Delayed gratification is overrated.

After this latest painful deadline with Pomme de Terre, I went to Alex, my big boss. Alex is one of the owners of Design Associates and is licensed to practice in ten states. Each of the owners has their specialties in design, and Alex's is healthcare. I can't recall the last time he did anything else. Oh wait--our office did his house not too long ago. That was a nice pad, for sure. But other than that, he only does healthcare in our office, so I work for him.

"Any word on the Mendwell Center, Alex?" I asked him. He ran his hand through his salt-and-pepper, devil-may-care hair and sighed.

"The owners are still looking for a site," he replied. "I think they're close, but they just need a site. I'll call them today and see what's happening."

Dammit.

Wheatlands doesn't require more than about five to eight hours a week these days. Pomme de Terre is leaving me so wiped out physically and mentally every day that it feels like I've been riding around all day in the tumbler portion of a concrete truck. I spent today fixing a few departments, trying to find space for a few of the rooms that hadn't yet been given space. Space planning is the weirdest thing: a list of rooms and their square footages seems so easy to make fit in a given space, but it's a lot harder than it looks. Sometimes the list of spaces doesn't take into account the amount of space that a department needs to get around between the list of rooms. For example, most administrative areas only need hallways that are about 5'-0" to 6'-0" wide (depending on the number of rooms leading into the hall) to get between offices, but building codes require that hospitals have hallways and corridors that are no less than 8'-0" wide. That's a big-ass hallway, and it takes up more space than you'd think.

Then, there's structure to think about. In most houses, the exterior walls and a couple of interior walls support the roof and the floors above the ground, no problem. But in large buildings, like seven-story hospitals, steel or concrete columns are needed for support. Once the structure is in place, then one is required by code to spray fireproofing onto the columns to keep them from deforming from the heat in a big fire. Then, one has to cover the columns in studs and drywall to make them look pretty. THEN, one has to make sure that a person (or a person with a cart) can navigate around the column, or make sure that the column doesn't stick into a corridor or an exit passageway, or.... You get my drift. So once the structure is in place and the design conforms to all applicable codes, suddenly I can't get all of the rehab center's administrative offices in unless I make them all smaller than they asked for in their list of spaces (called a program). And that makes me a sad panda.

So, I guess it's more space planning tomorrow and waiting hopefully for MCRI to kick off. I'm trying to be patient, but it's hard to be that way when you're exhausted and annoyed.