I love fridays.

I just love fridays. I love getting up knowing I can sleep the next day. It's the best feeling.
The morning was slow, so I'm not going to write about it. :)

The only really meaningful thing I did was sort through all our sheers in the library. We're still continually cleaning out that beast of a room. Oh - and we prepared two different packages for HeeSeung. They were two different samples of this brass finish going to two different firms. I think they're trying to finalize a finish for the Waldorf Astroia project - but I'm not certain on that. I'm not sure if i've mentioned HeeSeung before, but he's one of Senior Architectural Designers.

Things were busier after I got back from my lunch. Stella had given laura an assignment to work on this custom rug for the Jakarta project, but when I returned from lunch, she was working on something else for Karen. So I was handed this rug project.

The company is working with Tai Ping carpets to create a custom rug for the Jakarta Indonesia Hotel. It may be carpet - I can't remember if its for a rug, or carpet. Either way, I was excited to work on it. The pattern was already created, but they were still fiddling with the colors in photoshop and replacing some with a diffferent colors. She had brought up a printed out version of their first draft with arrows pointing to each different color used in the pattern and what that certain area is supposed to be colored now. She had brought up all these actual carpet poms that they want to use for the rug/carpet that I was supposed to match up in the photoshop file.

It's definitely a good photoshop refresher. As well as a learning opportunity. I'm kind of learning as I go right now. Ha. But that's how it usually seems to be in this major - we're thrust into some computer program, and we're just expected to learn it. Stella wants me to add some kind of strie checkerboard pattern to the rug which I still have no idea how to do. And I hardly even know what this kind of pattern is... But this problem came up right as work was ending so I'll have to deal with that on Monday. GAH. It is just neat knowing that what I am I working on right now in photoshop will eventually be a custom rug over in INDIA. It's pretty neat to be apart of something so big. :) Photoshop don't fail me now!

WEEKEND TIME.

Almost friday.

Thursday! Almsot done with my 3rd week of the internship. Crazy!

Today was a day full of little mini tasks. Nothing too time consuming that usually would take up hours of the day. Bob (carpet pom man) came in this morning and said that the poms will be in tomorrow. I wish he would have just replied to our 3 different emails regarding them earlier this week. But oh well, at least they will be coming in finally.

I ordered some Moore & Giles leather samples for Anna. Which are all SO pretty. I would never use real leather on anything, but these are real nice to look at. Here's one that I ordered. Check it out! http://www.mooreandgiles.com/shop/mojave-brussels/ So beautiful right?

Later on in the day, Aijun had us continue to help with these CAD furniture drawings for the NY Palace documents. Since Laura was busy doing something else, I worked on this for her. She wanted the plan view of all these different kinds of chairs in the lobby to look more like the actual chair being used. So I redrew some of them in CAD and made sure they matched up with the correct dimension restraints.  A lot of them had to be adjusted because they weren't the correct width or depth in the file.

Another vendor came in today! I waited until he was gone thougth to get food, so I missed out on a wrap because they were all gone by the time I went in. Boo :(
However, there were still some salad and fruit bowls left so I took one of each. :)

I also took some wood samples that Anna wanted cut down to the maintenance people and had them cut. They really just do it as a favor to us and for free. So we always make sure we're super nice and grateful when we ask for favors like this. He didn't seem to annoyed when I asked... so I guess that's a good thing.

Probably the biggest/most eventful part of the day was when Lauren's iphone was stolen off her desk. Backstory time: So a HUGE 8 ft tall box was delivered to the firm and no one seemed to know what it was or could even it claim it as theirs. We eventually just opened it up and it turned out to be two huge rolls of fabric. Me and Lauren each grabbed one and drug them into the materials room (literally 10 steps down the hall) to ask Anna and Ellie if they were theirs or if they knew who ordered it. When we walked into the room, there was this strange kid in there with a rolling suitcase. He asked us where the bathroom was and we said it was out the door to the left. It was very strange...
Anyway, we asked anna and ellie if the fabric was theirs and it wasn't. So we walked right back out of the library down the hall to reception to put the two rolls back in the box. When we walked through the door to reception, the same weird kid was just standing there. He didn't ever say anything - but he saw us, started mumbling to himself, and then just walked out.
We thought again how strange this was and how odd he was acting. Well right after we put the rolls back in the box Lauren starts freaking out that her phone was missing off her desk. She left it out on top of her desk, went to the bathroom, and came back to find it missing. She apparently was in the bathroom while we were both in the library.
When you walk in the door to the firm, the reception greets you obviously, but there is a hallway immediately to your left which leads to the room where some of the designers work. And you can seen lauren's from reception.
In basically less than a minute this kid snatched her phone. Seriously?? We felt so responsible. Because of course RIGHT when we haul this carpet ten steps down the hall to the next room this stupid kid decides to go into the firm for who knows what reason. And then HAPPENS to walk down the hall to Lauren's unattended desk and snatch her phone. How is all this even possible?? He was crazy.

