cry it out

wow, it is rough to listen to your baby cry.  last week, my wife and i put Chicklet in her room and crib for the first time (she’s 6 months old today, and has slept in a bassinet attached to our bed every night till now).  along w/ this change was our decision to try the cry-it-out method (CIO).  cindy had been steadfast in her decision to pick Chicklet up every time she fussed at night - there is a philosophy (i don’t remember its name) that basically states that a child can learn to sleep the night by being soothed and loved, and that the child will eventually gather the self-confidence to sleep through the night on its own.  perhaps this is true, but in all likelihood, either the kid naturally soothes himself and goes to bed easily, or by the time the child has learned to soothe himself he’s likely grown old enough to outgrow the fear of separation and darkness and whatever other reason kids cry at night.

anyway, we decided to try out the CIO method, w/ the understanding that if Chicklet cries for 10 min or more, we’d go in.  that happened a few times the first night, maybe twice the second, and once the third.  she’s slept the night for about a week now.  tho she still wakes up crying, she soothes herself back to sleep in a few minutes max.  it’s absolutely heartbreaking to listen to her cry, but she’s learned pretty quickly how to help herself out.

tonight i’m handling Chicklet all by myself, as cindy is in NY for a conference for 2 days.  the last time i had Chicklet to myself, she was about 3 months old and my parents were visiting.  cindy was only gone for 1 night, but that night held no sleep for me.  i literally was holding Chicklet for nearly the entire night - every time i put her down, she cried (and we weren’t letting her cry it out back then).  i was exhausted.  what a difference a few months makes.  i can totally handle this baby on my own, though i miss our family evening routines.  ultimate point - i can actually get some work done now that Chicklet can sleep.  huzzah!

back from the dead

talk about taking a break.  my last post was back in october 07 - let’s see, what was life like back then?  aside from my daughter not having been born yet, not all that much was different - of course, my daughter being born is all the difference it takes to go from day to night, black to white.  two totally different worlds.  life has been good since she was born in november - watching her grow everyday is pretty much all i care about at the moment.

i’ve finally gotten back into the swing of finishing some renovations on the house that i started before she was born - hopefully i’ll get them done in the next month so that i can move on to the next round of fixes: remove the crappy corrugated plastic overhang on the back porch and replace it w/ a trellis.  i’ve also started the design for our landscaping, which won’t exactly be cheap, but is the first thing to do when increasing home value.  major home renovation (aside from painting and installing wood floors) will have to wait.

i’m completing 100% construction documents for my current project this week.  very exciting - i’ve been on the project since design development, though i’ve watched and sat on crits during schematic design.  it’s a really nice and simple, small addition to a university building here in austin.  next week i’ll move onto a new charter elementary school project, which will be really exciting.  it’s set to be LEED silver, which means i finally will have the time to actually get LEED certified (which was on my to-do list since last september).

haven’t done much travel since the munchkin was born, aside from going up to dallas to visit w/ her grandparents.  did go to houston one weekend for a friend’s wedding shower - it was pretty much my first time there, but only had time to visit the contemporary arts museum.  great exhibit on…contemporary design.  mies’ museum of fine arts was across the street, but you need more time to visit that.  i’m excited to go back - some good architecture out there.

also went up to NY for the first part of passover - at 5 months old, it was munchkinface’s first flight.  she did pretty well, but that was thanks to the tubes in her ears installed 2 wks prior - she already had 4 ear infections, so tubes were pretty much the only recourse aside from constant doses of antibiotics, which are not at all cool.  she was a bit fussy in NY - i think the flight, plus change in scenery and new crib were a bit much.  she got to meet some of her cousins and spend precious time w/ my parents and sister, which of course is the most important part of these visits.  2 days after we returned, my sister came to visit for 5 days - it was great.

ok, good update.  back to work, and hopefully some more regular posts again.

