired of relying on a car, not being able to have spontaneity, and having to plan out errand trips. (I once drove to 3 different grocery stores in one day.) I was inspired by a class I took in grad school where we studied urban/dense living in which communities would be built around transit, amenities, community. We have all been programmed to want big houses in the country side with acres of land, but that is just not for me. Give me my box in the city!

Radvent, Day 10 - LOVING

Radvent, Day 10 - LOVING

You are loved immensely. You are wrapped up in a big fluffy blanket of love everywhere you go because you deserve it! Make up your own self-affirmations today.

...you love to make people happy
... you are going after what you've always wanted
... you are a goofball, and if people don't accept that, you don't care
...you never give up
...you have no unexpressed emotion

Radvent, Day 9 - INSPIRING

Ask someone you love what you have done to inspire them. Be proud of yourself and marvel at how your own little sphere of influence is ever-expanding, completely out of your control.

Instead, I will now write about what inspires me about Hum-z.
1. Soccer - Anyone from any country, regardless of language barrier, skill level, or economic can bond over soccer. It brings people together. He can go anywhere and make friends, whether it is playing in a foreign park, or striking up a conversation with total strangers in a bar. 2. People who put their ideas into motion - He has so many ideas (most of which I shoot down.) But that doesn't stop him from dreaming. He has so many things he wants to do, so many inventions, business endeavors, designs in his head. 3. Helping people. He will go out of his way to help people. Key examples include: shoveling all the elderly neighbors sidewalks, staying late at work to help a coworker with computer problems, and the most recent, helping a lost traveler and total stranger, pay her parking fee, find her train while carrying her bag and running to get to the platform so they both didn't miss the train. The Princeton train station can be pretty confusing. His random acts of kindness inspire me to take the extra minute to help someone out if the chance presents itself.

As for me...Here's what inspires me the most. 1. Lists - It's like writing it down peer pressures me into doing stuff...I also like to cross things off. 2. The internet - I can always find something new. There is always something happening somewhere and the internet brings it to me, while I am sitting on my couch in my pajamas. 3. The city - I love urban! I love people, lights, crowds, motion. Each city I visit has an energy that cannot be emulated anywhere else. My favorites include NYC, London, Sydney. 4. Colors - My happiest day would just be to throw gallons of paint on everything, everywhere I went. I think it's fair to say that if it has a good color palette, I want it. I want to be surrounded by color!

Radvent, Day 8 - CREATING

I'm finally caught up with the Radvent schedule!
















Choose an object to symbolize your creativity and put it in a place you can see it every day.

This is a sculpture that I made for my first advanced studio in college. This is one of the only things from architecture school that I still have and display proudly. The assignment was to define a cube by using volumes. This assignment got me to think outside of the box and it also helped me to understand architecture as a volume, not just floors and walls. In the background is one of my marker sets. (This one is actually Hum-z's, but we share.) As a designer, I use color every day, whether I realize it or not. I even conducted a graduate semester-long project on how we perceive color. It was one of my favorite projects during grad school because I got to collect all of the data myself. I can't design anything without thinking about my color palette.

Radvent, Day 7 - PLAYING

What were your favorite games as a child? What did you like to do with your classmates or the neighborhood kids? How did that affect the person you grew to become?

During recess we played hide-and-seek tag where the base would be the wall of the school and the most popular hiding place was in the big play-scape because of the many caverns it had. The school slowly started taking elements off of it, such as the tube slide, fire pole, and tire ladder and eventually boarded up the entire ground level due to visibility issues. They were trying to make it "safer" and hence, less fun.

We played airplane: where we would swing on the swings and pretend like we were flying to faraway places, mostly Disneyworld, and then jumped off to land. The playground monitors didn't like when we did this, so we would make it a game to do it when they weren't looking.

During gym my favorite games were tv tag, where you would have to say a tv show just before getting tagged to remain safe. Another class favorite from 1st-8th grade was Octopus, where one or two people were "it" and everyone would stay on one side of the gym. If you were wearing a color they called, you were allowed to run to safety to the other side, trying not to get tagged. If you got tagged you had to stay where you got tagged and try to tag other people as they ran by, like seaweed. I hated this game when I was wearing a monochrome outfit, which is probably why I wore my huge knit colorful sweater A LOT. I wonder if I still have that thing...
My personal favorite were the scooters, which were eventually outlawed because they marred the gym floor, but sometimes our gym teacher would let my best friend and I use them after school.

