o ho ho... Merry late fall. I'm recovering from the bloat of a generous Thanksgiving weekend filled with family, food, and family in my food. Cannibals can be thankful too. Flipping the food coin, I spent part of today at the dentist again. I really can't think of too may activities I dread more; If he tells me I need another root canal, I'm pretty sure Hell will follow close behind me as I go absolutely ballistic. So far he hasn't said that, and I've remained a friendly, peaceful sort.

Work has been fairly manageable lately, which means slow, which means we're coming up with jobs that we've been meaning to work on for a while to kind of clean up old messes. It's boring at times, and then you forget something critical, and the world crumbles around you. I liken it to long marches soldiers have to make between skirmishes - you're supposed to be alert and prepared at all times, but the boring bits make up 99% of your day. It's hard to stay on your toes, and mistakes get made, and then your day turns from the slow monotony to stressful firefights with melting servers and angry customers. The routine cannot be treated as routine.

After work and on the weekends I make regular pilgrimages to the new offices. They are getting really close to completion and we're well beyond the due date. Our contract stipulated bonuses and penalties for early or late completion, and the penalties are stacking up. Though this means we're getting paid for each late day, it still doesn't completely remove the frustration of waiting and watching. One of the big quagmires has been the quality of the window installation. I'm sort of at my wit's end - they're doing an amazingly slipshod job. Everything else has a pretty high caliber of craftsmanship - drywall, carpentry, electrical, etc. The problem is that the interior of our building has a lot of windows, and they're sort of a really visible aspect that is supposed to top off the whole project. Do it right and you pull the rest of the project's quality geometrically higher - screw it up, and it sucks the quality out of everything else. The subcontractor doing the work has been talked to, cajoled, and everything short of begged to fix it. What grinds me is that he'll ask with total sincerity "What's wrong with it?" when shown frames that have over an 1/8" gap at the corners. I think his hope is to simply push on, install the glass, and say "there you go, all finished." My patience is eroding.

We've let the architect handle the bad-guy role for most of the construction, as this is what they're supposed to do. I've decided I may not want that buffer anymore (on this particular issue). I want to call people to account for their work, for their costs, and for their lack of effort. I want to do so to their face, with as much restraint as I can muster. It's not the money, it's the principle... of course I'm joking. It's absolutely the money. If I wanted something crappy, I could have accomplished it much more cheaply and quickly than this guy.
Moving right along, we have some fun events at La Capilla (which probably needs accent marks to be actual Spanish). The church is moving along at a slight crawl, which beats the full-stop it often arrives at. We finished the lighting in the ceiling (and I have few-to-no pictures of it yet) and jumped right to the extruded, CNC'd crown jewel, our 10ft diameter ceiling fan. It's gigantic, and unwieldy, and menacing. Naturally Sally mistook it for me when she first saw it. The company who makes this fan pretty much just makes big fans, and this is at the small end of their lineup. Total weight was about 110 pounds, so it required making a hefty support structure to hold it up in our trusses. I fear for anyone underneath of it if the ceiling collapses, but then again, you'll probably go quickly if it does hit you.

I spent most of the Thanksgiving weekend that didn't involve food out in the sanctuary cutting, drilling and grinding steel bits into a relatively stable platform to hang the fan from.

We even clear coated some of the steel, which really looks nice against the old trusses. I may have to re-think picking rustic over rusty in some places.
I haven't run power to the fan yet. Maybe tonight. I'm a little nervous about getting any momentum behind that behemoth - I can see it slicing through walls and chasing me if it escapes its mount.

The last event of note comes by way of Ms. Pants, aka my wife, who works for a certain Big 10 (11?) school in Champaign Illinois. As a grad student, she not only gets taughten, but she teaches. Clearly her smartedness is rubbing off on me. She also grades and lectures and reminds me that someday soon I'll have to call her "doctor." Anyhow, the university has been trying to severely curtail the efficacy of the grad student program by reducing the perks that go along with the additional workloads. It's never going to be lucrative to be a Graduate or Teaching assistant at a university, and no one expects it to be, but it also sort of gets the university really cheap labor to fill in about 25% of the teaching roles. I don't know how anyone can afford to do it at what they currently make, let alone with further cuts. Anyhow, Sally and her cohorts organized, demonstrated, and went on strike for two days before the university toned down their rhetoric and agreed to some basic language to protect the student interests a little more concretely.
Sally & I attended the last bargaining session before a strike was called, and though I cringe at the thought of employee uprisings (mine will eventually tire of being paid with Krispy Kreme donuts and bad puns), I was very impressed with the reasoned position of the students and the organized approach they took to resisting a university that rarely is called to account for its actions.