Dark At The End Of The Tunnel

well that was interesting.

Summerfest started strong, loud and hot. Rancid, Matthew Sweet, Dropkick Murphys..... even a little Spoon for the hipsters.

And it ended on high notes too, English Beat and Elvis Costello. And lots of excellent local music, a welcome addition.

In between the high water marks is where the mold grows, however. Clouds moved in, and it started raining. The Summerfestblog showed signs of strain from the outset, balking at updates regardless of what I tried. Finally I stripped out everything but text, but it didn't help. I considered migrating everything over to Blogger, but what a PITA that would be. I eventually threw my hands up, made a couple of desultory posts, and when nobody commented, kind of threw the whole thing into the dumper. Fuck it.

Because in the interim, life was treating me to a harsh lesson in trusting other people. I was engaged by a client to prepare existing conditions drawings of a factory building in Beaver Dam, and design drawings for a conversion to apartments. Unfortunately, I am also in the midst of designing a new apartment building in Milwaukee, and severely short on staff. So, I engaged a local architect to measure the building and prepare computer files of the plans, elevations and sections of the building.

Finally, early last week, I received some computer files. As I started to review them, expecting a limited effort to format them, I started to see that they were inaccurate and too simple, almost cartoons. Essentially and mostly unusable. I found myself looking at the necessity to revise the plans in large amounts, and discarded the sections and elevations, generating them from scratch. The effort had already taken a couple of weeks longer than estimated, and the client was impatient. Hell, he told me I was insane. Maybe so, Bob, maybe so.

So, Summerfest became history for me. As of Wednesday the 30th, my streak of consecutive attendance became sacrificed on the altar of.... what, really? a lousy career. My streak ended at 46 days, somewhat impressive but far from any kind of record. As of Sunday evening, Zelmo and I are currently tied at... one consecutive day.

I spent the end of June and the beginning of July, including the holiday weekend, trying to pull together the drawings that somebody else should have done. I probably put in 100 hours on them in 6 days. FWIW, this is an example of what they should have looked like:


Four sheets of plans, two of elevations, one of sections.

Of course, that put me behind on the other project, which is due by the end of this month. So, I've been getting up early, working on the dining room table on my trusty battered Powerbook, then going into the office and ignoring the phone there, and coming home and working until... O let's see, it's currently 12:22 AM.

It would be less debilitating if the clients would be willing to make progress payments. But this particular client loves to screw the architect down on fees in the front end, demand the full completion of drawings, and finally pay the majority of the fees 90 days after that, financing the project on someone else's credit ratings. Welcome to the glamour of private practice. However, in the current climate, it's obvious to everyone that a developer with project in hand is in the driver's seat, and able to dictate whatever heinous terms they like.

Well, since I used the term:



So, the blog and the family and the sleep and the recreational time and the dog all just gets flushed down the drain. Fuck, I would take a job with another practice in a second, but you know how many design firms are hiring? somewhere between zero and negative 700. Hell, I've even considered calling my first boss, who is a legendarily abusive asshole.

And then today, as if Mama Life was having a helluva time kicking me in the teeth, decided to go for the yarbles when I tried to protect my face. While updating my iPod, ALL FUCKING 34000 SONGS GOT ERASED FROM IT. 150 gigs, all the music I have. Now, don't worry, my entire music collection is on an external hard drive and nothing is permanently lost. But the iPod refuses to re-sync, freezing up whenever it gets within shouting distance of 10 gigs of music re-loaded, regardless of whether I use auto-sync or manual. Might be fucked for permanent.

And, just before Summerfest, I found out one of my oldest, dearest friends had to have emergency spinal surgery to avoid becoming a para, or quadra, -plegic. Because he was unemployed, and anything like preventive care is a laughable pipe dream in the medieval health care "system" we "enjoy".

So, you know, fuck. Accordingly, the zombocalypse has been put on hiatus at least until Sarah Palin completes her meltdown. Cuz that's fuckin funny.