2010 Total Lunar Eclipse

This eclipse occurred last week; I posted a couple of photos to Facebook until I could finish this up. I hope you enjoy this mosaic it was a lot of fun to photograph and watch and it was a lot of fun to put this poster together. The first part of the eclipse was clear all the way to totality; I went inside during totality to re-charge camera batteries and download some photos then came back out as totality was ending for the second half of the eclipse. It remained clear most of the time but a few high clouds and some haze passed by during the last half of the eclipse but it was still visible.

A New Beginning...

On Thursday, August 19, 2010 I began a new chapter in my career and life, I am a victim of the horrible economy and am now joining the nearly half million others on the unemployment line. I along with several others at my former employer where part of an effort to keep more than 100 others employed during this tough time, this is a tough time for all. The design and construction industry is being hit hard by this recession and there are a lot of good people who are affected by this, either they are like me and unemployed or they are like lots of others who are taking pay cuts or working fewer hours to try and ride this out.


I will do fine, I am lucky, my family and my friends are being super supportive and everyone is looking out for me. Over the last several days I have received so many emails and phone calls that it is hard to be upset and sad with so many people sending me kind thoughts and prayers I know things will work out and something far better will come of all of this.

For the next couple weeks I am going to think of this as a vacation, it has been a very long time since I have had a long vacation so I am going to try and do some of the things that I have been saying “when I have some free time” because I now do. I am also going to work very hard at completing my AREs, those are the licensing exams that I must take in order to become an architect and I only have three of them left, so wish me luck. If all goes well I will be able to change my resume to say Robert A. Williams, Architect and that will be a huge deal for me. This is something that I have wanted for quite some time, since the 4th grade (let’s just say it is a long time).

I am proud and grateful to have had the opportunity to work at Dekker/Perich/Sabatini and I hope that in the near future I will have the chance to go back, but if that does not happen I also know that I will succeed and thrive wherever I end up. The economy will rebound and we will all be much stronger and happier because of all that we have learned over the past year and a half.

Thank you to all who have expressed your concern and support, please know that I appreciate it all and I will be OK, I will make it through this and I will be a better person for it.

Work in Progress...

I am back in the creative mode again and am now working on another watercolor for a friend. She saw the self portrait I did of myself (posted in May) and she actually liked it, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so she asked me to do a painting of her daughter.


I began the painting and decided to document the process along the way so over the next few weeks I will be posting the painting as it is being worked on. When I am all done with it I will post the picture I am using to do the painting and I look forward to your comments and suggestions along the way. I am working on becoming a better painter and I am going to have some fun while doing it.

Keep an eye out for future posts and for the final work when it is done.

The Moon, A long time coming...

Ok so I have been away for a while, I am not sure where I have been but I have not been posting very regular. It has also been some time since I have been out taking photographs or doing any artwork of any kind. I think I have been a little lazy and a little busy studying for exams (even though I have not been very good about taking them). I am going to try and do a little more photography and will be working on a watercolor of some friends little girl.


They were impressed (I think) by my self portrait watercolor, imagine that, and asked me to do one of their daughter. So what the heck, I need the practice and she is supper cute so I will start on that soon. This will be some more practice for when I do the watercolor of my nephew next (he is supper cute too).

This is a photo of the Moon I took with my point-and-shoot camera through the eyepiece of my telescope at Oak Flat last weekend. I am having a lot of fun doing this and the photos are getting a little better each time. This one is actually like 6 photos that were put together in the panorama software I have been using for some time now and you can see quite a bit of detail of the lunar features. I would have done some more photos but the battery in my camera died so it kind of ended the photo session.

Until next time, keep drawing, painting, photographing or just doing whatever it is you want to do.

Sketch and Paint

OK, do not laugh...or at least too hard. This is one of my first attempts at doing a watercolor of an actual person (in this case me). I did a sketch of my nephew a few weeks ago, I had been trying to do this for some time but have never been happy with what I have done in the past. I was motivated by a good friend of mine Sy, she does some wonderful paintings and I was talking to her about it and she convinced me to try again so I did. While they may not be perfect yet they are getting better. I really like the way my nephews pencil sketch came out so I decided to try and do a watercolor and I used a photo I had of my (it was a photo that Sy had taken). I am to some extent happy with it, I still need some more practice and will continue to try and then hopefully be able to do one of my nephew that I will be happy with. I like the hair in this painting better than my own hair, but the nose and mouth definitely need some work.

A Mess of Messier...

