Operation Grow Something and MaddyWatch--two updates for the price of one!

Our computer may be hosed here at home, which is going to make blogging a little difficult, to say the least. Hence, this will be a very brief update of life at the HKH.  The top photo is Maddy and Hazel doodling around the feed-me-Seymour tomato plant on the balcony.  It's in the 70s here in Denver, so it turned out to be a nice day to hang out on the balcony.  Maddy took her first dose of chemo on Friday and will take another tonight.  So far so good. She's also able to whoop Lulu's ass when she bothers to stick around to engage her.  Hazel's surely at least 1.5 lbs heavier than Maddy, but Maddy still rules.

The bottom photo is what's left of the tomato plants.  Parts of them have gone brown, thinned, and died a bit, but they're still doing well.  It's as if the onset of fall has brought out the tomatoes in full force.  The grape tomato plant has always been producing, but it's made a lot of little red tomatoes lately, which Guy and I are putting in chili and on greek pizzas.  The Roma tomato plant has become a maniac, maniac on the floor and it's grow-ing-like-it's-ne-ver-grown-be-foooor.  [running in place in the kitchen with a wooden spoon and legwarmers]  I'll be able to pass some tomatoes on to some coworkers, so it seems.

Anyway, I'll cross my fingers for the computer.  It sucks because I really try not to blog while I'm at work, just in case, y'know?  I don't want anyone to have ANY reason to lay me off, after what happened last week.  Meanwhile, many of us who are left are assembling their resumes and project info sheets just to be safe.  You never know--our coworkers have been calling and emailing us like crazy to get pictures and info on projects for their resumes, and none of the left behind crowd wants to be in that same position.

A swiftly falling ax

Last week, Design Associates laid off ten people in one day. Before now, we'd laid off a couple people here and there, mostly people who weren't being terribly helpful or had had performance issues. But last week, it was ten fairly decent people, including my pal Ethel and longtime pal and CAD manager Sarge. Wanda was also sent away, much later than she should have been in my opinion, but alas....

The people were laid off just before lunch, and then we had a staff meeting after lunch so that the partners of the firm could explain what was going on. They said they lamented having to do it, and they'd put it off for almost two months. To DA's credit, they tend to be among the last people to lay folks off. I think us and another firm had big layoffs last week, but that's all I've heard. Most other firms in town did their layoffs in the spring or even summer. It blew me away to hear of Sarge's layoff--he's really the only person who can answer the tough CAD and Revit questions, and I can guarantee you that there's going to be more problems in the office with software now that this happened. Sarge emailed me today to ask if I could get him some images of projects that he'd worked on, and Ethel already sent me her resume to look at and help her tweak.

Guy's office just got really busy. His office of his firm (they have offices in other cities) has gotten the job to do the construction documents for part of a big hospital back east, so they may need to hire another person, maybe two, but there's no way that his company can absorb DA's loss. Meanwhile, Ethel emailed me part of a wanted ad online; it was for a healthcare architect with 7-10 years experience (just like me) in an office south of town...with a starting salary of $80K. That's a sight more than I make now. I wish she hadn't sent it to me. I know I'm underpaid at DA but I hate being reminded of how underpaid I am. I really like the people I work with, and to an extent that makes up for a certain amount of money, but still.....

The (wo)man wit da masta plan

We’ve been master planning for a small hospital east of Wheatlands, and we just had a sit-down with a contractor who will price the master planning options that we designed. The little hospital presently has two buildings—one from 1970 and one from 1991—that are connected one right to the other. They need to update their facility in order to better treat patients as well as get new patients and expand their services, and they need to know what expansion plan is the best bang for the buck. Howie and I ended up with four options for them:

• Keep the existing buildings and just remodel parts of the 1970 building in stages in order to meet building and healthcare codes.
• Add onto the 1991 building and keep it mostly intact; remodel part of the 1970 building and demolish the other part.
• Add onto the 1991 building and keep it mostly intact; demolish the entire 1970 building.
• Build an entire new hospital and ditch both old buildings (sell, give to the city or county for their use, whatever)

We come up with some really schematic plans of how this would look, and the contractor figures out a per-square-foot cost for those options. A schematic plan involves rectangles and shapes filled with color and big print in them: Kitchen, Clinic, ICU, Surgery. There are no doors our countertops or beds or equipment or any of that drawn in, just general sizes and shapes. And it’s not just plopping down some colored shapes and calling it a day—the shapes have to be laid out so that it’s somewhat buildable as well as useable. For example, we have to show the imaging suite in close proximity to the emergency department as well as the clinic so that patients from either can easily get an x-ray or a CT scan. Another for example is working out how people arrive at the patient room wing—a visitor should have to walk past a check-in desk of some sort before they get to a patient room.

