SNAFU

Last few days same as usual.

Strange, wonderful, frustrating, and busy. I can't even remember what I did friday. The entire day is blank slate to me. Maybe I'll remember by the end of the post. Saturday afternoon I went to the the Arizona Science Center. For my history of architecture class, we have to write a paper for monday between 4-6 pages. The subject is unusual, not sure if I've mentioned it before. We have have to write as a famous old architect about a more contemporary work, using thier opinions and eyes to analyze it.

Took me awhile to figure out what to do with it, as its a glaringly open topic. I decided to become Sir Christopher Wren, London's most famous architect of old (designed st.Pauls), critiquing Predock's Arizona Science Center. The tie is that Wren was one of the last Renaissance men, who was the Chair of Astronomy at Oxford, invented blood transfusions, documented the anatomy of the eye and the phsyiological features of optics, and was the first to draw microorganisms with the help of his friend Robert Hooke. I figured it would be fun to have a foundng member of the Royal Society critiquing a center to promote interest in science.

Predock, the architect, has a background as a painter, and so its also interesting to see how they would react to each other, neither architects by primary means or education, the painter and the scientist.

Anyway, the paper's taking forever to write. Got a good bit out this afternoon at work, but its slow going as I'm trying to capture the essence and language of the time. Here's a bit from the beginning. I decided to structure it as a letter to Robert Hooke from Wren:

This twenty-first Centurie is a Miraculous one indeed! I am still becoming accustomed to these small letterd Buttons from which this Text appears as if Magick. I trust you are well in Paris. I long to visit this Pasteur Institute, but they would think me mad if I told them that I was the first to doccument their tiny Animacules. I am greatly releaved to find the City much the same as I left it, its Grand Architecture still whole over these Years.

And so on.

Anyway, the forward-thinking people got it mostly finished before the weekend so they would be able focus on the assignment for today in studio. We were to have 4 taboid spreads mocking up presentation boards, with views of a 3d model. The Science center took a few hours to get through and doccument (althogh my camera wont read or recognize cards anymore, so I need to take it in ASAP and get it fixed) so I did some sketches and took a lot of notes in the character of Wren. Not as much fun as I remember it being when I went a long time ago when we lived in Phoenix. So didn't get much done on paper that day.

Sunday, Sally and Jonathan invited me over for Easter dinner with more of thier family. Had some really great ham and I left totally stuffed. But not empty handed. Sally saddled me up with four grocery sacks of food to take home, including several complete bag dinners, cheesecake, cherry filling, artichoke dip, crackers, a big bag of rolls and fresh homemade strawberry jam. I brought over a bottle of wine, and some easter eggs filled with Jelly beans for Sara and Gabriel. Wore my pastel striped dress shirt. Havn't worn it since Easter with Jen's folks a year ago. Feels like a lot longer than a year has passed.

Anyway, so the long and short of it was that I gave up on my paper at three pages, only about one of which is really useful as information. I sat down at my computer to begin modeling at 7 PM Sunday night.

Ah yes, Friday, I went grocery shopping with Ben because we were out of food again, and then all afternoon and evening I spend studying and cleaning and organizing my room and stuff. I've started a goodwill pile with is slowly growing. That evening after Ben went out with friends to the bar, Ian, a friend of ours from 4th year dropped by looking for them. We talked for a bit, and he told me that in 4th year people were being called for using Sketchup for doing thier final renderings. It's great for concept and development, but it really does look cartoony, so FormZ it was. FormZ has a great rendering engine, but its uncomfortably halfway between AutoCad and Sketchup. My copy also keeps crashing on me. It must have a Catch-22 bug. I save often to avoid losing my latest work but saving sometimes causes the program to crash and when it crashes while saving, the entire file is wiped clean. I ended up just making tons of copies using Save As. Saving twice in a row so if it crashed and wiped at the next save I'd have a secondary backup. Anyway, that was very frustraing to say the least and I eneded up making the same set of trusses at least four times.

Ended up working until 4 AM, or nine hours straight. Went to bed for three hours of sleep and got up to continue work at 7 AM. Went into studio since I needed to reprint some autocad site plans and worked from there. That morning, i took images from the model and from the floorplans and converted them to formats I could use in my boards. Got four boards laid out and exported to PDFs for printing at 1: 10 PM, and walked out to the computer lab next door. Printer was broken so I walked back and noticed that in the last five minutes someone had posted a sign.

Studio had been cancelled for today. Nobody believed it. We all waited another five minutes and then EVERYONE split, probably to finish their history of architecture papers. I spent a few hours working some more on my computer model and then went to work down in the library. In the library I got another page or two pounded out on my paper.

Got a call from my supervisor asking me to ask a coworker to give more notice when she can't make her shifts. My supervisor can no longer get doctors appointments because he's had to cancel so often due to people being sick at work. He's up to six cancellations I believe. Not sure why he called me to ask her. Usually he's pretty direct and up front. My guess is he's feeling a lot of pressure right now and just had to do something. He wasn't unpleasnant, and commended me for my good track record of letting him know when I can't make it, but he just seemd really irate in general.

Anyway, here I am at 11:37 PM. I knew I'd remember my Friday night, although it was hardly memorable.