Two deadlines down, one more to go.

But alas, I'm reaching the point where I don't care anymore. Too long spent on high alert when things aren't truly life-or-death has left me--and a fair amount of my team--with adrenal fatigue. At least they still have their sense of humor, such as this pic, which one of them sent to me recently.

With T minus 96 hours to go

The equipment consultant is useless, the guy redlining the exterior details has taken a computer off of an empty desk and holed up in a conference room, the owner won't send me information about all their owner-supplied-contractor-installed equipment, the IT consultant keeps emailing me about the MOB (we're starting on that on Tuesday! Did you finish the hospital yet? Well then get back there and finish the hospital! If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding!), the owner's rep keeps emailing my staff for random floor plans and information...

...and my co-project manager/architect/right hand woman is having to work from home, because she's starting to have weird pre-labor pains.  Did I mention Chloe was pregnant?  She is, and any day now she won't be any more.  Right in time for the deadline.

Fun with User Groups: overheard during a review of the nursery with the OB nurses

Nurse 1: ...so in the Nurse Work Area, we need a blanket warmer and a small fridge for breast milk storage.
Pixie: [sketching on the plan] Sure thing.
Nurse 2: Will that fridge have a freezer?
Equipment Planner: No, not in a small fridge.
Howie: You freeze breast milk?
Nurse 1: Oh, sure, all the time.
Pixie: For what, smoothies?
Engineer: [under his breath] I bet they taste like vanilla...

......


Nurse 1: In the exam room, we prefer to do circumcisions on a countertop.
Pixie: [sketching on plan] Right on. 
Engineer: Do you need a card access lock on that exam room door?
Nurse 1: Hmm, I don't think so.  I mean, what would we lock in there? [turns to Nurse 2]
Pixie: Maybe you have to keep the baby in there while you're doing the circumcision?
Nurse 1: [laughs] Why would I lock him in there?  
Pixie: I dunno, maybe circumcising a baby is like trying to pill a cat--if you don't hang on to him, the little dude will scamper under the sofa and you'll play hell trying to get him out.
[Nurses, Howie, and Equipment Planner laugh]
Pixie: And babies won't come out for tuna like cats will, so you're gonna have to get him out from under there with something else. Maybe this is when you break out the breast milk smoothies, y'know? 

Aw, thanks, y'all!

Thanks for all the kind wishes, y'all.  I just got back into town to see all the mad props from  my awesome tens of readers.  I'll catch you up more on the goings on at DA and how St. Ermahgerd is going later on this week--right now, I've got to get through my emails from being gone for a week.  Yeesh....

Introducing the cast of St. Ermagerd

St. Ermagerd is about to own my life for the next 12-18 months. This isn't unusual--a decent-sized project can last 6-12 months for planning and another 12-18 months for construction. As the lead healthcare planner on the project, my involvement is heaviest during design, starting to taper off during CDs (construction documents, when we're making the drawings they give the contractor to build the building) and tapering way off once bidding and construction begins. I'll occasionally answer questions during that time, but by then I'm supposedly off designing another project. Or that's the plan, anyway.

St. Ermagerd is about 100,000 sf of hospital and about 70,000 sf of medical office building (MOB). Clearly, I'm not doing this all by myself. The project is a Bosley project--he's the partner in charge, and Howie is involved as another partnerish project manager architect person. (We'll see how well that works out-- the combination of Bosley and Howie on a project can be incredibly annoying with so many would-be chefs in the kitchen.) The rest of the St. Ermagerd project team is thus:

Chloe, the project manager: she's responsible for making sure everyone has what they need to get the building designed and detailed. She's doing code studies, talking to the Bieffee MT building department, checking in with and setting up meetings with the engineers, and so on.

Pixie, c'est moi, the healthcare planner: my job is to work with the users and with the various building and healthcare codes to program the hospital appropriately. I have to make sure the facility has all the right spaces and rooms in the right sizes and quantities, which means I also look at a facility's utilization statistics (how many patients of what kind use what services and how often). I then use that info to locate the departments and rooms/spaces in those departments appropriately. This is more of a process than a one-and-done thing.

