Recently in School Category

The real drawback to the thesis studio is that it's a yearlong process, instead of the usual 10-week sprints. That means an awful lot of stuff can accumulate in the studio without the forced cleanouts.

Noel took this photo of me presenting at the final crit on Saturday. My boards are on the wall behind me; the rest of that stuff is my classmates' projects (I'll post more about them later).

The crit went very well. We had the conversation I was interested in having, and I got some good directions to explore. I probably won't explore them for this project, but the saying is that you spend the rest of your life working on your thesis, and I think that is definitely going to be true.

The next day we cleaned some things out of my studio, went to my apartment in SLO and packed up a bunch of stuff, and drove home, where I have basically been asleep.

Technorati Tags: school, thesis

Our presentations begin tomorrow at 1pm. I'm home now for a brief dinner break, then back to the studio to finish this model. As of 6:30:

Technorati Tags: architecture, model building, school, thesis

Well, not quite, but it is getting quite large. Here it is just before I broke off work for the night tonight:

(It's rotated from the last shot, because I was working on the other side of it and crawling around on my classmate's desk was getting inconvenient.)

As you can see: lots of little towers clustered together. This afternoon as I was working I realized I'd failed to cut enough of the towers, due to a stupid calculation error. So tomorrow afternoon I'll be making a mad dash back up to Menlo Park for a quick cutting session; I hope that will get me enough pieces to finish.

Here you can see the missing towers, off to the left. All the other towers are assembled and placed on the model. (You can also see my printed cheat sheet for placing them.)

I still don't know how the roof works over the parts that are not the towers. In the upper right you can sort of see where the roof is starting to take form, but there's another layer of materiality to add to this before it's really solid.

And now to work on my major section. Fun!

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, model building, school, thesis

Yesterday I took my giant base and decoupaged a printout of my floor plan and a site photograph onto it, then I began attaching the towers I've been building. I still have eight or nine towers to assemble, and then, of course, I need to figure out what happens in the spaces between the towers, which is more complicated than it sounds.

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, model building, school

I feel like I've been working on this model forever. Last week I realized that trying to make it at 1/8" scale like my teacher wanted would be very bad (the model would be larger than our display space). I switched to 1/16" scale, but that meant I lost a week of work on the thing.

I still don't know how I'm going to build the interstitial spaces that are less structured. I don't even know how to draw them quite yet. But I do have a lot of these:

That's the from-the-sidewalk view of one of the structural towers. They're sort of "ivory towers" for the building: where labs and offices and collaborative workspaces are located. The space around them is more casual, more for interaction and collaboration rather than hard work.

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, model building, school

What have I been doing for the last three weeks? Making this:

Well, then taking that and making it into this:

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, model building, school

Well, the end of Summer Quarter, at least. Tomorrow, or later today if one is strictly technical about the time, we have our final review of the quarter, then Thursday we do our quarterly exit interviews. This evening I pinned up my posters and spent some time finishing my models -- I have to get some tape to finish putting my posters up but that will be easily accomplished tomorrow morning.

As you can see, the posters are drooping on the end, because the wall material changes and it's impossible to set tacks into the corner where they need to end.

I need to spend some time thinking about my setup for these crits: it'd be nice to be able to take up less space with posters. Because posters are a major pain to hang. Anyway. Plenty of time to think about that in the next few weeks.

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, model building, school

So what the heck am I doing with all that laser-cut stuff, anyway? Here's a little view of one piece of the stuff I've been assembling. My next iteration will have vellum screening glued onto the backs of the inner pieces. Maybe I should spray paint it black, too.

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, model building, school

I've now done a couple more sessions on the laser cutters at Techshop, this time using the Helix. Big, big difference. The Helix can cut the material the first time! Without torching it!

Tedious details follow:

Technorati Tags: design, model building, power tools, techshop, school

Last night I finished making the last of the little scaled blocks that represent buildings on my site model, and this morning and afternoon I've been assembling the freeway down the center.

My actual site (well, sites) is the area under the six large warehouses: two on the far side of the freeway and four on the near side. They're fairly easy to see in this photo, as they're the fattest buildings on the site, and all the same size.

The blocks that are those warehouses are not attached, so I can put my final model on the site, too.

I'm still in mid-assembly on that freeway; there are two off-ramps that I need to assemble and attach, but the rest of the site has to finish drying before I can fiddle with it some more.

When I finish the freeway, I'm going to trim the long end off the board, and trim the overhanging buildings, too. Then I need to clean the apartment, because it's a holy mess. I would have worked on this in the studio, but there's no room in there these days.

Technorati Tags: model building, school, thesis

All I can think about lately is my thesis. This is a good thing, but weird. For example, I haven't been attending plant sales I'd planned to attend because I just can't think about gardening. And I recently decided to drop my Construction Management minor because it would allow me to take only thesis studio for the next two quarters. Strange, huh?

Anyhow, I figured I'd show you all some of what I've been working on. Most of it is inside my head; I've been reading 3-5 books a day about spatial psychology and bioethics, which is great but doesn't give a lot of pretty drawings. So in addition, I've been making lots of little diagrams of complex systems like this:

Technorati Tags: design, drawings, school, thesis

I've been singleminded lately, and it's all about the laboratories and research and the nature of creative discovery. I've either been reading, or searching for things to read, or sitting around wondering what keywords would help me find more reading. One thing is really nice, and that is the computerized databases of all this stuff that make finding things and then requesting copies so much easier. It means that instead of having ten books on my desk at this point, I have closer to fifty. Of course, it also means I have to read those fifty, take notes on them, make bibliographies, and give them back in a much more compressed timeline.

Here's what I look at when I look up from my pile of books. Spooky, isn't it?

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, thesis

So the new quarter has started, and now I am in what is called my fifth year and is essentially an intensive thesis studio over three quarters. For the last week I've been prowling the library, digging books out and reading an amazing number of things. Suddenly my normal habit of spending free time reading random books from the stacks comes in handy.

Here's where I'm going to spend the next eight months:

That pile of books on the desk will get a lot larger (actually, it already has; I went to the library again after taking this photo) and then will slowly go back to the library. I think that, like my classmates, I'll be bringing my entire computer setup into the studio. I could use my scanner there, definitely, and the second monitor would come in handy. And after all, I'm going to be essentially living in the studio until I'm done.

As soon as I have some coherence, I'll write more about my research. But suffice it to say that I've been reading a lot about neurological implantation experimentation.

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, school, thesis

As of this afternoon, I have 270 days until I graduate, which is 144 days of class left (not including finals).

Not that I'm counting down or anything.

I've been working on systematizing the research center modules and creating an architectural language. Right now, I'm working primarily in plan and developing that language in plan; I have three quarters of work to develop a larger vocabulary.

Here we have a little diagram I've been working with showing the spines attached to each other, built out to meet the needs of a growing company.

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, drawings, school

I start my fifth year in a month or so, and fifth year is a 3-quarter long thesis studio. I've been thinking about what I want to do for that studio because the more prepared you are the better things tend to go. Especially because my advisor is known to be a tough cookie.

Anyway, the idea I am working with is a biomedical research center, not a rebuilding of the sort of facility we have now, but a totally new kind of research center: one aimed at fostering creative research and bringing people together in their work.

I began with the idea of a product development cycle. This might be a drug, a new medical treatment, a device, whatever. Instead of working from a traditional product development cycle, which would result in a traditional building, I designed a development cycle based on biology, most specifically conception through maturity. There are a lot of good parallels there to exploit, and this is my preferred way of working, anyway.

One thing big businesses do that this model explicitly tries to avoid is extreme growth. It's my opinion that when workgroups get to be larger than about 20 people, those people cannot talk to each other every day or work effectively as a single team. They break up into smaller teams and lose touch. Being too large to be born is a serious issue, and one that was a limiting factor on human evolution (despite common belief, it's very rare for a baby to be too large to fit through the birth canal).

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, thesis, school

So, let me tell you about how the internship is going. (Our building is a former laundry.)

Short story: very well. If they offered me a job here after school, I would be hard pressed to be able to say no.

Technorati Tags: architecture, school

We're on our last week of the design portion of the San Francisco internship program. For five weeks we do an intensive design studio, then for six weeks we work at a firm while doing lectures at night.

Our project for design is an affordable housing project in the Tenderloin, and we could choose between family housing and senior housing, or a mix of the two. I chose senior housing. This week I am working on elevations, having just finished the floor plans for my residential levels (the lower level is commercial space). Wanna see?

Technorati Tags: design, drawings, school

Today we moved most of my stuff from the apartment to a storage place, then packed everything else into our two cars, cleaned the apartment and returned the keys, and headed up north. We finished everything in remarkably little time, considering what we had to do. At one point I told Noel the time and he hardly believed me.

And now I am home! And I don't need to go back until January! And I only seriously bruised two fingers in the process!

Technorati Tags: alameda, moving

So sometime this evening I was kind of hanging around, thinking about printing and how I want to make some prints come out for tomorrow, and suddenly it occurred to me that in four days I am moving, and maybe I might want to think about what that might entail.

This morning I reserved a storage space; I need to go by the office and sign a contract sometime this week. I have a few boxes around the house, but as of now they are packed with books and stuff and I'm out of boxes. I don't have too much stuff here, but what I do have mostly, unfortunately, really does need to go home rather than to storage.

It's been a while since I last moved: almost two years since I moved in here in the first place, and of course moving in with Crazy, and before that, when we moved to Alameda four years ago. Funny how you forget simple things like "I might need to get some boxes to put this stuff into" and "it might be a good idea to sort through that four-foot tall pile of papers to make sure all of it really has to go home."

So the next few days will be total chaos here. Books on the floor, boxes stacked everywhere, and the growing pile of things to just get rid of by the door, which probably calls for a run to the landfill. Unlike the new neighbors who bought the frat house next door, I am not under the mistaken impression that you can just leave a huge pile of stuff on the curb and the city will generously scoop it up and take it away for you.

And now I should really do that printing, then to bed. Tomorrow is crit day.

Technorati Tags: moving

I may not have slept much in the last 48 hours, but I've just finished my final project for the quarter. It's off at the print bureau being printed, after which I will take it to the studio and mount it. The crit is tomorrow, so I'll have time to clean my desk, hang my pieces, and get some decent sleep beforehand.

The project was to build a museum on a lot in Paso Robles. We chose our subjects, so mine is a Reliquary for Unwanted Taxidermy. (Well, what else would be right for Paso Robles?) I really cannot wait to see the web hits I will get because of that phrase.

Here's a view of the building from the street:

Technorati Tags: design, model building, school

Today I created an underlying system of geometry for my building. It's based on a shape found in the collage, simplified and repeated and altered. I'm not 100 percent certain how I am going to use it in the building, but I think these may end up being floor plans.

Also, I decided to drop my second construction class. That gives me two more weeks at home, and more time to work on studio things. More sleep, too.

