I have concluded my semester of Beginning German with flying colors, an A+ no less. Kirk was disappointed though; he thought I should have gotten an A++, if such grade exists, considering the numerous advantages I have over the other students. Towards the first week of November my life got considerably busier when, out of the blue, I was called to help out with a project at a small, local architecture firm here in Bloomington. Having to juggle a first-period class four days a week and then go to work for 9 hours straight was no stroll in the park, but I'm glad to have the opportunity to get involved in some architectural design work and get paid for it! I don't know how long this gig will last; the plan was to resume work after the holiday break with the hope this might herald more opportunities to come. I used my first paycheck to buy a new refrigerator, and as a result, was called "white trash" in jest by a friend. (The reference takes some explaining, which I'm not sure I can do convincingly.) The truth was that the ice-maker of our vintage fridge which came with the house built in 1966 broke during Thanksgiving week and leaked water on the floor; it would have had to be replaced anyway. This winter will be our fourth in Bloomington! We have been slowly replacing our kitchen appliances in the past couple of years; the changeover is now complete for the kitchen. We will be working our way to other parts of the house in the coming years. My inclination is for small, piecemeal improvements, while Kirk favors large-scale overhaul.
The followings are some computer renderings of the interior renovation of the Monroe County Library Teen Center project (in the Design Development Phase) which I participated in -
Floor Plan
Longitudinal Section
Lounge Area
Radius Bookcase
"floating" Graphic Design Space
Quiet Reading Area
Here's to you all a very happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year!
For lack of a more poetic name, I call my new house design, "Pool House." The central feature of this design is a lap pool embedded on the basement floor, which is illuminated for full length of the pool by natural light through a skylight at 2 feet above the ground level. I finished the design using Revit 2013 a long while ago, though I encountered some difficulties, apparently having to do with Revit 2013, in rendering it as I normally would do. I had thought that my powerful new iMax desktop would let me zip through the rendering process but that did not happen, unfortunately. There were several reasons for it, not the least of which was that I have less time now to try it get it to work.
In this design there are basically three interlocking volumes forming an elongated rectangular block with the long sides facing south and north, intended to fit into a not uncommon lot shape in most US cities or suburbs. The middle and tallest volume is 3-story high, one below ground and two above, while the two smaller and shorter volumes are located at the front (west) and back (east) ends. Let me walk you through the floor plans -
Basement plan
The basement consists of an open space for exercise and entertainment with a kitchenette and the staircase on the north side and a lap pool on the south side lit by skylight. There is a mechanical and storage room directly below the garage, and a bath/changing room opens to the pool. The ground floor consists of the main living, dining, and cooking areas in the middle with an open stairwell on the north side illuminated by skylights on the roof. The garage is located in the west end while the vestibule and a guest suite is off to the north/east end. The living room and guest bedroom open out to a terrace in the back. A utility room is situated between the kitchen and garage.
The second floor contains the main bedroom suite, two offices, and another bathroom. The office facing west has a roof deck above the garage. The bedroom in the back opens out to a balcony facing south.
Ground Floor plan
Second Floor plan
West Elevation
East Elevation
South Elevation
North Elevation
The following are some section cuts, both longitudinally and transversely, and some semi-rendered interior perspectives -
Living area
Dining area
Kitchen
From Kitchen looking toward Living area
Guest Bath
Laundry Room
2nd Floor Hallway
West facing Office
Next are some rendered images; they are supposed to look more life-like, however, they take forever to do and the results are not necessarily more appealing -
Driveway
Back Terrace
Skylight to Basement Pool on the south side
Basement
Roof Deck
I haven't had the chance to do some walk-through movies like I did in the past--my German class has been keeping me very busy. I hope to do them over the Thanksgiving break though. As you may have noticed, the plantings in these images are mostly in the fall colors of red and gold. They are, of course, stock photos incorporated into Autodesk's 3D rendering library and a far cry from the burst of autumnal colors that are daily transforming our landscape.
The third LibriVox project I worked on was "The Song of the Lark" by an American novelist from the late 19th-early 20th Century era, Willa Cather, depicting the journey of an irrepressible talent in finding her "voice" from humble beginnings, propelled by her indomitable desire, determination, and drive--the magical formula for successful enterprises. (This was also the project that inspired me to learn German.) Though there are insightful and lifelike depictions of each of the main characters in the book, they seem to me to be somewhat one-dimensional, even Thea Kronborg, the heroine, seems to be confined in and, as it were, protected by, the bubble of a character type defined by the author. I thought that my reading had improved a little for this one but it was still plagued by halting diction, which impeded the flow of story-telling. I'm onto my fourth project now; I'm grateful for the opportunity to work on my speech articulation, something which I wish I had practiced more when I was young.
I almost fell out of my chair when our instructor showed this video in class the other day. I've definitely got myself into a totally unfamiliar, parallel universe this time when I enrolled in a German 100 class at IU this fall. I've been going to class at 8 in the morning, four days a week, since school started. Learning a new language, from the ABC's like a pre-schooler in a kindergarten, with a bunch of young men and women barely out of their teens, is quite a novel experience for me. When I went back to Graduate School over a decade ago to study Architecture, I was similar in age to my classmates' parents, now I could be their great aunt. Thankfully, I am not as prone to feel embarrassed in such circumstances as when I was younger.