Here are a couple of sketches of Messier objects I did a couple of weekends ago from my front yard. Leo is high in the sky now so I decided to set up my telescope and to do some sketches of some of the messier objects that were visible in the Lion. I am working to try and sketch all 110 of the Messier objects and I am asking people in TAAS to help out by sketching them as well. I will continue to sketch what I see in my eyepiece whenever I am out observing even if they are not Messier objects because I find it a lot of fun to sketch.

Sketch, Draw, Scribble...

I did some career workshops this morning at CNM for a very interesting group of young women who were participating in the “Expanding Your Horizons” conference put on by the New Mexico Network of Women in Science and Engineering. I was there along with three of the women at our office to talk to them about architecture and engineering and to let them know why architecture is the best job in the world (because it is).

It was a lot of fun and we had the opportunity to talk to the girls about what they felt the classroom of the future might look like and the kinds of things it might have in it to help them learn. I have had the opportunity in our office to work on the NexGen Academy, I have posted some of the construction photos here and will continue to post more in the future, and this is a school of the future. NexGen is a new way of learning, they are using a different model of education that has not been done in Albuquerque before and it is exciting to be a part of the design team that is doing some new.

I think that one of the things that may to some extent turn people away from architecture as a career is their fear that they have to know how to draw, you do not need to know how to draw. It is a good skill to have because it is a good way to express ideas and thoughts to others but it is a skill that you can learn, it can be developed and you just need to not be afraid to try, just do it. I always recommend to keep a sketch book and use it, it doesn’t matter what you are drawing just draw and draw and draw and then when you think you have drawn enough DRAW SOME MORE!

When I was in school, undergrad, we went to New York for one of my studios during spring break, we spent a week there and it was the first time I had ever been to New York. I knew that I would be doing a lot of sketching and photographing while I was there but on the way out there I decided I was going to draw people, until then I had always avoided putting people in my sketches, so almost every sketch I made this trip I drew scenes with people in them. I drew my classmates standing on the corner waiting for walk signals, I drew them sitting around fountains or on steps into museums or in the museum galleries, anywhere and everywhere there were people and I wanted to draw them so I did. My drawings of people may not be portraits, in fact you will probably not recognize anyone in them, that is not what I was after (maybe in the future) but you can tell they are people and they really do add to a scene in a sketch.

These are a couple of sketches we used in our presentation today and I wanted to share them here because I really do like the way each of them came out and what they helped to teach me.

The one at the fair was done while I waited for my nephew and my sisters who were on some of the rides at the time, I was sitting with my dad at a table just watching all the people when I took out my sketchbook (it is always with me) and did some quick sketches. The other one is something I did at home while watching TV, my mind was a little busy thinking of what I wanted for a house and it is just some quick sketches I made to jot down some ideas so I would not forget them.

Nothing to say, until next time...

There were a couple of reasons that I began this blog; one, I wanted to share some of the photos, drawing and things that I do to entertain myself and two, as a means to write more (to become a better writer).


I really did not have anything to say or show as of this moment, I guess I have been a little lazy lately. Actually I have been a little busy with work things, TAAS things, De Anza things (next week) and especially studying thing (structures, yuck) so at times it seems like there is just too much going on so when I have a few minutes to relax and wind down I just sit and watch TV and try not to think.

I opened up my Blog Page today to see if I could be motivated to say something and had nothing to say, so I just started clicking through other blogs (kept hitting the “next blog” button on the top of the screen) and ran across a couple of blogs that just had a couple lines of post that really said nothing more than what they were thinking at that moment; hey I can do that, so here it is.

I really do not have anything to say, until next time…

Extraordinary Dancing Lights…

It is interesting how sometimes the accidents and mistakes turn out to be some of my favorite pictures. I have taken pictures like this before, with longer exposures and then purposefully moving the camera around while the shutter is open, but I tend to forget about it until I try and take a photo in low light and wind up with a very blurry photo with some short streaks of lights (not holding the camera steady). It is always at this point that I remember that I can do some interesting things this way.

This image was taken that exact way, I have several shots that I made prior to this one and after and I like all of them but this one really stood out to me because it looks like a group of dancers moving in unison. Light is an amazing thing and some of the things you can do with that light is quite amazing as well.

“In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.” Aaron Rose

Sketch, Sketch, Sketch...

