GRIZZLY PEAR
Sometimes they are a long time brewing but happen in a flash. For quite a while I be been doing decaf shots but it has two major downsides – it’s not very tasty and it still has trace amounts of caffeine in it.
Last week I decided to stop that, but the bagged mint tea was very meh. The next visit to the shop I had a flash of inspiration. Get fresh mint from on the kitchen. Throw some hot water on it.
And boom a new habit in a flash.
I have an aphorism that you know you really like something if you don’t mind doing the garbage work that comes with any job. Its one reason I know I like architecture. There is a lot of grunt work in the profession, but I don’t mind slogging through that stuff between the moments of really enjoyable work (for me its puzzling out a floor plan within limited confines).
But this morning I realized its also true in other field. I’ve been practicing tai chi on and off for the last few years, but I also have a gimpy right knee. From the beginning my teacher said I need to just exercise that knee every day, strengthening the muscles around it and teaching it to bend straight. Given that I haven’t done so and its definitely a limitation on how much I can practice, I’m at a crossroads.
Time to exercise that knee.
Here is a an short interview on Hiroji Kurota’s iconic image during the Million Man March.
He went to the event at the suggestion of one of his Newsweek editors. It was spur of the moment and he didn’t even have press credentials. At the end of the interview he notes that attending this event led to the South during the civil rights movement.
Its reminds me of how life sometimes just turns on a dime. The stray suggestion, that leads to a single step that leads down to a whole path of discovery.
I find that I spend my self repeating lots of aphorisms, here’s the whole lot of them.
If you don’t get a promotion in two years, it’s time to find another place.
People will take all the free work they can get. I’m gonna also.
You have to protect yourself and your time. It’s your choice to do anything.
It’s your job to tell your manager what can be accomplished given the constraints. Let them decide how to allocate your efforts. The logical extension is that sometimes you got to threaten to let a project fail, because the alternative of sacrificing yourself for the sake of a project.
When you work overtime you are getting a lot of experience, even if you’re not getting paid. 44 hours a week is 10% more than the regular joe and the learning compounds fast. On the flip side, if you’re willing to accept slower advancement in the profession, it might not be worth working OT.
Architects get paid in money and experience. Make sure you’re getting your fair share of one, the other, or both.
Don’t let yourself be comfortably miserable at a job.
We don’t make as much as other professions, but it’s better than a lot of the other alternates out there and I really enjoy the work. But if you hate the job, for god’s sake we don’t get paid enough for the stress and long hours.
For a recent job, I made it clear in the first interview that with a young family I was not interested in doing overtime. It almost certainly affected my negotiated salary, but my boss was really good about making sure I would not be overloaded. It was the best decision I made for that four years run.
The architect is a symphony conductor but he also has to play his own instrument.
Every email you send has a lawyer attached to it.
It’s not a problem unless you have a solution.
If you aren’t recovering from the previous recession, then the next recession is around the corner.
An architect’s job is to manage expectations.
And don’t forget to write meeting minutes.
This morning, I ended up waiting a bit to pay my bill at the coffee shop. So I took the opportunity to take a panorama at the counter. By the way, Publicus serves great espressos. Eric knows what he’s doing.
The assignment this week was 9 to 5. And while I couldn’t think of anything particularly cool beyond shots of my office, last night I saw was an impressive looking automated delivery tower at the front of the Walmart at Fort Apache and Tropicana. Its pretty cool, but in an ominous dystopian way also.
Due to the recent meme, the guys decided to throw up a fun counter intuitive assignment. This Saturday I came across a case of bad retouching by my daughter at a nature walk, which I then tried to make worse with a filter, worse cropping, and even worse manual adjustments.
I thought I’d have a second shot at the assignment when she started trying to trace my mother in law’s handwriting, but it was just too sweet a moment to mess up gratuitously.
