Time Marches On!

I probably say this way too often, it begins almost every journal entry, but time flies by! The past two weeks were no exception. This past Wednesday was the last day of formal class work for my program here at Kingston. Hmmmm. We will meet intermittently over the summer for the professors to check in on our progress with dissertations and projects but other wise we are self driven for the next 4 plus months. Crazy how fast those 7 months went by. I will miss my classmates and a required reason to get out and go somewhere. I still have places to explore and things I need to do and see for my research but I will likely be on my own for those adventures.

The next few weeks will be spent finishing up all of the course work on the modules studied over the past 7 months. So I may not leave my flat much. It is a lot but as I work on each assignment I also realize how much I have learned, gained, seen, and experienced over those months. It has been brilliant, just brilliant! The historic buildings, places and things to study in the UK are endless but since I am an American I decided to include a few projects from the states in my work. This also forced me to look into US laws, programs, guidelines, etc. regarding the history, heritage, and conservation of historic buildings, places and things. It has been interesting and enlightening. There are some similarities and some differences but I have been pleased to find people and entities that are working to preserve and protect our American heritage. 

Two of my assignments have focused on heritage in the US so that I could learn about it and compare it to what I have learned from the UK.  One project centered on this building, Lynnewood Hall in Pennsylvania. Super interesting if you want to read up on it. For another project I took a look at regeneration schemes for historic main streets, which also included center streets, in the US. We had been looking at high streets here, which is the equivalent, so I wanted to see what the US was doing about them. Again, super interesting! Having lived in Logan, Ut for many years, and not particularly fond of some of their choices for downtown, I included Logan in my paper. I selected Logan, UT, Cedar City, UT, and Bozeman, MT, as my examples mainly because I have spent time in all three and had some familiarity with each. As I dove into researching each it was cool to see the similarities as well as some of the differences and to see the approach each took regarding conservation and regeneration of their main streets.

Another aspect of time marching on is birthdays. I am not a big fan of celebrating my birthday mostly because I do not like being the center of attention in that way. Yet, I enjoy teaching, presenting and speaking in public, maybe it is because in those instances I am sharing about things I love? So, maybe, this is due to my age or the fact that I hang out with people half my age or more, but I can never remember how old I am and I have to figure it out every year. No one need remind me either, I prefer living in a world where I don't count birthdays.

For my birthday, which is today and I do remember the day most years, I am headed out on a walk while the sky is blue. Perhaps, I will find a new place to stroll and take some new photos on this beautiful birthday morning!

Thanks, mom, for bringing me into this big, beautiful, crazy world!

Cheers!