Busy weekend

It's been a busy weekend. The rundown, counting back from

Thursday night, we met up with Mike and Ryan at the George and Dragon in central Phoenix. They were both classmates of mine and both working for the same small architecture firm. They both live downtown, which makes me start to wonder who else graduated from architecture school is living downtown. Ryan got married to a very nice woman, and it no longer feels strange to be hanging out with married couples my age. They've got enough work in their office to keep them employed at least for now, which is good to hear. We had a few drinks, and took the light rail home. George and Dragon is a nice place, a little expensive, long-standing British pub and a lot of the wait staff is either British or faking it well. Very good fish and chips.

Friday afternoon, we met a coworker of mine for lunch and he talked about working as an architect in his many years of working in AZ, which was mostly for Saori's benefit, but I enjoyed sitting in too. That evening, we went to mom's house to play bananagrams for a few hours, and left around 9 for Fiesta Mall.

For the past month, I've been part of a CANstruction committee at work. CANstruction was an event which is organized nationally by a design marking firm as raising awareness for local design, engineering, and construction firms and also to raise hunger awareness. Basically, firms compete to design large sculptures or scenes out of canned foods which are then donated to local food banks. This year, there were about a dozen firms participating in the valley, and ours raised about $5000 for cans. The committee, which was huge this year, voted to use Wall-E as a sculptural figure; not my first pick, but oh well, its for a good cause. We purchased a lot of cans and spent about a week working a few hours a day on a practice build, basically figuring out how we were going to lay it out and build it up. Last wednesday, we took it all down and loaded all the cases of cans into a truck and sent it to the food bank. The food bank, in turn, put all the cans on pallets, wrapped them, and shipped them to Fiesta Mall in Mesa for the event.

Friday, Saori and I arrived around 10 PM and jumped into canstruction. We worked for about four hours, stacking cans of butter beans, black beans, kidney beans, and baby potatoes. I was responsible for making the cubes of trash that Wall-E makes, so I make about five or six of them. Wall-E's body was created out of cans of spam ( rectangular AND yellow) so we had a spamular Wall-E. This entire project, the "Spam" song from monty python kept playing in my head. We taped together spagetti to form the treads and used coffee and large cans of beans for the wheels. The head was created from potted hams and two serendipitously black salmon cans. We piled random cans all around him to create a "trash" heap. It was pretty effective. While the entries from this year are better than last years, I think we still are in pretty good shape for most of the prizes. We went home extremely tired around 2:30 in the morning.

Saturday, I woke up late to discover Saori had already gotten me flowers, coffee, and made me breakfast. How have I deserved such a wonderful woman? She also prepared chocolate moouse and home made lava cake. After a liesurely breakfast, we went out shopping in Scottsdale, where we browsed American Apparel and laughed at the bleach blond, lamborgini lifestyles of the rich and tasteless who inhabit Skanksdale, sorry, Scottsdale.
I was white enough to walk to a nearby Urban Outfitters where I stumbled across a really cool jacket, marked way way down from $150, and Saori picked up a few nice things too.

We drove from Ghetto to ghetto, Scottsdale to Metrocenter, where we had great dinner at Fajitas. The last time I was there, if memory serves, I was 13 years old. After dinner, we spent the evening at Castles n' Coasters, playing a round of mini-golf and riding the rides. It was surprisingly fun, except for the numbly terrifying free-fall ride where its all you can do not to wet yourself as you drop twenty stories in about three seconds. But other than that, it was a blast.

Sunday, I made omeletes for breakfast and we hung out at home until we met Sal for coffee and he and Saori went to talk to a client. I wandered around downtown which was packed with pedestrians and sports fans who are all here for the NBA All-Star game tonight.

Now, I'm just relaxing on the couch with Saori and Suki, enjoying a warm and peaceful sunday night.