GRIZZLY PEAR
Last Sunday I ran around shooting my rabbits. Well, more like tried to get myself as flat to the ground as possible while trying to shoot rabbits while they sat around under the coffee table. Here are the ones that were good enough to post to facebook. Thanks to iphoto, its surprisingly easy to go through one’s photos and post them all around.
I don’t know how useful they are, but I was playing around with some personality tests last night. Basically I had to list my five most awesome moments in life and then tick off some descriptive action verbs off of a big chart. After doing that, it broke the chart into “personality” characteristics: Artistic, Investigative, Realistic, Social, Conventional, Enterprising.
It turned out (no big surprise) that Artistic came out first, followed by Investigative, Realistic, and Social with no ticks in Conventional nor Enterprising. Apparently Architects are supposed to fall in the Artistic-Realistic camp, so I guess I came close to my “category”, especially since I managed to completely avoid the Enterprising group. The Investigative and Social parts came from the problem solving and the coordination work I’ve needed to do as part of my job, especially while currently while doing Construction Administration. Which unfortunately also involve a lot of “Conventional” due to the mass of paperwork that comes with building a building.
I enjoy the CA process in that its a series of problem solving. And I don’t mind a little bit of filing to keep everything orderly, but I have noticed that when I am forced to just do a lot of paper-crunching I get very antsy. So maybe there is some validity to all this.
Or maybe its just a matter of a personality test that lets you see yourself as you want to be seen.
As I get more serious about this blog, I will be most likely messing around with it more also. Unfortunately that means certain things may change for better or worse. Namely, I’m going to most likely kill my feedburner plugin so the RSS feeds will go back to being out of the box with the wordpress site. Odds are the theme will most likely go back to an OOTB theme for a little bit until I get a better grasp of what I really want.
As I get older, I’ve learned that customizing often just isn’t worth the hassle of upkeep! OOTB!
I don’t remember where I read it, but it has stuck in my head. An architect is paid in experience and in money. If you aren’t getting enough in one or the other (or both!) then its time to move on.
It’s easy to forget the client is a crucial team member of a project. Since they provide the cash (one of their primary roles) its easy for them to become the boss. But their active participation is important in that many projects get derailed due to the indecision of the client.
As the cash provider and the one who will be stuck with the project at the end, it is fair and appropriate that they need to make the important decisions. However, when they take too long to decide or go back on their decisions they hold up the flow of the project. If the consultant team tries to forge ahead without final decisions, if there are any changes in the future, the mass of drawings that need change due to an ill-timed decisions creates coordination nightmares.
As an architect, its easy to tell your cash provider to that they are the decider in chief. What’s not as easy is to inform them of their responsibility to decide in a timely manner.
Just had a quiet dinner with my girlfriend at home tonight. We had some random music in the background and were just drinking some soup and eating a steamed bun. The dining table as usual was a mess. The ceiling fan was running. The rabbits were hanging out in their cage. Nothing special.
It was just one of those quiet moments where you might find a director lingering a bit too long in some artsy indie flick. But somehow, like in many of those such films, the quiet moments are the memorable moments. Something strangely rich about something mundane happening. Even though all the quiet moments blend together over time, the add up to something more than another dinner at a fancy restaurant.
One of my fondest memories in Berkeley was at a party hanging out with a bunch of artists. The building was utterly non-descript, but the crowd was great fun. Maybe because we all knew each other, maybe because they were a bunch of free spirits, almost certainly the autumn weather played a part, but in the middle of the event a group of us coalesced and started dancing around the fire pit, playacting random mundane activities like mowing the lawn, cutting vegetables, etc, etc.
It was a night all about the crowd and the mood. It could have been almost any old apartment complex, but without the fire pit that moment would have never come.
Maybe I posted this three years ago…maybe I didn’t. And maybe I wrote up a couple posts earlier this week that I can’t find now. Well digging around my draft box, I found this post which apparently never got published…so does that balance things out?
It was pretty deflating to lose a couple posts. But then again, I’m not writing long form essays here! The thoughts will come back if they are any good. And if don’t come back to mind, then y’all missed out on nothing. After three weeks at this I suspect that if this blog continues for an extended period, it will be have a core group of ideas that will be repeated and repackaged and reworded and revisited again and again.
By the way 2009 feels like yesterday, how on earth did it get to be 2012 already!?!
We just sold one of our coffee tables, thus freeing up our other coffee table that had been sitting on the original coffee table. We’ve had it for a while, it used to hide in the bedroom of our old apartment, but now it sits in the bunnies’ living room.
So as soon we let them out, Peppercorn came out to inspect the “new” table. Of course the full process includes a few nips a the new piece of furniture. I feel bad for the table, but what can you do?
Stillness is something that is easily missed in this society. Honestly, I’m not too good at it – I’m so easily distracted I’ve lost interest in devoting an hour and a half to watch even simple action movies.
The shame of quiet architecture of some renown is that they usually attract tourists who don’t have much time to soak in the stillness.