Future

Growing up, we spent all of our vacations and holidays down at the beach house on Pensacola Beach. Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Memorial Day and a couple of weeks in the summer.

When the weather was hot and sunny our days were pretty much spent playing on the beach and swimming in the ocean, but some days the weather was so disgusting and rainy that we had to find other ways to entertain ourselves. And sometimes this meant everyone piling into our big brown and beige companion van and driving into Pensacola to go shopping at Cordova Mall.

Well, we were down at the beach one summer, and I was about 8 years old. The weather was the pits, so we made one of these trips to the mall and on our way home decided to pick up a box of fried chicken from Popeye's. So we placed our order and as we sat there waiting in the drive-thru, I was looking at this house next door. There was a tall wood fence separating us from it, but you could see that the house was one of the pretty, old wooden homes you see in the downtown area of Pensacola. But this house had seen better days. It was yellow, big and worn down. Trim falling off, paint peeling and sitting empty.

I clearly remember asking my dad, "Daddy, if I wanted to work and fix up old houses what would I need to be?" and he said an architect. I always mark that exact point in my life as when I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.