Success!

The party was an unmitigated success last night.  HOwever, I'm really really tired and we still have to clean the office today.  The good news is that the owners of the firm loved some of the props so much that they want us to leave them up for the rest of the month.  More details later--thanks to everyone who's been reading lately.  I know I have some new readers in St. Louis and San Fran who are architects; welcome!  

Saved by Craigslist and the grace of Saints Charles and Ray Eames

I mentioned that I spent almost $600 of my own money on furniture for our midcentury gala-on-the-cheap.  Here's why I did this: Our committee had been talking and pondering and strategizing for almost two weeks, but no one had gotten anything, ordered anything, nothing.  We had less than two weeks to go before the party, and nothing had been done.  I don't know if this comes through on this pop-culture-reference-and-fart-joke screed of a blog of mine, but I don't do well with procrastination.  I rarely procrasinate, and few things leave me anxious and even furious like procrastination.  So, last Tuesday, I called a phone number on a Craigslist ad and made a visit in Guy's Ford Explorer Sport to a small art anf furniture gallery on the edge of downtown.

The fellow was a collector of midcentury vintage furniture, most of which he acquired through estate and yard sales, and he was moving into a smaller studio/gallery and needed to get rid of some things.  He had a marvelous collection, even a set of four Eames chairs for a cool $1K which I coveted but could not afford.  I had brought along $200 in cash, knowing the rules of Craigslist (buyer picks up the item, always pay in cash), but I could tell that I was about to spend more.  Way more.  I mean, this guy's stuff was gorgeous--Alvar Aalto knockoff table (but period-produced and accurate), two Goodform chairs (one upholstered in actual cowhide, sorry PETA), dark mahogany-wenge colored credenza....oh Jesus Mary and George Nelson, it was a beyond beautiful sight.  So, I went home $570 lighter and with a truck full of furniture.  I still had to go back the next day for a desk and the credenza.  I felt like the world's biggest asshole, like I'd just been taken.  I'd never spent so much in my whole life for used furniture, even though I was trying to convince myself I'd done a good thing.

I drove to the office and called one of the admin assistants to help me unload the truck.  I drove home feeling like the world's biggest asshole.  I got to work the next morning still feeling like the world's biggest asshole, even moreso after I told Guy what I'd done the night before and he exclaimed "Jesus Christ!"

One of the first people I saw when I got to the office was Dash and Tripp.  Dash is a landscape architect at DA, and I worked with him on Wheatlands.  His partner Tripp is a signage and graphic design artist who work for DA on contract.  Dash went across teh office to his desk, and I confided in Tripp as to what I'd done. 

"Well honey," he said in his Southern-Liberace lilt, "let's go see what you bought."

I took him into a file room in the basement to see my collection of chairs and tables.  As we turned the corner, Tripp was in the middle of empathizing with me about a furniture shopping trip gone wrong when he saw the two Danish Modern chairs with twill upholstery and interrupted himself to effuse, "OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGodoh-my-GOD!"

"What?"  I asked.  "Did I get good stuff?  How badly was I robbed?"

"Oh, honey, these chairs!  They match our dining set we just bought from ________ Vintage Emporium!  What did you pay for them?"

"Like $50 for the two."

"For the TWO?!  $50?!" Tripp exclaimed.  "Did you walk into this man's store with a handgun?!"

Later in the office kitchen, Nick came by and said he wanted one of the Goodform chairs, and he and Tripp nearly came to blows over it.  I might have to auction it.  Nick told me to come get him when I'd retrieved the credenza, explaining that he had a credenza fetish and it may have to be indulged again.  We'll see.

At the very least, every midcentury furniture fan I've shown the furniture to is confident I can get my money back--if not more--on Craigslist.  I bought good pieces, and good pieces are easy to unload on a vintage-loving public.  If my coworkers don't pick me dry first.

Always reasons to give thanks

It's hard to be depressed when you know someone somewhere has outfits for their cast stone yard goose statue and bothers to dress it each and every month.

I can't complain but sometimes I still do

We had a surprise office meeting today.  Not so surprising was the news that, while we would still be having performance evaluations this month, as we do every year, no one was getting raises.  Design Associates just isn't able to make it work this year.  We had a good first 6-8 months this year, but the last few months have been holy hell, what with all the financial markets and real estate investing markets taking a major hit.  This news, oddly enough, wasn't too much of a surprise.  What did end up being a little bit of a surprise was the announcement that starting in 2009, we're all going to 36 hours a week.  We can work with our project managers to figure out how to schedule that (leave an hour early most days a week? leave at noon on Friday? come in late on Tuesday?), but that's how it's going to be in order to avoid laying people off for a while longer.

