I love snow - People here complain about it, but whenever we have big storms, the entire city is a magical wonderland - partly because there are very few cars out (since the suburbanites aren't commuting into the city) and people are out walking (biking, skiing, pulling sleds) in the middle of the streets.

slowly creeps up your pants

Thanks!

And stop bitching. It's 6" of frozen slush here and temps below feeezing for as far as you can see. 

This is why you need snow GEAR.  Boots, hat, gloves, wristies, wool socks, silk thermals.  And this is also why I'm getting freaking tired of the cold weather - so many layers, so much encumbrance.

But love the Avengers reference.

toast, my boss used to cross country ski to work in downtown Philly on big snow days - and the lack of cars in the city makes everything soooo quiet by comparison.

@Sarah

nice Norse/Avengers reference... You aren't a pagan are you :P

i went out to site verify some stuff in an unoccupied building yesterday.  since i have a little car instead of a big truck, i was unable to just drive up to it . they don't plow unoccupied parking lots, and there isn't any street-side parking since there are drifts of snow stacked against the sides of the streets.  had to walk a half mile in snow that got up to nearly knee high.  if i had a set of cross-country skis... well, i wouldn't know what to do with them.  my car doesn't handle snow that well, but my boots do, so it wasn't all that bad.

staying close to the desk today.  that trip would give me frostbite the way it is today.

I really like layering - there's much more subtlety in what you display - and you have more of an opportunity to add drama and flourish in the removal or adding of layers.  I also like "gear" that requires a number of steps, so that might also be part of it.

You ever watch mr. roger's neighborhood?  The only thing I liked were the transitions - especially when he changed his shoes and jacket/sweater.  There's great power in that particular ritual - he's announcing he's moving from one world to the next without saying anything.

Toast, that was deep.

And no, I'm not pagan, but my husband is of Viking decent/desent?, and so we read a lot of norse mythology.  We also watched the Avengers.

the two other main transitions on that show were picture picture, and the trolley.  Picture picture he would take out something (a video cassette or movie reel) and stick it behind the frame and then it would superimpose itself into your TV's frame - it was more of an acknowledgement that you were watching TV and that this was another TV inside of your own TV (hence, "picture picture").  You actually followed the trolley between the two worlds - Mr. Roger's "neighborhood" and "make-believe-land" - an attachment of transition to an actual physical object passing through a threshold.  Mr. Rogers' changing his clothes was more his entry and exit between this "shared" tv world and his own personal world - he didn't just pass through the door, he also altered his own appearance to reinforce that this "tv world" is somehow separate from the real world.

I love Mister Rogers, he's a home town boy for me. My HS donated some musical instruments for Handyman Negri's music shop. I helped carry them to the truck and they gave me a tshirt I still own. 

Good memories.

My transition from office-clothing to home-clothing is hugely significant, every day.  I change entirely and if I can't my mental state has a hard time adjusting.

The problem isn't wearing the layers - I agree layers give more opportunity to make an interesting outfit - it's managing small maneuvers like reaching into the pocket of your suit jacket when it's underneath your overcoat. Or forgetting you have on a scarf when you try to pull off your necklace ID badge. Or pulling out just one dog poop bag from the roll when you're wearing gloves. Those things frustrate me. Yes, if I was more mindful of my actions it wouldn't be so frustrating.

BTW, right click doesn't work on Archinect for me right now.

me either.

I want snow to go, because of time for motorcycles. 

I was doing some black ice skating in a parking lot this afternoon with out my ice skates, to say the least.  It is a job site and the pavement was put down just before the asphalt plants close in the middle of November.  So the asphalt is still really black, and well with melting going on...it was like doing the windmill to keep myself from falling on  my keistor...

I've got 3 garbage cans worth of sawdust from the shop spread over two driveways and the backyard paths.

gruen: what's powering that beast?

could have been you donna.

Is there much difference between Tweerking and Tweeting?

donna - I spend hours practicing very similar maneuvers so that it seems effortless.  (except instead of guns, it's dog poop bags)

Ah, thumper. Nice. Looked like a twin the pics. I used to run enduros with a Honda 500. Big singles are the best. 

it's a twin. I've got a Honda CB900-4 also. The Honda is smooth. The Yamaha vibrates your teeth out. If I ever finish the yamaha the next project might be another CB. They really are nice bikes. 

btw donna, when you say right click doesn't work what do you mean?  I used to use right click for spellcheck but now it has a paste option pop-up thing going on, and I have to fix errors with my own brain (which is just not good for me)...same deal?

for me, right click only broke if you're cursor is over text in the comment box. still works outside of text in the comment box.

architext comics have a relevant link now that donna has twitter!

http://blog.ncarb.org/en/2014/February/TopTwitter.aspx

i do not have twitter yet.  maybe someday.

Exact same deal, Will.

I learned something three minutes ago: I've been using awhile incorrectly:

As you can see, "a while" and "awhile" can be used almost interchangeably in some cases – but a while needs to be accompanied by a preposition, such as “for” (“I slept for a while”) or “ago” (“I left work a while ago”). Awhile always means “for a while”

...and as of two minutes ago, the sound and image of a-w-h-i-l-e has become monstrously unfamiliar, as often happens when you focus on one word for too long!

how the hell did I miss this project?  So - I guess there was a competition for a city-owned site in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston last year, and the project from Sebastian Mariscal Studio was selected, and it's supposedly going to get built.

I'm trying to get a building permit to build a lovely little public urban amenity in our city.  The permit process is......I don't have words.  It's beyond labyrinthian, beyond Kafkaesque, beyond frustratingly opaque, beyond rage-inducing, beyond power-hungry-peevish-little-dumbass-bureaucratic-hickian.  When the people you talk to on the phone say things like "Well I don't know what they (the people in the office next door to them in the City-County building) will say about whether you need our approval first or theirs" you KNOW something is deeply rotten in the system.

