Holiday Windows 2011

Now that the Christmas window season is wrapped up and behind us, I want to record a few thoughts. First, I'm not entirely on board with the entire concept of Christmas, as it has become in modern times. I could do an entire blog post on THAT, but I won't. Suffice it to say that my skepticism about what's genuinely GOOD about the holidays guides my evaluation of my own work as well as others.

I had a hand in multiple retailers' windows and I'm quite pleased with how things turned out. Note that I'm NOT posting pictures here or anywhere else of windows I was involved with. I'm not refraining because I feel bound by non-existent stipulations in a contract I never signed, but rather that the web is saturated with these images. I also never brought a camera along on my many trips to the windows, other than my iPhone, and never got great shots. Que sera sera.

I was responsible for the initial design phases of Lord & Taylor, under the aegis of Spaeth Design as production company, and guided/directed by the client's dreams and wishes. They bring to us the central idea and we flesh it out. Then we build. In Lord & Taylor's case - build and rebuild and rebuild. Though the product we installed was true to the central concept and looked very good, with continuous thumbs up across the internet, the process to get to that was more convoluted than it should be. There must always be time for reflection, evaluation, and necessary modifications as the design is being brought to life, but I'd say that that has been taken to an unhealthy extreme in L&T's case. On the commercial side, I don't see how it can possibly be a sustainable business model for the production company. But that's their fight to take to the client, not mine.

Spaeth has my final color models of the windows on display at their offices, which horrifies me. Models are not the product and are certainly not art. There's a certain archival value to them, but these are not meant to be seen by non-L&T clients. But whatever. I don't own them, Spaeth does. And there's plenty of artifacts floating around those offices that I *am* proud are on display.

Macy's is a riddle in a puzzle in an enigma blah blah blah. Along about May, I was tasked with taking the initial sketches of the Macy's Herald Square designs and converting them to tell the same story in Macy's on State in Chicago. There wasn't much time to do this and much of the drafting was supposed to hinge on what was planned for New York. But much of THAT didn't exist - and so I made up fresh designs to explore the concept and the client, the production company, and I boldly stepped forward into building. Of the pictures I've seen, I like the results. Fun and unusual. Really liked the puppets. We have separate motion and costume designers and I have to give them credit for doing a great job.

I had nothing to do with Macy's Herald Square's scenery, beyond what was copied out of Chicago drafting for use in Herald Square - a few gear shapes, some lettering. My job in New York was lighting, which was an enormous undertaking. I was able to talk the production electrician I used in 2009 into coming back on the promise that there were fewer lights to deal with - less cable to run in advance, maybe 60% of the number of lighting units, and some miscellaneous practicals to power. I didn't LIE, but....well, I knew it wouldn't be as simple as all that. Yes, there were less units to put on the ceiling - but more on the floor. And there was an enormous amount of LED lighting to power. I did any LED installation myself, if it wasn't already dealt with at the shop, but poor Shu ran a lot of 12v power this season. If this style of lighting continues as a trend, I am wondering if dedicated 12V lines, powered from a main transformer, wouldn't be a better idea.

Anyway, the actual total count of lighting units runs to about 325 to 350. Conventional lighting planned for about 160 units, and LED lighting doubled that. For counting purposes, I define a unit as any piece of lighting powered by it's own connection. So each LED is not counted, but a group of them in one housing that then connects to a breakout or a transformer is counted as one unit.

What was shocking to me and a major obstacle to overcome, was Spaeth's reluctance to put money into the lighting. They had contracted to DO the lighting, but hadn't considered the actual costs. I had to get fairly blunt with them and explain what it really takes to light Christmas windows, labor costs, etc. They conceded on labor and also purchased all the LEDs needed. I got the client to purchase other needed items, including some units we can reuse for several years and some color. All told, though, the total lighting expenditure had to have run pretty close to what it did in 2009.

I am pleased to note that the LEDs held up extremely well. Only two units actually died the entire season. Maintenance was reduced (one of my goals), though the store employee responsible for changing burnouts really didn't like the birdies. :)

So how do other retailers' windows compare? Well, I thought Bergdorff-Goodman's Carnival of the Animals was awesome, though not especially Christmasy. Tiffany's got more accolades than I thought it deserved, but they were well-executed. I loved Van Cleef & Arpels small windows. I was disappointed with Saks. And while everybody was talking about Barney's GaGa windows, I was just puzzled. Wrong time of year. But whatever.

Happy New Year all

A few tribulations with my Apple computers lately. Had many things to fix and had to put it off until my FIT class was done. But finally, I had the Christmas break to deal with it all.

