I've moved.

From now on, find me at shanalines

and another thing...

There was a mention of a 747 pencil. If anyone knows what that is, please let me know.

preview post

What do you get when you combine 1/4 of a sandwich with pickle slices, a guy who doesn't know my name, a foolish neighbor, a whole bunch of water, take out dinner, a spilled beer, and some friends?

If you guessed Wednesday, you're right.

Details to come... probably.

it makes you wonder...

*Towards the end of the work day yesterday, I used one of the bathrooms in my office, which is a single-user toilet room. I washed my hands, and used a paper towel to dry them. (This is all fascinating, right? Wait for it!!) As I tossed the towel into the wall-mounted waste receptacle, I noticed something out of place in the bin. I took a closer look, and saw a plastic disposable container from a salad bar, with the remains of a few pieces of lettuce and perhaps some lentils.

Um... huh?

The bathroom happens to be almost exactly next to the kitchen, which is equipped with cans for recycling plastic... and, if you're really not even into recycling, we all have our own trash cans at our desks... so I'm wondering about the circumstances that would lead someone to throw out a salad container in the bathroom... is one of my co-workers so sad and lonely that he/she eats lunch alone in the bathroom!?!?!

I'm not even sure I want to know...

(*Editor's Note: I mentioned this to a few people yesterday after it happened, so my apologies in the event you are reading this story twice-- think of it as an opportunity to dig deeper into the question. Let me know your thoughts on this matter in the comments section. I welcome your insight.)

i feel so fancy.

Daybreak Shawl: Complete!

today's lessons

1. I am good at saving money-- specifically by VE'ing the hell out of a light fixture package while preserving the integrity of the design.

2. Kendall Square is an abyss. I will never understand my way around Kendall Square. It is my personal Bermuda Triangle/Black Hole of buildings.

3. On Wednesdays, I typically eat at least 1 butterscotch candy. At least 1, and only on Wednesdays.

the little things

I haven't felt so great over the past few days-- headache galore. I stayed at work a bit late to finish a tedious task, then made my way over to the T to ride home. While waiting for the train, I pulled out my knitting (shown below) and a wonderfully friendly girl came by and asked what I was knitting. I pulled it out to show her, and said "it's a shawl" and she asked which one, to which I replied "Daybreak". She knew he pattern, complimented my work, and pulled out some socks in progress! It really made my day.

Check out my daybreak-- it really is lovely! Ha!

what do these things have common?

not much... except for the fact that we ate corn on the cob AND popcorn at the movies last night. We saw Inception-- go see it today, it's great!

master of disguise

admitedly, I haven't looked closely at the toys for sale in the vending machines in grocery stores in years... so I don't know if this is new or not, but I was surprised to see this for sale:

yogurt tease.

Among other things, I just had a 6 ounce cup of Dannon Light and Fit yogurt for lunch, vanilla flavor. I've been noticing lately that unfortunately it is tasting increasing more artificial. I went to the kitchenette to wash out the cup before recycling it, and had the following conversation with a co-worker, who will be referred to in the remainder of this post as yogurt tease, or YT for short, for his comments and behavior. (I will be referred to as SSC, in case you were wondering)

SSC: (while washing out yogurt cup) Wow, this yogurt tastes increasingly more artificial each time I have it.

YT: Yeah, most yogurts do. Although Stoneyfield yogurt is pretty good.

SSC: (nodding, agreeing-- though making mental note that the Stoneyfield is pricier, and the enormous box of Dannon Light and Fit was a good deal at Costco) Yeah, you're right. (tosses cup into recycling bin, and turns to walk away)

YT: You know, I make my own yogurt.

SSC: (stops in tracks) Really! How do you do it?

YT: Oh, it's really easy. You just need to start with the culture, and you can't buy it at any regular store, because all of their stuff is processed.

(SSC nods, ashamed after eating processed cheap yogurt)

YT: You just heat milk to a froth, let it cool, add the culture, and refrigerate overnight.

SSC: (falling straight into the Yogurt Tease's trap) That does sound easy. Where do you get the culture?

YT: (drops bomb) Oh, mine is from [fill in foreign country here-- left blank to protect identity of said Yogurt Tease]. It's been a family tradition since the 1970's.

SSC: Right. Of course. (finally exits kitchenette, defeated)

time.

I've mentioned before, either here, or on my flickr page, that I look at this clock all the time.

In the past few weeks, I've had a lot on my mind and when I recently looked at this clock, it surprised me to see that the right face is missing its hands.

As if to tell me time is of the essence. To tell me something.

say my name!

