the return to the office

as if I can't be missed (not to sound presumptuous :))

it's been a month since my student job at the restoration office ended
but I kept in touch with them! ... or they kept in touch with me :)

first hit: e-mail from the office: do you wanna come for the Friday-sandwich?
of course! the Friday-sandwich is legen... wait for it... dary
ok, maybe not legendary, but still... very nice to be invited to the weekly office tradition I think!
I choose the usual "sea breeze"
what's a sea breeze, I hear you thinking... well it's a sandwich with smoked salmon, tartar sauce and rorippa
had no idea that green stuff is called like this, but I found it on Wikipedia... long live Wikipedia...
wow, my art history teachers should here me... I deserve to be punched
(art) historians aren't exactly supposed to look stuff up on Wikipedia, we're trained to go to a library... or to visit a peer-reviewed website
but I'm deviating...
I had a nice sandwich, an interesting chat with the former colleagues and an appreciated "keep us posted" before I left

second hit: a week later another e-mail from the office: would you like to join the proof-quiz?
maybe some preliminary explanation is desirable
one of the guys in the office, wait..., the only guy in the office is a member of a quiz team and they were organizing their own quiz
a quiz that needed some beta-testing before putting into operation
so, I join team 2 (the smaller team of 3 people; the other team has 4 members) and we start the quiz
we laugh, we think, we laugh again, we ache our heads in thinking (at least I did, I get pretty competitive during a quiz), but we lose (damn it) with only one point (damn it even more)
the winners won a jade plant, the runners-up won a bag of lolly pops (just to be sure I checked the ingredients list for milk stuff... didn't think they would put milk in lolly pops, but yes they do :( ... so... no price for me *snif*)
but we had lots of fun!

third hit: an e-mail from the boss (cool!)
"I'm sorry I wasn't in the office for your last day. I'm very pleased with your work and approach. If it's ok for you, we should go for a drink"
...
a drink! ... with the boss
...
cool!!!
so, couple of weeks later, I had dinner with the boss
yes! dinner! in the mean time the drink had become a dinner, boss's treat!
I was a bit worried for ackward silences, but the evening turned out to be very interesting!

no job offer though :)

maybe on the fourth hit?

you know you're in the car with a musician when...

- when besides music he does about everything: teaching, performing, playing piano, writing sheet music
- when he does his administration in the car i.e. accountancy, finances, secretary work, networking
- when he calls half of his (i-)phonebook in a 20 minutes drive... from his daughter and parents, to famous singer-songwriters and gitarists
- when he has no idea of time
- when 9:40 AM is the agreed meeting hour for him to pick me up
- when 9:40 AM becomes 9:50 AM and he has no idea he's late
- when 9:40 AM can be 9:20 AM and he has no idea he's early
- when I comb my hair with my fingers for I was still in my PJs in the bathroom when he arrived and he says "we always meet this hour"
- when he calls his daughter and wakes her up... and still doesn't believe he's early
- when we arrive at the rehearsal room and everybody says "wow, you're early", he still has no clue
- when besides music, everything and administration he does even more: conducting choirs, conducting orchestra's, conducting musicals, proof-reading, advertising local politicians...
- when he drives a sedan that is usually filled up with the capacity of a mini-van
- when his spatial visualization ability is consequently pretty well developed... wondering if he's a good tetris-player
- when he has breakfast in the car
- when the breakfast is a cup of coffee
- when I'm the cup holder
- when he taps his foot at 60bpm
- when he hears a horn and says "that's an a"
- when his live is crazy
- when his "good morning" sounds a husky rumble of his throat and is either followed by "I had a gig yesterday" or "I didn't sleep enough"
- when he speaks dialect
- when he tries to speak proper Dutch, it sounds ridiculous :)

- when no matter what... he loves us... and we love him!!!

people on the bus - part I

winter's coming in again, colour's disappearing...
today, the only bright colours I spotted on the bus, was when I looked down on my own orange coat and red boots

oh.. and when I looked to the girls on my right eating candy
*for the record, not the girls were colourful, the candy was... and smelling disgustingly sweet (again the candy, not the girls)*

of course I couldn't help but overhear their conversations, particularly the one on 'age'...
let me reconstruct from the part I started eavesdropping:


-Blondie: "she's mega-old you know"
*I suppose you can imagine what caught my attention*
-Brunette: "you think she's mega-old??? I'm really close to that you know! it's only three more years for me!"


