Measure once...

measure on & on & on.  What a reality that I live in that I spend most of my time measuring.  At my internship I spend my days measuring every square foot & linear foot of construction drawings to look in minute detail if the architect & the engineer have designed it appropriately so I can calculate how much a project is going to cost.  There are wonderful computer programs like Onscreen Takeoff or Bluebeam that can quickly scale & measure for me BUT the construction service company I work for doesn't have that technology. So I wield an architects scale, constructulator & a pad of paper.

After I'm done writing today I will switch to an engineer's scale & work on my contract work for a local surveyor laying out his ILCs. Another process that would be simplified if I had any of the Civil Engineering programs. Since it hasn't been that time consuming I haven't made the splurge for a new computer with new programs. Instead I'm using the ol' math equations to convert the total station surveys to CAD plots (simply put I've made my own app in Excel).  Remember I said not time consuming (yet).

Outside the doors of my lab I work on tiny houses. Recently its been cutting all the furniture grade plywood to make the stair/cabinet for the Mayday Experiment.  Its a more realistic adaptation of a design Lauri Lynnxe Murphy found on imgur.

It's been a real mind switch to go from measuring entire buildings to these little stairs. Talk about measure twice cut once. I won't write more about that project when Lauri writes so well about it on her blog.

Back in the home lab I have so much to do I'm happy that I take exercise classes to get me out of the house. I got the Arco Lamp repaired & in the living room. My friends poke fun of my desire to obtain certain pieces of designer furniture. I fell in love with the Arco when I saw it at the MoMA but not willing to pay the $2995 ticket. My beautiful friend Melissa remembered my drooling & gave me hers! This changes the living room wonderfully.

Let me know if anyone in the Denver area is interested in the old lamp.

The workshop is coming along. In between snow storms I've been building a new worktable. It would be so much simpler if our HOA allowed me to attach to the walls of the garage. Since we can't that means more measuring to make everything movable & collapsible - tiny house skills at work.  Once that's done I can get some serious work done on the Mead Brewing Station & the Mobile Tea Cart...

The lab was flipped on its ear this week with an introduction & an opportunity to teach millinery.  More to come on that when I get the details worked out. In short, my free minutes have been laying out a path for a better web presence for my hats. The fourteen hats in various stages of construction need to be finished & photographed. (A new concept of mine to photograph the hats BEFORE I sell them.) Then I need to do something about this janky ol' blog design....

The last measuring this week is the scary kind- body measurements. Nicolas & I enrolled in his company's health program hosted by Prevent. The management of Prevent decided for some reason to have people that eat together not be on same paths for some reason? Nicolas & I are in separate teams for the next 16 weeks of the program. His kit arrived first. The usual introductory book, meal log, tape measure, etc. The spooky part is the scale that came with it. Every morning you weigh yourself & IT SENDS YOUR WEIGH VIA WIFI TO PREVENT. I'm all about accountability but I don't like the grey area of my health being electronically monitored by a company connected to my health insurance. Oh week 5 we receive our pedometers that have the tracking too.  So when my scale arrived this week I wrote down my starting measurements, turned off my 'bugg-out' reaction so that I could mentally get over all my apprehensions & step on that scale. 

How do you measure life?