Rain, Rain, Go Away

Image of a street in Charlotte this morning. 

In case you can't tell, that is an almost completely submerged car that you are seeing...

I am actually quite thankful for the rain, we have been in a drought for some time, so several days of rain is much needed.

However, this morning, we woke up to having big puddles on our dining room floor where the rain had made its way through the window. It evidently rained so hard last night that it found a way in. So before leaving for work, we were frantically mopping up water and laying fresh towels out in case it rains some more. Now we question whether we need to go ahead and replace our windows (which we don't have time to do right now) or just wait and hope more big storms don't come through.

Then on the way to work this morning, we heard on the traffic report that 2 of the major roads (Monroe and Independence) we use to come into town were closed due to flooding. So we wandered as far as we could through neighborhoods to avoid most of Randolph (which we figured would be pretty bottle necked).

There was one section of neighborhood road closed due to flooding, but we found a way around it. Then we wandered through Grier Heights before coming out at Randolph right where there was a creek. Amazingly the creek was not yet flooded over the road, but it was significantly above its banks and flooding the areas next to it.

If we get any more major rain, I wonder if we will be stuck downtown since all major roads leaving downtown seem to cross creeks.

We received 2 phone calls on the way in, one from one of Daniel's co-workers who had gotten lost trying to find a way through neighborhoods and another from Daniel's dad who said that the news was reporting that we received 10 inches of rain last night!

Our meandering through neighborhoods was a good choice because it only took us 35 minutes to get to work and so far, I am the only person who is here from my department and there didn't seem to be a lot of people at LandDesign when I dropped Daniel off.

Update: It took most of my co-workers who lived in a similar area of town as me close to 2 hours to get to work this morning due to all of the road closures because of flooding.

Week 2 of Class

I am not going to lie, I was really dreading teaching tonight. My last class was so terrible, I had minimal rest over the weekend and then today was insane at my regular job. The whole time I was driving to Rock Hill, I just kept thinking how bad my class was going to be.

Thankfully, it was 100x better than last week. My students interacted with me. They answered my questions and commented. They seemed really interested in what I was teaching. It is amazing what a difference it makes when your class to interacts with you - I didn't feel like I was talking to the walls. I just hope this interest continues.

Flowers

Neither Daniel or I are big gift givers (we don't even buy each other presents for birthdays or Christmas), so it was a real surprise to come home to a bouquet of flowers that Daniel had picked up for me. I think he knows I have had a stressful week.

Death of a logo...

This is me venting:
About a month ago (maybe longer), I pitched 2 logo variations to a client. One incorporated clean, modern looking rings and a modern typeface. The other was a handrawn (sketched) icon with a very organic font. I did a good job at selling them on the rings, but they really liked the more organic font and wanted me to combine the two. My boss, put his foot down and said that to combine them would be to create a platypus - something that exists, but is kinda ugly.

So that brings us to today. I have been working for a couple of weeks now to make the modern rings more organic feeling. I used water colors to create a set of rings that looked more like the ripples of water (the point of what we were trying to convey).

Long story short, here are the comments from the client via a conference call... *Note there are 4 people on their end giving us advice/comments:

"Well, we don't really see the circles as rings of water. We just see circles."

"Actually, the overlap of circles reminds me of Mickey Mouse."

"Can we just go back to the original rings? And then can you add that more organic font with it?"

"Here, I'll show you what I mean. I am sending you an email where I, you know, used the circles from the first clean-looking logo and the font from the first organic-looking logo. Can't you just do it like?"

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Can someone please shoot me now???

Teaching...

It is no fun to lecture a class and feel like they are not interested in what you have to say. I have got to find a way to make the lecture portion of my class more engaging. I know the hands-on portions will be better, but until then, I have a ton of information to convey to my students...

First Day of Teaching Fall 08

It is almost midnight and I am just finally slowing down. Where did the day go? 8:30am - 5:30pm was work. Then home for a quick dinner with Daniel. Then off to York Tech in Rock Hill to teach my 8:00pm Art Fundamentals class. Then back home.

When I came inside, I found Daniel in the process of trying to finish the kerdi in the shower - our goal is to start tiling this weekend. He was having some trouble so from 9:30-11:00pm I helped with the kerdi installation followed by 30 minutes of clean up.

The frustrating thing is that we have at least one more night of installation. Now I have an aching back and I am REALLY tired. I can't begin to express how happy I will be to have the bathroom finally finished. I am trying not to think about how long the whole process has taken.

Class went really well tonight. One thing I realized is that I talk really fast - I ended up letting class out after 45 minutes. I don't think anyone was complaining.

Let's Go Canada!

For all of my Canadian family and friends, and anybody else that wants to see a ridiculously stupid, funny cheer, check out this link.