View of a Short Commute: The New Courthouse

My brain is going extremely fast + slow right now. Work is in hyper drive warp speed, which means the other part of my mind partitioned off for leisurely activities has basically gone to sleep. Only one more week! Then a break. Phew. Zzzzzz..... [That looks a bit like a mama duck leading her ducklings.]

Every morning on my way to this work I speak of I drive by this:

Right now the city of Jacksonville is constructing it's new Courthouse. 

For the first year that I worked at my job this was a barren, empty lot strewn with trash, covered in tumble weeds, and surrounded by broken down metal chain linked fences peeled back at their corners to reveal an undesirable, deserted space. 

About a year after that, or a year ago from today [roughly speaking], they finally started construction. Little by little I saw the trucks show up. The land was cleared and prepped. The initial wooden frame went up for the base of the structure. The concrete was poured. The metal beams were placed and walls began to fill the gaps between the gaps. One day the ginormous cranes arrived, with a counter weight [I don't claim to understand the science or terminology of all this] dangling, hovering, loitering over our heads in the air as we [we, the collective commuters] drove on down Broad St. every morning. Every morning for the first month of the cranes I would literally speed past the cranes as fast as I could in fear that one of the counter weights would fall onto my car and crush me. Eventually I forgot about them. 

Now, the structure is, while not nearly complete, it is... nearly complete. It's getting there. I can see what it will become. I can envision the building that will very soon become a huge center for Jacksonville's downtown. And it amazes me, day in and day out, to think that I will have seen the birth of such an important part of the history of this city.

Granted it will be crawling with popos and criminals and lawyers. But still. Amazing none the less.