Blonde Joke

I'm not a big fan of blonde jokes, but this one is pretty interesting.

Are you Ready?

For some Football!!! (Just imagine if Monday Night Football had Michael Jackson sing that line instead of Hank Williams Jr.)

This NFL season has almost passed me by. I think I only saw parts of two games all season. But today we are gearing up for the big Bears playoff game. Yesterday I cooked homemade chili. BTW, why are bean dishes more popular in winter when we are all stuck inside together? We will also be having Maison du Roti sausages, a beer or two, and maybe some nacho cheese dip. I missed turkey over the holidaze, so this may make-up for that. The Bears may advance and there may be a couple more games, but why chance it? This may be my only chance to watch a full game. No Cinderella or Charlie & the Chocolate Factory.... Today we're watching football.

Watercolor - Firenze, Italia

Here is a watercolor of the Ponte Vecchio in Firenze, Italia. One of my favorite cities in Europe including Vienna, Stockholm, and Paris. This one is a bit of a departure from the previous ones. I did a light pencil sketch to be sure of the proportions then used the color to define the edges. I also didn't close crop this image because I liked how the edges turned out.

My Soldier Field

It does not happen often that a project you have worked on is seen internationally. But on Sunday at 4:30 pm, Soldier Field will be the backdrop of the playoff game between the Chicago Bears and the Carolina Panthers. It will be my first time seeing it on television here in Montreal. Here are a couple before and after photos of the project.

Along with probably thousands of others, I take pride in calling Soldier Field mine. I spent four years working on the project, three in the office and one on site during construction. From the wild initial designs to the inevitable problems that come up in the field. The project was special for me on many levels. I have been a Bears fan all my life having gone to games since I was a kid. My father and I went to a few January playoff games long ago where I spent half the game thawing out in the bathrooms. I am fiercely proud to be a Chicagoan and this project is at a prominent location on the lakefront. Lastly, I worked with friends who I had gone to school with or lived with. It is easier to work out difficult problems when you know the other people well.
At Thornton Tomasetti's Chicago office, we designed the structure for the project: foundations, steel structure (beams & columns), and the floor slabs. The building is a partially-assymetrical design with some very interesting aspects (at least structurally). Each of the scoreboards is cantilevered 150 feet over existing stands. The west grandstand cantilevers 60 feet over the existing colonnade. Due to the nature of people being present in the grandstand, special measures needed to be taken. Devices called tuned mass dampers were installed at the tips in order to counter act the destructive rhythm caused by people jumping in sync.

But another thing that is really cool about having worked on a project this large and this visible is all the paraphenalia. Magazine articles, t-shirts, baseball caps, scale models, postcards, and posters are just some of the items with it's likeness. Now I'm not obsessively hoarding every item I can get my hands on, but I do have enough to show my pride.

See Jack Write

I prefer not to repost from others, but this is just too funny.

via Lightspeed Chick.

The 2006 Bloggies

For those of you who don't know, nominations are now open for the 2006 Weblog Awards. Something similar to the Academy Awards of bloggin. You can nominate numerous blogs for a variety of categories. If you are so inclined, you could nominate me for any or all of the following: Best Canadian Weblog, Best Kept Secret Weblog, and Best New Weblog. To submit your nominations click here.

Don't forget that you can only vote once and that it must be sent by tomorrow (Tues) night at 10pm ET (9pm CT). The blogs with the most nominations make it to the second round.

Life in Hell - Working-Day Emotion Checklist

GET BACK TO WORK!!!

Well, my two week vacation is over. It is the first time in ten years that I had this much time off without travelling or visitors. Damn was it nice. Am I ready to go back to work? Umm... No. Just laid back, tended to the needs of those around me, and checked off items on the 'to do' list. Plus the place is a little more set up to our tastes and upcoming needs. Now I have an idea how my life would be if I won the lottery. Though we would probably get out of the house a lot more.

...The Wrigley Building... Chicago is...

Here is a picture I took a couple summers ago. The Wrigley Building is on the left, the Tribune Tower is on the right, and the middle one is the Hotel Intercontinental. The second flag down is that of the State of Illinois. The third is the flag of Chicago. The two blue lines represent the north and south branches of the Chicago River. The three white lines represent the north, west, and south sides (Sorry, no east, G). The four red stars stand for: Fort Dearbourn massacre of 1812, The Chicago Fire of 1871, the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the Century of Progress exposition of 1933.

On the Metroblog

I wrote a post for the Metroblog a couple days ago about a new building in downtown Montreal. Here's the link.

