X-ray visionary

It's been so busy lately with the radiology department of MHRC getting built--they're working double shifts and Saturdays to get it done. Add in that I've been having to do a lot of marketing work with Howie lately, and my brain is so frazzled that I can't even remember which way is up. It's easy to spend so much time with your head buried in a project--indeed, my profession, Da Biz--that one needs serious comic relief to get some perspective.

It reminds me of early 2001, when I had only been at Design Associates for eight months, and my sister Miss Kitty wanted me to help her with some ideas for remodeling her back porch. She came to me during one of my visits home with a couple of sheets of notebook paper with roughly-penned pictures on them.

"Here, Pix," she said. "Maybe this'll help you get an idea of what I want to do. Here's a bird's eye view of the porch, and here's an x-ray vision of the wall against the guest bedroom."

I was momentarily puzzled. In an instant, I knew what she meant. And I knew as a good younger sister, I had to razz her.

"Um, Kitty, a, um, 'bird's eye view' is what we call a floor plan. And uh, your 'x-ray vision' is an elevation. An interior elevation."

The look on Kitty's face seemed to say that she needed a Ctrl+Alt+Delete reboot. "Wha...?"

"Lulu," I said in the tone of voice you use to explain to the cat why the vacuum cleaner isn't trying to eat her, "the floor plan is what you see if you're laying on the ceiling, as it were. And the interior elevation is what you see when you're standing in the room looking at a wall, but you can get far enough back from it to see the whole wall."

"Right," she said. "But to see that, you'd have to stand waaaaay back, like in the next room. So to see that through the wall, you need x-ray vision."

[headdesk]