UT SolarD rockin the house

so the 2007 UT SolarD team has been hard at work on the National Mall the past few weeks, and today inched up to the #5 slot!  i’m super psyched for them - they’ve put a huge amount of hard work into the project, and they deserve to do well.  hopefully they’ll be able to push up another slot, though they’re behind GA Tech by about 20 points, which will be pretty hard to make up.  the #1 and #2 slots are held by Univ. of Maryland and the German team, Technische Universitat Darmstadt, and are up by too many points to catch. the German house is really beautiful and elegant - bringing that European architectural and engineering prowess to US shores.

baseboards, Sketchup, and rest

yesterday we completed Addendum#2 on our rushed project, a school of engineering for a university in N. Texas.  Cindy’s been ready to strangle me b/c i’ve been working late and weekends, not having much time to spend w/ her during the last few weeks of pregnancy.  i’ve also had to finish painting the baseboards before they get installed tomorrow.  so it was w/ great relief that i left the office yesterday at 5:30p - that’s right!  not 3a!  it was amazing.  i went home, bought some more baseboards and mini-rollers, painted a bit, and went to bed by 11p - it was incredible.now i’m working at home, spiffing up a sketchup model of the project that the university will be able to use for fundraising.  there’s a bunch still to do, but i’ve been divying up the day between work and painting baseboards.  those should be ready to get a final coat in a few minutes, actually.tomorrow i move on to my next project - an infill/renovation for UT School of Nursing.  it’s been in schematic design for a little over a month, on and off.  it’s looking pretty nice, i’m looking forward to getting into something a bit smaller in scope and not as rushed.  it also helps that we’re building new structure instead of living w/in the confines of a building’s earlier structure, which had been a bit confusing on the engineering project.my little baby’s on the way - we’re just over 2 weeks from her due date!  i’m so excited that it’s hard to focus on much of anything, but it helps a lot that this deadline is finally over.  now i can focus on cindy, the house, and work in a much more balanced manner. 

Sounds like an airplane

one of the scariest things I’ve ever experienced is the AC ramping up at my office after business hours are over or on weekends.  like most buildings, AC is turned off or the thermostat is turned up after business hours to save on energy costs, but it is turned on at intervals to keep the temperature relatively acceptable and to flush the building’s air.  well, when it ramps up at my office it sounds like an airplane is roaring toward the building, aiming for a spectacular crash.  it is seriously loud.  i work on the 22nd floor of a 23 story tower, so it scared the shit out of me the first time i heard it.  i ran for the window to see if there was anything outside when i noticed the ‘airplane’ sounded much quieter by the window.  then i realized it was just the AC.  

Scrubs, anyone?

sounds oddly like an early episode of Scrubs:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/29/toilet.paper.ap/index.html

twitter like

don’t want to start a twitter account, it’s just one more account to maintain - but i do want that functionality.  blogging will have to remain the method. weekend working: construction document set going out on monday, it’s our drop-dead date on this project that has been an extremely cool mess.  the client is clueless, and this is not typical architectural disdain for a lesser mortal - this guy says one thing today, which is different from what he said yesterday and different from what he’ll say tomorrow and contradicts every email and documentation he’s ever sent.  the budget gets cut back, and half our design will likely be VE’d out.  anyway, our deadline has been moved back and back, and it can’t be pushed back any further.  thank god.  i have a baby coming in a few weeks and i need to finish working on the house!  cindy has gone into nesting mode and is freaking that these things aren’t done, but i can’t do them until this deadline has passed. 

Learning Curve

I’ve been working for about 3 months now, and as seemingly everyone discovers upon entering the workforce, I now realize I know nothing.  Not to discredit my five year (forever) education - I learned design and not necessarily specific material assemblies.  I was taught to research the newest and most cutting edge technologies - technologies that can’t really even be used in architecture yet.  The purpose was to expand my (’our’ in the case of the entire student body) horizons - to think of everything as a component of architecture.  Who says nanotech and shape memory polymers can’t be structural and design components of architecture?  If it isn’t yet, it’s only a matter of time, and the fact that we look at these materials as such will put us on the cutting edge of architecture when it comes time for these materials to become a part of our repetoire.

On the other hand, I didn’t really know how to structure the hanging facade from a cantilevered room that I designed for the project I’m working on, and I really had no clue how to specify the glazing hardware or connections or to look up the codes for the butt-glazed window wall that I also designed into this room.  I designed it, it looked beautiful, but where do I go from there?  I was given free reign to pursue this, it became my mini-project, but I felt pretty overwhelmed to actually specify materials.  After creating a material assembly from scratch our of locally reclaimed wood, threaded rods, 2×4’s, metal studs, and sound insulation, a new coworker told me about a product that did the exact same thing.  She thought, in fact, that I had specified that product since my assembly was nearly identical.   So I moved over to using this ready made assembly, speaking w/ the architect and sales rep at the company to make sure a few things could be customized for our project, and it will work wonderfully.