The schematic plans also have to be able to work on at least a general level with building, ADA, and healthcare codes. For instance, hallways in inpatient sleeping and treatment areas must be eight feet wide. Hence, when Howie and I are plopping colored rectangles onto plans, we have to make sure that we allow eight-foot-wide spaces to get through and between them. Also, the various codes require that any patient room has to have a window in it, so when we’re a-ploppin’ spaces, we can’t just smoosh the Clinic up against an existing outside wall of a patient wing because it’ll block the windows. Also, building codes require that if exterior walls of buildings are within a certain distance from each other, they have to be fire rated, and that includes the glass in the exterior windows. Fire-rated glass starts at $100 per square foot. So, putting some space between new and existing exterior walls can save you money in construction costs.

So, there’s a method to our really-schematic madness. It looks simple, but we can’t just draw some circles and squares and color them in and tell the contractor ‘vaya con Dios'. After the meeting today, we realized that we need to check into a few more concerns, such as:

• At what point of a remodeling project do you have to update everything in a building? Is that amount/standard the same amongst all the codes?
• How much of the building can be a business occupancy versus an institutional occupancy? Business occupancies require much less fireproofing and mechanical/electrical stuff, so they're generally cheaper to build than an institutional (hospital) occupancy.
• How much of the existing building is really out of compliance with present codes? If we make a plan and bullet-item list describing what's noncompliant, we can show that to the owner later on down the line when they complain about costs or get frustrated with the process. They'll say "why are we doing this shit again?" and we'll pull out the plan and the bullet list and say, "This is why; because we have a 30"x42" plan and a seven-page list of stuff that's against code in your old building, that's why."

Hopefully, we'll have pricing back from the contractor in a couple of weeks, but we'll see. What's been frustrating about all this is that we let the owner really beat us down on fee, so we've run through our fee but there's still work to be done. So, in one breath Howie says, "Look this up, do this, draw this," and in the other breath he says, "Don't spend a lot of time on this." Mmkay. Which one is it? As Liz used to say while working on Pomme de Terre, it takes as long as it takes to do a job right. No one's dragging their feet or piddling, but dammit, good work takes some time. However, I've only got a couple more days to get some stuff together for the contractor on this, so I guess the pressure's on.

Birthday Pixie and Guy

Happy birthday to Guy and me! Today we turn 40 and 33 respectively. This year we're celebrating low-key, just a nice dinner (my present to Guy) at a restaurant without a TV in it (Guy's present to me). Usually we give each other a trip somewhere, but we decided to save our money and vacation time for a trip to Yellowstone next year. Regardless, I'm lucky I get to share my birthday with a partner that can tolerate my bullshit and occasionally call me on it.

Work versus time

I read the book Why Work Sucks and promptly tossed it aside with the thought that it sounded like a good idea but I didn’t think it would work for my particular profession. The book’s authors describe what they call ROWE, the Results-Only Work Environment, which is something they came up with and put into place at Best Buy’s corporate headquarters when they worked for Best Buy. The simplest description of ROWE is that you work wherever, whenever, and however, as long as the work gets done. The idea behind it is that companies have to stop watching the clock and hassling people about how long they’re at the office, because ultimately if you work a white-collar service-industry job, you’re being paid for your work, not your time. The more I started talking to Kellye about it, though, the more it started to make some sense. I then bought the book and reread it, and my head exploded. Between reading that, learning about Dzogchen meditation in a book by Lama Surya Das, and realizing that yin and yang forces in the Universe are really manifested in Gary Busey and Nick Nolte, I nearly passed out from having a spiritual revelation.