After the TAAS meeting last night at our usual get together at Il Vicino we were talking about one of the astronomy clubs in Texas that Becky and Shane belong to, this group of astronomers has started to recreate the Messier Poster showing all 110 objects using their members own photos of the list. Becky and I decided to do this same thing for TAAS but using sketches rather than photographs. We are asking anyone interested to take out your sketch book, pad of paper, napkin or whatever is handy and easy to use and the next time you are looking at M1 or M101 to draw what you see in the eyepiece, jot down what size scope, eyepiece and location and let’s begin to compile a bunch of drawings and begin to put this thing together. I am going to do through my sketch books and gather my Messier Sketches as is Becky then we are going to begin to sketch some more so lend us a hand and lets have some fun…

So what happened to the Stars?

It is amazing that the clouds can sense what we most want and then do what they need to do thwart our hopes and desires. I really like to look at the Moon when it is in the crescent phase it is now and I was so looking forward to UNM Campus last night and to the Planetarium this evening to do some looking at the Moon and maybe some sketching and photographing of it, but these "darn" clouds are getting in the way, it is still fairly early on Saturday so I am not giving up hope for a clear sky this evening but it may only be a hope (now that I have put it down in writing maybe it will clear things up). Tonight will primarily be focusing on Mars but I may take a few moments and sneak a peek at the moon in there sometime. So let’s all keep our fingers crossed and maybe we will have a nice evening of observing.

Photo of the Moon I took in February, 2009.

Construction, Construction, Construction...and it continues...

Are you tired of the constructin photos?  Well they will be coming for a little longer but hopefully I will have some other things to post along with the construction stuff.  I am having a lot of fun with this photo-stitching software and as soon as I have enough I think I am going to upgrade from the free version to the full version but I will keep playing with this for now.  The immage above is made up of 22 seperate pictures and there is another earlier post that shows more of a curve on the beams and such I am playing with another setting in the program that straightens the image a little more making it not so distorted.

But things are going well on the construction site (for the most part) and the building is coming along, the spaces are really starting to take shape now.

Construction Continues and so does STUDYING...

You know those mirrors at the fun house...

And this was done with my point and shoot digital camera and a photo stitching software, I think I am feeling a little dizzy, but I am having fun.

At least with the photos I am having fun, I am taking my next ARE on Wednesday and am not feeling very ready for it (I am not sure how to change that, I have almost finished all the reading for it (I will by tomorrow). Then I have a day or two to go back and look over some of the things I do not feel very comfortable with, oops all of it.

I think with all the reading and studying for this exam I have definitely learned why architect hire mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) engineers to do this work for them; IT IS BORING AS HECK!! (Sorry to all you MEP engineers out there, but you must be crazy.)

After this exam I only have two more to do (or re-do in my case), I am so close to the end of all this study stuff; except fro helping others, oh yea and then studying for the new LEED exam, will it ever end?

Still putting up Steel...

New Tech High School (NTHS or NexGen Academy) is still under construction, well it will be for another 9 months or so. I am assisting Bob R. in our office with the construction administration on the project so I have the opportunity to visit the job site each week for the weekly construction meetings and I have been doing some photographs for fun of the building as it is being constructed. I will be posting some of these photos as we move the construction moves on and we start to see the building take on its final form. It is a lot of fun to see the building growing from the ground up I am looking foreword to opening day.

Mr. President...

As of last Saturday (01.09.2010) I am now the President of The Albuquerque Astronomical Society (TAAS). I have been a member of TAAS for quite some time and before going back to school in 2000 I was very involved and active in the organization. After starting back to school full time I did not have as much time to commit to TAAS so I all but disappeared fro the next 6 years or so, but after completing school in December 2006 I decided it was time to get involved again and now look what I got myself into.

I am looking foreword to the experience and happy that the members of TAAS have enough confidence in my efforts that they voted for me (a lot of it is that I was the only one foolish enough to say yes when asked, I have to work on that). Seriously though, I am proud to be a member of such a wonderful organization and very proud of the work that TAAS does to bring astronomy to the general public of all ages, we are one of the larger amateur astronomy clubs in the country and by far one of the most active ones and it is a great honor to be one of the leaders of this organization.

Wish me luck and look for some more posts regarding this position and astronomy in the future.

Construction, Construction, Construction...

It has been some time since I posted anything...well its a new year and I hope to get better about being a little more regular with my posts. I am fortunate enough to be fairly busy at work at this moment as we prepare for construction documents for our Del Norte project to be released very soon. I am also helping out with construction administration on the New Tech High School (NextGen Academy), this is Phase I of the Del Norte project and is scheduled to be completed later this year. Here are some of the construction photos taken during my weekly construction meeting at the job site, it is very exciting to see the building going up and I am looking foreword to the coming months and seeing the building take on more of a finished form.