Rain, progress

I’m at home right now because it’s raining, and it has been for several days.  Usually I’d be at the frisbee fields, but having gone over there and seen that they were a little more lake-like than is optimal, I found out that our team postponed our game to mid-June.  I was looking forward to the social time, and to running around for a bit of exercise.

I’ve been quite focused the last few days, finally accomplishing some longstanding goals.  I completed my portfolio revisions to my satisfaction.  While I may still work on some of the diagrams I had in mind and didn’t have time to realize completely, I’m very happy to have updated the work to show a few more key skills and ideas.  In addition, I quickly put together a web portfolio.  I’ve wanted to do that for a while, but using GoLive was never that pleasant, and I always seemed to need workarounds to accomplish the actions I was trying to achieve.  While my new effort is elementary, and obviously blog based (I may yet shell out for the hosting so that it can just be rachelauerbach.com and not rachelauerbach.wordpress.com), it gets the job done and has been fun to produce.  It was always tedious to get anything made in GoLive, let alone something that looked even remotely decent, so it’s nice that making this new portfolio was fun and easy, and that I know enough from the old days of html to make it a little better than basic.

[note.  I’ve just been trying to add a simple slideshow to my portfolio blog and have been foiled.  WordPress doesn’t allow javascript, so even though I could script exactly what I want, I am stuck with only being able to use the somewhat clunky slideshows they allow with shortcode.  Maybe it is worth it to pay for the hosting… or maybe I’ll just have long galleries.]

The other big milestone for the week was sending out several applications today, all to firms that are quite interesting to me.  It’s been very isolating to not have a job, and especially now that all of my friends who are in school are working overtime to get ready for finals, I sometimes feel like even my social life doesn’t make up for sitting alone all day, every day, working in front of the computer.  Now that I’ve got things to send, though, I can go back to a more varied routine, with time for sewing and reading.  I can also set up some more informational interviews, and hopefully something will progress to the point where I get hired and am once again part of a team – where at least I’ll be sitting with other people all day, every day, even if I’m also working on the computer all day, every day!

On a final note, though I delayed it because I didn’t go back to school this year, I’m doing my annual rereading of Atmospheres and Thinking Architecture now.  So many projects floating in my mind!