Last of the summer wine

I've written before about an oddity of the microclimate here in Stuttgart: it can be ten degrees warmer at midnight than it was at noon (and those are big meaty Celsius degrees, dude, none of that cereal-filler Fahrenheit crap (why do I remember thirty-year-old dogfood ads?)). Today is another such day, I was actually hot walking home from work this evening.

The clocks go back to Winter Time this weekend, meaning that winter itself is just around the corner, but somehow I can't get very excited about that. Part of it is knowing (to a high degree of probability) that I will be here in Europe for Christmas, meaning having a very mild, probably snowless, winter. Bah humbug. Give me a sunny -40° and knee-deep snow and a bare forest to walk in, now that's what I call "winter".

But I digress. The last two weeks (since the seminar) have been very intense, the winning team of G, U, A and myself has been putting in many long and frustrating hours trying to convert the winning project into a viable building. As usual, this is an uphill battle against the natural optimism of competition projects ("I'm sure that an 18cm floor slab can span twelve metres") and the clients' inability to define their requirements fully. Their latest whim was wanting a new computerized remote-sensor access-control system. Easy, you can buy them off the shelf - if you happen to have a quarter of a million Euros in your pocket. The budget for the whole damned building is only 4 million - but they are surprised and disappointed that we cannot provide them with this little extra toy. My, what inept archtitects we must be.

But I whine. It has been very stressful in the office, we have been snapping at each other mercilessly - and pointlessly, since most of the snappery has actually been triggered by third parties. The environmental engineers are at loggerheads with the heating-ventilation-sanitation engineers about the proposed double-layered glasshouse roof, which is either a sizeable energy gain or a huge energy loss. Whom to believe? And on what basis to decide? This was not in my job description.

On top of all that, the database has come back to life with a variety of exciting new commercial possibilities, all of them involving some measure of hard work for me, which obviously has to be done the week before anyone thought of it. I found myself sitting here at 2am yesterday/this morning, answering e-mail and close to tears from frustration and sheer exhaustion. This is not a good state of being, and I have arranged for the next three days off (meaning, working nearly as hard but at home).

But I bore myself. There is still more to tell from Venice, and a follow-up on the seminar, and a day at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, and some other stuff too: soon, but not yet.