We gave a description to the doorman on the bottom level, but what's done is done now. Apparently this wasn't the first time this has happened in the office either. Courtney had hers stolen when she was interning at reception too.

BUT STILL. What a crazy crazy day.

After Alexandra's meeting with all the designers associated with the Dorchester project was over, I moved all their trays back into the library. I created a label for anna for a package that was going to Switzerland, and continued to work on Aijun's CAD furniture until it was time to go.

One more day till the weekend!

Orthodox Jew = fantastic book binder.

Happy Wednesday!
I met Lindsay down in the subway today! Yay! Starting off the day on a good note. :) It's not as fun riding alone!
We had a potential client come into the office today to meet with Alexandra and Jon. Jon even ordered flowers for the occasion to sit on the receptionist desk. The flowers had come the day before and were aleady starting to look a bit droopy. What a shame - they were $125 and it wasn't even a huge arrangement.
Laura and I led them back to the conference room when they arrived and offered them water to drink. Luckily Jon had already made coffee because one of the three people wanted some and I wouldn't have had a clue how to make it. Liz showed me once last week, but I don't think I remember exactly. :)

Courtney came up around 11 or so with some things for me and Laura to do today. She had a huge file of pictures that were of these items in one of Alexandra's storage sheds or something and we needed to resize them all and slightly edit them because they're going to be going on this website: http://vandm.com/default.aspx to be sold. It's such a neat site! And Alex has some of the weirdest items ever that she wants to sell...

Right after I started, Amy came in and had a huge stack of Architex fabrics that she wanted to me order more of. She had a stack of about 15, and she wanted to get one more of each of the colors.
I quickly shot the rep an email and continued with my picture editing.

At about 2 I went out with Courtney on a super random errand. We took a taxi (my first one for this trip actually...) down to some random area in the lower east area. Really lower east. The taxi driver was an idiot too and really didn't say anything and didn't ever seem to know where he was going. Courtney was giving him directions as we drove. Haha. Anyway we finally made it to this cute little bookbinding store called 'Henry's Bookbinding'.

The owner was this CUTE little and old Orthodox Jewish man. The store was something out of the movies. Or hoarders. The entire place was stacked floor to ceiling with just stuff basically. Lots of things. The entire place smelled like old books and I loved that. The place looked super old - almost like the things in there hadn't been touched in 40 years. It was odd. But super neat. Alexandra's son who also works for the company, had all these really really old books that were his grandfather's or something that he wanted to have re-bound. And I didn't seen the books beforehand, but apparently they were in absolutely terrible shape, and now they looked beautiful. Courtney was so pleased when she saw them and said that alex and anthony will just to crazy.

At one point she said 'high five!' to the owner, and he just kind of ignored the action. I thought maybe he hadn't heard her, but after we were back in a cab (which I flagged down all by myself! :)) it occured to her that he probably couldn't because orthodox jews don't touch women. Unless of course they're married to one, but anyone else they don't. Which I hadn't ever heard of before so I didn't know what the reason was. So odd though... we probably made him feel so uncomfortable by doing that. Whoops.

When I returned I took a quick lunch break and then helped Laura finish up editing all those pictures. She had printed out the labels while I was gone so I didn't have to worry about that. At around 4:30 Laura had to return some camera device to a store on 22nd street, so I just ran the desk while she was gone. We were basically done with our big assignments for the day so there wasn't as much to do.

When she got back we worked on this drawing that Aijun gave us. We needed to resize the demensions of all the chairs in this one particular drawing  and then draw some new ones as well. Laura isn't as good in cad since she hasn't used it as recently as I have, so I kind of directed that little project. I made some labels for Stella for these Jakarta sample boxes and emailed this carpet rep one more time about getting back to us about replacing all these carpet poms we were missing before I went home.

And I ran into Lindsay AGAIN today on the way home! What is the chance of that? And with her mother too! Yay! She got here today and will be here until Lindsay goes home on Sunday.

Halfway through the week!
Jeez, this entry was sure a rambling one... ramble ramble ramble.

I don't like Tuesdays.

