Design for Unemployment

It's been over a week since I wrote anything for the blog, so now's the time.

When I look over my last week, it all seems creative overkill. I am going crazy not having a job, so the creative energy I would be spending on design is leaking out of me every waking moment. Designing things, redesigning things, conceptualizing, abstracting and generally driving myself mad.

Happy family news, though not exactly in the back yard: my Cousin Paul Riker (1st, once removed) and his wife Katie had a second child, a daughter, my cousin Maggie (1st, twice removed). Here's a really cute shot of older brother Max holding Maggie. I ripped it off from Paul's Facebook page, and I hope he doesn't mind, but they're such a good-looking family, I just had to share.

The big frustration last week was the "sofa problem."

A month ago, we bought a sofa from a place on South Lake called Pampas (South Lake touts itself as the Rodeo Drive of Pasadena, but I think that's stretching it just a bit). We ordered a special size (100" instead of 120") and the salesman said it would be ready in two to three weeks. Last Monday was just a shade over three weeks, so I called to check on the sofa. The woman at the home office said the manufacturer was closed for the day and she would call me Tuesday with its status.

Tuesday at noon she called, saying the fabric we'd chosen was damaged in shipping and it would take one to two months to reorder. She suggested we go to the showroom and pick a new fabric. I was a little irritated, but also grateful, as I'd been having second thoughts about our fabric choice (it got more garish the longer I looked at it).

On Thursday, after Steve got home, we went down and chose a new fabric. The saleswoman called while we were there to see if the fabric was in stock. She couldn't get the manufacturer. She suggested, just to be safe, that we pick a third choice in case the second was unavailable (see the numbered samples). This we did. She wasn't working the next day but would leave a note for the salesman (who had sold us the sofa) to check on the fabric and call us.

At noon on Friday I hadn't heard from him, so I called: he'd done nothing about it, but said he would call right away and get back to me. An hour later, the woman from the home office called: She couldn't contact the manufacturer, but would call me first thing on Monday with the order status.

I was pretty irritated by this point: If things are not right as rain on Monday, I may cancel the order and get the money back. Since buying this sofa, we've seen a couple others, both less expensive, which would work in the space. They just aren't as nice as the one we ordered, though. Rodeo-Drive-quality customer service, however, this is not.

And, speaking of rain, we've had a mild drizzle pretty much constantly for the last two days. I think we've finally broken the cycle of hot late-summer weather and moved officially into fall. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday also promise to be rainy, and when things clear out at the end of the week, temperatures will be in the low- to mid-70s, which is my very favorite temperature range.

I spent a day or two designing bookshelves for the living room. I was reminiscing about the old board-and-cinder-block shelving we used during my hippie days in college. I extrapolated on that concept, designing them with more upscale materials and keeping in the art deco/oritental/modern style mix we're working with. What I came up with was this design, using finished hardwood shelves and 4"x8" glass blocks:
We have books, DVDs, CDs and tchotchkes coming out of our ears, and even after we donate the unwanted stuff to Out of the Closet, there's still more than enough to fill them. Not only functional, they would also help open up the space in the living room. I've also designed them to appear built-in.

On the fountain front, I gave one last valiant attempt at sealing the base of the patio fountain, using the last of the aquarium epoxy, but to no avail. The fountain is officially a lot cause.

But take heart! I found a new fountain online; not quite as tall and now quite as Zen, but with nice aesthetics nonetheless. I went ahead and ordered it, and it should be here by the middle of the week. It's self contained, just plug-and-play, and it even has a light inside, so it will be a focal point in the evenings.

This, of course, leaves me with a perfectly good pump from the previous fountain, so I will probably be buying slate or rocks of some kind and coming up with another water feature for somewhere in- or outside the house. Stay tuned for that.

No new job possibilities. I keep combing through almost a dozen job sites and spend hours online filling out forms on companies' websites for positions that I'm totally qualified for, but no one replies.

I've been having insomnia worse than normal, and once stayed up the entire night processing images to update my general design page on the website. I've usually been getting to sleep between 1 and 2 a.m., which has been manageable, but I'm feeling lousy that it really doesn't matter when I get to sleep or when I wake up, because there's nowhere I have to be and no one who's counting on my to get a job done.

I'm up late tonight because I had to revise the slideshow programming on the general design page of my website, now that I have the new image files. I've included a couple extra brochures I found in my files, and also added galleries for stage design and my faux finishing work on interior design. The new slideshow is up and working, so I'm feeling good about that.

It's got me up late again tonight, though. And diving into a blog post didn't help matters, either. But, what the hell; I enjoy sharing inconsequential events in my existence with whoever has enough time to waste reading about them.