For indoor recess, I remember playing hide-and-seek, which was difficult because there weren't many places in a classroom to hide, but we still tried. Indoor recess was a time of rebellion because there weren't any teachers in the room, only hall monitors, so we had free reign. My best friend and I built a sweeeeet lego house in 5th grade and would stay after school to work on it. Having a best friend who's mom was a kindergarden teacher enabled us to stay after school, because she would always be there lesson planning. As we got older, we played hacky sack; I was terrible.

Living in the middle of nowhere, in the woods, I often had to make up a lot of games to keep me occupied. I had a huge boulder in my front yard that we would play "Indian" on...We would go around my yard, which was more like a forest and collect mud, dirt, sticks, plants, etc, to put in a big pot that I would "borrow" from the kitchen, to make Indian soup. My mom wasn't too happy about this, especially when I stole a freshly baked pumpkin pie and put bird seed in it.

As I got a little older I would play things that were jobs, such as: store, cooking show, etc. My two favorites were architect: where I would design and build environments for my toy cars, dolls, guinea pigs, and school: which was my most elaborate game. My best friend and I each had two classes of beanie baby students (so that when we went to each others houses, we would each have a class to teach.) This game was a HUGE production and took up my entire dining room and her entire playroom for what seems like years. I guess we were doing something right, because my best friend is now a teacher, and I am an architect.

During winter we loved ski tag, building snow structures and having snow ball fights. We would spend a lot of time at my friend's ice rink making up skating routines and crashing off of the sides into the huge snow banks. During snow storms we would sled down the road before the plows came. I think after huge snow storms was the only time that I wasn't afraid to live in the woods, because everything would reflect off the snow and seem less dark.

Forts. I can't talk about my childhood without talking about the many forts we had. We had SO many tree forts throughout my childhood; and we would stay in them for hours. My best friend had at least five different tree forts at her house which we would build platforms and rope ladders for. When we got older, another friend and I realized that we could build the forts by the road and then have a secret hideout to throw things at cars, or put sticks, snowballs, pumpkins, etc. in the road and watch them get run over. We thought it was hilarious.

Looking back through my childhood, I realize that I was more of a rebel than I thought. All of the games that I remember had some aspect of rebellion against authority or some fear of getting caught. I was probably just oblivious. I also realized that a lot of my childhood memories happened at my best friend's house. She lived in a less woodsy area, so there were more kids around to play with. When I visited my cousins in Illinois the summer before high school started, I was amazed that neighborhood kids would just gather spontaneously in the street to play basketball, baseball, tag, ghost-in-the-graveyard, etc., without having to call each other and organize rides home, etc. It was so much fun and I wish my childhood had been more like that. I hope my kids will have that experience.

Radvent, Day 6 - ADVENTURE

Abandon your to-do list and go somewhere else. Somewhere new. Somewhere you have wanted to explore. Bring a camera and take a picture to celebrate the moment when you abandoned anxiety and insecurity, embraced imagination and opportunity, and let life unfold.

I attempted to go on an adventure after work yesterday, but soon realized after my face was frozen to my skull that I would book it to the warmth of my home. Here is a recap of adventures I have gone on in the last year.






























1. Crossed the Delaware (Lambertville-ish, NJ)
2. Found Hum-z's dream car (Philadelphia Auto Show, PA)
3. Visited my bro and sis-in-law/attended my first baby shower (Greenbelt, MD)
4. Survived Snow-pocalypse and 3 days without power (Princeton, NJ)
5. FINALLY took pictures of my thesis model
6. Participated in the oldest 4th of July celebration in the country (Bristol, RI, see below)
7. Met Landon Donovan..Eek! (Princeton, NJ)
8. Danced the night away with my mom and aunts (Raleigh, NC)
9. Got our own place (Princeton, NJ)
10. Made it a home (Princeton, NJ)
11. Climbed to new heights (Bear Mountain, NY via car)
12. Got my best friend married and didn't totally fail at maid-of-honor duties despite 2 hours of sleep (Chicopee, MA)
13. Had a great photo shoot with some of my best friends! (Hyde Park, NY)
14. Braved the wilderness (Staatsburg, NY)
15. Celebrated 6 years with my love and realized I need more NYC in my life (New York, NY)
16. Met my brand new niece! (Greenbelt, MD)

















225th Bristol, RI Fourth of July Celebration (We're the top right of the curve of the first 2.)

Radvent, Day 5 - ROCKING OUT

Write down the soundtrack of your year so far. Play it for someone who loves you.

Most of my playlists consist of upbeat music with a good dance beat. At work I basically cycle through two playlists: "House Music" and "David Guetta" because as many times as they play the songs, I never get tired of them. So keeping that philosophy in mind, I built my playlist of 2010.

