Well, now that that's over with...

Now that my major deadlines are behind me, I've finally had a chance to reflect on the past year-plus of working on St. Ermahgerd. This project was a pressure cooker for everyone, and it especially took its toll on me as well as my fellow middle managers. During this project, I found myself drinking a bottle of wine a week (not good, given how poorly I metabolize alcohol) and shouting the f-word at my boss, Howie. By May, when our three major deadlines were, I was using the word "fuck" or some conjugation/gerund thereof about every seven seconds. I mean, it's my favorite word, but there's such a thing as overuse.

So after Memorial Day weekend, Howie and I got together to see what we could do to alleviate my 24/7 rage and get me back to something like normal. My state of being was best described as central nervous system overload/failure, and I can't operate like that. I wanted to go home at a decent time every day, with sun still in the sky and energy left in my bones. We figured out staffing a little for the project, including figuring out who could take some of the construction administration (CA) tasks off my list. Howie also advocated for some regular three-day weekends this summer as well as taking a full week somewhere., which I planned to do around July 4th. 

I'll be posting more about what in St. Ermahgerd made me live up to this blog's name, as Howie and I agreed to do a post-mortem on the SD through CD process. I'll hopefully be able to stick to the architectural issues, as opposed to the general white-collar blues issues that plague us all. In the meantime, I'm going to go sit with my cats on the balcony and drink Riesling out of pleasure, not stress.

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.

Pull off another miracle? Sure, why not?

So, St. Ermagerd has been understaffed for almost a year, the client continues to make changes two weeks before the construction documents deadline, and right after the hospital's CDs are due, my team has two weeks to take 76,000 sf of adjacent St. Ermagerd clinic space from DDs to CDs?

Piece of cake.

[chugs half a bottle of Riesling]

Monday Visual Inspiration: You can't medicate me in my safe house

Hazel recently had her teeth cleaned at the vet's office, which means that she had to be knocked out with anesthesia and given an IV. You can't see it because she's got it tucked under her, but there's a shaved spot on her front left leg where they ran the IV. They had to pull a tooth because of a cavity, but overall she did well, and the vet couldn't stop talking about how incredibly cute and sweet she was during the visit.

Hazel decided to hide in her house a little this weekend to avoid being given her antibiotics. She hates the meds being squirted down her throat, but she's gotten to where she doesn't run around the house when it's medication time. She's done with the meds either today or tomorrow, and I'm sure that'll make her happy. It was tough to medicate her as well because of all the hours I've had to work at the start of this month. We had four master plans/conceptual designs due with in a week of each other this month, so it's been pretty unrelenting since the holidays ended. Things should slow down a bit here for the next week or so, but I'm sure we'll get busy again soon. In the meantime, I'll go clean the house and take a nap.

It

Back after these messages...

Sorry folks, I'm on my way out of town for a business trip and haven't had time to collect my thoughts for a decent post lately. More when I return...

Your indulgence, I beg it

I really appreciate everyone's patience right now. The construction documents for Gestalt's Uber MOB are due in two weeks, and I'm slammed busy. There's a lot to do, review, check, draw, markup, and fret over, and my team and I have our work cut out for us. Because of this, I haven't had the energy or even time to really do a good post or two for y'all about architecture, life, or anything. I check/email/review stuff and answer questions all day in a state that is super-busy bordering on frenetic, and I come home and collapse and read magazines because I don't have the energy to read a real book.

So, I keep posting about Yellowstone and coming home and resting. I'll be able to do better in a couple of weeks, but for right now I'm just posting pictures and apologies.

If I can't see my deadlines, they can't arrive

This picture of Hazel (taken just after Gracie arrived at the HKH last summer) illustrates just how I feel. I just wrapped up one deadline only to have another hanging over my head. Forgive the lapse, dear WAD readers--I'll be back in proper blogging form next week.

Someone call Glenn Frey, because the heat is on.

