A Week in the Life: Monday

Years down the road (or maybe mere months down the road...) I know I am going to look back and wonder, "What the heck did I spend my time doing for 5 years in college...?" As such, I am documenting one random week out of my college life in pictures, day by day.

So...what did Monday, April 5, 2010 hold in store?

12:41 am: Yep, AM. I started out my day (quite literally) in studio. Note the energy drink strategically located within arms reach on my desk. As we have a critique this coming Friday, I have a feeling that a lot of my photos this week will be from this exact same vantage point...

9:29 am: Woke up a little later than usual. Getting ready at my sink...my side is the right half. I like to think that it looks slightly more organized than the left. ;)

10:08 am: Arrive back at studio 8 hours after I had previously left it. Slightly surprisingly, since we have a critique this week, I am the first one there.

10:29 am: Dive right into work. First up: study for the Art History exam that I have tomorrow (Tuesday).

11:49 am: Lunch time! I dug right into my turkey, lettuce, green pepper, onion, provolone cheese, and ancho chipotle sauce sandwich (purchased conveniently from the Design Cafe) before reluctantly getting back to work...

5:26 pm: I was so engrossed in studio (class time from 1:10-5:20 pm) that I forgot to take any pictures until the end. I spent a good portion of that time working on this rendered elevation of our hotel bungalows (it's about half finished here) before dashing home to grab my car and some quick dinner.

5:51 pm: So, you may ask, what does such a busy design student eat? No surprises here. Only 3 minutes to cook, and you get your week's worth of sodium intake! How can you go wrong?!? :P

5:57: Before rushing off to study and go back to studio, I took a moment to, quite literally, stop and smell the roses tulips, ones that Tyson surprised me with this past week. Gotta love that boy!

8:17 pm: Rendering with those markers is messy business, especially if you dig in and blend it together with your fingers. Too bad that can lead to leaving fingerprints all over your pretty pictures...frequent trips to the bathroom are necessary to prevent that from happening. :-/

11:05 pm: Tyson calls, probably wondering why I haven't called him yet. I have been a busy bee, that's why! On a side note, this is how sexy my hair looks after sitting in the same spot for hours on end, continually running my hands through it and putting it in and out of ponytails while I am working and thinking...

12:20 am: I suppose this should technically be on Tuesday's post...but here I am leaving studio. Besides, it's not really the next day in my mind until you go to bed. This leaves me plenty confused when I pull all-nighters...

12:21 pm: My car! Slightly hidden and blurry, due to Chad's huge monster of a truck being in the way, and me walking and trying to take a picture at the same time. Anyway...it got me home sweet home, where I am finishing typing this up, and then ready to finally call it a day (er...night).

What's Left

One exam...

Before yet another big, important, lots-of-work, in-progress studio critique...

Which is the same day as the dress rehearsal for the dance recital that I have to organize...

And the dance recital is the next day...

Which is the same day as a bachelorette party that I am in charge of...

After all these things, my senior honors project is due, which includes a 2-hour poster presentation (which equals a 2-hour critique in my mind)...

Not too much later a cost-estimate project is due, which has yet to be started...

Two days later a 5+ page paper is due...

And the next day is THE FINAL CRITIQUE for studio...

But then I just have one (or maybe two) final(s)...

Before I can GRADUATE!

So the question is...

Just how little sleep (and how much caffeine) can I survive on for the next 6 weeks?

blah

While flipping through my most recent issue of Architectural Digest (which persists in coming to my house in Minnesota...for some reason I get about half of my mail at my apartment in Iowa and half of it in Minnesota...) I noticed that most of the projects featured were rather...bland.  Now don't get me wrong, there wasn't really anything wrong with any of the projects individually.  I actually truly liked the majority of them, and they featured interesting furniture selections or other nice components.  Taken as a whole, however, the magazine was pretty blah.  I flipped through it once, but when I was thinking about it later realized that I could not really recall anything specific from any individual project.  Upon looking through it again, I realized that if I had not known any better, I would have throught all of the images were from the same project.  Every design (except one, which featured different shades of blue interspersed throughout the residence...but otherwise was no different) was in the same neutral color palette.  

Basically I just found it interesting that in such a luxurious and highly respected publication, they would not feature more diversity.  I mean, do you know what kind of work it takes to get featured in their pages?  I don't mean to make them sound completely awful, though.  This is the first time I can remember (in about a year and a half of receiving the magazine monthly) feeling so disappointed in an issue.  I'll have to pay close attention in the future and see how I feel about what is being featured.

Some good did come from this disappointment, though.  I remember last year looking at the senior interior design students gallery show that displayed their range of work from being in the interior program.  Each student had a fill-in-the-blank profile next to their work, and one of the things each of them had to answer was their "design philosophy".  I have been thinking about that off-and-on ever since then, because while I have had a somewhat vague idea in my head about what my personal design philosophy is, I have not been able to nail it down.  Now, however, I know exactly what will go in that blank:

"Create every project to have its own personality, like something nobody has ever seen before."