Chester, the lead designer: Chester's job is to figure out how this building should look, what it's made of, and how to get that outside to look and wear well given the spaces inside and the weather outside. This is not going tone easy, between designing with Montana's climate and Howie's attempts to interfere with exterior design. Godspeed, Chester.

Jimmy Ray, healthcare architect: he'll yeah, Jimmy Ray is on the scene, and not a moment too soon. He's been helping me work through planning issues, and he'll be very helpful when we have to start really drawing how this building goes together. Healthcare architecture isn't just thrown together, and Jimmy Ray knows all the codes I do. I'm relieved that he's here.

Devon, the design intern: I got Devon an interview at Design Associates, and they hired him quick like a bunny. Good thing, as he's not afraid to push back on Howie when he disagrees with a design decision. He's sharp and inquisitive to the point of almost being annoying. However, I'd rather answer a lot of questions than answer none--he wants to learn everything he can.

Vera, the planning and exteriors intern: Vera has skills in healthcare space planning as well as exterior detailing and she's pretty good with details as well, so we need her skills in a lot of places on the project. That being said, I'm really trying to reserve judgement on Vera, but it's tough. She refuses to work any overtime whatsoever, which is a pretty tough stance to take as a non licensed person in my field. Her questions sometimes feel like the wrong kind of pushback; not like she's trying to rethink how we do things, but rather it almost sounds like she wants to avoid doing anything that takes a lot of time. Yet she does and comes up with some amazing stuff sometimes. Again, I'm trying to reserve judgement, but it's tough.

Candace the planning intern: Candace expressed an interest to Bosley that she wanted to do healthcare planning and get away from exteriors, so she's helping out on planning as well. I worry that she wanted to be a healthcare planner because she thinks it'll be less work than doing CDs, but so far she's not bad. She also doesn't like overtime, but she will occasionally stay late at the last minute to help with a deadline.

That's the main group at DA for the project. We also have Evann, our landscape architect, and Shana, our interior designer, plus a host of eternally-entertaining engineers. I'll tell you more about them as the project moves forward.

The band is back together, and we're going on tour

The recession was hard on a sister, and on Design Associates as well.  We laid off a lot of good people, and to their credit DA has hired some of them back.  Elliott was brought back as soon as we could get him, and then Kellye was rehired back in early 2012.  And now, we have the final piece of our team in place: Jimmy Ray.


Jimmy Ray left Denver back in 2007, as I was just starting this blog.  He moved to the Midwest when his wife got an amazing promotion that they couldn't refuse.  Fast forward to 2012, and her company was bought by new owners who laid her off (as well as everyone else who made as much as she did).  Suddenly buoyed by her new freedom and the realization that her job had been making her miserable for several years, she decided to go back to school to become a therapist.  Guess where some of the best schools for her particular kind of therapy are? Yup--the Mile High.


So, a few phone calls later, Jimmy Ray has a job with Design Associates again.  He started last week and will be moving his wife out to the Mile High sometime this month.  And guess whose project he's on?  Yup--St. Ermahgerd, with yours truly.  This is a huge relief to me, as Jimmy Ray knows how to put a hospital together, and I need help making some stuff happen on a deadline as tight as ours.  Jimmy Ray is a solid dude--smart, funny, gives a damn about his job, and easy to get along with.  


This is gonna be fun.

The roof, the roof, the roof (and everything else) is on fire

Well, not exactly, but you get the point.  There are separate fires burning north of Denver, west of Denver, and south of Denver, and the recent record highs and lack of rain have not been helping matters. Generally here, it's been hitting 70 by 8am and then mid- to high-90s by 2pm, and humidity keeps scraping along at about 5%-15%.  (Meanwhile, Scarlett in Vegas snorts with laughter at our wah-wah-it's-so-dry-and-hot-here lamentations.)


Guy and I are safe, as we live five minutes from downtown Denver.  However, one of my coworkers had to evacuate her house while on vacation across the country.  (I don't know how she did it, but she did it.) Mostly you notice the fires here in town by smelling the air and finding a fine layer of soot/black dusty sand on everything outside...or on your floors if you left the windows open for a few hours.  I went out to swim the other morning, and it smelled like someone was having the mother of all cookouts.


