One of my favorite National Parks to work in (I have many), is the Keweenaw National Historical Park in Calumet, Michigan. The park was established to preserve and interpret the history of copper mining on the Keweenaw Peninsula through partnerships with both public and private organizations. The Historical Park preserves two large-scale mining complexes: the Quincy Unit which interprets the above-ground and below-ground technologies of copper mining and the Calumet Unit which incorporates the social, ethnic, commercial, and company-planned aspects of the Calumet & Hecla mining community. In addition to those units, there are over a dozen independently operated Keweenaw Heritage Sites that work in partnership to tell different stories about Copper Country.

I am a fair weather sustainable commuter. I not ashamed to admit that biking or walking to work in the snow is just not my thing. It may have to do with the fact that I have to drop off a little one at daycare on my way to work or it may just be I don’t like the cold.

Venice, California, the coastal community west of downtown Los Angeles and south of pricey Santa Monica, is a visual delight at a point of sensory overload.

I have been thinking a lot about the three legged stool lately - you know the one. Old school was that there are three components of executing a project: better, faster and cheaper. The old adage was that any two of the three were achievable but all three weren't. I never really understood this metaphor, as a two-legged stool has very little utility. Fast forward twenty-five years (yes, it has been that long) and that paradigm no longer cuts it. Our clients are asking us to do our work better, faster and more economically (saying cheaper sounds so, well, cheap). While squeezing inefficiency from the way we currently, or "have always" done things has allowed us to make huge gains in delivery times and quality we have just about squeezed everything we can out of the old process. Those of us who want to stay at the forefront of our profession are reexamining everything we do for its relevancy in this rapidly changing world. There, I said it, the big ugly word CHANGE.