First I went to TekServe and after extensive queries and waiting, a manager managed to dig up a MacCuff in the basement. Apparently, these things are generally sold in bulk to institutions, not individually to people who want to get the Mini under the desk, rather than on top of it. (My desk has 7 square feet of space.) The MacCuff is a very nicely engineered piece of steel, I have to say. Easy to mount with a variety of options, all ports accessible, and the fit is snug but smooth. I guess that's what surprised me most - how well the thing fits a Mini. I'm now trying to find a similar mount for my connected external drive.

The Seagate hard drive I've been using as my Archive drive is borked. In early December, I was doing a TimeMachine backup when it fell off the desk. This damaged it enough that DriveSavers couldn't recover any data. So...19 years or more of work - gone. I'm still discovering things that are gone forever, but surprisingly, I'm not terribly upset. It feels like freedom, in a way. but I will shortly have to start a new Archive drive and will BACK THAT UP along with backing up the main computer harddrive. So frustrating.

Within the last three weeks, I've had to get service for all of my expensive Apple toys - some of it long overdue. The Mini needed a new optical drive. (The mist from my breathing treatments eventually buggers the optical sensor, I believe, as this isn't the first optical drive to quite working and the techs ALWAYS note a "white, salt-like substance" on the computer's vents and fans. (As a matter of fact, hypertonic saline is one of my meds.) For similar reasons, the 23" Cinema Display also needed service. They did about $600 worth of work, replacing the glass and LCD screen inside completely.

What AppleCare didn't cover, however, was the liquid damage to my MacBook Air. Scotch is not good for a laptop. And though the niece and nephew indirectly caused the accident, it was, I admit, primarily my own fault. Let's just say NORAD Santa Tracker is now the target of my enmity. The upside is, the repairs were cheaper at Apple than at TekServe and I now, basically, have a new early-2010 MacBook Air, given the number of internal components that got replaced.

iCloud: Upgrading to Lion has gone smoothly, mostly due to good advice from a stagecraft forum. Moving to iCloud went smoothly until syncing the Air last night. Instead of disabling the calendars on MobileMe, I deleted them - which had the effect of deleting them on iCloud and everywhere else. Undos only brought back the calendars, but not the events! Fortunately, I'd backed up the calendars before installing Lion on my first machine, so I restored my calendars and events fairly quickly. Still, I have a lot to learn about Lion.

NOTE TO VECTORWORKS USERS:
When you upgrade to Lion, your user Library is hidden by default. It IS available as a shortcut from the Go menu with the command key held down. To get regular visibility back, type this command into terminal: chflags nohidden ~/Library.

And so my annual "deal with the hardware" is over, for now. I am ready to deal with taxes.

New Year's Resolution #1: A better writing habit.

First New Year's Resolution (and we're only half way through December!) is this: less Facebook status updates, more blogging. After all, there's about two dozen things I want to post to Facebook each day, but I realize that most of them are not something I should broadcast - a blog is a much tighter circle of readers. At least, mine is.

So from today forward, I'm getting back to this blog which AS ALWAYS is chiefly an exercise log. But in the past, it's been a great outlet to think through other problems and I didn't give that enough credit. There were many moments these last four months I should have brought my thoughts here, but didn't - and instead they festered.

Many of those thoughts revolve around Dad. I'm finding it a lot harder to process the fact of his death - no, his ABSENCE - than I thought I would. Let's face it: we didn't have the closest relationship ever. There'd be weeks where we didn't speak; months even. But towards the end, it was a lot closer than it had been in years and now I find I miss that.

FIT is also at the top of my "hell no I'm not posting that to Facebook" list of things to express. I had a serious problem with my students this semester and perhaps in a later post, I'll document it. No names will be used, of course.

And, of course, my health remains variable. Right now I'm on oral antibiotics and much to my surprise, they're WORKING! No IVs this December! But what impact will this winter have on me? I don't know. Another New Year's resolution, and one I'll talk about at length in another post, is my resolution to put on some muscle mass. Back in March 2008, I looked GOOD. No reason I can't get back to that with a few months of focused weight regimen.

My one hesitation in returning to blogging is that I really don't want my family reading it. It isn't that I don't want their support - I really do - but I don't want their input into my day-to-day quandaries beyond what I post on Facebook. Unfortunately, my only choices are to either shut down public access to my blog, or keep it public and straight out tell my family I'd prefer they not read it. This blog has had proven benefit to other people, complete strangers. My post about cough syncope from February 28, 2009 is the fifth hit in a Google search for "cough syncope". Many people have found that they're not alone! (Incidentally, I need to update my readers on how things have developed on that front, as well.)