Behind the Barriers

For those of you who are not my friends from the industry. Here is a look at one aspect of my job through the lens of Annie Leibovitz. This is what our work looks like before it is hidden behind walls or under concrete. We did more work like this in Chicago, here more of our work is concrete. Similar, but different. Great images that really capture what it looks like on a typical hi-rise or large scale construction site. Thanks again to my friend John for the link.

One thing that is evident in the photos is the controlled chaos. Plus it seems so surprising that so much of the work is still done by hand. For instance, pouring a concrete floor slab still requires a bunch of guys sloshing through the wet concrete sculpting a nice flat or slightly sloped surface. Interior partitions and finishes are assembled by hand. Muscles is still employed to move things from here to there move often than you would think. Machines don't do the work, just human strength and precision. And since almost every building is unique, it may never change.

The Chibougamau Trip

This time last year I took a business trip up to a mine 100 miles (150 km) north of Chibougamau. So a total of about 500 miles (800 km) north of Montreal. The trip up and back was itself an adventure. We flew Air Creebec up to Chibougamau in a small prop plane. On each flight, the plane was half Native Canadians and half others. The plane was an aisle with seats on each side. The aisle was narrow enough that a third person could not sit between the two seats.


The flight attendant handed out our meals and gave us the pre-flight instructions. Then she asked if we needed anything, put on a headset, and climbed into the co-pilot seat. There was no cockpit door, so on the return to Montreal in a snowstorm, I was able to lean my head into the aisle and watch as they aimed between the two parallel lines of blue lights during landing.

From Chibougamau, we rented a pickup truck and drove 100 miles on a road of grooved ice. Special machines pass regularly on the Route du Nord (Road of the North) to make the grooves. The landscape was stunning. The pine trees were shorter than usual and the tops all looked like clumps of pine on sticks. There were also quite a few spots where there were only the trunks still standing. At first we thought it was clear-cut forestry, but it must have been forest fires since the trunks were still there. Though we did see quite a bit of clear-cut forestry from the air.

We saw quite a few caribou. There was also quite a few traces of blood where caribou had been killed on the roadside. Not sure whether they were killed in the forest then dragged to the road or just killed on the road. The rumor was that the Native Canadians had killed them illegally in order to resell the meat. Anyhow, there were easily two dozen traces along the journey. The drive there was hazy and cloudy, while the ride back was bright and sunny.

Once there, it was quite an interesting place. Though not somewhere you would like to be caught alone with Jack Nicholson. You are really out in the middle of nowhere and you are highly dependant on that electrical wire to the outside world. If there had been a snowstorm and the power went out, you'd be SOL. The wind chill the next morning was -60F (-50C) and the actual temp was -40F (-40C). Luckily most of the places we needed to go to were protected but unheated and we were required to wear so much equipment, we didn't feel the difference from harsh Montreal cold.

Although it was the coldest place I had ever been, I was surprised that it was not the furthest north I had been. It is as far north as London and Stockholm is much farther north.

The second trip in March was quite a drag compared to the first visit. With the exception of a $250 cab ride between Chibougamau and the mine, it was uneventful. May have been because I did this trip alone. But damn, that first trip was really something else.

Watercolor - Villefranche sur Mer, France

I'd be amiss if I continued with the Watercolor series without mentioning the person who taught it to me. Carl Johnson (the artist, not the Olympic athlete) was our guide on the watercolor sketch trip through the French Riviera and Tuscany. You may notice that much of my style mimics his. My better attempts were those of a permanent ink hand sketch with accented color filling in between.

Each day we would find ourselves in a different locale and he would give us tips on the environment. We would all disperse and proceed with searching out our subject and completing the painting. Afterward we would rendez-vous and he would critique our work. At night we would meet up for a good supper and numerous beverages. The thing that made the trip so special was not only learning watercolor, but the interesting conversations and the adventure of traveling together. He was one of us discovering the place and enjoying the moment.

We have kept in touch after all these years. He sends us a Christmas card every year and we visited him a few times in Galena, IL while we lived in Chicago. We happened to be in his studio on our first wedding anniversary and he gave us a print of his painting of the Versailles Chateau. Very appropriate on a few levels and it proudly hangs in our dining room.

Here is another watercolor from the 1992 sketch trip. This was done during another day trip from Nice along the French Riviera. Villefranche sur Mer and the surrounding area is where they filmed Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

You have got to love Google Maps (with the help of maporama). Using the two, I was able to locate the set up for this watercolor. The subject is to the right of the map and I was sitting at the left end of the beach that crosses the page. And here is a shot of the actual subject. It is on the left of the photo.

Hopefully, you can see a bit of progress from the previous one. The greenery is decent, but it keeps it from being framed and hung. Kudos to anyone who can figure out what was added at a later date and was still done incorrectly.