Technorati Tags: design, school

A lot of this quarter in studio has been focussed on methods for finding a form and an underlying structure for a building. I've been working on a series of pieces to that end: a "junk" sculpture, then some digital collages from photos of the sculpture, and now an attempt to turn those collages into a massing model of a building.

This is the collage (actually, a cropped out piece of a collage) I'm using.

I am designing layers of protection: an arcade, a windowed corridor, then a darkened, sacred inner sanctum. My building is a museum, but also a mausoleum, because it is a repository for discarded taxidermy (something I've been moderately upset about for many years).*

I want to building to have a sort of contemplative nature, one that makes you turn inward and think about how humans relate to nature, but I also want it to be kind of creepy and weird. So over the next few days I will be refining my plans and sections so I can make a flow through the building. Blah blah. Also, I will be thinking a lot about refrigeration units.

*I'm upset about the way people will just throw away the remains of those animals as if they were trash, not that taxidermy happens in the first place. I'm merely confused by the fact that taxidermy happens in the first place.

Technorati Tags: design, school

For research into our studio project, we went around town on Thursday looking at buildings under construction, and some wineries.

Our first stop was at a construction site, where they are putting together a series of office buildings out of tilt-up concrete. The theory with tilt-up is pretty simple: they cast the walls on the floor, then lift them up into place and bolt them together. It's perfectly good construction, and saves the cost and risk of building full-height forms. The thing about concrete buildings is that you end up building them twice: once in formwork and once in concrete. Tilt-up reduces the labour and materials because you don't have much formwork to build at all.

But how to connect the walls to the floor? The way it's done is like this: you can see that they left the floor a bit shy of the wall, and some rebar is arranged to come out of the wall and tie into the floor. Sometime soon they will place concrete in that hole and tie the building together. Although it was pretty well tied together when we were there, already.

Technorati Tags: construction, wineries

We had a little studio field trip today, first to visit the site for our final project, and then to a junkyard to get some things for the next phase of our work.

I'm usually not much of a junkyard person, having been trying to get rid of excess crap in recent years. But this one was very interesting, with piles of scrap and sorted bits and bobs.

Technorati Tags: design, model building, school

We've wrapped up the cardboard object exercise in studio, and the final step was to make a portfolio page about the project. I've been working on my portfolio this summer, anyway, for the internship program in the fall, so the only thing I had to do was decide which of the photos I took would work best. But here, I can use them all.

We started with an item from nature with a structural system. I found these seeds, encased in a hard protective shell.

Technorati Tags: art, model building, school

Our latest assignment was to make an abstract painting based on some of the ideas behind our model, and inspired by a famous painting. I based mine on Arthur Dove's Forhorns, which is one of my favourite abstract expressionist paintings.

It's a bit hard to see the beauty of the surface on the web. But suffice it to say that I am very happy with how this turned out.

Technorati Tags: art, school

Yesterday afternoon, Noel took off for a gig and I attacked my beach ball.

First I would like to say that it takes quite a lot of air to inflate a 48" beach ball (it ended up being more like 35" diameter when inflated). I spent most of Friday blowing it up, with the help of our roommate's bike pump.

I borrowed the dog pool and made a vat of flour paste, and began work.

Technorati Tags: art, model building, school

We're working on an interesting little project in design, although it manages to be interesting while also being a project I was hoping to avoid in my later years of architecture school.

Here's where I started:

See, I told you it was interesting.

Technorati Tags: drawings, model building, plaster, school

Hey, I just got kicked out of my final exam in Farmer Class. No, not for brawling or cheating or anything really interesting. The teacher just went around and picked off everybody he was sure was going to get an A on the exam, wrote the grade on our tests and kicked us out.

Brawling would make a better story, to be sure.

Oh, and: the irony? When he did it, I was struggling with converting gallons to cubic inches because it was 7am and I was half awake (and hadn't had breakfast).

1. We had our final crit yesterday in studio, and for the first time this year, I felt really good about my project and really ready to be critiqued. And I feel like it shows in the project itself, if that's possible. I still need to tweak it before I turn it in next week, but it really only needs tweaking, nothing more.

2. I am signed up for studio over the summer, plus two construction classes for my minor. That means I don't get much of a summer break, but I'm on the accelerated track to graduate December 2007, which is a very good thing.

3. It was 85 degrees here today, and I am dying. I am so overheated that my hands are sweating. That is just wrong. Did I really just sign up to stay here for the whole summer?

4. I just started 36 plantlets from my Mother Fern. So if you want a little Mother Fern in the fall, let me know, because I only want a few of these, but it seemed like a waste to not plant up more of them. For those of you who don't know, Mother Ferns are 24-30" tall ferns that produce little plantlets on the fronds (rather than making spores) that you can pot up and grow into new plants. Eventually the fronds get so weighted down by the plantlets that it's a good idea to remove them or the whole frond because the fern starts looking really sloppy. If you grow them outside, the frond will fall to the ground on its own and the plantlets will root themselves around the original plant, but mine is in a pot. Anyhow, they should be large enough to move around by September. They make good potted plants in shade, and in the Bay Area they can grow in the ground, though they will need rich soil.

Technorati Tags: ferns, heat, schedule, school, summer

On Wednesday I spent five hours cutting up pieces of construction paper and arranging them on larger pieces of paper. This was not silliness, it was mockups of my board layouts for our final project, which is due at 2pm next Wednesday. I was delighted to discover that not only do I have plenty of drawings to fill the boards, but in fact I have too many, and I can jettison some of the weaker ones.

It's surprising how many iterations you can go through in search of a good layout. We have restriction: two or three 30"x40" boards. And there's a list of required drawings and scales that basically account for 2/3 of the real estate on those boards (there was no way my building was fitting on two boards). So there's not a lot of flexibility to begin with. How did I manage to spend an entire studio period working on it?

Technorati Tags: design, drawings, school

I spent my day today detailing the structure for this ceiling:

Which was a lot harder than it looks; it took me six hours to get it right. (The sun pattern is for midday at the winter solstice. Pretty, huh?) Amazing how something as simple as a ceiling like that can take so long to draw out and explain. Also, please note that this ceiling has some bodaciously large beams going across it, because the room is fifty feet wide. So there was a bit of engineering work to do to calculate how big the beams needed to be and if it was possible to make them the way I wanted that took half my studio time on Friday.

Technorati Tags: design, design software, engineering, model building, school

Sometimes a bunch of small interesting things happen that aren't really worth their own entry, so here's a group from the last few weeks.

One of my classmates referred to the Leaning Pine Arboretum as the "Arbitrarium," which delights me more than I thought possible.

The scene: a long hallway in the library, nine feet wide, no openings on either side. I am walking along the right side, maybe six inches from the wall, and a guy coming towards me is walking directly ahead of me. As he approaches he edges to my right until he finally squeezes between me and the wall rather than use the wide open space to my left.

I have recently changed radio stations from the big-band, easy listening station with the unfortunate call letters (KKJL, which sounds like KKKL in the jingle) to the local heavy metal station. It's all classic 1980's heavy metal, small town and very funny in an unintentional way. The best part is the advertisements, which are all, with no exceptions, aimed at the over-35 yuppie demographic. I find the morning show so fascinating that I've had to change my commuting habits so I have ten extra minutes to sit in the car to wait for the next station announcement. I mean, how can you not love "Live, local, and rockin' Pismo Beach"?

Oh, yeah, and we had a fire today. The building my studio is in also has the support shop, and the dust collector caught fire and they had to call the fire department. It's Open House, so there are like 40,000 visitors on campus. Amusingly, a few years ago the same building caught fire during open house weekend because of a mechanical model gone wrong. I guess it's a tradition. Anyway, I'm sitting out on the lawn in the sunshine (despite predicted rain) and waiting for them to get it under control so I can go back to studio. I'm guessing maybe we won't have much of a crit today.

Technorati Tags: odd, school

The last 24 hours we have been doing a charette (an old tradition from the Academie des Beaux Arts in Paris, in which everybody works on one fast design problem; the name comes from the little cart that went by all the ateliers to collect the finished work). The program was a bus stop on campus, and this is one of my screenshots of my computer model of my design:

I really don't care for the charettes; they tend to be very competitive and I think they don't really bring out the best in a lot of people. But whatever: the work was assigned for class and I did it.

Technorati Tags: model building, school

I'm taking a class on irrigation technology and water resource management this quarter (not just because I want to, but because it both fills a huge hole in my schedule and fulfills a technology requirement). Sounds all technical, right? Well, let's just say that after the last year and a half of engineering classes, the idea of needing to spend two lectures on unit conversion including thirty minutes on inches to feet is simply beyond my understanding. I mean, I know the aggies drink a lot, but surely this is elementary stuff?

On the other hand, it is looking like it will be a fun class, especially when we get into the more interesting technical bits, like sizing and doing flow calculations. I was hoping for a section on wetlands reconstruction, but I think this is not the right class for that. I admit to a qualm or two when the teacher suggested that our take-away information for this course would be knowing how to install sprinklers in our lawns, but you know, I can actually use that information. Of course, I did just spend three months reading every book in the library about it and making a detailed sprinkler plan, but I'm always open to more information.

Other than that, I have just studio and professional practise. Thirteen units. I'm not sure how I'm going to cope, with so little to do at school. In all likelihood, I will waste the time on things like reading that whole shelf of books I just found on concrete mix design. The library of a technical school is full of gems like that.

Technorati Tags: school

I forgot until today that oh, yeah, I should go and get my stuff out of the studio. And it has to happen tonight, because I have a final tomorrow afternoon and after that the girls and I are bundling into the car and heading North for my week off. (Can't do it in the morning because there's no parking nearby during the day.) I was going to do laundry tonight but found a secret stash of clean clothes, so I guess I'll use that time to move out of the studio. At least a lot of it is just going to be recycled, because I have electronic copies already. Less stuff to haul down stairs and cram into the apartment somehow.

It's been cold and rainy here -- colder than in the Bay Area, according to my little weather monitor. So cold that on Monday morning when I went to drive in for my engineering exam there was ice all over my car, and when we go out for morning yard use at 6am, the dogs have been walking funny on the icy grass. The cold and the rain makes us all less inclined to hang out outside, so when it warmed up this morning it was a very pleasant change.

I finished my next-to last final (a take-home) yesterday evening so today all I had to do was stop by school before noon to drop it off, then the girls and I went to the beach for some sniffing and splashing. It was gorgeous: warm and sunny and not too windy, so we stayed for over an hour, which seemed to shake the beans out of them. Goldie was playing this really cute game where she would stand and wait for a wave, then jump on it and bite it. Adorable. And when we got home, neighbor-dog Naga was waiting for us, all ready to play, so we stayed out and threw balls with him for half an hour, until Goldie begged to go inside. We've spent so much time outside today that the dogs are completely socked out now, snoring their heads off on their respective beds. Not bad for a day off.