It was 73 yesterday this weekend in Denver, but I wouldn't have known it since I was in the office. Spring makes for an uncomfortable time in large buildings here in Denver. Our spring weather has multiple personalities--it's 60, then it's 40 and raining, then it's 70, then it's 35 and snowing, and my ass has been through so many freeze-thaw cycles that I think it's just going to give up and fall off. Well, at least then maybe I can find some jeans that fit. Anyway, many large commercial and residential buildings are designed such that going from heating to cooling is a major undertaking--it isn't something you just flip over every other day as you feel like it. Once you flip the system to heat, the HVAC system is going to pump out warm air until sometime in late April or early May, at which point we will switch the system over to cooling, and then the system will pump out cool air from May to October. So if you get a hot day in March or a cold day in August, you're just gonna have to deal. Hence, we've had to turn the heat off and open the doors in the Happy Kitten Highrise condo here lately, and the kittehs are enjoying the sunbeams and fresh air and the change in weather.

The warm-up is making for an interesting office environment, too, and not just because we haven't switched over the HVAC system. Part of the reason that we've been so cold the last couple of winters is that there haven't been as many bodies and computers in the building, what with the layoffs and recession. But lately, we've been a-hiring and now the office is filling up again with bodies and computers and activity. I actually broke a sweat the other day just walking around the office. It seems that work is picking up, and we're getting some projects in finally (mostly healthcare, to be fair, but work is work, and of course I prefer healthcare over anything else).

But back to me being in the office on a lovely, sunny, 73-degree Saturday in Da Mile Hizzle: wtf? Well, one of the largest (and busiest and most profitable) departments in Gestalt HMO's Uber MOB came to us furious back in January. They didn't like where they were in the building, and they didn't like their layout at all, and we better fix this right away. So, having to revamp the entire floor on which they were situated put the project behind schedule, especially the interior part. In order for us to make up time, we're having to separate out the core and shell from the tenant infill. This means that the exterior, structure, floors, and roofs as well as the stairs and elevators and main toilet rooms on each floor and utility rooms will be released to the contractor before the tenant infill (i.e., all the departments of the clinic) will be released, and that core and shell will start construction first. (Note: this happens a lot when building a big building. I've done it in buildings as small as 60,000 sf.) But it also means that we're having to work fast and furious to squeeze as much air out of the schedule as we can and to make up the month-long delay as best we can between now and the end of the design schedule this fall. And that means working some nights and weekends. Hence, Shorty's in the office on a Saturday.

And Gestalt Colorado is getting pressure from the home Gestalt office in the midwest: deliver this building on time, at or under budget, on schedule, and not over-sized. Gestalt National told the local Gestalt Design and Construction crew that the building's total area on all five floors can be no more than 241,313 sf. Fine. However, in the process of laying out the building as well as making it look good on the outside and allowing for easy expansion later, we've found that the building needs to be 242,524 sf. And Gestalt National is having None Of It: get the building down to 241,313 or it's not happening. And they're putting pressure on some very reasonable folks about this, and the pressure is turning these wonderful people into unreasonable folks who fly off the handle at the drop of a hat. Howie and Sven and I have gone into meetings with these reasonable local Gestalt folks who suddenly start shouting and refusing to even hear us out on an idea of how to possibly fix the square footage issue without compromising the building's function or look.

So, yes. We're about to jump through some flaming hoops over an extra 1,211 sf in a nearly quarter-million sf building. We are arguing over five-thousandths of the building's total area.

It's a bean counter issue, not an architectural issue. Probably, someone who is good at estimating initial cost but does not fully understand construction costs, engineering, and making a clinical space actually work has set this 241,313 in stone and refuses to let anyone else budge from it. Sadly, in order to fix this short-sighted imposition, we'll either have to take a few inches off the outside of the building all the way around, or we'll have to engage in some engineering dynamics that will cost more than just letting us build the extra 1,211 sf. Plus, depending on how the 1,211 sf is taken out of the building, it could affect the flow of staff and patients through some very busy departments, including the one that we've been redesigning a whole floor for. Are we really "saving" anything here?

