The Traveling Studio

I apologize to those of who sent me emails and comments in the last few days, as I've been working constantly on our group's final semester project.

To catch up, for thanksgiving we all went to Janette's apartment, the biggest and nicest one. We all brought something to share, so there was a wide assortment of food. My cornbread was interesting story- as I didn't have any measuring cups or spoons, I had to eyeball everything, and as a consequence, I think I used half the amount of baking powder I needed (hey I was impressed I was able to find baking powder on my own!). It smelled great coming out of the oven, it was nicely browned, but my happiness turned to dismay when I realized that it was only about half an inch thick. I'd created cornboard, the densest, but still edible, cornbread I'd ever seen. It was still good though. Ben made an incredible double decker pizza, someone brought some turkey, and Chris made mashed potatos, mashed by hand since no one has any appliances. There was wine and beer, and we ended up the night playing charades. A good thanksgiving, but we were all missing our relatives and family.

After that night, I got about six hours of sleep for one day, and then it dropped down to an average of three hours a day for the next five days. I stopped all work on everything else and we all settled down for the final crunch period. My group would meet alternatively at studio, Joe's house, and my apartment for extended working periods. We slept in shifts of a few hours each, taking time to only go home and shower and eat before coming back for more work. Since our project was purely digital, our final charette was totally portable. Whenever we needed to move, we'd pack our laptops up, and walk to the next place to work where'd we'd take over the kitchen table, monopolize an outlet, and start crunching again, occationally swapping data on USB sticks. Dan was working the 3D model in AutoCad and VIZ, Adam cut sections in AutoCad, and I worked on details in sketchup and photoshop, while also working on the powerpoint presentation. We worked this way from friday night to wednesday morning. Typically I would grab an hour or two sleep during the afternoon, and work until around 3-4 AM, when I would be too tired to think anymore. The last two nights, I knew it was time to take a nap by my chills and shaking.

Anyway, we got to studio Wednesday morning and Adam went to go print all of our presentation materials. An hour and half before presentations were supposed to begin, Claudio sent an email out with the order of presentations, which were split into two days. Our group was going today. First. At least we'd get it over with early.