Technorati Tags: beach, california, dogs, school

Yes, I am still at school. Yes, I am still alive. I have three finals tomorrow (engineering at 7am, design review at 3pm, law at 4pm), then a final Tuesday (housing) and a final Thursday (environmental control systems). All of these I feel prepared for, although I am a little nervous about the engineering final.

That will be my last engineering test until I take the registration exams, for those of you keeping score at home. That definitely feels like an accomplishment.

In the mean time, I have the dogs with me for the week, so we can go to the beach and run and play. Except Goldie ate something bad and has the poops, so instead of getting to have fun, she's alternating between urgently needing to use the yard and sleeping it off. Poor thing. We're skipping the evening walkies because it's cold and rainy out, and she's pretty miserable anyway. I hope she feels better tomorrow.

Thursday afternoon I go home, then Friday Noel and I are playing hooky (him from work, me from nothing at all) at go to the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show. Because we can't get enough of the plant matter.

Spring break is a week long, then I'm back in school, trying to get into several construction management classes (non-majors can't register in advance, which means that whenever I want to take one or more of those classes, my schedule is a total mystery to me until the second week of classes). And apparently I'm super-popular, what with being famous and all, so my time in Alameda is rapidly booking up with dinners, garden projects, stitch and bitches, and some doctor-recommended sleep. So if you want to see me in the Bay Area next week, you better let me know soonish.

Technorati Tags: dogs, gardening, plants, school

And spray painted with dark grey primer:

Tomorrow I do more printing (I modified my plans and need to re-print them), some rendering, and build a light study model.

Technorati Tags: model building, school

This evening I finished the model for the CSDR project we've been working on this quarter. All I need to do now is spray paint the buildings dark grey and attach them to the base. The glue is still kind of wet, so that has to wait until tomorrow.

There are three buildings arranged around a central courtyard, to meet all my program requirements. The closer one in this photo has a large display lobby for exhibits, some conference rooms, and the administrative offices for the program (in the low section in the middle). There's a huge theater/lecture hall off to the left of the building. The zig-zag roofs is eight units of housing, loft-style, for graduate students and faculty. Half the roofs have solar panels on them. The other building is laboratory space, classrooms, and offices. There's a cafeteria there, too, because this campus is located well away from the nearest campus food services.

Technorati Tags: model building, school

It's that time of the quarter again and I've been deeply buried in model building and drafting. I got a bit ahead yesterday, finishing a model I meant to finish today, but that turned out to be a good thing because I spent half of today asleep. Ah, sleep debt. I'm not going to be able to do that again for another week.

This evening I just finished my research paper for construction law (managing risk in design-build contracts) and am now beginning my engineering homework. My last ever engineering homework. Hah. Amazing how good it feels to be finishing the engineering sequence. Almost as good as it felt to finish the history sequence.

Next week, last week of classes, I finish my models, finish my research project for housing, print all those drawings I finished (but came up with a modification for yesterday), do some renderings (I'm planning to do them based on the models), do some drawings (I have them on the boards and just need to finish the shading), then breathe deeply and relax and prepare for my final crit on Friday. I've actually scheduled it out and can afford to slip schedule by an entire day without a problem, and that's not likely to happen, on account of how far ahead I got yesterday. Calm and relaxed.

Wednesday morning, the San Francisco interns are meeting to do a planning session. Wednesday is usually my sleep-until-noon day, because I don't have class until one, but I guess it will give me some motivation to work on project stuff if I have to get on campus for a morning meeting. After that I might as well go up to the studio and work all day.

Anyway, if you don't hear much from me this week it's because of that, although I do have some plans to post photos of the model and so forth.

Oh, and also, check out this piece on house blogs in the New York Times magazine. I do kind of wish some of my self-deprecating humour had come out in the writeup, but you can't have everything, so I guess I get to be the Austenian heroine instead, which isn't bad. The site is kind of getting something like a hundred times the normal traffic right now, which is only slightly intimidating.

Technorati Tags: model building, school

I just found out I was accepted into the San Francisco Internship program for next Fall quarter. That means I get to live at home for a quarter, and make lots of professional connections. Yay me!

Technorati Tags: school

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

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

Technorati Tags: california, trees

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

I have quite a bit of teaching experience. A couple of semesters of composition, a long period of literacy work, and a couple of years of teaching non-technical people computer programming basics. It's true that teaching gets easier with practise, but I am here to tell you that nothing, absolutely nothing, is as good at teaching you how to be a good teacher as being a student with teaching experience.

It's really simple. You get to see somebody else make all the mistakes. You get to compare their style to yours and notice things you never noticed before. Just like the realization when you first stand up in front of the classroom: Oh my god, the teacher really can see and hear everything that happens in here. But in reverse.

So I decided to start keeping track of some of the mistakes I see my teachers make, and some notes for myself on being a better teacher. Bear in mind, this is not a criticism of my professors. All my teachers are great, the state certainly doesn't pay them very well, they have to try to cram lots of material into the typical ten-week quarter system, and the outdated equipment and materials available are embarrassing when you consider that this is the world's fifth largest economy running this place. But they are mostly not teachers by vocation: most of my teachers are engineers or architects or construction managers or what have you, first and foremost, and they give up no small number of billable hours to come give us the latest, greatest, and most relevant information. So there's a lot they can learn about teaching.

Technorati Tags: advice, school, teaching

I didn't scan these two drawings last week before turning them in, because I didn't totally finish the shading until right before class. I really dislike drawing in pencil, but I'll tolerate it. In a week or so, we're supposed to transition to conte crayon, which I dislike even more. I hate messy drawing materials. I'd rather go to pen or marker.

Technorati Tags: drawings, pencil

I've got my school schedule all worked out now: 19 credits, which sounds like a lot but is actually a pretty workable load. Almost all my classes are Tuesday and Thursday, which sounds great until I tell you that they start at 7 in the morning and go until 9 at night. I get some decent breaks in there, but still.

My studio is doing a neat project this quarter: years ago the College of Architecture and Environmental Design put together a proposal for a Renewable Energy/Sustainable Design Research Center, but what with our budget being slashed into tiny pieces and the students even having to vote ourselves a special fee to ensure that there were enough classes that current students could graduate, it's been shelved. So we're going to use the proposal and the proposed site (on campus) and design it. This will allow me to develop an idea I have for modular plumbing (so you can easily switch out, say, experimental toilet designs). We got a glimpse of the program today, and we are starting our first exercise in the process.

Technorati Tags: drawings, floorplans, school

The studio I'm in this quarter requires weekly sketches, so I guess I'll be posting more sketches here for the next ten weeks. This week there was no real assignment, per se, except to do two sketches in pencil. I did a little theme pair, both fountains.

Technorati Tags: drawings, pencil

This is a week of crits. We had a bunch of architects and instructors in today to see our desk setups. Tomorrow our instructor is going from desk to desk critiquing our work. Friday we have our "exit interviews." It's a paradoxical mix of rushing to get work done -- we can work between crits to adapt our designs to the feedback -- and sitting and waiting or listening to somebody rip your work to shreds.

Here's my desk this afternoon:

I finished off the site model with a couple of little massing models. They're pretty rough, but I just wanted to show relative size.

Tomorrow afternoon, a half dozen architects descend on my studio to discuss what I've been doing all quarter.

Tonight, I stayed late and managed to bruise two fingers making this (the glue and the bottle of mini-bungie cords are holding it while the glue sets):

It's a 1/32" scale topographic model of my site with the plan drawn on it. Tomorrow I will drop in some small cardboard massing models where the two buildings are on the site, but the bruising on my fingers is bad enough that now I need to give them a rest from cutting board. And some sleep would be nice, too.

I have a set of technical pens, Rapiographs, and they are the biggest whiney babies of the pen world, I swear to god. Today, as I'm drawing details onto my final studio drawings, they are cloggy and spitty, and my hands are covered in black ink. I do need to give them another go through the ultrasonic cleaner, but I think some of the finer nibs need to be replaced, especially the one in which I made the collosal mistake of using white ink -- official Rapidograph ink, but it turned out to be cloggier than the fine black ink that's the standard.

I'm on the edge of just trashing the set and replacing them with Rapidoliners, which are the same basic thing but with disposable ink cartridges that incorporate the nibs, so every time you refill you get a fresh, unclogged nib. I am about to walk up to the campus store and see if they have anything in a double-ought (0.30mm for you metric types) technical pen for a reasonable amount, because mine just, well, blew up. I wonder if you get a discount for coming in covered head to toe in India ink.

Also in the misbehaving studio supplies this year are the metal 18" ruler with cork backing that has been shedding the cork backing despite repeated re-gluings, and the 36" metal straightedge that... well, who knows what happened to it, but it is no longer in my bin of rulers, nor is it anywhere in the studio, so all I can imagine is that it has made its escape after years of putting up with me using it to knock objects off high shelves. Oh, yeah, and the parallel rule for my drawing board (which, admittedly, I never use any more) snapped a connector and is no longer parallel. I'm trying to decide if the repair is worth it.

Of course, everything has to break or need maintenance right when we're 24 hours from deadline in studio.

This weekend the Cal Poly AIAS took a field trip to San Francisco. I joined them for part of it, because I didn't see any point to going to hang out at Fisherman's Wharf but there were two firm tours and a visit to the De Young on the agenda that I was interested in.

The rebuild De Young museum is nice, but clearly needed more thought given to circulation and usability. You enter a courtyard, and when you get to the door you realize there is a ribboned-off passage to your right, so you have to leave and come back in. Then you get in the door and there are ticket counters to your right, where you stand in line again (no ribbons this time), then there are stands at the entrances to the exhibits that say, "Ticket Check Point," and a lot of people seemed not to understand that they didn't need a special ticket to enter there.

The collection is OK. Not all great but some nice pieces. The museum itself was more interesting, but only in the sense that I found it a good study in how not to make space easy to understand.

I've been filling up my sketchbook with little tiny sketches to get my mind around my design project. The basic shape is good, but a lot of little details in the connections are weird and confusing. I was unsure until last Friday about just how wide this building was going to end up being.

So I have a lot of this:

I also threw together a quick slice model on Monday, to get a better understanding of my roof slope. It doesn't look half bad, and I've worked it out so the center hallway (what appears to be between two doors but actually is between two closets) has a tall ceiling, but not mine-shaft tall, while the rooms to the sides have a ceiling that comes down to a reasonable height.

Yes, I am a big fan of the scissor truss. They just seem lighter and more elegant than a plain old triangular roof truss.

This is the sixth week of the term, and today marked the halfway point to the end of studio, so we had a midterm crit. This means we set up our desks with what we have been working on, and our teacher invites local architects and other teachers to come in and critique our work. For the last few weeks we've been designing a visitor's center and hostel to go at the base of one of the local "mountains" (more of a hill, really).