So, we have to figure out how to get this extra area out without hurting patient and staff flow or making the building look funny. And it takes a lot of time (which we don't have) and effort (which we do have, but it's easy to get burned out when banging your head against this all day). So, I'm working weekends.

Prepare for decompression...

I wrapped up my deadline this morning with Orville and Intern Devon, and then I left the office by 10am. Having spent at least one day a weekend in the office for the past five weekends in a row, I'm kinda over it. Plus, if I have to start working on space planning a specialty clinic with Howie tomorrow, I need a break. I ended up getting some errands done around town as well as some cleaning done around the house. Now it's time to paint my nails and wait for Guy to get home and cook dinner. Tuna Helper for everyone!

In better news, we got an email today saying that the day after Thanksgiving would be a paid holiday this year (as opposed to being a furlough day like last year). That was welcome news indeed and makes the holidays look a little better this year.

Who watches the Watchmen? Part 2 of 2

It's been a while since I mentioned the MRI project with Will. Since Will is a partner, he usually isn't that involved in the day-to-day management of a project. Therefore, an associate is the next level down at my office (and at many firms across the country) who would actually manage a project. For the MRI project, Will assigned Orville as the managing associate, me as the architect, and Intern Devon as the intern/drawing-and-printing lackey. It's a small project, really--we're putting in an MRI into an existing space and renovating some nearby offices as well. What makes it tough is that the project has to be built on a really fast schedule so that research group that's going in halvsies with the research facility can move into the MRI suite in March and start doing their research. Like big research. Like they're-on-the-cusp-of-curing-three-major-diseases big. Oh, and did I mention that we haven't even finished the construction documents for the project, and they're picking the contractor in December? And they want all this done in less than three months (Jan-Mar)?

I'll wait a moment while all my architectural readers twitch and convulse regarding those last few sentences.

So, Will puts me on the project because I've done four MRIs in ten years, three of them in the last five years. Will brings on Orville presumably to run the project and because he has a lot of construction experience and has done two MRIs himself. However, in the past couple of months, I have found that I really like Orville as a person and loathe him as an architect. I'm having to get all the engineers in the room for coordination meetings and and run those coordination meetings as well as the meetings with the users and basically run this project. Orville has done the specs for the project (eventually), but hasn't really reviewed the drawings at any point that I can tell. He comes in at ten am and calls me eventually to ask "hey, did uh....did you see...........this...this email from So-and-So...?" And my response is almost always, "Yeah. Go up in your email about five or six exchanges to where So-and-So responded at 9:34 am and you'll see our solution to the problem." Dude wasn't even in on Friday, and these drawings are due this Monday. While Orville has had some interesting comments and suggestions on how to fix things, it's like his head isn't even in the project most of the time. Even riding in a car with him from the research facility back to our office is unsettling and time-wasting--there's a quick exit off the highway that takes you straight to our office, but he's wandering all over the back roads of Denver's industrial fringes and has-been neighborhoods.

This is my fear, as un-PC as it might be to say or write it: I think Orville is going senile.

He's 67, and several years ago he had some work done on his heart (stents or something), and according to my dear friend Vinnie the psychologist, having your heart worked on in such an invasive way can really slow you down both in terms of physical speed and mental processing capacity. And I fear that's what's happened to Orville. He is quite literally acting too slow to be on this project with Devon and me. So on a project in which I'm only supposed to work about 4-8 hours a week (which is what Will told Sven), I'm working more like 20 hours a week because it's the only way to make the project even stand a chance of being successful.

So here's my question, faithful readers: is it wrong of me to express this concern to Sven? I feel like I'm being ageist if I say something like "Orville is too slow to run this project", but I feel like I need to explain to Sven why I'm not able to fully keep on top of the four Gestalt projects I'm running for him and why I've had to work overtime for the past couple of weeks. Further, I'm hearing from other folks in the office that they've had similar experiences in working with Orville (e.g., the interior designer who had to suck it up and run the client meetings because they no longer had the patience for Orville's constant non sequiturs, jokes, and random stories of his childhood growing up in Leadville). At least people like him (which is more than Howie can say for himself at the moment), but working with him is frustrating and unproductive.