When I recovered and had some vanilla hazelnut coffee from Einstein’s (which will be the official beverage of my regime when the revolution comes and I rule the world), I turned over the concept of hourly versus salary in my head. Most architecture firms pay their people salary, but Design Associates pays interns and non-associate architects hourly while associates and partners are paid salary. DA also pays its design staff bonuses based on project profits, which is kinda unusual for an architecture firm. In the past, I’ve often told interns that being paid hourly is a good thing, as it prevents abuse—that is, your salary doesn’t suddenly become based on a 45-hour or 50-hour week, which happens a lot to interns. Also, being paid an hourly wage means you get overtime for anything over 40 hours. This was really nice when I was working 56- and 60-hour weeks for eight months on Wheatlands. Some of the cash I made doing that stuck around in my savings account, and I was able to use it on Maddy.

With work being slow, however, the hourly thing is killing me. I have to work my ass off to find something to do to fill 40 hours, and most weeks it’s more like finding 32-35 hours’ worth of stuff to fill 40 hours, which leaves me feeling a little guilty at the fact that I know I’m overbilling to a project a little. Now, on the one hand, I could just work 35 hours and bill 35 hours and have a short check. That action would only cleanse one portion of my conscience. The part of my conscience that would be furious is the one that knows that I, along with several of my colleagues, am very fast, efficient, thorough, and great at what I do. If I can finish an eight-hour task in six hours and with excellent quality, why must I be punished for my efficiency by having to find something else to do for two more hours?

When I posed this question to Guy, his response was, “There’s always something else you can do.” Well, number one, no there’s not. Not lately at my office. I’ve had days where I’ve sent out emails to at least a dozen managers in the office letting them know I’m available as of now to help, and I get no response. And then, number two, by Guy’s logic an employee should never leave work because there’s always something else to do. No one’s inbox is ever empty. At some point, you should be allowed to go take the cat to the vet,, take yourself to the doctor, go buy groceries, go rock climbing, go see your kid in his or her soccer game or school play, whatever, without guilt. Instead, you have to do all that stuff on your only two days off, which are the days you’re supposed to be resting. Frankly, we’re still applying Industrial Revolution-era concepts about time to the Information Age workplace, and it’s falling a little short.

On the one hand, motivated and interested employees will finish an eight-hour task in six hours and then look for more things to do, more ways to help, and so on. On the other hand, finishing an eight-hour task in six hours means the employee gets “rewarded” with more work. Myself, I’ve found in the months and years since Wheatlands that if I work less than eight hours of overtime, I’d rather take it as comp time, and I do. Even when I think about Wheatlands, I realize that I didn’t work all that overtime because of the money, but rather because the work was there and it needed to be done and I was the only one available to do it. And many of my colleagues—Derek, Kellye, Norman, Ingrid, and Elliot—are the same way. They’ll do the work because it needs to be done, not for the overtime, and they’d rather have time off than overtime cash.

I’m still turning all this over in my head. I realize that all this is probably more suited to Ms. Theologian’s blog than mine, but I think about it now and then. I don’t know that I’m ready to roil the waters at DA with this sort of talk, what with the economy being in the crapper and all, but I think it’s worth dissecting at some point.

Think of the children

We decided to go with the at-home oral chemo for Maddy. Dragging her to the vet oncologist’s office once a week for 8 weeks plus once every two weeks for four months for the IV chemo doesn’t sound like a good deal for Maddy. Never mind the fact that the IV chemo is more than twice as expensive; it only adds 6 months to her life versus the at-home chemo. I’d rather her be comfortable and healthyish at home for less time, and no, I’m not willing to just let her dribble off with what’s left of her life. As I type this, she’s in my lap nomnomnomming on my right wrist, as she’s wont to do when I type. This morning, she and Hazel got into a pitty-pat-pat fight in the floor which ended in Maddy actually jumping on Hazel’s back and chomping down on her neck, like she used to do before she got so sick. Lulu mrowr-rowr-rowr!ed and scampered off, prompting Guy to laugh and me to holler after her down the hall, “Lulu, you got pwnd!” It reminds me of my sister and me. She’s two years older and was therefore bigger for most of our childhood, and inevitably she could throw me off whatever bed we were wrestling on. Even as teenagers when we were evenly matched and even when I had a 20-pound advantage on her, she could still throw me off the bed. Even as 20-somethings when I weighed a little less but had a lot of muscle, still ‘twas my ass flying into the floor. When Kitty visits in October, I want a rematch.