1.) Uprising – Muse

I listened to this song a lot during the Winter Olympics in February. For some reason it reminds me of Johnny Weir, and figure skating.

2.) New York Girls – Morningwood

This song makes me feel super bad ass, like I too could be a New York Girl one day.

3.) Amazing (Thin White Duke Edit) – Seal

Seal is my guilty pleasure. His voice is so soothing.

4.) The Way You Make Me Feel - Michael Jackson

I remember Beth and I blasting this in our cars and singing at the top of our lungs during high school, especially after tennis practice. It’s always a goodie!

5.) Sex on Fire – Kings of Leon

“Yahhhhh, your sex is on fiiiiiire!”

6.) Dance in the Dark – Lady Gaga

This is one of Gaga’s less mainstream songs, but I think it is my favorite!

7.) Hanuman - Rodrigo y Gabriela

I wish I could play the guitar like these two!

8.) Tonight I’m Loving You – Enrique Iglesias

This has been been playing nonstop for the last 2+ weeks. I loooove Enrique, especially when he comes out with dance music

9.) Stereo Love - Edward Maya & Vika Jigulina

This song reminds me of that great night we had in Atlantic City!

10.) Ghosts n Stuff – Deadmau5

I had to represent at least one electronic song and I love Deadmau’s mouse ears! I wish I could buy a replica to wear around the house.

Create a playlist at MixPod.com

Radvent, Day 4 - FORGIVENESS

It’s hard to come out of a place of resentment, and it takes practice (just like everything). Practice forgiving about small, everyday things. You can always non-forgive later. Who and what are you ready to let go of resentment toward?

This one is very hard for me to write, seeing as how I tend to give people the benefit of a doubt and I try to forgive people as much as possible. You never know what people are going through or if someone is just having a bad day. Maybe I am just avoiding the situation…I’ll give it a try.

People I am ready to forgive, to practice:

*My father and sister, for leaving me before their time *My sister, for thinking it was a good idea to swim alone *Myself, for thinking that I could have done more to prevent my family from falling apart, *My boyfriend, for stinking up the living room * My crazy junior year roommate

People who I am not ready to forgive yet:

*My 12^th grade math teacher who yelled “what are you stupid?” to me in front of the entire study hall, I lost total confidence in myself for a long time because of you. *Myself, for losing touch with certain friends

Radvent, Day 3- WRITING:

Today’s journaling challenge is about giving yourself permission to put any thought into words. Explore your feelings and dreams, record your moods, and embrace your own unique weirdness. Make collages, lists, and inspiration boards with quotes and pictures and drawings. Write about the things you are afraid to say. The things you aren’t supposed to say. It’s all okay and it’s all allowed!

My Dearest Katharine,

I have never been that fancy with my choice of words, so I’m just going to get straight to the point: You are better than you think you are. There have been many times in your life that you think you aren’t deserving of family, friends, love, opportunities, golden retrievers, etc. but you totally are. You are often shy, awkward, unsure of your capabilities; but on the flip side, I am proud that you don’t care about what other people think about you, and you can find something funny out of any situation! Be confident in yourself; don’t sell yourself short. You got this far without asking for any help; but it is okay to ask for help. You are proud of your accomplishments, even though you may think that you have yet to accomplish anything. Remember that you are now only 25. You have made it through high school (and not hated it), completed college, gotten a Masters degree, found someone who understands you, comforts, and laughs with you, made (and kept) true friends, and are practicing in a profession that you have wanted to do since you were 10. Sadly, some people may never even accomplish one of those.

You have often been extremely cautious to try to new things, travel to new places or go after what you really want, or think you want, because you’re afraid of being reckless, or losing your focus. I encourage you to be a little reckless sometimes. Don’t worry all the time about money or doing the “right” thing. Don’t be afraid to fail doing what you believe in. You’ll never know if you don’t try. Don’t be afraid to do something just for yourself. By the time I see you next, you’ll probably have a years-worth of new experiences and adventures to tell me all about. Make sure to keep in touch with everyone who has gotten you this far.

Love,

Quarter Century Katharine

Radvent, Day 2- ORGANIZING:

Radvent day two!! Today’s theme, “organizing,” is not about making your life perfect or forcing yourself into new habits, because that’s a sure way to feel like a failure (which you are not at all!). The point of organization is to clear out all of the things that make you feel bad, that let crappy feelings bubble up to the surface, and making room for good feelings, for better things, for family, friends, hobbies, health.
