Here's my desk, waiting to be attacked:

I was pretty nervous about this crit. Not because I didn't have enough work done, but because for some reason I can work on a project for a week and get pretty far along, and then the teacher will tell me to step backwards and go through my generative process so he can see it. When you've been designing stuff for more than a few years, it's really hard to walk through that process, kind of like trying to explain to somebody how your tongue works when you're saying the letter "f." So designing in school has been a lot of painful, excruciatingly slow exercises in explaining how I do things I tend to do without thinking about consciously.

As it was, I got only one piece of really useful criticism, which was that the first architect who looked at my work thought the wall arrangement was too inflexible for a hostel. In between that crit and the next visitor, I redrew the floorplan and fixed that problem and one other one I'd been puzzling over.

But everybody liked how I used tracing paper overlays to show the layers of process in my work. Big hit with the local architect crowd.

So, yeah, school. I'm kind of light this quarter, with only my studio, a few support classes, and construction finance. I'm doing yet more baby engineering for non-engineers: small scale structures this quarter, then large-scale next, then I'm done with the engineering sequence. It's a mere sixteen credits all together this quarter, which feels like basically nothing, although my finance teacher certainly gives us enough homework to keep me working on the stuff just about non-stop.

This year in studio we're supposed to learn more about the site: analyzing it, designing with it in mind. So with that in mind, on Monday we had a field trip.

The Cal Poly "Greeks" -- frats and sororities -- are all upset this week because Housing distributed a pamphlet to dorm residents that gives national figures for rape among Greeks, and it is not flattering. (What a surprise!)

Rather than make a real effort to a) get actual statistics on Greek-related rapes on Cal Poly's campus, and b) make a real effort to stop the crimes caused by excessive drinking and drug use that are endemic in the system, they got all huffy in the campus paper about how those statistics are stereotyping and cause prejudgement. Because, you know, warning freshman girls that they might be preyed upon by frat boys is somehow oppressing the frat boys. God forbid we should try to help women avoid situations where they are in more danger than they expected.

Who's surprised that there are more rapes as a result of frat parties than other types? Nobody, because that's what happens there. Who's surprised that you don't see many upper classwomen at frat parties, and if you do, they're not drinking much? Nobody, because the older a college woman gets, the more savvy she gets about avoiding situations where she might be preyed upon.

Now, that is a problem the system can solve. By changing the tenor of their parties, by changing the culture of fraternity life from a rehash of Animal House to a real community-oriented club. But they do not care to, and so they will be judged by their actions as a whole.

The president of the campus Greek Council can protest all he wants, but the fact is that Housing had actual facts about the situation, and all the council can come up with is a sort of mock-victimization, as if suddenly it's the frats and not the women who get raped that are the real victims. As far as I can tell, the only argument they have is that the numbers might be different for Cal Poly, although they have no statistics to offer. Forgive me if I find their argument considerably less compelling.

After what was not entirely as relaxing a summer as I would have liked (I'd been hoping to spend it gardening, after all), I am back in school. With what feels like a ridiculously easy schedule, though I'm sure I will be more rushed as the quarter progresses.

This is my schedule (because I know you are all on the edge of your seats):

My earliest days, Tuesday and Thursday, start at nine. My latest days start at one. If it were possible with the sun shining right on my face, I could sleep until noon those days.

Of course, my late days end at eight, so that sort of takes the fun out of it.

I've been noticing lately that I get creative spurts that come on all at once. Lately I've been working on my final project for design, but I've also been planning a sweater (I've given up on patterns; they drive me nuts and are often wrong; if I have to do all the work anyway, I'll design exactly what I want), working on a garden design for the far-off future when we have a yard again, and designing three web pages.

Maybe I need to work on spacing this out a bit better.

Um, so. We've been doing a lot of stuff in studio and professional practice. This leads to me just not posting much because there's enough going on that it seems like there's too much to post every day, but then again, at the end of the week there's an even huger pile of stuff to talk about. So I'm going to skip some stuff and you will have to trust me that it was not all that interesting, anyway.

I don't know where my obsession with anthropomorphic buildings has come from, lately, but as I said, I've been designing this ritual space for architecture for the last few weeks. On Wednesday we had our crit (we have six more to get through today).

We had to do a series of drawings, a slice model, and a detailed model called a fragment.

I guess I should have known something like this would happen when I started designing a building based on hands and bones and tendons. Somehow, my design for our latest project has morphed into a bony structure with chunky, knuckle-like bits, lacing over a twisty, organic staircase in the shape of a uterus and ovaries.

Maybe there is something to the theory that all good artists are insane.

So we had our models of our room for drawing due last week, and we presented them to the class on Friday and Monday. I didn't have the digital camera down with me, but my teacher took photos and gave them to me, so you can all see them. (Well, actually, he took the photos for grading and his teaching portfolio, but the side effect of that is that you get nice photos instead of crappy cameraphone ones.)

Ah, so the quarter, how is it going? Quite well, thanks for asking. Not that you did, of course, but I have my little fantasies.

You can never quite get away from plaster in architecture, can you? In studio we've been working on a quick, two-week "warm-up" project. It's kind of complicated, but bear with me and you'll see how fun it really has been.

I am going to spend April Fool's Day on a college campus with 17,000 undergraduates.

shudder

At Smith, exams worked differently. You had a week or so to take exams, but you could mostly take them when you wanted, because you went, checked the exam out, did it, then checked it back in the right amount of time later. A good, well-enforced honour code and trust in the students meant that if you had two easy exams, you could do them the same day, and study for the one hard one the rest of the time.

The last week of classes at Cal Poly is traditionally called "Dead Week" in the College of Architecture, for reasons which seem to be lost to antiquity. Anyway, the last day of Dead Week is when all the studio crits are held. Noel came down Thursday night so he could see my presentation. And now you get to see it (well, the pictures from it, at least), too. But first, some scene setting....

I actually finished building my model today, on time and on schedule. I was the only student who managed it, and I did it by not spending the first week screwing around like my classmates.

Today I did the kitchen and living room, both of which relied heavily on pieces built for other rooms (like cabinets and bookshelves. I also made some backdrop walls for the photos, which naturally I will be posting here as I work on my presentation. I'm so glad that I don't have to rush on this, because I have 200 doctor appointments this week and Noel is coming down Thursday night to see me and go to my presentation/crit. This will be his first visit during school, and I'm very excited.

...

Our final project for studio is a live/work space, and last week I made the "work" part of the equation. The thing that's due is a bunch of photos of the space, so I'm going to re-use a lot of the pieces for the kitchen and living room, which are all that remain to be built.

And of course, I have photos. Some actually taken with a decent digital camera instead of with the cameraphone.

...

Lots of model-building today. I finished my framing model for practise (the final is going to be open-book! And open-notes!), and also did a bunch more work on my final model for design. Our "deliverable" is actually a set of photos of the model, so today I changed my strategy on the advice of one of the teachers and began "building towards the photos": basically, building only what I need to get the photos I need for my final presentation.

I must say that building out of balsa wood lends a finished look to the model that cardboard lacks. Some photos....

My desk in the studio is a bit cluttered right now, because we're in the middle of a couple of teeny-bits-of-balsa-intensive projects. In studio, we're designing a house to fit in an alleyway downtown, through a process of writing stories about how the space is being used (it has to be a live/work space for ourselves) and then creating models that fit those stories. Very interesting, indeed, though you should hear the grousing and complaining about it, all from people who don't have itchy pieces of tape stuck to their backs.

In professional practise, which also takes place in the studio, we're building a framing model of a sample house. We already did a set of working drawings (though not a very complete one), so we have all the measurements. I'm almost done with mine except that I keep running out of materials because it certainly takes a lot of STUFF to make a weensy little house, where STUFF is balsa wood.

...

I'd kind of forgotten that I could write long rambly posts about things like going to the grocery store, chiefly because I haven't been going to the grocery store. I haven't been starving, but I haven't had the time to deal with it lately. So this afternoon, after Noel left to go home, I ran errands.

...

I mentioned that the second year studios were doing a sketch problem, right? It was due today, and this is what mine looks like. All the teachers will be voting for their favourites, and the solution with the most votes wins. I hope I win the contest, or at least get some votes.

...

I've been drawing a lot today, which is probably why I have this terrible cramp in both my shoulders. Yes, I switched off hands, but there are some things my right hand does better than my left, and shading is one of them.

But I have photos.

...

I'm starting to think about getting a summer job. If you know of an architect or engineer in San Francisco or otherwise accessible from the East Bay, who wants a part-time summer flunky (or what the heck, full-time summer flunky) with CAD and hand-drafting experience, drop me an e-mail or send them here.

Last week we worked on building complexity into our designs. We made three models of a space with a simple program (mine was a day spa with a sun deck and a pool) and increasing levels of complexity in defining the space.

...

I finished my engineering homework in two hours tonight, which is the sort of stunning accomplishment I never hoped to be able to write about. Granted, it was a shorter-than-usual assignment, but usually I average 45 minutes a problem (because they are so detailed), and tonight I finished eight in two hours. Hey, wow, I must be getting this.

...

Three more years of this is really going to be a drag, isn't it? Well, suffer. Here are some photos from the work I've been doing in studio, plus one of me actually rowing my cardboard boat.

...

I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, really. I've just been really busy. To tide you over, I offer some scans of my notebook this quarter, where I put all the assigned drawings and my notes or ideas from class discussions.

...

My boat made it across the pool and back just fine, actually. It was the only boat that suffered absolutely no damage from the trip. It was one of six that were still usable after the race. Yay, me. Of course, I totally lost, but I didn't come in dead last in my heat. Photos of me to come when my classmate who took them e-mails them to me. I look cute. Seriously.

Crappy cameraphone photos of the race below.

...

This is probably my last entry ever, as I prepare to meet my watery end tomorrow afternoon. So I figured it was a good time to show some boat pictures from our boat show this afternoon, and talk about matters of boat design.

(edited to add some more comments on boat design knowledge.)

...

Last week was a frenzy of cardboard boat construction, which mostly involved tedious measuring of regular triangles and folding. Lots of wetting of paper tape, too. As a preview of the race on Saturday, I offer you this photo essay on boatmaking.

...

So the cardboard boat building continues, with minor interruptions for purchase of items like twine and a very long ruler (I can use just about any size of metal ruler, if you're casting about for somebody to take some of them off your hands, by the way, not that anybody ever is). Actually, the ruler has not yet been purchased because the fricking-fracking hardware store closed at 6pm which indicates that nobody who shops there has a regular job.

Anyway. I figured to show some more photos. Just to keep you all coming back for more excitement.

...

As it turns out, I can take my writing test before I go to a watery grave in a cardboard boat (in an outdoor pool, rain or shine), so I was reading over some of the information on the test. It's a 500-word essay on some topic, for which you have two and a half hours.

Nothing makes you feel smarter than having the California State University system tell you that in order to graduate (or, in my case, in order to change status to graduate student), you must pass a (two and a half hour) (500 word) writing test where the following might be helpful:

The Writing Lab also offers a selection of helpful handouts on essay writing in general, on organizing paragraphs, on making paragraphs specific, on how to develop ideas rather than repeat them, on writing summaries, and a handout particularly designed to help students write under pressure.