Tuesdays are dumb. It's just a weird day. It's the day the week starts to feel like it's dragging on...
But I arrived first to the office today so I got started looking over the emails the firm received over the night. Most of them had to do with the samples Laura was ordering from the day before so I left them for her to look over.

I started organizing and putting together the public spaces spec book for the Delta Hotel while Laura attended to the samples. It was mainly just matching up the corrected spec sheets to the old one as to see what was fixed. It didn't take me too long to finish.

A vendor came in 12 again today. FREE FOOD. It was a rep from Lefroy Brooks which is funny because I still have one of their faucets in my basement. :) In fact one of the faucets she brought with her today was the Mackintosh 1930 faucet. The exact one I was sent to help with my presentation last semester.

And she brought yummy food. I didn't have to spend money on lunch today! I think she thought I was one of the designers because she kept telling me to let her know if any of my upcoming projects could use their stuff. Can't help you there! Haha.

I also finished up working on the leather bins in the materials library today since I didn't have enough time to finish them all yesterday. I still need to make new labels and re-label some tomorrow because some of the bins existing labels no longer correspond to what is inside.

The Maraham rep came over today. We emailed her about picking up these 7 binders that we cleaned out of our library and she said she would pick them up. She wanted us to just empty each binder into her suitcase and then throw the binder away. Apparently she didn't need them?..

Today was really just a slow day. A lot of the activity going on didn't really concern me. Laura was involved mainly with the little things going on at the front because she's in the process of tracking down all these samples for this residence in NY. And its just easier for her to do it quick rather than explain to me what needs to get done or what something is for.

Lamerzzz. Most of the office is just used to going to her because she's been here 3 weeks longer than me. But I try to keep busy and help out as best as I can! It was just a boring-ish day. Hence the title: I don't like Tuesdays.
But onto Wednesday! Halfway through the week that marks halfway through my internship!

MONDAY, MONDAY.

Raining this morning. Yippee. At least I had my umbrella so I wouldn't end up looking like a drowned rat again like last friday....
The subway was dumb though and made everyone get off two stops into my communte. I have no clue why. Some maintenance thing. Luckily there was an N train waiting parallel to mine.

Courtney, one of the designers, wanted our help in the library today. Basically we're deep cleaning and organizing everything. My cup of tea. I adore straightening and organizing. As soon as me and Laura got started however, Stella, another one of the designers, came in and said she needed all these fabric samples for the Jakarta project ordered today. Laura volunteered and I didn't complain.

I first went through all our fabric books and threw out either duplicates, or ones the firm never use. There are certain companies that we really never use in our projects, however their books are in our library. They were the first to go. Then I started organizing our leather bins while courtney was going through all the fabric bins. I'm still not even done, and I worked on those for the rest of the day. We have so many gosh darn pieces of leather. And the bins were all mixed up even though they're supposed to be sorted by brand. Apparently Alex is coming back tomorrow from her trip to Hong Kong and everyone's excited to have her see the library. Okay?.. And me and Laura are getting extra brownie points for helping out so much with the cleaning out progres. Yay us?

I was supposed to complete the public spaces spec book today for Rose, but I didn't have anywhere near enough time, so that will be part of my work tomorrow. It seems like every intern has a library cleaning day, and I am loving mine. I love getting to know different companies for all the various products out there. I now have a new favorite wall covering company as well as a leather company that I didn't even know existed before. It's fun to familiarize yourself to new things!

Cigarette free.

I love Sundays.
It's really nice to go to church here. Mainly because I get away from three things.
1. The constant cigarette smoke foating around your face.
2. Sheer shirts with little to be desired underneath.
3. Girls wearing shirts as dresses.
Lindsay and I went to the 11 o'clock church because 9 am church is icky. :)
Sunday was overall just a slow and very relaxing day. We didn't go back out till after 4. When we did finally leave our apartments, we first went over to the west side of town to try to find the Richard Meier model museum. It was a place we went to last year with our school group. We weren't sure where we were last year while we were there, so we thought we'd try to find it today!
We gave up once we got to the right street intersection. Sketchy area. :)
So we began to wander around the middle/west area of Manhatten. We ended up finding our favorite pizza place from last year! Yay! So good. And Lindsay was accidentally charge $65 dollars for her slice instead of $6.50. Hahahaha.
We walked by our old hotel, found really neat design shops, looked at Karim Rashid things, and stopped at dylans for some sweets. Lovely!

A Post office! So big!

Hahaha.

Must remember this place. We were in love.
Too bad it was already closed and we couldn't go in.
We window gazed foreverrrrr.

Let's wander.

