February 2006 Archives

We were on conte crayons for the last few weeks in studio, and I find it hard to find good subjects for conte crayon, which really wants you to draw things with lots of texture and not lots of fiddly bits. I draw the fiddly bits best.

So I spent a few afternoons wandering around campus finding decent buildings to draw. I think they came out pretty nicely, overall. I was playing with negative and positive a bit in some of them, but I don't know if you'd be able to tell where without standing in front of the building in question.

Mott Gym

Technorati Tags: conte crayon, drawings, school

I went in to talk to the graduate business school about the Architectural Management Track program this week, and the short summary is that I left the meeting deeply dissatisfied with the answers I got to my very specific questions about the level of actual architectural content in the program.

But that's not what I have been thinking about from that conversation. Instead, I keep thinking about a comment the associate dean made to me about "double counting": he alleges that credits received for one degree should not be used to count for credit for another. That doing so is, in fact, unethical. I think he's wrong, and I think the way that he is wrong is what is wrong with business education today.

Technorati Tags: school, teaching

My neighbors in SLO just bought a used hot tub. I know this because they spent an hour earlier this evening painfully hauling it into their back yard, discovering it was too wide to fit through the fence and had to be lifted over, trying to get it to lie down in a space where it would exactly fit only when horizontal, that sort of thing. They had four or five friends over there helping them out, and it still took them an hour to move a hot tub twenty feet.

Then there was a minor hose mishap when they began to fill it.

All in all, it is very reassuring to hear other people making total asses of themselves on home improvement projects. (The neighbors on the other side have been building a retaining wall since December, which is also calming, but they're a fraternity and let's not even talk about whatever they do to their backyard so not even weeds will grow there.)

Technorati Tags: neighbors, renovations

I try not to anthropomorphize, but sometimes it is hard to avoid.

Technorati Tags: california, trees

Last night, around 10:30, I was puttering around getting ready to go to bed, thinking about doing some homework that I'd planned to do this morning, when there was a knock on the door.

It was Noel, the dogs, and a large bag of See's chocolates.

All evening I'd been calling him and would hear that he was in the car, and first he said he was running errands (OK, whatever), then he said he was going to go to In-n-Out for a burger, but as we talked it seemed to be taking a long time, even though there's one right over by the airport, not 20 minutes away, AND I could tell from the freeway noise that he was not in traffic. He insisted he was going to that one, but I suspected him of going to one further away having forgotten that that one had been put in. I figured he just wanted to get out of the house.

You could have knocked me over with a feather when he showed up at the door. I definitely was not expecting that. So nice to see him and the doggies.

They had to leave really early this morning to get back home to meet various engineers and inspectors for the final review on the foundation, but just a little while to see each other and have him re-light the pilot light on my stove that keeps going out and to listen to the dogs snoring again was very very sweet.

Happy Valentine's Day, sweetie. May I always have you to perform death-defying feats of wonderment for me.

Technorati Tags: love, romance

Noel fixed my scanning problem (Image Capture only wants to work in one specific directory, forcing me to leave all my applications in a big jumbly pile instead of nicely sorted out by usage). So I've been scanning my weekly drawings. I've had a bit of a week this week so I didn't do two drawings (I'll do four for next week), but to make up for that I had a backlog of unscanned drawings.

A couple of weeks ago we did our last pencil drawings. I did two drawings of buildings on campus. This one is an office building beyond the stadium. It's an older building, in the fake-Mission style that is so popular in this area.

Technorati Tags: conte crayon, drawings, pencil, school

We all like piccies of the dogs on the beach.

Rosie found a tennis ball and she and I spent most of the time playing catch. Here she is waiting for me to kick it for her (she prefers a kicked ball to a thrown ball). Check out the surf behind her.

It was a really beautiful day: warm and sunny on the beach as opposed to the usual kind of foggy. The surf was high, and the tide was coming in, so there was a lot of running around and splashing in the water then suddenly being overtaken by a huge wave. Good fun for dogs.

Technorati Tags: beach, california, dogs

The AIAS (American Institute of Architecture Students) club from Cal Poly went on a field trip on Saturday to Hearst Castle. It's a nice trip: if you like guided tours and a few tidbits of historical trivia, it's a nice way to spend an afternoon. A little pricey, of course, but just don't make the mistake of planning to eat at the visitor's center and you'll do OK.

I took a lot of pictures, but most of those were note-taking pictures rather than artistically arranged photographs. So I give you a brief selection from our tour (we took Tour 2, which is Hearst's private apartments, the two libraries, and the kitchen; I didn't choose the tour, but that was the tour I happened to be most interested in).

Here's the view from the second floor over the court where guests arrived. A nice view out over the hills to the ocean.

Technorati Tags: antique kitchens, hearst castle, julia morgan, california

On Friday I finished the Flower Petal shawl. Those points were fun, a nice dessert after the long hard slog through the last several rows.

Here's a terrible photo, with a medicine bottle for scale. I need to wash it (not in the least because it got all furry by being on the floor) and block it, but I will wait until the apartment is dogless to do that.

Technorati Tags: crafts, handmade, knitting

I started the points on the Flower Petal Shawl last night. It was a relief to finally start them because at the end the row length was 300 stitches. I don't usually knit things that are that wide, and my brain was not happy with the prospects.

The points go much faster than a row was, so I got four more done today, for a total of six so far (I may do one or two more tonight; I'd really like to be done with the shawl already). I only totally messed one up, and then I was able to salvage it.

I took some pictures tonight, but they look like hell, because the lighting in my apartment is terrible. I'll have to lay the shawl out tomorrow at school and try some pictures of it there, so the light will be better.

Technorati Tags: crafts, handmade, knitting