Hat Trick!

Lets see... After getting seven hours of sleep monday morning I went to my architecture lecture and to sociology where I asked for an extention on my sociology project. She granted it easily, which means now I have to a good job with it for tuesday. I then spent the rest of the day working on various aspects of the architecture project. It's difficult to remember exactly what I did for the rest of the day since I was so tired, but I somehow managed to finish the watercoloring of the plan, four watercolored perspective drawings, and four photo-collages of the site with people. It ended up Jen and Ben just watched me for a few hours watercoloring past midnight. I finished all that work around five AM tuesday morning, and then started working on my process book.

Aside: Process books are small 8.5 x 5.5 booklets of 20-60 pages of stuff you do leading up to the final architecture design. It should include preliminary research, site photographs, what other architects have done relating to the site, and most the sketches and preliminary models you make.

First, I took pictures of my sketchbook pages, then I popped up the contrast and color and made them all square. Then, using the process book template I designed for the last project, I plopped the pictures into place. I was so strapped for time, I only used two formats, with no writing whatsoever, except for whatever I'd written in the sketchbook and photographed. I finished putting all the pictures in the processbook and getting it all set up around 8 AM or so, then I attempted to print it on my color printer I got from the parents. Earlier monday, I'd bought a new tri-color cartrage for thirty-five dollars and installed it.
Two problems arise: First, the printer takes about two minutes to print one page. Second, I have to manually feed each page in since the printer has trouble pulling blank sheets from the feed tray. Third, the printer keeps coming up with errors and stopping halfway along the job.
This puts me in a serious time crunch.

I print out all the black and white pages on the laserjet (thank you, thank you, thank you!) and save the color pages as a pdf file to stick on my usb drive. I load all my drawings up in my big 2'x3' portfolio since they can't be rolled, and drive to Kinko's. They tell me it will be half an hour, which is pretty quick for mornings at Kinko's. I then drive my stuff to the architecture building and run it up to the habitat for humanity office I use as a storage room there.
(on a side note, I'd also just finished coordinating a habitat project for tuesday. I'm going to have to quit my post since I just don't have adequite time to commit).

Then I drive back home and grab a glass of juice before dashing back to Kinko's on bike. They have my pages ready for me. I gave them cardstock to print on, so its slighly less than a dollar per page. Sigh. Money vs time all over again. Well, its still cheaper than the last project where I sank sixty dollars in the process book. I take everything over to alphagraphics and there I organize my processbook. We were supposed to make chapters with this process book, so I just printed blank pages with chapter headings in differet places. For the table of contents, I just wrote 'table of contents' and put the headings on the page where they were located on the heading pages. Then I took a pen and a ruler and drew lines from each one to the other in the order they came in. Desperation is the mother of invention. Alphagraphics charged me five bucks to cut the full pages down to 8.5 by 5.5 and ten to bind them with metal. I was done with everything at 10:25. I had fifteen minutes to spare.

I spent that time gathering my presentation materials and trying to track down our studio instructor who, because of a scheduling conflict, couldn't get a space to present in. He finally got us to put our stuff up in the empty art gallery downstairs. This part, the time just before presentations, got me really pumped up and excited. I believe it was the lack of sleep, the happines of being done, the energy of everyone else running around with thier projects, and the anxiety of the jury presentation. At any rate, once presentations started I calmed down a lot, and nearly passed out. The entire class was having trouble staying awake as people talked about thier projects. In my class of 12, I was in the top five for model building craft, and I'd say number one for my watercolored perspectives. This was a relief as I'd really worried about the craft on my model. I'd ended up rummaging around empty lots for dried desert weeds for plants. Thankfully, and with a bit of ingenuity, I was able to model them all pretty sucesfully, although my jojoba looked like a very convincing agave.

The reviewers were the studio instructor and a colleuge of his from work. They're both pretty young, and way too nice to give a really good critique. Unsurprisngly, they really liked my project. I had one of my friends from studio take notes on what they said (a really good idea since you're nervous and so focused on defending your project and explaining it you have no clue what they said afterwards). Their only real critique was that the landscape was not as developed as it could have been, and I knew it wouldn't be, given that I put most of my time and energy into my building design. I was one of the last ones to present, and I had to alternate sitting and standing to avoid falling asleep in my chair. The other people in the class were the same way, and one actually did keep falling asleep and waking up. And then it was over.

I took my model and stuff back up to the store room and then went home. I ate my leftover pizza voraciously then threw myself into writing my Life of Pi paper. I was finished with lunch at 2, and the paper was due at 4:40. It was a four page paper, double spaced, and I had about a page and a quarter done already. I just sat down and started writing.
Somehow I managed to get all the ideas out and connected, used text from the book, and made a coherant thesis, but my lack of sleep was catching up with me. I think I actually started dreaming while I was typing, and the screen kept coming out of focus. When I printed out the draft, and read it, I realized that instead of writing "athiests and agnostics" I'd typed "criminals and prostitutes," don't ask me why. I'd also substituted "green soup bowl" for "religion". Knowing I was no shape to proof my own work I ran it upstairs and had Amy proof-read it for me. With ten minutes before class, I added her corrections, printed it out and took it to Popular Cultrure and Religion.
Mercifully, the teacher was just collecting papers. I dropped mine off and went back home. At this point I was too tired to sleep, so I kicked back and watched Tomorrow Never Dies with Ben. I made a pork loin roast in the oven and for desert the three of us went to Baskin Robbins, where I had a cone of pralines and cream. After I got home, I slept for more than 12 hours.

Today I dropped Jen off at the airport and came back to begin cleaning. Everytime I have a charette, my room, bathroom, and kitchen become absolutely trashed. So I washed the dishes, cleaned the counters, cleaned my bathroom and swept and mopped the tile floors. Now I need to start working on my sociology project. I'll pack tomorrow morning for Oklahoma.