Thoughts?

From the frying pan into the pizza oven

I got news today from another partner at Design Associates that we got a new project in which I was to be heavily involved. It's an MRI at a research facility that will be a pretty fast-paced project--the equipment has to be up and running by the end of 2010. The partner who involved me on this project, Will, is a delightful and charming and very talented fellow who looks much younger than his fifty-something. And I don't mean younger as in had-some-work-done or oh-that-devilish-look-in-his-eye or even hasn't-he-held-up-well; I mean he just looks barely 40. Anyway, Will asked me and another associate in the office to be involved in the sudden phone interview for this project, and evidently we did well enough that we've been given the project. Even better is that we snatched it away from a firm that's been snatching a lot of projects from us over the past couple of years. Boo-yah.

Will came up to me late this afternoon to give me the good news in person and to high-five me, which is always a nice reaction from a partner. Will adjusted his glasses and said, "Now, we need to get realistic about your workload. Your presence and involvement on this project is vital, and it's a very fast project, so it'll take a good chunk of your time. What else do you have going on?"

I explained that Gestalt's first floor project is a bit feast or famine--one day, there won't be much to do, and then the next I'll be eyeball-deep in RFIs and shop drawings. I also told him that I don't mind working more than 40 hrs a week, but I'm not able to do 60 hrs/week for four months straight. Been there, done that: I'm not productive at the volume anymore, as my mood of late has shown. Then, I got a lovely idea.

"You know what would help free up my time?" I asked. "If I could share the AIA seminar coordination duties with someone. You know, we just hired back Saralee this week, and she used to coordinate them, so maybe she and I could share--"

Will interrupted. "I think we should take that completely off your plate, Pixie. You've done a great job of revitalizing them, of getting them really organized and together, and I think it's time to pass that back to someone who will have the time to do it."

What's funny about this is that it was Will who asked me to start managing these back in February. I'm glad, though, that he can see what it takes to do the job right and that I'm just too damn busy to do it well anymore. We talked to Saralee briefly about it, but we'll have to talk it over with Norman, for whom she's working. On the one hand, it'll be nice to get rid of this godforsaken, thankless task...but I'm about to be crazy-ass busy, just at a time when I really need a break.

We can rebuild it, we can make it stronger, faster, cheaper...

Yesterday morning, our receptionist called Howie to the front. I heard him say over the phone, "Who's here? Huh...? Oh...oh! Yes! Okay!" He went to the front, I heard a female voice, and then he returned with a young woman: Tara, an intern I worked with for a couple of months back in the summer of 2008 but was laid off in that same fall. Evidently, with Intern Timmy and Liz moving on to bigger and better things, Howie suddenly found himself in great need of good but inexpensive help on a sudden rush of small projects. Tara, to her immense credit, had worked mostly with Jann during her few months here, and Jann emailed her one day recently to ask if she had any availability to work with us again. Tara jumped at the chance to get back on track with getting her internship hours, now that she just finished grad school.

I suppose I'm not surprised that Howie would hire someone like Tara to help him out. He's got a lot of stuff to do, plus he's not the easiest person to work for, so he really needs youngish interns because a) they bill cheap on projects but know how to use lots of different kinds of software, and b) especially right now they're not in a position to push back when he leans on them (work harder! faster!! more!!!) I asked Tara how much/long she'll be working with us, and she said Howie hadn't really told her. I mentioned that we'd all just gone back to 40 hours a week, and she said she might have it to do--evidently, Intern Kimmy told her that she'd worked nearly 80 hours last week and more than 50 a week for several weeks so far this year. I suddenly thought that perhaps I could have been helping her, but then I remembered: Howie needed cheap help.