Except possibly this passage:

If you want to brush up on grammar, punctuation, usage, or essay organization, the University Writing Lab Website has links to several helpful online resources. Some of these sites offer interactive tutorials and powerpoint presentations to help you review the basics of essay writing.

OK, I'll give you that for whatever reason, California taxpayers decided it was a bad idea to actually educate our children unless their parents are rich enough to send them to private school. But there's something wrong with needing to teach punctuation to college juniors, ya know?

(Before the e-mail starts, note that this test is used to get around taking a composition class (because you want to take other classes for most students, or because you would die of boredom in my case); foreign students don't have a choice about taking English composition, so it's not as if the people taking this test are not, in theory, fluent speakers of English.)

As I was writing this, it occurred to me to be grateful for one thing more in my life: I don't have to grade those tests.

This quarter is unlike last quarter in that we have huge amounts of work to do in studio. This is good and it is super busy-making. I do feel like I'm getting more real portfolio work in this quarter, but also I feel a little overwhelmed and rushed. Between long hours in studio and trying to get the dog enough exercise, I always seem to be running late for something.

Anyway, projects.

...

I got e-mail from a friend today that started out, "So, how's school going?"

I just finished my second day of classes. I'm not entirely sure how school is going, to be honest, but I can give you my impressions of my classes so far.

...

Notebooks. We keep notebooks. OK, architects' notebooks don't have to withstand solvent spills, but they do have to stand up to Coke or glue. Which is why I am saving this link to lab notebook information here.

Some quotes:

Not everyone sets out with the goal of patenting a process or contraption, but you might stumble onto something important and in such an event you must have a notebook that supports your claims. If you have not kept up a proper laboratory notebook, other researchers and their patent lawyers will beat you to the Patent Office and to the bank.

Some researchers insist on reserving the left-hand page for "cryptic notes to self, and quick calculations", and the right-hand page for "real" entries. Do not do this. This strategy undermines the more important goal of keeping a notebook that is truly dechipherable by others. If you have made "calculations and notes to self" without proper narrative explanation and justification, you, too, will probably find the left-hand page unusable after several months have elapsed.

Good stuff.

Yesterday was the last day of classes, and at the College of Architecture and Environmental Design that means one thing: crits!

I have some photos from third and fourth year crits, plus photos from my own studio: my classmates and my work. So read on.

I'm in a frenzy of model-building this week, for our crit on Friday (arch school speak: a crit is when you set up your work all nice-like and everybody piles on and gives you what-for about it. This is actually desireable because most of the time the feedback you get comes from the teacher or your friends, so on this one day you get to hear a lot of other responses to your work and learn from them. Or have your heart broken if you're a fragile flower).

I'm back in SLO after what feels like a very short holiday break. Rosie came back with me because Noel has a conference this week, and we had a good talk on the way down about how too much traffic sucks, and how we're not going to get to play as much this week as we did last week, because it's going to be very busy.

I did all the talking, of course.

I stayed up until about 2am finishing some watercolours that are due today in studio. The thing about watercolours is, you really can't rush them. So I have one watercolour that took three days and is very nice, and six that took several hours each and are OK. Looser, to be sure, but workable. One is drying as I type this from a final layer of paint. Of course, they're all of the same basic thing: the Arizona desert.

...

I went back to Alameda this weekend, and I felt completely removed from everybody I saw. It's as if the travel puts a layer of emotional distance between me and people who live there.

We did more watercolours and drawing in studio today, which was stressful and painful because I was feeling kind of out of it and had to work hard to stay upright on the stool. I had almost skipped out of school altogether after physics, where I was so out of it that I almost passed out.

I came home and had some dinner, but I can't say as how that helped much. I must be anaemic right now, or I'm coming down with the evil cold everybody else has had, but I won't allow that to happen. Iron pills are easy enough to come by. A week of rest is not.

Anyway, I won't torture you all with the hideous paintings I did in class today. They were horrible. My trees kept coming out like evil bright green blobs of ugliness. Maybe that wooziness was getting to me.

I came home as soon as we finished up and have been doing engineering homework since then. I've plowed through most of it, only to get stumped by one 3D strut problem that seems to have one too many unknowns. I know I'm missing some hint in the question, so I figured I'd check the Sox's score (there IS a God!) and browse the web a bit, only I managed to kink my back up so badly in studio that it hurts to surf the web. Dammit.

As of this afternoon, I'm officially a Construction Management minor, as well as an ARCH major. This involved more running around than I care to go into, but when I did eventually get the right paperwork to the right person, it was a matter of a frank discussion about getting into classes (hard; CM is an impacted program; there are techniques for getting into classes, but it needs persistence) and timing for the nine required classes, then a signature filed in the office.

Construction Management is managing the construction phase of a project, making a budget, bidding it, setting up a timeline, making sure everybody shows up when they're supposed to and does what the plans say. It's what contractors do. It's what architects SHOULD do, but chose not to in favour of being artists, heaven knows why. Here's the result: Construction Management majors get recruited out of college with lots of bribery and competition over them for the many open positions. Architecture majors have to fight 200 other applicants tooth and claw for one low-paying design job that they hunted for a year to find. I'd do a double major but I can't quite swing that and the Master's program in the fourth and fifth years.

So here's my new apartment in San Luis Obispo. It's quite nice inside, largish for a studio, with a full bathroom and a decent kitchen. I have a dinky little under-counter fridge, but that will just make me eat better, because I can't buy frozen food.

We had breakfast at IHOP on Saturday, while I was reading my new lease over before signing it and faxing it over. When we came out, Rosie was sitting in the driver's seat. That's her thing.

Somewhat out of order, this is the model I worked on on Friday night while Noel sat on a conference call for a network outage at work. We went to my studio at school to do that, because there's good network coverage there and there would be something for me to do, too. Just about when Noel finished his call, I finished my model (apart from the painting, which I did Monday morning). Good timing.

If you have my address in San Luis Obispo, don't send me anything there. I'm moving this weekend. Mail me for the new address.

I just bought a new backpack. I know that doesn't sound very exciting, but believe me, when you compare it to doing force calculations, it kinda grows on you.

Also, I've been making some stuff this quarter, and if you follow this link, you can see some of my schoolwork.

I've had a lot of homework (but not, oddly, very hard homework, with the exception of that engineering problem which turned out to be quite easy once we knew the trick), but this evening I was sitting on my bed doing some of it and getting ready to go out again for the Habitat for Humanity meeting, when my bad sleeping schedule for this week caught up with me abruptly, and I basically keeled over.

I slept for two hours, and woke up feeling predictably groggy and out of it, some of which has been healed by having some dinner (I missed breakfast this morning because I had a hard time getting up and was running late). Unfortunately, I missed the meeting, though of course I can just drop them e-mail and ask if when the next one is and when work days are. I figure all the knowledge of drywall and so forth that I've gotten over the last couple years should come in pretty handy, and maybe I can learn some other skills, too. On somebody else's house.

We did lettering today in studio, and then several Golden Mean exercises (yawn). Next time, we're going to work on model-building skills and go over the process of bubble diagramming. We did have one interesting discussion today, when the kids were giving the teacher shit about the lettering and drawing exercises (and when it was clear that most of them had not done the work). She asked us what we wanted to do as architects, and predictably most people raised their hand at "designer." "You know how many designers there are in the typical firm? If you want that job, you better be prepared to compete for it."

I want to be a programmer/project manager, personally. I guess I'm not going to have to compete tooth and claw for that job, if my studio is anything to go by.

Now back to my regularly scheduled homework exercises.

Well, I think I was just as close to a 5.9 earthquake as I've ever been.

We were in the middle of class and when everybody gasped as the entire Architecture building shook violently, the teacher (who hadn't noticed it because he was pacing) thought we were reacting to his lecture.

This being California, and a computer class, we immediately went and checked USGS's web site and saw that there were just a bunch of big ones and medium ones out in Parkfield (which is on the other side of Paso Robles from us). God, we are such geeks.

I got all smug about my workload with Charlotte yesterday, and then one of my homework problems for statics totally and completely stumped me and my study partner today. It was stunning. We spent two hours writing and re-writing the same equations and finding ourselves with equations that had no fewer than two unknowns in them no matter what. We finally resolved to try to track the teacher down tomorrow, but I was unable to let it go and have been fiddling with the problem since I got home.

We had our "pin-up" today in studio, where we put out all our recent work and went through a critique. I thought the teacher was remarkably fair and gentle about things, but some of my classmates got all upset about her suggestions for improvements. She critiqued my portfolio first, and had nothing bad to say about it, so maybe that set up some unrealistic expectations. Actually, I would have liked some feedback more than "this is good."

Sometimes I feel like I'm really "getting it" and then I go through a pin-up and I was just totally wrong, but today it was just about right. I felt like the feedback I got on my work was in keeping with the amount of "getting it" I felt. It was very pleasant.

It was very nice to work in a studio with all my tools and things right there at hand. I'm glad Noel helped me take them in this weekend. There are still some things I could use from home, but what I have with me is good.

Now I'm going to go back to work on that statics problem.

One thing that people told me over and over about transferring to a professional program in architecture was that I would not have many free weekends. So far, that is not the case. Noel came down through FIVE HOURS of traffic Friday, and we had a nice, relaxed weekend together, and now I'm sitting down to do some physics work and some statics homework which will not take more than a few hours.

On Saturday we went out to breakfast, then drove out to the airport to see if there was a book about planes Noel wanted at the store there. While we were there we looked at prices for flight school for me (relatively reasonable) and talked to an instructor about what the process would be able how much of a time commitment she expects it to be.

The idea is that if Noel buys a cheap commuter plane, I should be able to fly it, too, to make traveling that way safer.

Then we unloaded some things Noel brought for me from his car, and loaded a bunch of art supplies I needed to bring to school into his car, and went by my studio to drop it all off (much nicer than trying to schlep it across campus during the week). The key to the studio also opens the building, which is super nice.

Then we went shopping for a rolling set of drawers, to see what options were available and so forth, so I can have one set of drawers that I move on campus every quarter, which will roll around from place to place instead of having to be dragged. But prices were high and features were low, so maybe a bit more thinking things out is in order. I may decide to build something, but bought drawers have the advantage of having good locksets on them.

In the evening, we went out to eat Tsurugi, which was wonderful. Good, fresh fish, not terribly artfully arranged or as perfect in appearance as at Ebisu, but fresh fresh fresh, which counts for a lot in sushi.

This morning, we drove out to Morro Bay and had breakfast at a dismal little diner called The Coffee Pot, which had uninspired food. Then we drove around a little before we had to get back to my house and get Noel off to the Bay Area, so he could mow the lawn before it got dark.