This task was pretty easy for me, since I was going to do it anyway. Score! I'm just glad that I got the extra-push from the Radvent to not procrastinate until December 21st. To get into the Christmas spirit, I thought it would be appropriate to pack up the Halloween/Thanksgiving/Fall decor and replace with Christmas spirit! I left the decorative leaves up because we haven't gotten curtains yet and it just looks so sad without them after they've been put up. I should definitely work on finishing the project of getting curtains. And yes, this is a little embarrassing, but that is our air conditioner that we JUST removed. Whoops!

Today we were successful in picking out and decorating our Christmas tree. It was definitely weird for me to "trek" out into the shopping center parking lot to the large corral of trees. I've been collecting ornaments from various places that I've traveled just for our first tree in our own place. They have mostly been from coastal places, hence the nautical theme, but I am pretty proud of the ceramic Tulum jaguar from Mexico and my double decka London bus!

Radvent, Day 1 - REMEMBERING

Found this cool Advent Journal idea from this blog. It's almost as good as poking a perforated cardboard window to get a piece of chocolate every day!

"What were you doing five years ago today? As the holiday season began? Where were you? Who were you with? What did you want? What did you have?"

Early December for the last 6 years (excluding 2009) was always spent cranking out final production material for my studio finals. I can remember every year based on what studio I was in, but everything else is just a blur of sleepless nights, 3-day-old sweatpants, and trying to catch a nap in any of the larger lecture classes.

December of 2005 was probably the worst for me…I had a hard-ass critic who no one in my studio group could crack. His philosophy on architecture school was that we shouldn’t have holidays/family/vacation because they get in the way of studio and the design process. What a Grinch! My classmates and I bonded over his craziness. My fall 2005 was the semester from Hell and I thought that if I could just make it out of this studio, I could get through any subsequent studio relatively unscathed. Studio finals were always in the first week of December before other finals so that architecture students wouldn’t fail their other classes. In architecture school, Studio is King, and most other classes come second.

As a second year architecture student, I remember this was the first semester that we were allowed to use computers (aka: Cad and 3d modeling programs) for our finals. So along with trying to have a kick-ass design concept, we had to teach ourselves these programs and hope that upperclassmen would take pity on us and help us figure out plotting, scanning, etc. To this day, plotting is still a nightmare!

I remember one guy in my class was told 5 days before the final that he should just start over. I remember signing up for my last red-line review before our final, only to be blown off by my critic for a “faculty meeting” that I later found out was a “tennis date.” I remember slicing my left index finger with my x-acto while trying to build my final model. I ran to the bathroom as my finger gushed blood. Standing alone in the bathroom, I thought I was going to pass out and have no one find me, but thankfully my roommate, who was also an architecture major, saw what was going on and followed me. I had sliced it so badly that it looked like I had a hoof. Public Safety demanded that I go to the emergency room but I refused; I had to finish my model, or risk failing studio. They made me sign a release form, saying that I wouldn’t sue the school for negligence. Hum-z bought me a huge pizza to cheer me up, which meant I had hoards of people at my desk trying to snag a slice. I plugged away, trying to one-handedly finish my model. To my amazement, there wasn’t a drop of blood on the tiny diving board I was trying to cut before the incident. To this day, I still remember my studio critic telling me I had horrible craftsmanship on my final model. But I didn’t care. I was just happy to be done with him, and that studio, and that evil diving board!

I remember 2005 was the year that my parents decided that they would FINALLY put real floors in our house. Until college, I had thought that plywood floors were suitable residential flooring. Because of this project, my mom had “cancelled” Christmas and said that we could not get a Christmas tree because there were boxes of flooring everywhere and furniture strewn about. This was unacceptable to me, so my best friend Beth helped me stuff a tree into my tiny Celica and sneak it into my house. All was well, until my parents and I came home from a Christmas Eve dinner to find that the tree stand had leaked and ruined part of the newly laid parquet flooring in our living room. There was a whole lot of yelling that lead to me having to un-trim the tree and drag it outside. I called Hum-z, who was with his family in Maryland, crying hysterically that Christmas was ruined! He offered to buy me a train ticket to Maryland that night, but I refused.

My parents eventually got over it and let me bring the tree back inside, but only if I put it in a non-parqued section of the house. This was the last Christmas that I spent at home during college.

Things I've learned because of December 2005:

- I don’t want to be one of those people who takes myself or my design SO seriously that I can’t have a life. My life was made miserable because I thought I had to spend 28 hours a day designing to make someone else happy.

- Never trust an old Christmas tree stand.

- Basswood diving boards are still evil!

And now for some pictures of the Christmas Tree finding adventure. We are clearly up to no good!