Next up was the glazing. All of the glazing details in this building involved steel plates and steel bars.  We pretty much reinvented the wheel because it was so beautifully minimal.  Glazing sits on 1/2″ x 7″ steel plate, and is locked in by 1/2″ square steel bar on each side.  Well, with the massive amounts of butt glazing, that detail wasn’t going to cut it - we needed more structure to hold our tall spans of glazing.  The detail would work for our standard replacements, but not for a window wall.  So I was told to look at a particular detail on a previous project, which used a ready made glazing system often used for glass rail walls.  Pretty much an aluminum channel w/ neoprene blocking holds the glass in place with a solid 1″ bite or more to hold the glass.  Well, our details are steel.  This aluminum channel would be sitting on a steel shelf.  Aluminum and steel don’t mix - the aluminum corrodes.  We could separate them w/ another neoprene gasket, but then we’d have the clashing aesthetic of aluminum with steel.  So now I’m looking at using a steel channel instead of aluminum, but nobody makes such a product.  We’d have to customize a steel channel and specify the blocking and gaskets.  It will work, but we need to engineer it.  I also had no idea how these channel systems worked, so I had to disect the aluminum channel system to reassemble a steel channel system.  It’s fairly simple, but until I learned how it worked, I had no idea how I’d get this together aside from specify ‘Steel Channel’.

And that’s really where this all started. In school, we learn to specify ‘Steel Channel’ or ‘Spider Connection’ or sometimes we might even get specific enough to call out bolt and stud sizes, but in general, the emphasis was on design.  That’s really how it should be, because we can learn the nitty gritty on the job, which is what I’m doing.  But if you’re burdened with making sure you know exactly how to assemble the building while learning to design, your horizons will generally be diminished.  Not to say that we should be designing completely impossible things - our structure courses keep us in line, but knowing how an aluminum channel glazing support system actually works is rightfully kept to the sidelines. 

coffee spills

i spilled my coffee twice this morning on my way to my desk.  i hope this is not an indication of how the day will proceed.

doggie door from hell

i installed a doggie door this past weekend for none other than my doggie. it’s top of the line - the golden seal of perfection in doggie door land. this thing has an automatic locking mechanism so that other animals can’t get into your house - it is unlocked by an infrared tag worn around the dog’s collar. hoo ha. all of that was great until i actually tried to install the damn thing.

the instructions were simple: cut a hole 16-7/8″ x 11.5″ in the door. slip interior component of dog door through hole. mark off the six screw holes to be drilled. take dog door out, drill holes using 3/16″ drill bit. put dog door back in, slip exterior component of dog door on, slip bolts through interior component - drill holes - exterior component. screw nuts onto bolt and tighten. that’s pretty much how it should be - however these instructions provide zero tolerance - if you deviate at all (perhaps you didn’t cut a perfect 16-7/8 x 11.5 hole, or perhaps your drill holes weren’t spot on straight) then there is no way that this door is getting installed. let me explain to you about the 3/16″ hole: it’s tiny. when you’re talking about drilling through an insulated aluminum door that is 1.75″ thick, putting a perfectly straight 3/16″ hole through the door is like assuming Pres. Bush has a clue. it just doesn’t happen. the bolts themselves were about 1/8″ in diameter, and the holes in the doggy door through which they passed were probably about 1/64″ or so smaller. lining all of that up properly is not easy.

i started on saturday using the jigsaw attachment to my dremel to cut the hole. after about 10 minutes i had only cut a few inches. this obviously wasn’t working. after 2 more trips to home depot to try different blades and some lubricant, i realized that perhaps the dremel isn’t really the tool for this kind of job. i was very sad. i was much happier, though, when i returned from home depot 30 minutes later w/ a mega sawzall - sort of a super power jigsaw. w/ that in tow, i cut the hole out of the door in about a minute. but the edges weren’t perfectly straight, so the door - which is exactly 16-7/8 x 11.5 - didn’t fit very well. note to manufacturer: when you’re giving instructions to install something like this, add tolerance! about 1/4″ on all sides! that’s why the frame of this doggy door is so large - to cover up poor worksmanship! add to that the fun bit about the lining up the drill holes, and you’ll understand why i didn’t actually get the damn thing properly installed until sunday morning. and i’m a fairly handy guy around the house. i was so tired and frustrated w/ this thing that i didn’t end up going to see the detroit cobras at emo’s saturday night, which i had been looking forward to all week. and my dog is still scared of the doggy door.