ok... short conversation, I know... but my imagination jumped on the editorial train :)
first of all, what age is mega-old?
I didn't hear the particular age the B&B were referring to, so I had to guess
I suppose Blondie herself must have been 21, for she claimed 22 to become "the best year"
*pretty sad, I think, when after 22 nothing in her life will ever be as good as it was when she was 22...*
and Brunette was definitely not much older than Blondie *my guess is 22*
so all adds up to the age of... 25... mmm
I'm older than mega-old... interesting...

also, I must have missed the tendency in juvenile slang to refer to particular ages with a binary prefix...
wonder if there's kilo-old, tera-old, or even peta-old or exa-old...

and if I'm older than mega-old...
does that make me giga-old?

my love...

I've told you guys before, there's no such thing as coincidence

faith has brought me joy, it brought me laughter
it granted me moments that made me stronger
it gave me friends for life

it has brought me love...
... and it did again...

I've found my love :)

there's a warm fussy feeling inside of me, a flame bursting with energy when I'm with you
I feel like I have known you all my life
when I least expect it, you're there :)

you're powerful in so many ways
you're harmonious, you're tremendously interesting
you inflict sparkles in people's eyes... oh those sparkles
you're sweet soul music
you're loving, you're shy
you're cute and you're fierce
you're tricky, you're hard to read
you're the best I've ever known

you're...

:)

you know you're an art historian in a restoration architects' office when...

- when your contract entitles you as 'architectural historian' (nice :) )
- when your job description is promising
- when your job turns out to be not limited to the job description
- when you're outnumbered in discipline (it's 7 against 1)
- when you're not outnumbered in sex (it's 7 against 1 (women vs. men this time))
- when the one guy is gay
- when you don't have your own desk
- when you don't have your own PC... sorry Mac
- when you have to find your way in the Apple world and start struggling with Mac
- when you're bound to commute between the Macs of the architects on holiday, the ones working at home or the ones supervising the construction works on the yards
- when you're banned to the laptop when everybody's in
- when you will do research on two not even remotely related monuments in restoration
- when 'not even remotely related' means: 18thC curly ironwork and 20thC industrial ateliers
- when you're all together back in archives and libraries (it almost feels like home...)
- when those two historical analyses take up three of the six weeks you're there (I should work more slowly...)
- when the architects drown in their work
- when you're a bit ashamed to ask for more...
- when you cannot participate in the lunch break conversations (about projects you're not working on)
- when on Friday you leave the office at 15h30
- when you should have asked for more work a bit earlier
- when the temporary solution is: catalogue the updates of the architectural handbooks or 'Vademecums'
- when you, as art historian, have time to do such things... the architects are still drowning
- when a second temporary solution is: find spelling mistakes in the SOW (Statement of Work)
- when you come across the weirdest words in that SOW; words the spelling corrector approves
- when words like 'elbow' are spelled incorrectly according to that same spelling corrector
- when after 700 pages of SOW at the computer screen, you start to see sentences in the air
- when there's still two weeks of work to fill
- when you start cataloguing the office's library
- when you realize an architect's library is a good source for the list 'books to buy'
- when there's a book on etched illustrations of extinct birds... O_o
- when your height is convenient: you're the chosen one to climb the library 'ladder' to get to the books on the top shelve
- when your the one without an excuse not to climb that ladder (three architects are too short, one is too pregnant, the other two are too busy)
- when on the last but one day the office collectively attends a symposium
- when on the last day you can participate in the lunch break conversation (about the symposium)

- when you miss being an art historian in a restoration architects' office

last week in the office - day 3

awesomeness to the fullest!!!
ow yeah...

I know, I'm a little late on  the sequel of my last days in the office
don't really have a reason...
I can call it upon my 'busy' schedule, the level of awesomeness of the third day of the week (as in still recovering, hehe), it might be me being lazy or I can blame it on the boogie...

anyway...

after 6 weeks of office work I finally got to go on a real survey trip
jihaa...

ok, probably you architects think "what's so 'jihaa' about surveying"
well, I'm an art historian, we basically jump up and dance around every time we can get out of any library :) (we practically already jump up and dance when we can go to a different library than we're used to)

so...

I can start describing the site, but a picture says so much more than words, so ...
in the category 'awesome' I believe this one has a pretty high score :)

Antwerp (Mortsel) - Fort 4

the beauty of decay

pathology's paradise

also pretty awesome: it didn't rain :D