Either way, it was great to see Tara again, and frankly it was nice to see a new employee. Seeing anyone get hired here lately made us breathe a little, though we know that no one's really publicized the hire. Still, nice to have her back and to see Kimmy get some help.

Initiative versus communication, or, the Thunderdome Battle in My Head

Lawdamercy, y'all. The last two weeks have been exhausting. I'm taking today off so that I can a) catch my breath and b) get caught up on errands and housework. Yes, I know that sounds lame, but nothing makes me calmer than a clean house, and I could use a venti-half-caff-no-foam cup of calm right about now, funk soul brotha.

I've had four deadlines over the past two weeks, but this biggest among them was the DD deadline for Gestalt. We're remodeling several departments in multiple phases on the main floor of the Bierstadt Building, which is a logistical nightmare. Each department needs to go somewhere else to function while we remodel their space, and they can't all move at once or the clinic can't function. Plus, this will be the first of several multiphase remodels to happen on other floors in the building. By the time we're done, the people who go to Gestalt for their healthcare are going to despise the names Design Associates and the contractor on the project, Glasnost Construction. But they will like having a nicer clinic to work and receive care in, one that doesn't look like it was done in 1989 and all that's missing is Melanie Griffith with a krinkle perm and NFL-worthy shoulderpads in her menswear-esque suit jacket standing behind the check-in counter. It's going to look amazing when we're done.

I've mentioned before that DD stands for design development. This set of drawings and specifications gives a good, clear picture of what we're doing, what everything's made out of, generally how big it is, and so on. The contractor's not going to build off of DDs, but rather s/he's going to price the project off of them. So the general rule for DDs is this: if it costs money, put it in. Show it, draw it, label it, and tell the contractor it's there. If you put something expensive into the project after DDs, contractors get annoyed because they haven't budgeted the money for the solid surface countertop/exotic handblown light fixtures/entire extra five rooms to be remodeled. It's important for the DD set to be complete and well-coordinated as well, because if the engineers' drawings don't match mine, it throws up red flags for the people pricing the drawings, and they will usually just throw extra money into the project because they don't yet have a clear picture of the project.

This DD deadline snuck up on me big time, unfortunately. I came back from a three-day weekend in which I worked on some stuff for my industry group presentation, and I realized that the DD set was due in two weeks and I had hardly anything done on the interior elevations I'd been working on. And I realized that the help I had for the project had, so far, been no help at all. Allow me to introduce Buster, a licensed architect pushing 40 and who has spent most of his 15-or-so-year-long career working on banks and small commercial buildings, an airplane hangar or two, and for the past few years, Gestalt's clinics. Buster came to DA about a year after me, and he had a few more years of experience on me, though neither of us were licensed. However, I got licensed before he did, which he says prompted him to get on the ball and finish the tests. Buster is a decent enough human being, but I'm not entirely impressed or pleased with his professional performance. His emails--to clients, engineers, contractors, whoever--look like he's taking dictation from Nell. No punctuation or grammar or even a clear sense of what he's asking or trying to say. I frequently read his emails and think, "God, if I hadn't been in that meeting with him, I'd have no idea what he's asking." Talking to him in person isn't much better, sadly, so I can't blame a learning disability. I ask him what he's doing on the project right now, and the answer is some broad expression like, "I'm scrubbin' these drawings" or "I'm getting through it" or "Just pluggin' along." Scrubbing for what? Plugging along on what? More unsettling throughout the project was the common refrain of "oh, this set's in great shape."

Let me back up. One of the five departments we're remodeling in this phase of Gestalt is a pharmacy. Buster has remodeled and built several pharmacies, and he was available as this project kicked off, so we all decided together (Buster, Sven [the partner in charge] and me) that Buster would handle the plans, interior elevations, and detailing of the pharmacy, and I would hadn't the other four departments, which were all less intense. What I discovered as the project went along is that Buster took me literally when I said, "You handle pharmacy, and I'll handle everything else." When I went in last weekend to print out and review the set, nothing had been done in the set--the cover page was kinda updated, but the index page had nothing, and all the other sheets--wall types, general info, site, code/life safety plan and info, doors and windows schedule and elevations--were untouched, left as they had been when they were copied over from an earlier project. Even more frightening to me is that the stuff that had been copied was incorrect in some places, such as the address of the engineers on the project--it was their old address from 2007 before they moved into their new office...while I was working on MHRC.