So, I owe St. Blogwen the Patient and Beneficent an apology for not responding sooner re: the Gaping Maw of Burning Fury in the Mile High.  I've been writing an application on my own behalf to join a professional organization with great prestige (no, not the Masons) plus three presentation proposals to a variety of architect-y conferences.  And naturally, all of these things were due July 1st, so I spent most of June running like...well, my head was on fire.  I'm looking forward to a quiet July, but you know how well-laid plans of mice and men and pixies oft go astray. But here's hoping for some quiet time by the pool with a cheesy fashion magazine for the next few weekends in a row.

MomWatch 2012: ...and a good time was had by all!

A mom-approved dress at Nordstrom's in Cherry Creek.

Mom left earlier today after a nice morning together, which included a wonderful breakfast at Racine's (awfully quiet at 9:30 am, but I guess Denver's movers and shakers had already paid their mimosa tabs and left by then). We had a great week together, which was as always too short. The closet is done, and oh yes there will be posts and photos about the process. Mom was a real trooper for the whole week, from demoing the old shelving to finishing the new shelving. It was an amazing job; Mom was done in less than a week with a task that I clearly couldn't manage to accomplish in the past almost-three years. Well done, Mom!

We also managed to spend some time at the spa and wandering around Cherry Creek Mall, heckling the high fashion in Nordstrom's (as well as enjoying some of the handmade St. John dresses and jackets) and lusting over some YSL and Louboutin shoes at Saks. Speaking of Yves Saint Laurent, we saw his retrospective at the Denver Art Museum on its only U.S. stop. Every evening was spent trying new dishes and fantastic margaritas and various Rieslings at our favorite restaurants in Denver, and days were spent making messes and fixing shelving and snuggling my unhelpful kittehs, who appreciated the chance to go outside on the balcony in the unseasonably warm Denver weather. I appreciated it all the more, since I had three big presentations during part of the week she was here, and I was more than useless while she worked. I stumbled to my presentations in the mornings, to work in the afternoons, and then home to find that Mom had cleaned the kitchen in between putting up wood furring strips in the closet and spackling over chunks of fallen-away plaster in the closet.

It was indeed a wonderful week, and always too short a visit.

Call Rolling Stone: we're getting the band back together

Recently, Design Associates rehired my good friend Kellye to help out on all the healthcare work we have coming in. Kellye, as very-longtime WAD readers might recall, was (and is) a solid, licensed architect with a sharp eye for detail, an unflappable professionalism, and a wit so sharp that I have to remind him not to run with it or he'll put his eye out. Kellye is one of those rare people who is both actually good at his job and can make me laugh out loud. He'll be a good addition back to the office.

A few folks have been rehired in the past few months at DA, and we've added some new faces as well. For better or worse, the recession forced/allowed DA to shed some folks that weren't that good. A former coworker of mine has tried to get back in at DA a few times over the past year, but when she heard that only Howie and Bosley were hiring recently, it turned her off from re-re-reapplying--they were the ones she was working for when she was laid off three years ago, and she's had enough of them. Funny enough, when I asked Bosley about bringing back people who had been laid off, he specifically mentioned that former coworker as someone he wouldn't rehire. Guess that worked out nicely for everyone, then.

Adding to the fun of bringing Kellye back is that I'm finally going to be moving to a new desk this week after spending about six years at the same desk. I'm annoyed at moving, but at least it gave me the chance to clean my desk, and no one forced me to move while I was working on three deadlines at a time. My new desk will be next to Elliot (who was brought back several months ago) and over the wall from Kellye, who's working with Elliot right now, and Intern Tiffany, who will be working with me on a lot of master planning and concept design projects. So I'll be moving away from Intern Kimmy, whom I adore, and Ingrid and Norman, who have always been great colleagues with a good sense of humor, but I'll be moving closer to people that I hold in high regard (both personally and professionally). I also realized last week that I'll be moving away from the package pickup area, which means people will hopefully stop interrupting me to say hi just because they've come to pick up a package and were in the neighborhood. Maybe I'll actually get more done for once.