The news left me stunned for about five minutes, and then I felt alternatingly anxious and exhilarated.  Anxious over money, of course--what sacrifices do I need to make in order to live without four hours' of pay a week?  I wanted to send my cousins on my mom's side some money for Christmas, but it appears that I'll have to save that cash for myself as a cushion--dammit.  I'll need to cut back on some of my usual splurges, but...I don't feel like I live that splurgey anyhow.  Am I just another callous upper-class American, desensitized to the cost of living?  Should we still go to Vegas for our anniversary this year?

Then I felt a little exhilarated.  What would I do with four extra hours a week when I'm not having to pretend to be busy, not having to stretch my hours?  (I suppose I coulda done that before now, it just somehow never crossed my feeble 40-hour-a-week-by-God mind.)  I could do my grocery shopping on Friday afternoon instead of first thing Saturday morning.  I'd have more time to write on a couple of books and projects I've been brainstorming on.  I'd have time to sit with Maddy and snuggle her as she creeps into the gentle, waning months of her life (though she still seems to be doing pretty well on the chemo and prednisone).

Guy and I talked a little about it this evening.  While it leaves me feeling unsettled, it also leaves me feeling a little hopeful.  Funny enough, several other bright and motivated interns and architects around me felt the same way.  We were all concerned about DA's future and the cash we'd be missing out on, but think of what we could do if we knew we only had 36 hours to get everything done and could also get a few hours back to live our lives.  (Kellye, if you're reading this, the first thing I thought when they announced this was "hot damn, it's almost like ROWE.")  Regardless, we'll be making small temporary changes, like cutting back (but not deleting) our contributions to our retirement accounts, keeping Christmas really simple (especially since we have to fly to GA), and finding other ways to be thrifty.  Fortunately for us, we have always been pretty frugal to start with, so it's not like we're starting this savings cushion from scratch, and we also know how to live with less.  Not tons less, but less enough to make a difference.

(Book) tag, I'm it!

Okay, Miss Kitty over at Educated and Poor has tagged me for the Seven Weird Book Facts meme.  This is a good thing--I've been worn out lately, as I've been roped into being on the office party committee at DA, and I cannot brain this evening.  So, this meme gives me just what I need to make a post without hurting my noggin.  First, some rules:
--Share seven random or weird Book Facts about yourself.
--Then tag seven other people.
--Notify the seven others that they have been tagged.

I don't think I have seven other people I can tag, but I do know a few.  So here goes:

1. I cannot read just one book at a time.  I have to read at least two or three at once, plus a couple of magazines.  I read each book or magazine depending on where I'm sitting in the house.  Like right now, I'm reading Brain Rules if I sit on the infamous red chaise, the latest issue of "Bust" magazine if I'm at the dining room table, one of several catalogs if I'm on the futon in the TV rooms with Guy, and the latest Yoga Journal in bed.  I have some other books and 'zines I'll be taking along when we drive to St. Louis on Wednesday for Thanksgiving.
2. I've finished every book I've ever read, no matter how awful, insipid, or wretched I found it, with three exceptions: Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe, and The Bell Curve.  Melville's 19th-century prose knocked me unconscious with its florid verbosity (granted, I was in 6th grade), Defoe's glacial pace made me wonder when the hell they were even gonna get out of the dock and on the water, and Herrnstein and Murray's tome was heavy on the scientific data, as it should have been.  The Bell Curve caused such a stir when it was published, and because I lived in a particularly racist part of the country, I thought I should know what it said.  Alas, I wasn't ready to read it when I bought it and only made it a few chapters in.
3. I very, very rarely read fiction.  It's been my experience that truth is stranger than fiction, and it tends to make a better story.
4. The rare exception to #3 was when I took a modern western lit class at Georgia Tech, which the professor (Terry Harpold, gawd love him) subtitled "Grotesqueries".  We read some fantastic novels and stories--many of them banned in their countries of origin--with some wonderful storylines and characters: Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, and of course, Kafka's Metamorphosis.  "One morning, as Gregor Samsa wa swaking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug...."
5. The worst book I ever read--worse than Dostoyevsky or Flaubert, nay far worse--was Loving What Is by Byron Katie.  It is the biggest bunch of psuedospiritual tripe and the most psychologically irresponsible waste of paper and paste I have ever laid my eyes on.  I can't even describe the book for raising my voice and using sailor-like profanity; it makes me so furious that someone cut that lunatic a check for that crap she called "self help."  [spitting on ground]  I try really hard to be respectful for all authors and for free expression of ideas, but it is the only book that I have ever truly thrown across a room.
6. Favoritest book ever?  Watership Down by Richard Adams.  A book about pretty smart wild bunnies in England?  Sign me up.  And even though I know the ending, it still makes me weep with quiet, humane joy.
7. I'm a voracious and compulsive reader.  Where some people feel like they need to text or talk on their cell phones all the time, I have to read all the time.  I'll study the backs of cereal boxes, I'll pore over pamphlets on melanomas, I even read the entire "TV Week" insert in the Sunday paper, just to see what all movies are playing this week and on what channels.  They tried to make me go to bookhab, but I said no, no, no.

