The Condo

There has been yet another new brilliant plan for development of our humble abode. Every day that passes brings a new idea of how to make our condo more useable, attractive, close to perfection, basically better. We, as architect, will always be thinking and re-thinking about what to do with the space where we live. And even after we've made any modifications to our space, I'm sure they will be quickly followed by new ones. This is just the way we are. It is our passion and our hobby.
Yes, I'm aware that I've been crying wolf about this for roughly a year and a half now, and all the beautiful ideas that we've come up with and HAVENT done anything with or about could fill a book. But we have devised yet another one.
This has less to do with the bathroom, and more to do with the living/dining/second bedroom space. We'll see how it goes, but from our calculations it could REALLY help the usability of our place. It, of course, involves knocking down of some wall area, and making the second bedroom more of a sub-space of the living room. it already has a partial-height wall - we'll just by taking a bit more advantage of this. We will also be changing the point of entry into this room. All of these changes will be done with the idea in mind that if we are to sell the property, it will be extremely easy and inexpensive to revert back to the original design.

Just wanted to keep everybody up to date.

A Rant

Okay.

We have a client, who will remain unnamed, who apparently has a problem with me. First, a couple weeks ago, I sent him a set of drawings, and he sent back comments for me to modify the drawings. I did the modifications, sent him a NEW set of drawings, then he writes a nasty email to my superior saying that I missed nearly ALL of his comments. Well, upon further review of his email and its attachment, he was looking at the OLD set of drawings AGAIN. He saw the exact same set of drawings twice, and said that I missed MOST of the comments. He didn't even see the new set that I sent him. Idiot.

And this time, he sends us an email in his pathetically cryptic English capabilities, misspelled, non-punctuated, as always. He tries to convey in words what's in the little head that he owns, and, as always, does a terrible job at it. Knowing how it is my responsibility to read his mind and come up with a solution BETTER than what he asked for, I go above the call of duty and make some spreadsheets for him. Well, he has a problem with these, so he decides to write to me and my boss and the attorney on the job, telling me how "he doesn't like the spreadsheets." and then he talks about how they're too "complicated." Yeah - for him, maybe. It was like when George Bush was trying to score one on Kerry for Kerry saying that the procedure for voting for funding the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan was "complicated." YES, IT IS COMPLICATED. Deal with it.

Anyway, twice in a row now, I've been villainized for my client being a moron without enough time or patience. And I fear that I will be punished for it, in the end.

Weekend Review

Just got back from a quick trip to the burbs.
Last night Mrs. Architecturefootballandfood and I said to ourselves "we haven't been to see the fam in a while" so we called them and scheduled a paired-down dinner. She still can't eat much solid food since having a wisdom tooth pulled on Monday, so the meal of the night was a hearty (what ISNT hearty when you go to my mother's house for a meal) potato-shimp soup, with chives, cheddar cheese, and bacon to garnish. Homemade cornbread and a Dr. Pepper rounded out the meal for me, and it was close to perfect. I got schooled by the missus in Wii bowling, and then got schooled by pops in Wii MLB 2008. The more things change, the more they, seemingly, stay the same, as no matter how natural the electronics companies try to make video gaming, ol' Kev sure does suck at it, still.

Crazy Time

As some (both?) of you may notice, I've been sporadic at best with any new posts. I apologize for that, and there are a few reasons for this.
A) The office has been getting weirder and weirder. As you all know, the economy is hitting everybody wicked hard these days, and while it seems like I've been saying that for most of my life by now, it is still expected to worsen, and we probably won't be out of the woods for another three years, minimum. My professional office (which will go unnamed) has been recently been hit incredibly hard from this, and we have begun laying people off. It started as an exercise of efficiency, by "trimming the fat" or our small corporation of 70 employees. But after the first round of almost 20 people, we had to make another cut of 9 employees just this past week. This second round really hit us hard, emotionally AND professionally. These are now people who were really, really valuable to the office, and losing them has made it much more difficult on the rest of us.
So, as you can see, the 8-6 portion of my day has gotten not only much more stressful, but much more strenuous in terms of workload as well. I don't have any time during the day to write, and I'm pretty much battered by the time I come home, so the blog has suffered because of this. Apologies all around.
B) I'm beginning to mold and shape what I would like this particular blog to be about (again.) My thought is that this will be more of a personal running diary, and will be about whatever the heck I want it to be about. I've taken the liberty to start two NEW blogs, one being solely based on architecture, and one being solely based on food. These are still in their infancy, and have basically nothing on them yet. Once they're up and running a bit, I'll publicize them. Also, as some (both?) of you may know, I was asked a while ago to write for a fan site called Sportingo.com. I did a couple posts then stopped, but recently I added another post there, and I plan on doing most of my football writing on that page. So please bookmark it, and you can search for my name under the "authors" area.

So for these reasons, this blog has been a bit inactive recently. I am having to sneak even this little message in at work. I'm going to try my best to keep contributing, because I really enjoy doing it, and I especially getting feedback from you guys, my beloved readers.