Weekend time! When I got off work Friday night and walked to the subway, it wasn't raining. I then proceeded to miss my stop because I was totally zoned out, and ended up in Queens. When I got out of the train at the Queens stop, water was basically pouring through the concrete roof. It was quite strange. Obviously it had started to rain. But the time I hopped on the next downtown train and got off at my stop, I could see it for myself. It was pouring. And I didn't have an umbrella. Why would I have thought to bring one on a 90 degree day? Go figure. After I got my drenched self home and dried off, me and Lindsay went and got pizza. And I left my keys in the apartment. It caused a lot of stress during dinner. I was so mad at myself. I didn't want to pay $240 for each key...
We ate at a cute little place right next to our apartment. SOO yummy. My first pizza since I've been here! So greasy, huge, and perfect. I talked to the doorman when we finished and he used the spare set to let me in! Bless his soul. I hadn't LOST the keys... they were just in the apartment. :) No fine for me for that. :)
Lindsay decided to stay over at my place tonight since Dani was gone visiting Mary in New Jersey and her apartment is always extremely hot. Her cooler doesn't work - for shame. We just hung out at my place for the rest of the night since it was still drizzling outside and we didn't really want to get wet. We stayed up way too late talking about things we can't even remember now. Thank goodness we slept in till 10 to make up for it.
We didn't really have any huge plans for Saturday. We thought we'd just walk through central park and kind of make plans as we went. And we knew at some point today we wanted to get a Johnny Rocket shake because they are super delicious.
We started wandering at about 86th street by the reservoir and just slowly meandered our way down. We found another cute little reservoir, a castle, a lovely creek that made you feel like you were in the mountains, a lady who was hoola hooping while playing the violin (we found her twice actually), and BALTO! We looked specifically for him because he's a cutie. And we found a black squirrel! Neatest. Find. Ever.
We'd take multiple breaks just to sit and people watch because we're creeps and love to do that.
After about 4 hours of central parking, we looked for more pizza. We ate at a Sbarro on 5th and then walked over to Johnny Rockets for a shake. It took the waitress like an hour to finally give us our bill... I swear she forgot we were even there.
Following that, we wandered a bit around midtown/east because we love exploring and looking at the architecture. We wanted to walk to the base of the Chrysler Building. Very Neat! We then wandered to Times Square to look in the Disney store at all of the Brave merchandise. We wanted just about every stuffed animal in the store. To end the night we sat on the red steps again because they're awesome.

We decided to take the subway home because we were so pooped from walking all day. BLAH. I was tired. And for whatever reason the 49th street subway stop smells like sewage. Smelliest stop ever.
Bed time.

Central Park + Lindsay!

So we found this in the park. Looks like a wad of hair.
WHAT?

Overlooking the park from the castle area! So greet!

We found the woods! So refreshing.

BLACK SQUIRREL EATING A PEANUT.

Balto! We love him.

Post Johnny Rocket shakes.

Neat architecture! Those are bricks. Fun fun.

Creepy, creepy, creepy, creepy, Ronald Mcdonald
pole dancing in the air in this two story McDonald's.

Best people watching place ever.

Raven Symone! We love her.

1/3 of the way done!

Another friday has come and I'm now two weeks into my internship! Crazy! I can't believe I'm a third of the way done already! Where have the last two weeks gone?
Fridays here have been slow. At least the last two now. Because there are always a lot of people that take Friday off and the firm has a lot less activity. Less phone calls, less packages, fewer people needing help. They just drag on and on. And today was one of those days.
When I got there I finished up the last and final spec binder for the Delta Hotel. The last binder was one just for the firm to keep. But that didn't take me too long unfortunately. Me and Laura worked on ordering all the carpet poms we needed to order and then after that we moved on to just straightening around the office.
SO fun.
I actually really do like organizing and straightening and the library here needed it badly. We basically worked on that the rest of the day. Everyone seemed really really pleased with what we had done too. I don't think it had been organized thoroughly in a long while. We're not quite done yet though. We still need to go through all our wood samples and all the leather. And there is a ton of leather. But we went though all the fabric bins and all of our many many shelves of random different finishes and things.

I did a lot of it on my own because Laura was asked to help with something else during the middle of our organizing spree. And all of a sudden today a thunderstorm broke out and it was so neat! We're on the seventh floor and the material library has a great view overlooking the city! It was so neat to see the lightning strike when you're overlooking the city!
I found another box of poms today in the library that we hadn't looked through yet to find the missing ones, so I did that right before I left today and sent an email to the companies rep.
I hope Fridays get a little more eventful in the future, but since it is summer many of the firms employees take 'summer fridays' off and the day just seems to be slower in general. Oh well...
And now its the weekend and I LOVE WEEKENDS. I'LL GET SLEEP TONIGHT.  :)

Hot hot thursday.