Details, you might say. Mere details, Pixie, why are you losing your mind over that? They're easy to miss, and no one gets hurt. Right? Every detail is important to architects. It has to be important because it's a detail that can make or break a project, that can be the difference between a good project and one that lets water into a building where people are doing surgery. And that's when I was blown away by Buster's seeming lack of attention to detail. I noticed on a project that he did a couple of years ago for Gestalt that he put down the wrong occupancy for a project. The project was an outpatient surgery suite, which was an I-2 occupancy, but he showed on the drawings that it was a B occupancy. That's a big difference, people. And fair enough, the project made it through and got approved and looked at by the authorities having jurisdiction, but I call that luck. And when the health, safety, and welfare of my clients and their clients is on the line, I don't like trusting in luck.

So last weekend, I marked up the set heavily and was blown away that he hadn't looked at any of these sheets on the project that he could totally work on. He would occasionally come up to me and say, "well, I've got the pharmacy almost to CD-level, do you need help with any of your stuff?" and of course I'd say "no" because I thought he meant "did you need help with the other departments", not "did you need help with the entire rest of the set". I especially heavily marked up the code info and life safety plan, because I found it startling that we appeared to have no information on the location of rated walls in this existing building that we'd been doing work in for at least five years now. When I insisted that we go take a peek regarding locations of rated doors and walls, he was extremely resistant, saying "We're a B occupancy and we have sprinklers--it washes away our sins!" yes, but the building is 13 stories tall, which makes it a high-rise, and there may be some rules we don't know about regarding rated walls. Frankly, though, after seeing the occupancy mistake on drawings he put out not more than three years ago, I don't trust his word regarding code matters. It's apparent to me that he's not looking at details, and that gives me great concern. In general, he seemed reluctant to do much of anything--each request for effort or assertion that x or y info should be on the drawings, Buster balked. "This isn't Glasnost's first project," he'd say. My reply was, "Just because we've worked with them before, and worked at this building before, that doesn't give us an excuse to give them half-ass DDs." Buster would make some weird grunting noise. I couldn't tell if he was complaining but trying not to use actual profanity, or if he was reluctantly conceding a point.

I expressed my concern about the state of the set to Bosley and asked his advice. Bosley said, "If it was my team, I'd want to know. I can't fix problems unless I know they're there. But bear in mind that each partner is different." I went to Sven and discussed the problem, and Sven's reply was that he trusts Buster, and when Buster works on a project alone he gets everything done. Having said that, Buster does sometimes taking direction from people at his level or below his level. Ultimately, Sven felt like after the DD set went out, we should all sit down and figure out who's in charge of what from here on so that we close any gaps in getting work done.

Over the past week, I've vacillated between two points of view. One is this: "Pixie, you're the head of this project, and as such you can't blame other people when things aren't getting done. If you're working on four other projects for Jann and Bosley and Howie while working for Sven, you can't expect people to know that you need help, even if they know you're working on other stuff. People aren't mind readers, and it's your job to direct workflow."

The other point of view is this one: "Dammit, Buster is a licensed architect, too. Not only does he have more years of experience in general, but he's done several projects for Gestalt before. This isn't his first set of DDs, and he knows what goes into a set of drawings. If he's done as much as he can with his original portion of work, there's nothing stopping him from taking some initiative and being useful and working on the more general sheets in the set. This isn't Pixie's set, it's DA's set. It's our set, and everyone has to give a damn. He's a decent enough guy, but that's no excuse for doing slack work."