So, let's say I'm back as a regular blogger. My reticence to blog, attributable in large part to Dad's death, is slowly evaporating. And my need to document my life is increasing - possibly due to a heightened awareness of my own mortality.

And I'll wrap up with how I staved off mortality today: a return to the gym. I haven't been to my gym in several months, mostly because it was great weather this summer and I exercised outdoors exclusively. My bicycling skills are good! My running has shown slight improvement lately. But my upper body strength and overall flexibility are poor. Hitting the weights is way overdue, so I did a test workout at the gym this evening - seeing where I'm at currently so I can start a structured 2x week program. I'm about 30% off where I was a year ago. Gotta fix that.

Where was I?

Newsflash: Cris makes rookie mistake and goes running in the heat without water. DUMB. My reasoning was also rookie: I'm fairly acclimated at this point, I'm only going a couple miles, etc etc. See, I was running in a new pair of shoes for the first time and didn't want to go too far in them - it'll take a while to break them in. But I didn't take water, either, and that was just dumb. I was very uncomfortable out there on a route that I usually run quite well.

So where was I? Where am I?

I've seen most of my doctors lately and I'm still not a candidate for transplant, thankfully, but I'll be the first to admit that it's getting harder and harder to keep my lungs clear and functional. In fact, I'm on IVs again, a mere six weeks after coming off them. That's not a record for me, though, as there was one time I only had four weeks off.

Dad's birthday passed this week. He would have been 69. In a few days, I'll be off to Terre Haute for Dad's memorial.

And, of course, I'm working. That's good, though I'm less than energized by the work I'm doing right now. I'm designing - drafting at this point - two sets of Christmas windows. Neither of which is based on a particularly solid premise. They could be charming; they could be disasters. At every turn, I'm told budgets have been slashed, we can't do THIS, we can't do THAT... and I fear that will make all the difference.

On the plus side, the IVs are working - my sputum was markedly less green and I'm producing less. And while my running abilities have nosedived through lack of ability to breathe and just lack of practice, I have gotten back on the bike and am pretty good at cranking away for an hour and squeezing a worthwhile workout out of it. If I'm serious about my health, I'll get back to 3 runs a week and add in a weekly weights workout at my gym, something I've neglected all summer. Who wants to be in a gym while the sun shines?

The year is about to start at FIT and I'm slated to teach two classes. I am uneasy about this, but can't back out now. If the Vectorworks I course doesn't go any better than this last spring, I'll decline to teach it again.

Duane Reade pharmacy people are...not smart

For the third time in a year, I've been handed someone else's medication. The first time, I didn't catch it 'til I'd gotten home, as the copay was identical, the bottle size identical. Only the pills were a different shape and that clued me in. What if I'd taken them by accident?

The second time, I discovered the error in the store. The higher copay tipped me off.

This time, I was well into being unhappy with the way things were going before I discovered the error. When I went to pick up my pulmozyme, I gave the woman my name and SPELLED IT OUT. Then stopped her from searching the small bins, saying it would be a box and was probably on the bottom shelf. She goes searching and comes back saying my insurance denied the refill and shows me the denial slip. She said if I wanted to pay for it myself, it would $215. I was not happy about this; I am not prepared right now to shell out that much for a single medication.

I was puzzled because this was a new prescription, not a refill. And though it was for the same medication as the previous script, that script had long expired. So what the dealio? I didn't recognize the 800 number on the denial notice, but called anyway and got connected to Medco. That seemed odd, so I hung and checked the number. There was an 866 number listed for patient helpline, so I called that - and got connected to United HealthCare. This is where bells began going off. I was with UHC when I worked for NYU, but that was eight years ago. Were they called some old numbers still hanging around in the system? That didn't seem right.

Then I noticed the patient name. Robin Do-something. The stupid lady had only looked at the first two letters! What if that woman's insurance hadn't denied her refill and I'd ended up taking it home? Another day would be lost as I was already out of Pulmozyme and the Robin woman wouldn't have her medicine either! This is INCOMPETENCE.

So I have the pharmacy girl on the hunt for MY meds and find out they never filled the script! "We don't have enough." I know that, I said, and thought I'd made arrangement when I dropped this off seven hours earlier - WITH THE SAME PHARMACIST ON DUTY - to take the one box they had; a partial fill. Apparently, since I wasn't going to wait on it, it was forgotten about. Goddamn it. So they grumbled, but I got my box of Pulmozyme. They owe me two more boxes.

On the plus side: two thumbs up to MY insurance, which is not only covering my meds as usual, but is now not charging a copay, either, as I've hit my catastrophic cap for the year.