Next weekend I'll be home, and the weekend after that. I get to see the animals!

So I said I would say more about this portfolio project, and now I am putting out, as it were. The assignment was to make a container, at least 11" x 11", to hold and display the work we do this quarter. This container should say something about us, personally.

I was thinking along the lines of a binder, then I thought maybe a box would be nice, but it all came together when I thought of something Noel said to me on Friday when I showed him the tool holder I had worked on instead of painting the Front Bedroom: "You like to make things, don't you?" And I do. Making things was why I wanted to study architecture; making software was not as satisfying, and there was always the peril of one's hard work being wiped out with no trace.

So I decided to make an elaborate multi-layer portfolio, and in the end I decided to make it from printed cotton because seeing printed cotton always makes me think of my mom, who also likes to make things.

I chose four fabrics to keep it simple (but I ended up buying many more because I could not make up my mind). One looks like a wooden floor (the house), another is gold with bees on it (because I like bees and they are a symbol of female power), then there's a dark raspberry that's just mottled (no special symbolism in that), and finally a wasabi green with sushi and chopsticks printed on it (which reminds me of eating sushi with Noel and my favourite story about him overeating and not being able to lie down, and how I was laughing so hard).

There's more to the fabrics, though. The ones visible when the portfolio is closed are drab and brown, though nice enough. They make it look very ordinary:

But then you open it up and the raspberry is visible and it is clear that there is more here than is immediately visible. I feel like that says a lot about me.

As you peel back the layers, the sushi is revealed.

Keep in mind that when this thing is done, it will have papers covering most of the sushi.

These pictures are a bit out of date. I finished assembling the main part of the thing, and now I have to to some embroidery on the corners and sew on the large tortoiseshell button and a ribbon to hold the thing closed. But I'm proud of myself for having finished the major work.

You may wonder how I managed to sew this whole thing so fast, or how I knew to bring my sewing machine. Well, I did not sew it. I used this tape that basically glues the fabric together, which you set with an iron (the first time I ever used the stuff was on my Space Bee costume). So the miracles of modern chemistry came to my rescue. It's neat stuff, but I would never use it for something that I wanted to last 10 years. It's one thing if my portfolio disintegrates in less than a decade; it would be much worse for a quilt to do so.

Since I overbought on the fabric front, I may use some of the other fabrics to make little folders for projects that fit inside the portfolio.

I had my first long studio today. Five hours, from one until six. For the first two hours we went to see a photography exhibit my professor has up on campus, which was very interesting. A technical/architectural way of looking at light in Italy.

Anyway, here's a picture my new home away from my home away from home:

And my desk space:

We worked on some very basic cutting and pasting composition exercises today. This teacher is very classical in her approach, which is interesting and sort of a relief after the High Design of my last few design studios. I was working decently fast, so I felt able to take my time and do a job that was one step up from what I usually do. My gluing came out really nice.

I had a revelation in physics today, as I was trying to understand why we were getting a whole hour of lecture (well, screaming) on the concept of pressure being force divided by area. It was related to the fact that my statics teacher had spent an hour explaining vector addition and then said he'd go into more detail next time. The revelation was: Hey! My classmates are one or two years out of high school! They actually don't know this stuff! This is NEWS to them!

So maybe physics will not be my hardest class.

Now I'm going to go make some dinner and settle in with some nice comfortable engineering textbooks.

A longish post composed over a couple days, talking about school and the new house and animals and impossible art projects, as usual.

I was browsing around, eating lunch and reading the news, when I came across this little gem. It seems that the average British woman is carrying A purse with a total value of over $1,000.

I thought that seemed a bit high, but then I considered the impact of a couple gadgets like a camera phone and a Palm, and I realized how quickly the total could grow. So I stopped for a moment to consider what I carry in the student version of a purse: my backpack.

Lesse, we have the laptop, which is about $2,500. Software: $2,000. iPod: $300. 40GB of songs on iPod: $sheesh. Graphing calculator: $100. Drawing tools: $100. Textbooks: $400. Phone: $300.

That's over $4,000, not including notebooks and pens and other assorted crap I might be carrying. I can't even say that it'd be an unusual day for me to be carrying all that, because that's pretty much what I've got to pack onto campus with me every day this year.

Well, at least now you know who to rob.

I've run out of plaster, so finishing the Front Bedroom plastering has to wait until tomorrow, when the hardware store is open and I feel like it (no, I won't shop at Home Depot in order to save some money and time; we have a nice hardware store close to home that has helpful staff and where I'm never treated like a criminal, and I am willing to pay some in cash and convenience for that).

Instead I've been doing a bunch of little things to get ready for school: buying a docking station for the laptop, so I can drop it onto my desk when I get home and use my customary keyboard and mouse, buying a carrying case for the iPod so I don't ruin it, buying a new handlebar and some baskets for my bike so I can use it for commuting (I think also some fatter tires are in order, but that can wait until John gets back from heliskiing and can advise me), sorting through desk items, installing more software (Adobe Creative Suite today), deciding which pieces of furniture need buying (so far: bed, bookcase, some sheets for the bed).

I had a little spate of buying new music last week, so I should have plenty of interesting things to listen to while working.

I'm moderately ticked off that the room I rented in San Luis Obispo ended up being smaller than advertised (more like 10' x 12' than 14' x 14' as originally claimed) but since I don't plan to spend a huge amount of time in there, it doesn't matter all that much. I do wish there were not a bunch of somebody else's stuff stored in my closet, but that can be Dealt With Later. I'm accomodating because I have roommates who won't rely on me to get them alcohol, and because I don't have to buy anything for the kitchen or the rest of the house; the stuff's all there. Also the place is close to campus and decently close to downtown, which is a nice bonus.

Everything else is going swimmingly, though: I have my classes and schedule squared away, books are ordered for classes that require them, I've covered my drawing board with vinyl board cover, I've got the information I need about where to be when on Monday next week, I've got my parking permit and attached it to its approved hanger (purchased for 50c from the cashier yesterday), I have almost everything ready to load into a rented van and move down there next weekend.

From here it's all filling in the details. Some people tell you that's the hardest part, but really, the hardest part is getting the underlying structure there to detail.

Usually, when I talk about my schedule, it is with angst and much suffering, but today, it is with great happiness.

That is because yesterday, the Architecture department sent me e-mail telling me they were opening some slots in a class I needed, and today I was able to register for it. So my schedule is over at 6pm on the latest days, instead of 9pm as it might have done. This is a good thing because it starts at 8am every day, and I simply cannot handle more schedules like last spring (7am to 9pm).

Also, I was able to pre-reserve my textbooks online with a discount for doing so, so they will be ready for me to pick up the weekend before classes start (big bonus, because crowded bookstores are no fun). And the laptop is pretty much ready to go, as soon as Noel gives me the disk so I can install the fake Windows shell on it (so I can install AutoCAD). Last night Noel suggested I buy a docking station for it, which doesn't seem like a bad idea at all.

With my schedule set and the computer in line, I just have to arrange for moving down to SLO (renting a minivan seems to be the way to go). I'm going down to SLO this weekend for Old Fogies orientation -- one day of stuff rather than a week of seminars on things like how not to drink yourself to death and how to budget for studying time. Noel's coming with me (yay!) and we'll bring my drafting table and the sewing table (which will be my regular desk) with us. Should be interesting to meet my new roommates, as the room has been arranged entirely by phone.

Rosie is going to spend the weekend at the doggie daycare place, probably playing until she nearly explodes. I was soft of hoping to bring her with us, but what with her anxiety in the car and the new living situation, I think it's best if she stays home this time.

I had a bunch of spiral-bound notebooks which I had used for various classes, and each of them had about 25 remaining clean sheets out of the original 100. I would not be able to use the remaining sheets for another class easily, and it seemed a shame to let them go to waste, so I just did some surgery.

I snipped the coil locks with dykes, twisted the coils out, and assembled the clean sheets into a new notebook shape, with the back and cover from one of the disassembled notebooks. Then I twisted the coil back in through the holes and used pliers to make new coil locks.

Viola! A stringed instrument! And voila! A new notebook!

I'm now trying to decide if this makes me resourceful, crafty, and smart, or simply a huge lame-o loser who rebuilds notebooks in order to save $3.

You may wonder what happened to the notes from the classes. I've got them in file folders for now, but once I don't need them any more for school, they're going in the recycling bin. I learned that lesson the first time around: the only school notes I ever used after I finished school were my Shakespeare notes, and that was because I hadn't yet bought my trusty summaries of the plays that's ever so much better than my notes. Yet I toted that crap around with me for five years.

I spent the last couple of days down in SLO, meeting with my advisor, looking at places to live, and locating hardware stores and hobby shops (the basic needs of an architecture student).

Downtown SLO is kind of twee and slightly yuppy for my tastes, but workable. There was a shoe repair shop, which bodes well. I don't think much of people who can't support even one shoe repair shop.

The countryside out of town is breathtakingly beautiful, and reminds me of the countryside outside of Ithaca, with slightly different vegetation overlaid on it. Last night I went for a drive through the fields and got to watch a sunset through the fog, that brilliant orange light streaming across the crops horizontally, diffused by the fog and occasionally cut out entirely by the hills.

I liked one place I saw: a tiny bedroom, but lots of common space, a usable garage, and a house dog who is charming and well-behaved. If I lived there, Rosie could occasionally visit for short periods, as long as she was well-behaved. That has a great appeal. Also, there would be a small private patio that I could fill with plants.

I looked at a couple of more generic places, but they felt very dormitory-ish, and I really dislike the feeling that I would be asked to buy alcohol for my underage roommates all the time. Also, they were much more expensive.

My meeting with my advisor went well. I worked out a schedule for next quarter, but a longer-term schedule will have to wait because there was a mixup in the admissions office and they didn't realize they had to do transcript analysis for all of the transfer students. So I probably won't get my analysis until mid-fall. I was a bit surprised to find that I'd be taking 18 credits rather than the expected 15, but they're in the middle of curriculum changes, so in a way it was to be expected.

I register on Friday afternoon.

I apparently have a secondary personality. This personality is answering the phone for me, which is a handy function for a secondary personality. She's even speaking to the registrar at City College, discussing the status of my transcript, which I have been unable to do (as they do not answer the phone, and apparently are not keen on calling back people who leave them messages in a timely fashion).

How do I know this? Because I finally broke down today after my third phone call, no answer, and message left on the voicemail to never be returned, and sent them e-mail. This is the response I got:

We spoke to you today and reported the status of your request. Weve never received a message from you. Maybe you didnt leave a phone # or possibly we couldnt understand the message. Both of these things happen frequently. We answer messages on the day or the next day after they are received.

Which is odd, because I have been sitting here since I got home at 1:30, phoning various registrars and so forth to try to get this stuff all cleared up in time for my transfer to get finalized.

Not only that, but if they didn't get a message from me, why did they speak to me in the first place?

And who the hell did they speak to about my transcript?