After all this internal dialogue, I finally come back down on the side of my original complaint. Buster doesn't take a lot of initiative to solve problems and make the set a good one, nor does he take ownership of a project if it's not him and just him 100%. Had I know this when I started working on the project, I certainly could have made myself clearer and prevented some of these lack of communication issues. The reason these communication issues blow me away is that I have interns that can do this stuff without being asked, so why am I not getting similar performance out of a licensed professional? I suppose some truth lies in something Bosley once said: "The ARE only tests for minimal competence in architects."

So, at the risk of starting another firestorm on WAD, having just gotten through a firestorm, what's everyone's take on the communication versus initiative debate? How much must we be explicit about, and how much "should" people know?

[slumping on the chaise with a glass of wine, Part Two]

Y'all, it's been a while since I've been this worn out. Tomorrow is the last of my four deadlines in nine days, so I'll be glad to be done. After a couple of days' rest with Guy (who is also planning to do everything it takes not to work this weekend), I'll be able to post more about the lack of initiative in the workplace and why I watch interior designers for fashion tips.

See you on the other side with my big-ass glass of wine, peeps!

Monday Visual Inspiration: The fun of juxtaposition

Still on a deadline, kids. No rest for the weary...or catty, in my case. Anyway, I thought I'd show y'all some interesting images I've taken over the past year that show odd things next to each other.

This little wee barely-1,000-square-feet house is in Cherry Creek North, a very posh neighborhood in Denver. The surrounding buildings are 3,000sf stucco and lick-n-stick stone behemoths, but this little throwback to Denver's rural past refuses to budge. Plus, it's on a double lot. You just know the owners are loving. it.

A lone gate-like sentinel in the north Country Club neighborhood. There's a big iron lantern-thing on top, but it doesn't appear to have electricity in it (from where I was anyway), and there's no gate or fence attached to it. It's just standing there in this person's side yard, begging everyone to remember when it was useful.

You're an iron fence? Well screw you, I'm a vine!

Old-school in the shadow of new-school.

[slumping on the chaise with a glass of wine]

Y'all, Shorty is worn out. I just got done with the submission deadline for a presentation I'm doing later this year, and now I'm about to embark on the journey of four deadlines in nine days. This means that while there are plenty of interesting architectural activities going on (and even a little gossip to share), I just don't have the energy to blog it all for now. Instead, I'll share a few photos that my friend LFP took recently. LEP came out for a weekend to Denver (from Bawston, I sweah to Gawd), and we took him to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the latest cool architectural and cultural addition to the Denver landscape. Designed by David Adjaye, a starchitect I can actually tolerate, the building is made with a double exterior wall--1" black glass on the outside and white translucent panels on the inside--that eliminate the need for A/C (just an evaporative cooler is needed), which helped the building earn a LEED Gold rating.

Still here...sorta

My deadline got pushed to Wednesday, so Intern Timmy and I still have one more day of work to do on TCMC. Turns out that our structural engineer hasn't really looked at the drawings for the past two months, and he suddenly realized that we were tearing out a lot more of the load-bearing walls than he originally thought. Plus, we finally heard back from the OR equipment company about where the surgery booms should be placed, which left the MEP engineers very little time to really revise their drawings properly for a deadline today. Hence, the delay in the deadline.

This one-day extension is good and bad. Good in that we've got a little extra time to check things, coordinate stuff, get everyone on the same page. Bad in that everyone was planning on being done today--the engineers had booked their drafters on other projects tomorrow, and Intern Timmy and I are both working overtime and need to take those hours off pretty soon. Further complicating matters is that the delay in deadline means that I have to get a package ready to go to the state health department for review, but it might not be ready to go out until next week...when I'm gone to Georgia.

My sister and I IM'd briefly today regarding our maddening end-of-year schedules, and we came to the same conclusion: we may not be finished, but we're DONE.

Justwaittiltuesday justwaittiltuesday justwaittiltuesday...

