Alex Hicken : August 2, 2014

I am currently at the Capitola Beach. I am chilling out, watching the bags of two Japanese foreign students that my family are hosting. They are pretty cool. This past week has been my first week of the summer break. It has been pretty good. I got in a couple days of work. I started working on designing my cousin's house. My brother has the calling to organize service opportunities for the branch, and we served the grandma of Adrian.

The Japanese students are fun. The two Japanese students are teenagers about to start high school, and their names are Tamoya and Keiji. Trevor downloaded the new Puella Magi Madoka Magica movie. We have been wanting to watch this movie for a while. It is a full length animated Japanese film. Puella Magi Madoka Magica is hailed as one of the greatest science fiction cartoons. It is super deep, and I don't understand it. It spoke about the Law of Cycle. We invited the two Japanese boys, and they were not into it because I don't think that they knew that it was in Japanese. They said that they were only interested in watching the opening scene. When we started watching the film, they wanted to watch the whole movie because it was in Japanese. The movie was a lot less comprehensible than the anime because it was based on different theories of science. No being able to read each subtitle makes it more confusing. On Saturday, I took Tamoya and Keiji to the beach. Keiji really enjoys the beach. When we arrived, I just let them go play and do whatever they wanted because they are very good friends just about to be freshman in high school. I sat with their bags. Sitting with the bags, I was left sitting next a big Polynesian family, and I did know if it was more embarrassing for me or them because they threw a Frisbee, hitting me in the head almost twice. They offered me a beer for compensation, but I resisted. I wanted to take a picture of Keiji and Tamoya. When I went looking for them, I ran into a BYUI alumni, recognizing me as a student from there because I was wearing a competitive sports champion shirt. He actually studied construction management like me, and he works at Swinerton. He asked me about looking for internships, and I said that I plan to intern with an architecture firm. The guy was named Sterling, and he graduated in 2004. Swinerton is a general contracting company, and they actually did a seminar at BYU Idaho. When I finally found Tamoya and Keiji, they were worried about their stuff, so I had to take a quick picture and go back to my sitting position, guarding the bags. We played monopoly in the evening with my Japanese brothers. We have had many foreign students stay with us, and I always have a brotherly relationship with them. Tamoya and Keiji barely understood what was going on, and I kind of took advantage of it. I like letting people think on their own while dad persuaded them not to trade me property. My family has developed the ability to complete both Monopoly and Risk games in one night. You may not believe this. Trevor and I had a similar value of property, and dad was being too conservative in playing as usual. My father really likes the orange properties. My family thinks that those properties give an unfair advantage, so we decided that the houses should cost 200 dollars each. I out bid him for his last property needed to have the whole set of orange property, when it was up for auction. That limited the competition a little. He started investing very late in his property, when he finally purchased it from me. I did not have any property to develop, so I gave Keiji the necessary property for him to have the complete set of the yellow properties. I also bought a purple property for like 800 dollars from him for fun. He was kind of out of it. He invested a little in the yellow properties, and he wanted to go to sleep early. When he quit, he decided to give me all his property. Now I had a heap of property to invest in. Trevor had a lot of potential too, but the property that he won was mortgaged, and mine was not. It was a fun game.

The job opportunity was interesting. We did inventory work for Outdoor World. I was really slow the first day of work. I only scanned about 1300 items while my brother heard that other employees had more than double the amount of items. There were a couple teenagers that Trevor and I hung out with during lunch. Taylor, the girl, is a junior, and Kyle, the boy, is a senior in high school. They are both really cool. Taylor got me into Instagram because she doesn't have a Facebook account. I love people, and I realized that I will be able to follow my friends more closely while I am away with the app. My second day, working inventory, was much more successful. I actually finished the section that I was assigned, and I finished my third section in a fashion that surprised the person that hired us. Taylor and Trevor were nearby and humored by his astonishment.

Before the semester ended, my cousin, Shaundra saw my Revit architecture work, and she wanted me to help her design her home. She gave me her ideas. The main floor plan is inspired by a house featured in the Design Build Magazine. I don't think that the floor plans look normal, since it has very limited information, but I am working with it. The image is also very small. The house is very luxurious. She asked the master bedroom to be about 250 square feet. I feel that I am a very inefficient architect because a bed covered most of the room. The house has many weird angles. I think that the angles make the master bedroom hard to effectively use. The master bedroom is about 280 square feet, and that will probably make the entire house much larger than requested. Working with a client is interesting. The information on the house is very limited. I only have some exterior pictures of the house, and the floor plans. Shaundra said that she has been developing her vision for the house for over 5 years, and I have been able to see this from her Pinterest. Here are some pictures of the house. The progress of this house has slowed down because Sterling from Swinerton galvanized me to put together my portfolio for applying for internships.

I saw that in many of the images that Shaundra was impressed with in her master pin board. She liked a lot of big windows, so I put this huge 16 foot long double glass side-doors.

blurry floor plans

The master bedroom is the red section. You can see the bed takes a lot of room.

I heard the word decal a lot in my class, and I did not understand that it was inserting image in a model until the end of the semester.

How do you like the nightstand lamps that I found on Revit City? I think that it matches the bed somewhat well. The material of the lambs are not shown well.

Last Friday, we help Adrian, a member of my branch to serve his grandma. She doesn't have much help. We helped trim her yard plants mainly. We also took out a couple tree stumps out of the ground. I learned how to prune a rose bush. Humphrey, a member of the branch, saw me pruning a rose bush, and he trimmed down a rose bush a lot, but I pruned the bush how I was taught. Humphrey was very knowledgeable and a good leader.

I want to add a series of pictures that I got from a run. I told a friend from school about a traiil from high school that goes to a Buddhist monastery. Here are the pictures of that.