I've come to the realization that people just aren't getting the fact that I've changed my last name. and it's kind of OK, i guess... as it makes sense to me to be called all 3 names. Seems fair.

I've been reading Sloane Crosley's new book, How Did You Get This Number-- she's also the author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake, which I found super funny. Anyway, this morning on the bus I was reading the short story called "If You Sprinkle", and found the following line on page 153:

As it is with anyone who has made an impact on your life, her first and last name are inseperable.

Of course, this got me thinking about the years and years of being referred to by my first and last name, and the fact that the majority of people in my life (sometimes even my husband!) seem to forget I now have another name tacked on the end... and of course I got a bit full of myself when reading this quote-- thinking that I must have had an impact on a lot of people's lives... :)

our saturday in pictures (and words)

Yesterday we went biking.

I have nothing more to say about this-- I just thought this is a cool picture of the mud on my tire. :)

And now, for something completely different.

Last weekend, we went grocery shopping at Market Basket.

Despite the insanity of 75% of the customers shopping like grocery stores are going out of business, and, oh, that sawdust, we were completely impressed with the brevity of the receipt. It was printed double sided, and lacked the extra "stuff" that Stop and Shop receipts have-- that is, when they tell you how much you've saved this year, how many arbitrary points you've accumulated, etc... so in our minds, score 1, Market Basket.

Fast forward to yesterday: we went to Stop and Shop to buy some ingredients for a goat cheese cheesecake to bring to our friends' Dave and Steph's house for dinner. We purchased our items, and then in the car I realized I had only grabbed 1 block of cream cheese rather than the required 2, so I ran back into the store to purchase the cream cheese pictured below. (Note: when running through the store to get this cream cheese-- because at this point I was realizing we were probably way too late in starting this cooking venture, I accidentally knocked down a small display of mustard. I had to spend more time to pick it up than I would have had I been walking at a normal speed... note to self: do not run past seasonal grilling displays)

So back to this cream cheese: that's all I bought.

LOOK AT THE LENGTH OF THE RECEIPT!

Seriously, Stop and Shop? I had trouble getting this receipt in the frame! Take some lessons from Market Basket, please!

Back to the cheesecake: it was a bust. We managed to get through baking the crust and making the filling, then realized we were better to take it unbaked to Dave and Steph's house, and cook it there... well, their oven was feeling a bit under the weather, and couldn't quite handle making dinner and dessert, so we ended up taking our cheesecake back home afterwards to bake it... and bake we did.

Yet... the filling had been sitting for so long on the crust, that the crust is no longer crusty. And the middle didn't really bake. And apparently we went a little heavy on the lemon juice, because the cheesecake is surprisingly lemon-y.

jets vs. sharks

sometimes i go home via the red line. last night was one of those nights. i was coming from a yoga class on the green line, and changed to the red line at park street. i realized that i like standing in the center platform (pictured below) and trying to guess which side people will ride: ashmont/braintree, or alewife. in my mind, it's a west side story thing. i always wonder if people will break into dance...

because really, i know this is totally stereotypical and cliche, but i think i can guess which platform people will ultimately migrate to. i like to play this guessing game for myself when walking down the center stairs, and try to determine who will go left (slightly punk southie urban hipsters and southie townies, and the like) and who will go right (geeks and nerds from MIT and Harvard, chill Somervill-ians, etc.)

and then, once i'm on the nerd/geek/somerville side, i like to look around the train and guess at which stop peopel will depart. again, i feel this is intuitive, but i'm often correct. Fancy people at Charles, academics Kendall, hippies at Central, academics at Harvard (but somehow they look different from the Kendall ones), neighborhood-y people at Porter, slight urban hipsters and 'regular' college kids at Davis, and then all the rest of the assorted bunch at Alewife.

Does this sound right to you?

what's the deal?

i just don't understand the intrigue of the game of golf.

perhaps it's better that way, though.

opening day

this evening we visited a brand new restaurant in the square near our house. in fact, today is the opening day! very exciting indeed. apparently we weren't the only ones who had the idea to visit Yak and Yeti on opening day-- there was a huge line outside! after a few false starts, we ordered our food to go, and sat outside the coffee shop waiting while it was prepared. lucky for us, our square is entertaining-- the local wine shop was taking pictures of the outside of the building at dusk, and not-so-successfully attempting to dissuade traffic from stopping outside of their storefront while the photographer waited to capture the perfect shot from across the street. they had 2 of the employees inside fake wine tasting, too... i'll have to check their website soon to see if that picture makes the cut! anyway, we finally got the food, and walked it home, only to find that they had left out the naan! fortunately for me, dan went back to pick it up, and it was great! actually, the entire meal was great: vegetable samosas, naan, and palak paneer. yum! the decor in the place is cool, too-- very funky and creative with these long shoelace strings wrapped around simple black pipe, and then a side room with a huge graphic of mountains. i'll have to go back with my camera. so far i would give this 3-1/2 stars (on a 5 star scale-- i've got top chef masters on the brain) basically because of the strange service.