Ask two people at the local building dept. the same question and you will get two different answers. And nobody will put anything in writing.

you need a single point of contact.  work with all the other departments as necessary, but have one person at the city (plans reviewer or something like that if possible) that is copied on every email and imply they are in charge of the city's responsibility for this submittal.  keep repeating it until they believe it.

so, does kafkaesque imply that the permit process in your jurisdiction is actually morphing into an organic bug-like creature?

in my limited dealing with indiana, it seems like the legislature and/or the higher echelons of administration are constantly micromanaging delivery of services, making little changes here and there, so that none of the folks who talk to regular folks ever know what *today's* expectations are. 

After seeing how it "works" I use an expediter who used to work at town hall. Some people use lawyers, and there are a number that specialize in dealing with the town bureaucracy, mostly former town attorneys.

Enforcement is highly variable, l,largely depending on how deep your pockets are > how well represented you are. In other words, it's exactly like the "justice" system. I know people who've complained about code violations on spec development that have been told by the town to hire a lawyer.

curt, isn't it true that Kafka's Metamorphosis story gets the most play, but the bulk of his stories are about bureaucratic labyrinth nightmares? I'm asking honestly - I vaguely recall a bad movie of one of his stories that was all about bureaucracy, but I'm pretty sure the only story I've read is The Metamorphosis, and I hated it. Both as a teen and now; that image of an apple stuck in him was impossible for me to accept.
 

yeah, The Trial is a good example. 

seconded curt - latch on to a single person.  I will often e-mail people to verify things discussed over the phone - I do this selectively, though.

There's also the tactic of entrenching yourself within the major neighborhood organizations and using them to help push things along, but this can be risky.  However - if the city is getting pressure from several different groups they're more likely to move - especially if someone high up is getting bugged from at least a couple individuals with a lot of clout in the community.  It's all politics.

Books on bureaucracy:

Kafka's The Trial. Also Heller's Catch-22.

I just put David Foster Wallace's The Pale King on my reading list.

I'm reading The Goldfinch right now - it's harrowing, and dense, but wonderful.

perhaps i did not understand what people meant by 'kafkaesque.'  i learned something.  i should go home now.  can't get any further ahead than i already have today.  i familiar with 'the trial,' but i'm not sure i've read it.

i'm reading a brandon sanderson novel.  not very dense or even sophisticated, though he does try to craft fairly detailed worlds.  i figure i spend too much of my day thinking already.  i need a break from that, so i prefer a book to be simple entertainment, sort of an alternative to watching survivor (or whatever it is people watch on TV).  i suppose i might get smarter if i read more intelligent books, but then i'm not sure i really need to be smarter at this point.

currently reading joel garreau's 'edge city' - ostensibly to become smarter. i think it might make me dumber. if this book had any influence in the 23 yrs since it was written, it can only be damage. 

recent reads:

keller easterling's "enduring innocence" which scared the crap out of me. 

joe & dave henry's bio of richard pryor "furious cool", which was kind of amazing - and unexpected. realized i didn't really understand pryor's influence at all, having come of age in the era of 'the toy'.  

i should probably read something fun next. 

I'm re-reading Alain de Botton's "The Architecture of Happiness" right now. It's still great. I find something new in it every time I read it. Strong recommend.

I've been reading "Ahab's Wife" for 4 months, now.  I'm still stuck in chapter 4, or maybe it's 5.  Reading is tough for me.  You know how TV and Smart Phones can suck people out of reality, and cause them to ignore everyone/verything around them?  Yeah, books do that to me.  To make it worse, I tend to absorb the mood of the book, and then it comes out in reality.  Maybe I should only read happy/loving books.

I'm wearing screw-back earrings today, similar to these, but gold.  

My ears aren't pierced, and so I never wear ear rings, but my dad gave me most of my grandmothers junk jewelry collection, and she has this one pair of bright green, jade earrings.  They are large, and a nice shape, and such a wonderful color.  No one has commented on them, or the fact that I have earrings at all, but that could be because my hair is down.  Certainly feels different.

Not sure I can get into the whole earrings look.  Maybe I should have them made into something else.  Tassle necklace?

Just finished Schlosser's Command and Control. Talk about harrowing. Fascinating and terrifying. 

I described the word "ma" to a group of friends last night: the empty space that is necessary to allow for things to be seen as discreet things in themselves, is how I've always understood it. Only one of them had heard this word before, and it made me think about how we architects, in school especially but then in practice, are asked to consider the sacred, to understand ritual, to see essential qualities...all of these heady concepts that most other disciplines don't train for are just quotidian to us.

Donna, I think most people who work in the physical world, the trades, people who make things, all have this knowledge. It's those who push paper - the bankers, lawyers and salesmen of the world - who don't.

I agree Miles - most tradespeople know this stuff, and engage with it, even if they don't use the same words we do when discussing it.

I'm contacting Big Green Head now about the weird right-click glitch. Assume everyone else is still experiencing it too?

Well that was strange.  I wrote a whole post about not knowing what 'ma' is, outside of mothers, and it's not here.  I'm sure it was brilliant, though.  Probably very deep and insightful.

The forum has been occasionally eating comments and swallowing them whole after one hits Post Comment.

I'm enjoying the wacky racketeering thread.
 

sarah, i expect your post is somewhere in the 'ma' space

http://www.npr.org/2014/01/18/263103378/living-and-forgiving-in-a-brilliant-writers-orbit

vado came by! Wooooohoo!

thanks donna