last few days

When we last left our exhausted hero, he was bent over his work in the early hours of the morning Tuesday. Apparently, our hero missed the memo that the final project is actually due after final reviews, just before grades are due.

I wouldn't call it a waste of time, lets just call it front-end loading for my work schedule.

My class was at 9, and we had a guest speaker from HOK come in and talked about King Abdullah University of Science of Technology, or KA-UST. There are literally dozens of King Abdullah centers/cities/universities, including

• King Abdullah Center for Excellence
• King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center 
• King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center
• King Abdullah International Medical Research Center
• King Abdullah Center for Interpretive Dance (probably)

Anyway, I felt really bad about the whole thing because half the class, including myself, were falling asleep from exhaustion as he talked, and we're not a big class. Actually, there's six of us, including a student who's auditing the class. It just doesn't leave a favorable impression when I'm trying to not noticeably jerk myself awake.

After class, I went straight home and slept until 2, when Saori picked me up and took me back to school for the DT book presentation. This was the best part of DT, the moment where everyone puts their hand-made books out on display, and you get to look through everyone elses. It's also a very humbling moment, where I had previously considered my book to be perhaps slightly less profound and insightful than Palladio's Seven Books of Architecture and I realize that in comparison with my classmate's work, it's actually just below Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

I can't even remember what I did for the rest of Tuesday. Around six, we were invited out for drinks by our DT instructor along with famed architect Craig Dykers of Snohetta. So we had a big informal gathering of Ben's DT section and Craig's studio up on the rooftop bar of Moonrise. It was an amazingly gorgeous early evening, with an unbelievable view from up there. It's astounding to realize how green St.Louis is out here, even in first ring suburbs. The sky was motley of orange and purple and blue, and the beer was expensive, although Ben bought us a round and I showed him my custom DT shirt.

One of my classmates brought her mom who was visiting to meet Craig and they chatted for awhile at the end of the table. It was a very pleasant surreal experience, and I look forward to going up for a drink again at the end of the semester. Still very short of sleep and not having eaten anything all day, two beers made me disinclined to return to studio, so I went home, did laundry, and napped.

Yesterday, I came into studio very late in the day, applied to a few firms, and built the styrene formwork for some concrete vaults I'm creating for my studio project. This took a long time. Saori and I finally called it quits and went to dinner at the Boba noodle house on Delmar (Soy Sauce Chicken- its cheap, its great, and there's a lot of it) and then drove around for awhile before heading back to the house and watching the end of Aliens.

This morning, neither of us had classes, so we went out on a morning dates, first stopping by World's Fair Donuts, a contender for the best donuts in St. Louis, and on to the Missouri Botanical Gardens for an early afternoon stroll.