i like our neighborhood.

slip slidin'

About 2 weeks ago, we started a thorough spring cleaning of our house. It has been really great to go through old books, clothes, and miscelaneous other things, and figure out what we do or do not need to keep. Going along with this purging, of course, is the actual process of dusting, sweeping, washing, etc. Now, I don't know about you, but we use a combination of a Dyson vaccuum and the good old reliable Swiffer in our house-- typically the dry cloths, but sometimes the wet ones, too. I'll tell ya, though, something must be wrong with our Dyson and Swiffer system, because our floor is so incredibly slippery that I literally fell down on the way into the kitchen the other night! Seriously! The wall broke my fall. It was alarming and frightening and laughable all at once.

Several things come to mind. I wonder what failed us: the Dyson? The wet Swiffer cloths? The dry ones? Or have we unknowingly created some lethal combination, like Pop Rocks and Coca Cola?

So now we are faced with a dilemna of what to do to get rid of the slippery floor. Typical outdoor choices (salt, or the ever popular New England dirt) are unusable, as this is, um, an interior space. Sandpaper is also a bad idea, as it would destroy the finish on the wood. I also can't stomach the idea of always wearing shoes... that just seems to be an oppresive way to live in one's own house.

I am considering getting some lounging socks that have the no-skid pads on the bottom, but I am open to your suggestions for getting rid of this dangerously slippery floor.

our trip pics up on flickr

water

dear eastern massachusetts,

i want some clean water.

sincerely,
shana

age is just a number

a lot of times i get carded at bars. worse, i often get mistaken for a student in my class rather than being the professor. today, though, the opposite happened, and i'm not sure how i feel about it.

i was in the kitchen at work getting a cup of coffee, talking about my weekend with a coworker. i mentioned that we travelled to a good friend's baby shower, and that she is having twins. the conversation went something like this.

coworker: you went to RISD, right?
me: yeah, for grad school
coworker: do you know so-and-so?
me: uh....
coworker: he's about our age. i'm figuring that you and i are about the same age... well, within 10 years.
me: uh...

yeah. so i happen to know that this coworker of mine has teenage children! i got all confused-- do i suddenly look old enough to have teenagers?

greetings

i just received a work email with the closing salutation of "yours".

um... doesn't seem P.C., does it?

a conversation at work

at work, someone in my desk area was frantically running around looking for a calculator with a square root function... after asking 2 people without any success, the person approached me and said:

shana, you must have a calculator with a square root function! can i borrow it?

i said yes, i do, and yes, you may borrrow it, and then i got to thinking... what about me made this person think that i would most certainly have a calculator with the ability to calculate square roots?

i received these M&M's as a gift.

hoodie

Today someone told me my outfit looked like a gym teacher, and I ought to have a whistle.

Perhaps.

auto spell check

i find this quite funny. i just received this email from an engineer who is supposed to be sending me progress prints today. see if you can figure out which word was auto-spell checked:

Shana, Denise is making the puffs now, we will send them over in a few minutes.

yup.

[via http://xkcd.com/710/]

Thursday morning conversation

As a dad an his small son got off the bus, the dad says to the son ( who is maybe 3?) " say thank you, Elijah", to which the kid responds with "thank you Elijah!"

It made everyone on the bus smile.

Have I mentioned I like Thursdays?

sad orange

we stayed for dinner

thought i'd write another post, because i felt sort of mean at the end of that last one. i hope you'll enjoy this one.

last friday night, dan and i went to dinner at a Thai restaurant that we really like... it's a fairly small place with really good food. it was kind of crowded when we arrived, so we had to sit by the front door where it's rather drafty. within a minute of entering, actually before sitting down, we notice that a diner at one of the back tables is puking at his table. like, everywhere. table cloth, floor, you name it.

and, as the title of this post indicates, we stayed for dinner! yup. we've been there so many times that we were not phased by this at all... a few days later when i mentioned this to a friend i realized that maybe we could have interpreted this as a sign that something was wrong in the kitchen, but we didn't. and there was no issue as far as we were concerned-- we enjoyed our pad see-yu and pad thai quite a bit.

i bet if we hadn't been to this place a dozen or so times before this, we would have left. probably. i will tell you one thing, though: we're never sitting at that back table. i mean, i know that any number of things could have happened in any public space i'm in, but the fact that i actually saw the puking take place means i refuse to sit at that table. in fact, if we went back and it was really busy and that was the only table free, i'd probably opt to go somewhere else.

really.

the secret word

so my friend at work, who i happen to be working with on a project, was talking to a consultant of ours who was really hesitant to change part of his design. she was telling me that while she was talking to him, it seemed really unlikely that he would change... until she mentioned that one of our principals thought it would be a good idea to make this change. upon hearing his name, the consultant agreed to make the change. as she told me this part of the story she said "all i had to do was say [this principal] wants to make this change, and the consultant agreed! his name is my secret word."

