Friday... finally!

I guess Friday as a subject for a blog is fairly ubiquitous.  That makes it pretty boring as well, I suppose.  I tend not to pay too much attention to Friday as a day of the week because I often work through the weekends, though at a lesser pace than throughout the week.  Nevertheless, there were a couple of days in this past week that just dragged on, making this Friday a little more worthy of note to me than usual.

I am not sure what the weekend holds in store yet, but I am hoping to get a little father - daughter time in.  What weekend I get, I enjoy, but there are times that lull along and I am hoping to make some time with Megan to go to my office.

Detachment Two Office Building

My plan is to make a 3D model of the office I work in using the free modeling software from Google called Sketchup.  I had seen Sketchup before and even downloaded it, but at the time I held no special interest in it.  Recently, however, I was reacquainted with it and think it could be really neat in modeling the building I work in, which is very unique and probably dates back into the late 1800s or early 1900s.  I want to do it to scale, so I will need to measure all of the sides and angles.  I plan on starting with the basics and adding details to it over time... and it could take a while.  Anyway, I think it could be educational for Megan and give us time together.  I think I will be able to do this fairly easily because gathering the data will be very similar to what I used to do as a party chief on a survey crew. Whether Megan sticks with it or not, I plan on finishing the model.  As a matter of fact, this could be very educational for me and give me some skills I have been interested in getting for a long time now.  Not wanting to drag this on too long, I took an Engineering Graphics course during my very brief college experience at the University of South Alabama.  I enjoyed it immensely and wonder if it wasn't my true calling.  Life is cruel, however, and I am definitely too old to be changing career paths at this stage in my life.

If you are interested in seeing what Google Sketchup does, just do a google search on it.  If you want to see some really cool models on the WWW, open Google Earth and check on the 3D Buildings icon in the layers section in the left hand pane.  There are 3D models in just about every major city in the world.  And, if you want to learn sketchup, there are some really good training videos on the sketchup page.