Guys it was so hot today. Like 100 with humidity. The little AC coolers and fans in our office couldn't have worked harder if they tried. And everyone all over nyc looked so sweaty. Gross.
There were a weird mixture of things to accomplish today. There were many things that the Jakarta team needed our help with. Stella needed a bunch of samples sent for immediately, pictures taken of all the samples used for the guestrooms, and things sent out.
And Jon had a random assignment for us as well. He needed us to prepare a powerpoint thing with all these pictures in it that he took in a penthouse. I guess its some upcoming project or something. But he gave me his iPhone to email all the pictures off of. And his password - which was his dads address apparently. Haha! He's funny. He calls me Utah. He finds it so weird that I'm in New York. We finished that up throughout the day. Usually assignments get finished in segments throughout the day due to us getting interrupped continually with other things.

And actually, now that I'm thinking about it - yesterday Winston (head principal architect) started talking to me about where I went to school and asked where I was going. Parsons, Pratt, and something else I can't remember. So when I said, 'no, Utah State University', he looked completely surprised. I thought interns from everywhere came to New York? Why is it so surprising that I'm from Utah? No one seems surprised when Laura says she went to school in Auburn... Weird.
Anyway, the pictures for Stella took a while because the camera kept dying and I could find a charger for the longest time. So frustrating. And when I finally sent her all the pictures she kept emailing me back saying certain ones didn't look right. So I'd retake a few of them and send them back. And she'd tell me again they didn't look right. So i'd do it again. Then she just had me photoshop some of them. SO PICKY. But some of the fabrics I was taking a picture of just wouldn't show their colors well in a picture. One in particular was giving me grief. It was dark navy but looked grey in the camera. Stupid thing. I  gave up and photoshopped it blue.

Laura was helping in the library as I was finishing up the pictures so I moved on to work on the firms material spec book by myself at the front desk. I did that for a while and then worked on ordering all these pom poms that we were out of and needed to order.

We ended up staying up way late tonight because we actually had to create our own 30"x 30" box to ship these presentation boards in that were going to Jakarta and it took a while to combine two different boxes to make one. Anyway, we didn't end up leaving till almost 7. EWWWW. Hopefully never again. The office was so darn hot by then and I wanted out.
And now its Friday tomorrow! YIPEE. Never before have I looked so forward to weekends. I get to SLEEP in! And not spent all day in an office. Hooray.
Oh and I'm starting to realize how sassy people can be in New York. I called Fedex at some point this evening before we resulted in making our own 30" x 30" box. I called to see if they had one that size. And its Fedex - so you'd assume they'd have boxes right? Because they ship things EVERYWHERE. But no. I called them and asked if they had one that size and he goes... what kind of a box? So I say just a cardboard box that I can ship a presentation board in. And he says, "Excuse me? We don't sell boxes."
WHAT. Hahaha. Just the way he said it, made it sound like I had asked me if he had a jar of salsa in the store. He replied with such sass it was funny. Plus, if you already know you don't sell boxes, which is ridiculous, why do you even bother asking what kind of a box I need??
Phew. Anyway, I was just amused by this man.
Friday here we come!

The first current update.

Finally my blog dates match up to present times. Today is really Wednesday June 20th!
I spent the morning first fixing up all the things Anna wanted me to change on this custom bookcase, while Laura answered all the emails that had come in during the night.

Then we began a short hunt for a new Eames table for one of the work areas downstairs. After I had emailed Anna the new bookcase with the updated changes, I began organizing the materials for the spec book that we're keeping in the office.
When the vendors came in from B&B Italia we helped them set up. I love getting free food so much.
Laura ended up leaving around 2 to go take pictures of the floor in the atrium of the Waldorf Hotel because they're trying to match this piece of tile up. So that left me in charge of the front while she was gone. And of course then it got super busy, and awkward. I had so many darn foreign people call and I couldn't understand any of them. I think the phone is bad because Laura said she has problems too. But I felt bad asking them to repeat themselves for just about everything they said.
It was a mad rush at the end of today as we FINALLY finished up the last remaining ends on the three binders that were being sent out. There were still a few more materials to insert, and then labels to make. We finished up madly taping the shipping boxes right before the Fausto, our UPS man, was scheduled to show up to collect any mail/packages for the end of the day.

I am so glad to have these huge binders out of my life.