Notes from the Asteroidtukee

First, a book review.

I just finished reading Manifold Time by Steven Baxter. I rolled my eyes through the whole thing. It reads like Baxter tried to fit everything he ever read in the physics section of Barnes&Noble into a single novel. No stone lies unturned, or experiment unrepeated or remarked upon by frankly unbelievable characters in a very loose plot which, it seems, was simply there to hang the experimental physics together. The whole thing is throughly drenched with quasi-philosophical ruminations on fate, spirituality, morality, etc. etc. There's even a re-creation of the end of 2001 a Space Odyssey. The only thing that made me keep turning pages was to get to the end of time, a depiction of the heat death of the universe. If you're going to write an end of the world-beginning of a new world book, you could probably do much better, or at least not use the "brilliant children transcending humankind" plot device used by several other authors, including Arthur C. Clarke. If you want to write about the end of the world, I much prefer Douglass Adams approach, which involves the complete annihilation of Earth in the first twenty pages in about four sentences. So. Not impressed. At least it means I can skip the other dozen books in the Time series.

I'm firmly entrenched in Ahawatukee at this point in the summer. I have my old job back at the architecture office  I used to work at, Saori is here with me, and so is Suki. We're all living in my mom's house on a distant asteroid roughly orbiting several thousand miles from Phoenix. Getting my job back was actually the easiest part.

We landed back in Phoenix a week back from last Wednesday. Thursday, I sent a note to the HR guy at the office, not really expecting much, but following up on the possibility that I might be able to get some CA time in doing some punch list work up on a project I'd spent a few years working on. Maybe two weeks of work. I got an encouraging response. Two emails later he asked me to show up for work on Monday.

The hard part was actually getting to work. The asteroid this house is on is only tenuously connected to the earth. There is nothing out here but barren rock and the harsh sunlight. Mom commutes to her summer school program by a tiny personal craft, which can only accommodate two passengers. The viciousness of space travel such as they are, there is only room for the pilot, one passenger, and enough oxygen to last the gut wrenching ride out of orbit into the city. There is however, a shuttle which runs from a hub on the planet-facing side of the asteroid. Two miles of scorched rock buffeted by harsh solar winds, no atmosphere. A local  transport does make the rounds, its spindly form crawling over the face of the rock, but it only runs every hour, ferrying the few space cadets on duty patrolling this desolate world.

Lately, mom's been taking her tiny craft short hops to drop me at the trans-planetary hub. The shuttle makes quick work of deep space, with a regular launch schedule, it screams through the atmosphere, bypassing commercial and residential traffic with its special clearances. From the landing pad on earth it is only about a fifteen minute walk to my workplace.

So, I've got this hourly job. I work about 9 hours a day, four days a week. I negotiated Friday off since, if I'm only coming in for four hours, it just doesn't make sense to spend two hours in transit. So far, I've done some coordination work for fire protection, designed a wall which probably will never get built for a pediatric dentistry wing, for kids to look at while in the dentist chairs, and modeled and updated the more typical dental chairs based on the approved basis of design model chair.

People seemed happy and surprised to see me back at work. I actually blended in so well, it took people awhile to realize I was actually back in the office. There were a lot of double-takes. It was a bit last minute, decided upon on a friday to have me come in monday, so few people were expecting it. They actually have an ASU intern already.

I know I've only worked four days, but I am so happy I decided not to work fridays. This whole work thing, it just steals time from you. The office has changed so little since I left. In the professional world I left, a year is a grain of sand in the glass, a blink. In the academic world of studio, a year is a transformation, an endeavor, a journey, an ordeal. If you want it to be, that is. The professional world is a single small flame on a very large candle, the academic; fireworks.