Y'all, it appears that I'm going to have to work both days this weekend, both for TCMC's Tuesday deadline and for Mickey's project that I'm helping him with, for which he has to pick up drawings from the office Sunday night to take with him on an early Monday morning flight to an all-week client meeting. And I'm so worn out from changing mental gears but racing along in 6th gear physically (occasionally with m parking brake on) for the past three days that I only have the energy to read catalogs when I get home. Not even magazines, y'all: catalogs.

Hence, I'm not gonna have anything useful or coherent to say on WAD until Wednesday. Please stand by--I'll be back soon after my deadlines have passed. Word.

Be careful what you wish for

Me and my big mouth.

I was kvetching about how quiet work had suddenly become. Then I remembered that I really haven't had that many Friday afternoons off this year because my project(s) had actually required 40 hours a week, and I got excited about taking Friday afternoon off and hitting the grocery store, then cleaning the house a little, snuggling with Maddy (who had a rough few days where all she wanted to do was curl up in the bathroom, but she's acting more herself again), and doodling around...

...and about 11am on Friday, just as I was doing a little light filing, here comes Ephraim, one of the project managers in our office. Ephraim looks like a character on a children's show and has the sweet and beguiling personality to match, but evidently back in the day he was a super bad-ass in the Navy or Marines, like a sniper or special forces or something. It's kinda flattering when Ephraim, a short, round version of Beaker from the Muppet Show, talks to you. "Pixie, I hear you're available...?" he inquired.

"I am indeed, for a couple of weeks. What's up?" I responded.

Ephraim went from gently assuming to gleeful and amped. "Aw! Man! We could so use your help for the next four days..." He went on to explain that the rather large-scale multifamily apartment building/multiuse building that his team was working on had CDs due on Tuesday, and they really needed someone to do some roof details. He then said that the partner in charge of the project had approved up to 16 hours of overtime for me to do the work. It took me a second to realize that when he said they needed me for the next four days, he didn't mean Friday-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, he meant Saturday-Sunday-Monday-Tuesday.

So I ended up working a full Friday plus ten hours this weekend on the roof details, and I'll be working the first part of this week on the project too. Funny, though, I actually felt bad for only working ten hours of overtime on the project. As Guy and I walked to one of our neighborhood watering holes after I arrived home at 7pm Sunday night, I asked him if that was lame of me. Guy, of course, scoffed. "No. Don't feel guilty. You did your part," he said.

He went on: "They asked you this on Friday. What if you'd had stuff that you had to do this weekend? It's their fault for not getting you on board sooner. And look, ten hours--I can't get the people that work on my project full time to do ten hours on the weekend, much less someone I roped in at the last second. So, no...don't even worry about it."

There's a reason I lurrve my Guy so much.

So anyway, the house is still kinda grody and my nails are left undone, but maybe I'll take Wednesday off or something. Or save it for a full day next Friday. Whatever. As I age, I'm finding that I prefer time off to overtime money.

Happy birthday Dad!

If my dad were still alive, he'd be 63 today. I rather think he'd be proud and glad of the way that my life has turned out. I think he'd rather like Guy as well; they'd have likely gotten along quite nicely. Usually on Dad's birthday, I like to celebrate a little with a nice dinner and a glass (or two) of wine and watch some comedy. This year, however, the celebration will have to wait til later in the week: I have a DD deadline on TCMC on Tuesday and the handover DD deadline on FCH on Wednesday. Intern Timmy and I spent Sunday in the office working on TCMC, and Intern Kimmy has been spending lots of late nights and lunches getting FCH in shape to pass off to Contigo Architects so that they can finish the DDs and CDs on the project. And after those two deadlines, my sister is coming into town for her Fall Break. I'm really looking forward to seeing her, but I have hardly had a chance to a) get excited and b) clean up the Happy Kitten Highrise in anticipation of her arrival.

So, I have a few more days before I can clean up and rest. The good news about all this overtime I'm about to have to pull is that I can take some time off right afterwards. Kitty's visit is timed just right for me to take a day (or more) off. So, please be patient, my peeps--I'm not gonna be able to post much this week while I slog through these deadlines, but all will be well again in a few days.