What prompted me to take up German was the frustration I felt when I attempted to pronounce a few German words in a book I was reading for LibriVox in the summer. Also, I remember feeling very embarrassed and rude when I couldn't understand or say anything in even the barest minimum of German on our trip in the German speaking part of Basel some years ago.
One often reads about how learning to speak a new language or to play a musical instrument can improve the mental agility of older adults. It so happens that I seem to have been doing all the things that may contribute to keeping my wits about me. At any rate, I hope my learning German now may have many more benefits than just enabling me to say "Vielen Dank!" when occasion arises.
The Fixed Period is the title of the second audiobook to which I contributed in the LibriVox project. It is a strange story, to say the least, written by the prolific Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope, and first published in 1882. Kirk and I, since we joined The Folio Society back in the 90's, have collected all of Trollope's 48 novels and have read most of them through the years. The Fixed Period, however,was one that I tried in vain several times to read but could not get past the first few chapters. It was very different from the usual themes of Trollope's stories about love, marriage, inheritance, lawsuits, impetuous and stubborn men and women, greed and ambition in some of his more unsavory characters, etc. It has been called a dystopian fiction, set in 1980, long since passed without any such event, fortunately, ever having happened. The story itself, though grim enough, was narrated in a matter of fact tone, mundane and argumentative, though what sends a chill down one's spine is not so much the dystopian society it depicts, but the realization how one can be led astray on a grand scale by mistaken beliefs and an inflexible will. When I saw the book in the Readers Wanted list of LibriVox's catalog, I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to find out, finally, what the story was about and how it ended. I actually started reading, my first attempt at voice recording, from the last two chapters of the book. After satisfying myself that nothing more disastrous happened than the frustration of a misguided idealist, I gradually read my way back up, and eventually recorded six chapters of the book in total. I'm afraid my reading is rather mechanical, not like story-telling; I've a lot to work on still.
[The following post is for people who may be interested in finding out more about western operas. If you're well versed in this subject, please read no farther.]
For opera newbies out there, me included, I'd like to bring your attention to a new series of video podcasts this summer by Nicolas Revels of the San Diego Opera Company in which he introduces some of the basic elements of operas. (Hat-tip to Marija for first telling me about this podcast a couple of years ago.) Opera for most people is an acquired taste, like bitter greens that take a little getting used to. In addition to its unfamiliarity, there are several obvious reasons why it is not a more popular form of music theatre than, say, Broadway Musicals in the U. S.-- e.g., the fact that live operas are not readily available unless you live in big cities, that they are sung in languages other than English about 90 percent of the time, that opera singers do not normally enjoy the same cachet as pop idols, except in their own rarefied world, and that operas can be interminably long, and so on. It was not until the Metropolitan Opera started showing opera productions live in HD at movie theaters that I got exposed to this musical/performing art form, just a couple of years before we moved from Gainesville to Bloomington.
Luckily for me, Bloomington's IU School of Music happens to be one of the hot beds, and the best schools, for opera studies in the U.S. Each year they stage seven full-fledged opera productions at the IU Musical Arts Center. As a result, since moving to Bloomington, though a small town, I've been to see several live opera performances, by semi-professional opera students with all the accompanying fanfare and pageantry of live orchestra, gigantic movable sets, dramatic lighting, and period costumes, etc. I can't say that I've now become a bona fide opera buff; my knowledge about operas is in truth minuscule--barely scratching the surface. But I have caught the opera bug. I hope that the following introductory podcasts about operas by Nicolas Revels may perchance become the entry point to the world of [western] operas for some, who perhaps think it not to their taste, while providing, for others, an opportunity to dig a little deeper into the subject. I don't know if there will be more podcasts in this series coming, but the followings are what have already been broadcasted -
By the way, the schedule for the 2014 Met Opera Live in HD season is out; you may catch a few of the performances "live" in the movie theaters near you this Fall!
We hit the trails, on horseback, one auspicious afternoon when it was not too hot, for an hour's ride in the Brown County State Park. I vaguely remembered, or perhaps falsely remembered, having mounted once before, but it was probably before moving to the U.S. I got myself fitted up for the occasion, donning my cowgirl hat and my "fire-engine-red" cowgirl boots, so described by our guide somewhat jealously. We were told two basic maneuvers - right or left turn by pulling slightly on the rein accordingly, and then, off we trotted in an orderly procession, one horse's nose behind another's butt, so to speak. I was assigned a horse named Sam; later on I learned that he tended to misbehave by snacking on the greenery along the way. Sure enough, he would snap some branches off the scrubs once in a while and munch at his leisure. The trails through the park were not all on smooth turf or gravel, there were some rough patches of mud, steep inclines, and down slopes. A couple of times, Sam sidetracked us from the trails to get at some juicy bits of leaves in rather precarious conditions. The guide hollered at me from the front to pull him back, saying with some encouragement, "You can do it, Cowgirl!" Kirk said that Sam had "got my number" -- and could do anything he wanted with me. When we got back, no sooner did I dismount, Sam let off a heavy jet of pee -- I barely got away in time.