"funny", i said, "when i run into that situation, i use your name, and that works for me.".

hierarchy is funny. so is lowerarchy. HAHAHA no, i know that's not a real word. seriously.

i kind of want to be someone's secret word... sometimes i think i might have that going on in studio but i'm not sure.



i decided i don't really want comments on this one... is that wrong? well, whatever. this is my blog, damn it.

assorted

1. power supply, 2. pervious paving, 3. 357:365, 4. discarded headphones, 5. 320:365, 6. fall leaves, 7. 307:365, 8. paint on concrete, 9. poor gummy bears, 10. on site, 11. keens on a boat, 12. 204:365, 13. new keens, 14. construction zone, 15. expansion joint, 16. really?, 17. on the edge of the practice green, 18. they used the slate i picked!, 19. in the rain, 20. wood vs. concrete, 21. i like these., 22. 078:365, 23. yellow + black + gray, 24. the length of these socks is inexcusable, 25. on the steps

and for our next trick...

we got this 45 gallon trash can into the back of our Civic.

now all we have to do is figure out how to throw out the old trash can.

how many architects....

does it take to design our own workspace? i think we have 13 involved, and we can't get it right. one thing that we did agree on is that we're not going to allow our clients to come into this haphazard mini-office... which is sort of ironic, when you think about it: shouldn't we want to show off our own work?

we're back.

a beautiful weekend trip ended for me in illness... cross your fingers for me that these flu-like symptoms pass soon.

grapes and raisins.

red grapes.
green grapes.
white grapes.
yellow raisins.
[brown] raisins.

discuss.

this made my day.

this past weekend, dan and i helped our friends dave and steph move into their new house! exciting!

today i got this email from steph:

quote from my dad:
"That Shana. She's a strong one."

i love it.

I thought I was relatively observant.

Really, I did. It turns out I'm not as with it as I thought... let me set the scene.

I teach a design studio, and tonight was the second class of the term, but the first time I was with my own 8 students. The class began tonight with yours truly giving a project intro lecture to all 48 students. Afterwards we went upstairs, and they pinned up their work. I noticed I only had 7 instead of 8 (observant!) but started anyway. A few moments later, student 8 arrives. He apologizes, and them looks at another student and sort of nods and smiles... I assume they are friends.

Fast forward....

2+ hours later, student 8 presents his work. The whole group has been presenting and conversing for a while now-- I've learned all their names. So this guy is presenting, an someone makes a comment, and I sort of turn to see and hear it. It is at this very moment that I realize that student 8 and the student he exchanged glances with are WEARING THE SAME SHIRT! I couldn't believe that a) I hadn't noticed, or b) that it was actually happening! I'm losing my touch for detail.oh, and did i mention the shirt in question is plaid?!?!

picture in picture

a little print screen action with my new double monitor scheme results in capturing both screens... and some crazy picture in picture action.

[i think this is another case of me thinking this is much cooler in my head than the resulting blog post. whatever.]

attempting tumblr

i'm trying tumblr. we'll see how it goes... i think i'll still use this blog, too.

you can find me at shanalines.tumblr.com

i can't make this up

here, an excerpt from an email from a client-- this is one bullet point in items that need to be addressed/fixed:

Upstairs ladies bath partition is falling out of wall and creating situation where door can't be opened. Apparently large women have had to crawl underneath on several ocassions and are quite distraught upon reaching the sunny side.

i can't handle it.

who buys this stuff?

I guess the real question is whether it's imitation cheese or simply imitation cheddar... but for that matter how does one imitate cheddar?

thanks, 2009

january

knitting, early morning coffee, quiet

february

teaching, travel, tasting

march

studying, birthday, observations

april

discovery, cooking, listening

may

friends, conversation, relaxation

june

construction, photography, iphone

july

sunset, grilling, outdoors

august

camp, parties, smiles

september

red sox, holidays, fall

october

anticipation, preparation, wedding

november

thanksgiving, climbing, togetherness

december

lights, laughing, ends and beginnings