I called Mom last night and caught her up on Maddy’s progress and our decision on the chemo. She was glad to hear about Maddy still being fairly frisky for a 10.5-year-old cat with cancer. We chatted on about various topics, and we somehow got on the topic of these damn kids with their short attention spans and inability to entertain themselves without a television. I thanked Mom for not having the TV on a whole lot when Kitty and I were small—I really think it made a difference in our cognitive abilities and our academic and professional success in general.

“That TV not being on was your call,” Mom said.

Huh?

“I used to watch soap operas,” explained Mom. “On one of them, there was a car wreck in which a baby was badly hurt, and it lingered and was in the hospital, and they’d even show it sometimes with tubes and wires hooked up, and the characters were always talking about what to do with the baby and if it was gonna live, and I think it eventually died, but…you were just a little thing, and you’d sit there and ask me ‘Mama, why did they do that to that baby? Why did they hurt that baby? Is that baby gonna be okay?’, so I cut it off. Some of the other women I knew would talk about soap operas, and I’d say ‘I don’t watch them anymore, they upset my children and I can’t have that’. So, after Sesame Street and The Electric Company, that TV went off and stayed off.”

Well, we must think of what’s best for the little ones in our care, whether it’s the TV they watch or the medical treatment they should have.

Scylla, Charybdis, and Maddy

The vet oncologist had okay news, but nothing spectacular. While lymphoma is common in cats, Maddy's has advanced somewhat--it's in her lymph nodes and not just her intestine. We can do an oral chemotherapy at home, or a more aggressive IV chemo at the vet oncologist's office. That would be taking her to the office once a week for 2 months, then every other week for another 3-4 months. Optimistically, she might live another 6 months symptom-free after the 6 months of IV chemo, then it'd be a one- or two-month downhill slide ending in euthanasia. I don't know what our results will be like with the at-home oral chemo pill, probably darker/shorter. The IV chemo is also about $4,000 total over the 6 months, the at-home pill less, but I don't even know how much less.

Guy and I haven't really talked about it yet. I told him what the oncologist told me, but we haven't had the should-we shouldn't we discussion. Probably tomorrow during our walk--it's the kind of talk that needs to happen when you're kinda doing something else, like driving, which is when we usually have our deep discussions. However, Guy started going for walks with me after Maddy first got sick. I just needed to get out of the house, and Guy would go with me to walk and relieve some anxiety.

Guy is frankly a bit hit-and-miss on the consolation. When there's something he can do, he's pretty helpful. The walks, for example. Also, he's bought dinner or had us end a weekend morning walk at a breakfast place now and then, which is a relief of mroe than one level, for sure. He's been kind to Maddy, and he even--and I have to be honest, this surprised me--offered to help with Maddy's vet bills. But the actual consolation is, well...at the emergency vet's last week after Maddy crashed post-biopsy surgery, I was shaking and weeping in the waiting room. Guy patted my knee with one hand, and I felt him twitching a little. I looked over, and I realized he was playing Tetris on his cell phone with the other hand. He's playing fucking Tetris while I'm losing my mind from panic and fear and grief just 3 inches from him. I'm finding that if I'm shaking and weeping, he has no idea that he needs to put both arms around me and hold me and pat me and say something kind like "I'm sure we'll make the right decision" or "Whatever happens, Maddy won't suffer and you've done a good job." But if there's something to be done, like active doing, he's right there and almost psychic. Perhaps in another eight years I'll have trained this quasi-autism out of him.

So, we're weighing our options. Either way, Maddy has to take prednisone for the inflammation caused by the cancer cells. The conversation with the vet oncologist went thus:
Vet: So, prednisone is a type of steroid, which will help Maddy gain weight.
Pixie: But...will it raise her batting average?
Vet: [pauses, then bursts into laughter] I don't think it will, sadly! Is she any good on the field?
Pixie: Look, if she can bat at least .250 and play right field, I'm sending her to the Rockies. They're not doing too well this year.
Vet: Well, prednisone isn't that kind of steriod. She'll just gain some weight, and she may even balloon a little.
Pixie: [eyes wide] Like Jerry Lewis? Puffy-ass Jerry Lewis?!
Vet: [leaning on exam counter with laughter] Yeah, more like Jerry Lewis!
Pixie: [looking at Maddy on the table] Maddy, you can have your own telethon now!
Vet: [sits down on stool, laughing]