No Picture Today - Blogger Hates Me

In my excitement to write about running hither and thither, I overlooked a significant milestone: my 200th post.

Woohoo!

Okay, now that I've celebrated (by eating tuna salad, the dinner of champions and tired intern architects), on we go. To... a place. Where I will write about... stuff.

Like the fact that neither of my clients have called us to schedule meetings or to discuss their projects, so I'm currently writing commercial building specs, which are a heck of a lot longer than our little residential specifications.

Residential specifications are maybe 100 pages long. Maybe. Commercial specs, however, are much much longer. By the looks of it, they'll top out around 300 pages. I'm not really sure how long they'll be. All I know is that: 1) we don't have most of them on our server, already, so I'm having to type them all up from a set of commercial specs written about 6 years ago; and 2) they make my fingers hurt, so I won't be typing much longer, this evening.

I still have an email to answer, too. I can just feeeeeeeel my fingers seizing up.

And my first project of my very own came back, because one of my supervisor architects (Scooter shall remain nameless) neglected to mention a requirement of the Home Owners' Association that was kind of important.

Okay, actually, it was very damned important. I received an email from the vacationing Scooter, this morning, and he informed me that he was aware of the requirement, but just forgot. So he's out of town, and I'm doing damage control. And working for free, because we obviously can't charge the client for work we're doing to fix a previous mistake.

The client's been really nice about the whole thing - they're a really nice couple, and have much less money than most of our clients, although they're not exactly hurting for cash - and they're super grateful that we're doing the revisions without charging them. I liked Aaron and Mirabelle when we first met them, because they're such a nice couple. With three kids. And they love Texas. And Mirabelle's originally from Arkansas (seriously, who in Arkansas names their child something exotic like Mirabelle?), so she has this lovely Southern accent that you don't normally hear in Texas, because the people I know who live in Texas don't really have accents. At least, not in my opinion.

But that's finished, and all I have to do is print off the drawings for Aaron and Mirabelle, courier them over tomorrow, and send them a PDF of the drawings, too. And they'll love us forever. And if they ever decide to build a new house (because, you know, they've inherited beaucoups of money), then they'll call on us. Which would be pretty awesome, because they're such a nice couple.

Okay, I Need Another One...

The weekend is almost over. In fact, it's essentially done for.

And I could really use one more. Right now. That would be great. Thanks.

Friday night, after skipping Happy Hour, because it was in Ft. Worth, of all the inconvenient places to host Happy Hour for a bunch of architects from Dallas, I came home and worked for a while longer. Because really, what else was I going to do? I'd had a migraine earlier, so I couldn't drink, anyway. Stupid migraines, with their stupid "no drinking alcohol after taking this medicine" medicines. Psh.

After transcribing Uncle Moneybags' existing floorplans from their 1958 hard copies into digital copies (loads of fun, let me tell you), I got an itch to organize something. That never really bodes well, because it usually means a couple of hours of organizing, but I decided to go ahead and run with it.

So I reorganized my bookshelves, in anticipation of what will henceforth be known as The Great Living Room Rearrangement of 2010. If there's another living room rearrangement this year - which I highly doubt there will be - then I will append a month to the second one. For posterity's sake.

This coming Saturday, if all goes as planned, my dad will assist me in moving one very large steel book case from one end of my living room to the other. At the same time - okay, on the same day, obviously not completely concurrently - my TV will move from one end of the apartment to the other. I'm swapping the TV and the book case. It's going to be epic.

I really hope I like the way the layout works... I'm pretty darned sure I will, though.

I failed to get more than 5 hours of sleep, Friday night, not because of an overage of organizing, but because I simply couldn't sleep. This has occurred multiple times this week, and I'm chalking it up to migraines keeping me awake (yes, they can do that, if they strike at night). So I slept poorly, woke up later than intended Saturday morning, and then showed up later than intended at my parents' house where I discovered that...

My dog had been bored to tears at some point and found a nice mushy pile of mud and set to churning it, perhaps with an eye towards profiting by starting a brickyard. Because it seriously looked about like a mudpit in a brickyard. Amazing.

And he tracked a good deal of it inside, of course, where it dried into the carpet. The carpet which, in an hour's time, a host of males would see while they retreated to my parents' house during my sister's baby shower, which was being hosted elsewhere.

I got out the vacuum, wearing my cute little "I'm going to a baby shower" outfit, and set about cleaning up what I could, and then picking up the larger chunks, while the world's greatest brother-in-law took the dog outside and washed his paws off with a hose. I secretly think it was my dog's way of retaliating for my sister's failure to bring her own red-headed pups to visit. He's usually very sweet, but he has his moments, and he's something of an ornery old man, these days.

My mom and my sister arrived at the house in the midst of the grand clean-up (my BIL Swiffered the floor while I touched up my make-up post-vacuuming), and then we jetted to the shower, spent three hours there, got back to my parents' house, rested for a little over an hour, then hosted my BIL's mother, aunt, and cousin for dinner. I drove home that evening and tried to crash. Again, I failed.

This morning, I ran a couple of errands, then met the family for lunch before my sister and BIL departed for Houston with their baby swag. This baby will be the best-dressed baby ever, just in case you were wondering. And then I ran a couple more errands (Container Store! Oh! How I've missed you!) and came home. I intended to go to the grocery store, and to Target, because I need light bulbs and food. But I decided that, heck, I had enough stuff to make pancakes, and I really needed to use those ingredients anyway, so I'd just eat pancakes for dinner.

Pancakes are kind of like men: they can be a lot of fun at the time, but then there's a huge mess to clean up, and you totally regret them later.

Heh. Heh heh. Heh.

Uncle Moneybags

I met my new client for the first time, yesterday, and then spent a full 95 minutes in his presence today.

I thank God I was chaperoned by one of my big-brotherly male coworkers.

At past jobs, my clients flirted with me. It's an occupational hazard when you're a 20-something female in a field where your commercial real estate clients are overwhelmingly male with overwhelmingly large pocketbooks that give them an overwhelmingly large sense of entitlement. Their flirtations were mostly benign and confined to the conference room, or cocktail parties for real estate promotions. But this character is something else, altogether.

Unlike past clients - and my present clients on other projects - who oozed money without ever talking about it except in the context of what they wanted to spend on their project, Uncle Moneybags talks about it. All the time. Seriously.

"I pay $500 per month for a climate controlled storage unit for my 5,000 bottles of wine."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand?

"I was thinking about building a 15,000 SF house in Preston Hollow a few years ago, about $5 million or so, but decided not to."

That's quite the non sequitur. What, pray tell, does that have to do with asbestos abatement?

And he's one of those people who talks about money all the time, talks about how much money he spends, and then talks about how cheap he is and how much he hates to spend money. Wonderful.

And he hardly talked to Radio at all. Most of his comments were directed towards me. Even though I'm the subordinate in the office, the little helper, I received the brunt of his attention. Radio's the big man on the project. I'm just a CAD monkey, right now, inputting the existing floor plans into the computer so they make sense. But noooooooo. He hardly looked at Radio the whole time.

Granted, I was wearing white jeans, and according to my guy friends, a girl in white jeans is difficult to pry your eyes from, but still. When I left the room to investigate things, he inevitably followed, even if Radio was in the middle of discussing things with him. Important things. Sticky issues we might run into.

Like asbestos abatement.

Sigh. Maybe next time we go, his 25 year old ex-girlfriend - who's living in the apartment, right now, while the apartment he's bought for her is being renovated - will be the only one there. I have a sneaking suspicion he'll be there, though.

Maybe it's time to invest in a couple of muumuus.