Okay, that's all I got.  I tap everyone Kitty called out as well as Eric over at The Reason of Voice and Miz Scarlett at her new blog.

Not all reality checks are a hand to the forehead

I mentioned that last week we finally did the presentation to get some work at a hospital on the south edge of town.  The hospital in question is having architecture firms audition for what they call architectural services, meaning that we'd be the firm they call whenever they want to do a facelift on a patient floor, replace a piece of radiology equipment and redo the room(s) involved, hey we wanna turn these three rooms into one and make it the new audiology lab...you get the picture.  This is the kind of work that DA does at MHRC and used to do at a lot of facilities until about ten or twleve years ago, when it became cheaper to build anew.  With the credit crunch and financing and the economy being what it is these days, I think we're going to see a lot more remodel and small addition projects.

So anyway, the presentation started with Bosley introducing the team, which consisted of Winston, a youngish interior designer named Cora, and me.  I was up first after the introductions; I explained our design philosophy and our approach to working with hospitals and facility management to make projects work.  Then, Winston took the floor and discussed how we manage projects in general, and finally Cora stood up and explained how we use interior design to benefit the environment, the patients, and the staff.  Then we opened the floor up to questions (the hospital group asked us some standard questions and some followup stuff from the presentation, and we all joined in answering those questions) and then Bosley wrapped up the presentation.  

The presentation was more involved than I'm describing, and it was more interesting for sure.  I'm being a little evasive here, as it turns out that we were the first to present, which means that Guy's firm, Acme Architects, still hasn't presented yet and I'd rather not put Guy in the position of knowing just exactly how much our presentation rokked.

As we drove back to Denver, we did a debriefing/postmortem on the presentation, and I will fill y'all in on that at the risk of sounding vain.  I kicked it, my people.  I wrote out what I was going to say to the word, practiced it til it was 90% memorized, did it in front of Bosley and Veronica, incoporated their copious comments into it, rememorized it to about 90%-95%, and then ROKKED it for da peeplez.  I had their attention, I had them nodding, I had them responding to my own questions for them.  My breath felt like it was in my throat--I think my heart was in my spleen or something; I quit feeling it after about 30 seconds into the presentation.  Winston has a quiet, somewhat tentative speaking style, peppered with some "ums" and "uhs", and a bit more reading right from the PowerPoint slides, which had a few of them flipping through their handouts and one of them even started texting for about a minute.  Cora's nerves got her a bit; she read almost straight from her notecards, and her speech was more speech than conversation, almost designed for CEOs and senior admin folks or people with some design school knowledge.  However, the crowd seemed to be with her, as is often the case with younger people presenting--everyone's been nervous presenting to a crowd before, so everyone's rooting for the younger nervous person at the front of the room.

After the presentation, Winston and Ceila told me more than once how blown away they had been by how well I did, that it was almost intimidating to have to follow me.  (Bosley was pleasant, saying that everyone did a good job.)  But I knew, since I was the first "guest" to speak, that I had to set the tone of the presentation--I had to be strong and yet conversational.  Someone you can relate to but who also seems competent.  In other words, just the kind of person you want to work with.  I had been a bit stunned that Cora, despite having taken a public speaking class in college, didn't seem that prepared for her part of the presentation--perhaps just a victim of her nerves?  Winston, I thought, should know better.  Though he used to have his own firm with another guy and has by his own account done many of these presentations before, he just seemed (to me) to 'um' and 'uh' too much for someone who should know what they're doing.  If you have a quiet and unassuming verbal delivery style and lower energy level, it seems to me that you've got to be sharp in your demeanor and precise with your vocabulary to keep the crowd with you, especially if you're discussing stereotypically boring stuff like budgets and schedules.  However, I may be being too harsh.  This was only my second presentation with DA, and the first one in which I participated actively, so I'm no expert. Though I didn't overhear Bosley tell Veronica anything critical about me when we returned to the office, it's entirely possible that the reality of my performance was less stellar than my perception.

Hopefully, it went well, and also hopefully no one can match our awesomeness in the following days.

Yet another MasterCard ad you'll never see

Patterned silk, 4.5 yards: $126.

Brown silk shantung, 2.5 yards: $52.50.

Rhinestone slides with 2/5" heels: $40.

Kate Spade leather clutch on 40% off sale at Nordstrom's: $104.
Fee to seamstress who also happened to give me the gift of life: $50.

Having a mom who can sew you the most amazing and original evening gown ever made on the planet, fit it exactly to your measurements, finish it in two weeks, and ship it from Georgia to Denver in time to wear it to your husband's office party and stun everyone who sees it:
Priceless.