And why didn't they simply tell me what the status is in the e-mail?

It seems that the two lockstepped classes I thought would not be offered may have "experimental" alternatives, found in an addendum to the catalog. Which means I can take every class I want next semester (some long days in there, but apparently the college is not fond of early-morning classes). I've worked out how many classes I need to take every semester, and even with a minor in construction management, I'll have no troubles; my work load will be about 15-16 units a quarter, which is well below the recommended 18 for the college, and the allowed 20 for the university.

I'm going to try to figure out how to fit in some Spanish classes (very useful, working in construction in California) and maybe some more ceramics.

I've just spent a while working out what a possible schedule would look like at CalPoly. Alas, it seems that a couple of the classes I want to take in the fall are simply not being offered (including my Structures class, which is a lockstepped class, so I'm not sure how that's going to work), so I have to work out some alternatives to the four classes I was planning to take.

I was thinking maybe I should have taken physics over the summer, but fortunately, that is not one of the classes that is not available in the fall. Less fortunately, one of the classes is another lockstepped class, which is the intro to the studio. I can't use the studio until I take the intro, and I can't complete my design class (which I can get into) unless I can use the studio.

I'm thinking it's a good thing I signed up for the summer advising program in late July, because this seems to suck, big time.

On the other hand, maybe I can get some of those weird construction management classes out of the way early on, which would be handy. I have one semester with three of them at once, which seems a bit much, even for one given to excess like myself.

Speaking of the summer advising program, I'm planning on going down to SLO for a couple of days around it to scope out housing and other things that might be of use sometime before I am absolutely required to be on campus and ready to go (things like hardware stores, hobby shops, and art supply stores need to be found well in advance of my first project). Summer classes will be over, and I can spend some time figuring out how the place works, and how to get to and around campus. Should be interesting.

I've been in the throes of a weeklong public speaking intensive. I need to have three credits in public speaking (and public speaking alone) for transfer to Calpoly, and I need it by July 15th, so I signed up for and by the skin of my teeth got into a class that runs June 1-8 at Contra Costa College.

It works out to one or two speeches a day, two of which have to be ten minute speeches with formal outlines and citations (I did my first one on how to make a linoleum block, transcription to come).

Because I am incapable of arriving at a class like this unprepared, I have spent nearly all weekend writing my last big speech: a debate with a classmate on whether you should submit to store receipt-checks without argument. (I'm anti, natch.) I have charts. I have statistics. I have moving quotations. I have said this speech five times, trying to get it down under ten minutes so I don't go over my time.

I am very much looking forward to Tuesday, 4pm.

I stopped by school today to pick up my portfolio from photography. Nice, quick drive in, which is pleasant, compared to early-morning arrivals which involve an hour in heavy traffic.

There was a file cabinet in the left two lanes on 880, but I saw it in plenty of time. I hope nobody was whipping through there like some people do, because that thing could cause a lot of damage. Anyway, by the time I came back an hour later, it was gone and there were no accidents reported, so I guess all was well.

Now, because I am free, free, free, Rosie and I are going to pack up and go hiking with some cameras on the Kennedy Grove trails. There are some nice paths there, with views, and it's OK for dogs to be off leash away from the developed parts of the park. I think Rosie will stay on leash because she's a bit of a spaz and her ability to control herself with freedom is limited.

I just got out of my last final of the semester. Math was harder than I'd have preferred this semester, but not unmanagably so. I think I did well on the final, even though something's in bloom that I'm allergic to, so I was snuffling and snorting all the way through it.

Afterwards I walked across campus and sold my math and physics books back to the bookstore. They didn't take my calculus physics books because I guess there's been a version rev, so I'll have to sell those on eBay or Amazon or something.

In the meantime, I'm done with school, at least until summer school starts next week!

I spent the day doing all sorts of bits and pieces for final projects: making the crate for the Gnome Garden, finding a frame for the Kitties piece, and matting seven of eleven prints for photography. I was spotting some of the prints, and botched four of them, so I need to go back and rewash those tomorrow, so matting will have to wait until after they're done-done.

In the evening Christo came over and made me feel good by flattering my artwork and gamely eating my first attempt at fillozes from one of the cookbooks my mom gave me. Um, the fillozes did not taste so good. Don't know why. I think I will try the yeast version of malassadas next.

Printing all day tomorrow. Noel will be drywalling, so I will attempt to feel lucky that I'm in class.

Lots of glazing today in the sculpture studio. We're out of wet clay and into bisque, and I have lots of stuff to work on. Unfortunately, a bunch of my greenware had not yet been fired, so I didn't have as much to work on as I might have hoped.

On the other hand, the kiln programming was faulty, and most of one of the bisque loads blew up, so maybe I'm glad my stuff was not fired over the weekend.

I did get my birdhouse and bird feeder glazed and into a kiln for firing, and I'm still trying to get the right amount of glaze on the winged gnome, so he's drying and waiting for layer two. I also put a layer of tea dust glaze on the gnome pot, and glazed a bunch of eggs for the gnome garden. I do appear to have gone overboard with the gnomes, somewhat.

I came home to a couple more molds arrived from eBay purchases. I really cannot wait to try them out; I may even join a ceramics studio in Berkeley for the summer, if there's time.

Once home, I went out to run errancs and bought a box to "grow" the gnome garden in (three buried gnomes, several eggs, and some plants in dirt in a box). I was looking for a shadow box or nice frame for my "girlhood" wall piece, but no luck. Maybe I'll find something at a thrift shop. I'll have to go Thursday or Friday afternoon, because the last day of school is Tuesday next week. Yes, I am a little panicky.

The other bit of school news for today was an irritating conversation with the admissions office at Calpoly. I have to get general ed certified by City College, because if I don't it counts against me and I can not be allowed to transfer. But City College appears to have a dimwit as a registrar, because they think I need to take freshman composition. I guess I'm going to have to go in and go over my transcripts with them, line by line. Sheesh.

I also put my name on the wait list for a weeklong speech class, which I need for Calpoly, again, and really do not want to have to take. But I will. Anyway, the class was full and I'll have to go and try to get in on the first day of class or something. Because I'd really rather not take it over any longer time period.

A brief two-hour session in the darkroom this afternoon (after printing my pages for my printing class) yielded five of the eleven prints needed for my final project. I have a math test next Wednesday, so maybe I will mat the prints between studying tomorrow.

The semester is starting to get really tight.

We have to present a final portfolio to the teacher in my photography class. About 11 photos in all, from all the assignments through the semester, in their best condition and at least four of them mounted.

I've been deciding which photos to use. Here are some of my choices:

Contrast in Nature: Down Down Down

Variable Contrast Filters: Hands on Keys

Self Portrait: Up High

Lighting: Just One More Chapter

Series: Graffiti (Joon, In a Corner, Trash on Trash)

I have others for the other assignments and more in the series, but I haven't scanned them in yet.

After school today I stopped by Photo Supply downtown and picked up mounting boards, tape, bags, and a box. I grabbed two new tongs while I was there, because my darkroom tongs are starting to fall apart, and new ones would help a lot with my frustration levels. I figure I'll need to reprint all of the images for the portfolio, so the final results are all the same size and can be mounted too look uniform (which will be more important when they get hung on a wall than for the final portfolio).

This summer I should mount all the prints I bought at the print sale, too. Then I should get back to getting things framed once a month; all this art will never get on a wall if I don't get off my butt.

I came home to find a mold had arrived. A gigantic bust of George Washington; I mistakenly believed it to be 5 inches tall when I bid on it, and it turned out to be, um, considerably larger than that. But I'm sure I can find a good use for him. Maybe an army of Washingtons buried to their chins in the back yard will keep that idiot cat from digging in the lettuce.

Seen today:

Slender young Japanese female wearing the typical Manga-styled heavy socks and platform shoes, but with Morris-style jingly bells sewn onto the socks.

And apparently, everybody who's anybody is showing their underpants this season.

I've been trying to enroll for summer classes via the web interface. Instead of taking classes in San Francisco, I want to take them on my very own island, so that means a new computer enrollment system, and apparently one that's not coded very robustly.

My "appointment" -- the hour after which I can enroll whenever I wish -- was for 9:45 am today, according to the postcard I received some weeks ago. But when I try to enroll, I get this mysterious message:

I've been trying to figure out how they got it to fail in exactly that way all day.

I just wrote a letter to the College Board, asking them to dig my AP test scores out of their archives and send them to CalPoly (because CalPoly wants them, and what CalPoly wants, CalPoly gets).

No kidding. I just paid a $25 archive fee for this. But it means I'm almost done sending transcripts (City College doesn't do mid-semester transscripts, so I have to wait until final grades are in to send them that one).

Now all I have to do is attend to the small matter of piling my portfolio into the car for the portfolio review in two weeks. I reserved a motel room for the night before (the wonderful Motel 6), so I'll drive down Thursday night, stay over, do the orientation and portfolio review Friday morning and afternoon, then drive back up so I can make it to my printing class on Saturday.

Then I'll be all set except for dealing with housing.

A big old NO from MIT.

A pity, but it would have been hard to convince myself to go there, even though it would be great, because of the expense and the complexity of moving half the household across the country for three years minus summers. Calpoly's a better deal all around.

So, Calpoly it is for the next three years. Wish me luck.

Columbia University: Si!

Not one I expected to get into. Interesting.

Yale School of Architecture: Nyet.

Actually, that's not true. Yale did not write me a rejection letter in Russian, as unbelievably cool as that would have been. No, they sent me a very sincere letter about how many candidates they have and how they hope I find a perfect school, but how they think it should be somewhere else.

UCB: No.

Not that I had such a stellar performance the last time I was there, so I don't blame them.

I somehow missed the envelope, but in yesterday's mail was another response from a graduate school.

Princeton: No. My first rejection! Not a huge surprise, as halfway through the application I realized that what I want to do and what they have to offer really didn't match up. But I still did it, anyway, because I'd started and it wouldn't hurt.

I got my acceptance from the University of Oregon today. Excellent program in sustainable architecture which would be really tempting if it didn't start in frickin JUNE instead of in September.

I had an extra hour today between photography lecture and the lab, so I dropped in at counselling to see if I could set up an appointment to get checked off as General Education certified (a ridiculous requirement, but one I will have to comply with if I go to CalPoly). The receptionist gave me a counsellor assignment, and I went to wait in the hall for him to be free.

Ahead of me, in the counsellor's office, was a woman who clearly did not get out much, and needed somebody to talk to. Anybody. She probably does this at home, with the toaster as an audience rather than a guidance counsellor. I sat there while she talked about how hard it was going back to school after having a baby, how she was managing this around her home life, how she wasn't sure which classes to take to get a degree in Fashion Merchandising, how she was concerned about how her daughter would react to her being away from home too much, how she thought she had to take all the required classes at once, rather than spaced out over several semesters....

I sat there, waiting to have a five minute chat, for more than half an hour. When I finally gave up and went to make an appointment for tomorrow, the receptionist was shocked that I had not gotten in to see the counsellor yet.

Seeing women go crazy like that after having a baby makes me ever so glad nature had other things in mind for me.

I got an e-mail from CalPoly today, telling me I've been accepted for the architecture program there!

Now I don't have to worry about whether I will get into a grad school somewhere. Ah!

This week at school:

A car where clearly the owner had run out of space on the rear-view mirror to hang crappy little Japanese cartoon dolls, so she'd hung them all over the ceiling, so they dangled around her head as she drove.

After an evening in cabinetry class with The Guy Who Stands Too Close (ladies, you know this guy. He stands RIGHT NEXT TO YOU even though there's plenty of other places to stand, and he likes to smile at you a lot, as if you were Something Special. Ugh. Anyway), I thought nothing would be more noteworthy to talk about. I was even composing a little entry about TGWSTC as I walked off campus.

Then I crossed the street.

As I did so, a lady came around the corner with her lights off, and of course, she didn't see me (on account of it being, like, dark and stuff). So I waved, and she slowed down. I tried to signal to her that her lights were off, but she didn't seem to get it, so I walked closer to her car and she FREAKED OUT. Like I was seven feet tall and four thousand pounds of pure muscle. Jesus, people! I'm a wimpy little girl. She swerved wildly, almost driving right into the street light in the median, then whipped past me as if I were Satan incarnate. So I did what I always do when people think I'm threatening: I cursed her soul, those of her ancestors, and hoped she drove into a pole.

Moments later, as I was pulling out of the parking lot, she came back up the street in the other direction, lights still out. I flashed my high beams at her, and she nearly drove into the side of my car. You'd think that in this time she might once have checked her dash, but apparently not.

I was ahead of her, so I drove slowly, hoping she'd pull up alongside and I could roll down my window and tell her, but she was having none of that. She stayed right behind me, then suddenly whipped into a dead end alleyway after I'd passed it. Um, that's not a very good survival skill if you seriously think you're under attack. But honestly, I was ahead of her, we were both in cars, and she's the one who nearly drove into me, twice, with her erratic behaviour.

Anyway, I gave up on trying to help her out and just came home. Some people want to live in a world where nobody will help them out, and they do everything they can to make it that way. I choose not to live in that world, so it's best to ignore psychotics like that lady.

Of course, she could have just been on drugs or something. This was downtown Oakland.

I was kind of excited by the woodworking class, but it's so incredibly slow-paced that it's actually not all that fun. I mean, I get that we're talking about safety and all that, but it's been five weeks and we just cut wood for the first time today.

Lots of people in the class were seduced by nice woods at the lumberyard. I bought poplar (went over to MacBeath's in Berkeley this afternoon) because I figure I'll paint the project (a bench) and put it in the front hall. I don't want anything too fancy as a hall bench. One woman got some rough-cut maple that was truly lovely when it had been jointed and planed -- one of her pieces has a gorgeous figure on it. Another had bought a very nice piece of poplar to do a solid (not glued-up) seat. Mine is going to be very utilitarian. Bench, not art.

Another thing I did today was buy more stuff to make molds from for ceramics. I'm out of control. If I make all these molds I'll have no time for anything else all semester, I think. But I must. It kills me to think that I might not be able to make castings and fire them in the future. I will work overtime, all weekend, making plaster molds, so I can cast them and get them in the kiln before school is over (no ceramics in the summer, alas, and besides I'll be travelling and building a shed).

So, I've been taking a bunch of art classes. I like learning new art things, and generally enjoy these classes, except for my classmates. While most people seem to understand what the teacher says the first time around, in every class there is at least one person, usually more like five, who simply cannot make sense of the language.

I'm not talking about non-native speakers. I've got a lot of sympathy for people who simply don't know how to translate technical words into something they can understand. I'm talking about native speakers of English who sit there in a demo and ask the same question five times, seemingly unable to understand:

Teacher: You take the temperature of the developer and look it up on this chart to find the developing time. See, this developer here is 68 degrees, so we'll process the film for 9 1/2 minutes.

Student #1: So the developing time is 9 1/2 minutes?

Teacher: If the temperature of the developer is 68 degrees. If it's 70 degrees, see, it says to develop it for 10 minutes.

Student #2: So which time do we use?

Teacher: You check the chart in your lab manual for the time.

Student #1: There are lots of times here. Which one do I use?

Teacher: You find your film in the list. You find your developer in the list, too. And then you find the temperature of your chemistry to find the time. See, we're using Kodax Tri-X 400 and this Lauder developer, so you have two choices. You can use the developer at full strength and it will take this long [points to chart] or you can dilute it 1:1 and it will take 9 1/2 minutes at 68 degrees, which is what we're doing now.

Student #2: So do we have to have a thermometer?

Teacher: Yes, to take the temperature.

Student #3: Can we use those times even if we're not using the same film?

Teacher: No, you have to look up the film you are using separately. But the assignment requires the Tri-X film.

Student #1: So we process the film for 10 minutes?

Student #2: How do we know how long to process the film?

This went on for HALF AN HOUR.

OK, I get that I'm an impatient person, and I also understand that I tend to learn this sort of skill really quickly (especially anything involving mixing chemicals). But were these people even listening?

Even better, when we had class yesterday and had to produce our developed film, one person had simply NOT DONE one step in the developing (adding fixer), and she wondered if that was a problem. Um, yes. Notice how your film is not transparent? That will make it a bit rough to do any kind of printing, don't you think?

Then there's ceramics. High-fire glazes are kept on one side of the classroom. Low-fire glazes are on the other side. There is a good reason for this: low fire glaze in high-fire conditions is VERY VERY bad for the kiln and anything else in there. So why is it that every class has one person who mixes the two glazes? And why is it that every time we talk about glazes, we need to discuss why it is that glaze looks different when it's unfired? This is just how it is, no amount of questioning it is going to change it. Come ON, people.

The worst part is that all this dithering about stuff that's written on big signs all over the room (well, now I understand the need for the big signs) means we don't get to get to the meat of the matter. I'd really like to understand more about the chemistry of glazes, for example, or maybe discuss different methods for developing that will produce interesting results. But we're too busy repeating the same basic information over and over for the people who are categorically unable to listen and comprehend. It's a good thing I'm not a teacher, or there would be bodies everywhere.

Twice today I turned around or stopped walking to find somebody standing right behind me. Now, when I say right behind me, I don't mean feet or even inches away. I mean standing so close that you could not slip a piece of paper between that person and my backpack.

One guy chewed me out because he was apparently trying to get around me, despite the fact that he'd stepped, with me, to the side of an aisle -- a move I made to get him to stop walking directly behind me like some kind of creepy stalker. The other guy responded to my turning around and smacking into him with "Excuse ME!" as if it's unpardonably rude to expect that it will be safe to turn around in place without finding yourself in an intimate situation.

The next time I feel one of these creeps breathing on my neck, I'm going to suddenly take a step backwards, with all my mass aimed at knocking the idiot over. I may even throw in a quick elbow, if I'm feeling cranky.

Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

I've long considered grades as a relatively objective way of determining whether you're not getting it to sucha degree that you're incapable of understanding how little you're getting it. If you get bad grades, you can be reasonably sure you're doing something wrong, right? I was not previously aware of just how deep this unawareness could be.

So it surprised me to discover that one of my physics classmates from last semester had failed the class three times, and yet was unable to understand why she was doing so poorly. I suggested to her that perhaps the combination of her rare lecture attendance, inability to keep a coherent lab notebook (I was given hers to grade in a peer review once), and spending much of the classes she did attend texting her boyfriend might have contributed to her lack of absorbtion of the concepts of mechanics. But, well, I'm not one to fight for other people's lost causes, so I didn't try to make her a better student. I ran into her in the hallway this semester, and she admitted that she was re-taking the class, again, and said, "I don't know what I have to do to pass this class." [smacks head]

Around 2pm today, I began thinking, "What if I'm one of those people? What if I'm so stupid I can't figure out how stupid I am, and all my friends and teachers are just humouring me?" You can really go down a rabbit's hole with that one, my friend.

On another forum, somebody remarked that her classmates bring their kids to class when they can't get adequate childcare. This leads to some rather awkward situations in biology lab, which is definitely not the place for a child. Hell, it would lead to fisticuffs in my physics lecture, where there are not enough seats for all the students in the class, much less an extra seat for a child. I caught some flak in the conversation for asking where the fathers of these kids were (it's always the mother who gets stuck with the kid). More to the point, where are the so-called friends, the family, the social network every mother needs? We're so socially detached that somehow we let people get in a situation where they have nobody they can ask for a favour. I can't think this is a good thing. Not at all.

Somebody asked me how school was going. I'm only a few weeks into the semester, so it's going as well as it will ever go, as I haven't had a chance to completely and utterly fuck up yet.

I'm taking a physics class this semester, as I have every semester since I restarted school. Only this time, I may be in over my head. For one thing, I'm not as far along in math as I ought to be, although I suspect that that is not going to be as big a deal as it might. So far I understand all the math I've needed.

One pleasant thing about this class is that we're required to keep a normal lab notebook, with prenumbered pages and written in pen. I was surprised last semester that we were supposed to use a spiralbound book and write in pencil, but I guess that's just a way of gentling you into the notebook thing. It felt weird, and I was compelled to do a more carefully edited job than I usually would with a lab notebook, on account of having erasability. Anyway, I feel more calm with the normal setup.

I'm also taking a math class -- second semester calculus (I ought to be in third semester calculus for this physics class) for the second time. I don't know why last semester was so hard, but I suspect it had to do with having math in the afternoon. That, and the teacher completely ignoring the textbook.

The rest of my classes are studio/craft classes: photography (black and white), ceramic sculpture, and woodworking.

The woodworking class is a bit slow-paced; the teacher talks very slowly and quietly, and he's a bit of a stoner in personality type if not in fact. I'm hoping we get to some real meat in the class soon.

Photography got off to a good start: we shot a roll of slide film and discussed composition, then had a tour of the darkrooms. I'm excited about having access to the darkroom all semester for just a $15 user fee. I'm trying to get my hands on a large-format camera so I can try out the developing on the cheap at school. We shall see.

Ceramic sculpture is also interesting. With the teacher I had for ceramics (Don Santos). We had one field trip to a gallery to see some ceramics, then I missed the day when we learned alternative wheel techniques (which is a bummer because I saw the beginning and it was very exciting), and then in our last class we worked quickly and excitedly to prepare pieces of stuff which we're going to use to make some wall pieces next week. I worked on press molds, because I think I'm too short to use the extruder effectively. Bummer, because I love the extruder and was looking forward to making things with it this semester.

So that's this semester in a nutshell. I also get to fill out financial aid forms, and wait anxiously to hear back from the schools I applied to so I can know how I will be spending my next three years. I'm glad I bought that extra-large bottle of Maalox.