A week in the life....

Life in the the East Bay has been a real scurry lately and I am starting to really feel like I live here.

Mental scrapes and scars from the school year are all healed up, took a while hmm? That reminds me of a Mark Twain quote, 'It used to take me all vacation to grow a new hide in place of the one they flogged off me during school term, ' although I'm guessing in his day the scrapes and scars were of a more tangible kind like from a hand made switch.

Regardless, life is running along a new track. So here is a showcase of a week in the life of Chelsea Larsson, Dashing Young Intern, 2010:

Well..Every morning I walk to work, here is the office:

Wait! First I pack my lunch every morning, this week I made a seaweed/rice/garbanzo bean salad and paired it with shrimp dumplings:



Now here is the office, my desk is right between these two:



Yes that is a row of gabions full of plastic fruit and yes people do come in all the time thinking we are an organic grocery. As you can see, the office is quite small and resembles STUDIO in the way that drawings are pinned to the wall and everyone's desks are close to one another. It's very intimate and we joke around a lot. One guy who draws cartoons for Landscape Architecture magazine loves to read the headlines off the covers of trashy celeb magazines and is otherwise very adept at diverting the entire office's attention.

But it is a very serious firm as well and we stay late to finish deadlines as much as any other firm.



After work I really need to relax before going home and working on other projects so every day I visit the local pananderia. If my plane can't take off from the SF airport because I am weighing it down this place will be to blame.



I love it at Casa Latina. Behind the counter the ladies talk swiftly in Spanish and now that they recognize me they yell "Hola Como Estas?" when I walk in. In the front of the bakery are all the pastries and tamales but in the back is cozy dark room for eating. This is where I hide away for a half hour after work and meditate on the momentous pastry of the day. This triangle kind is my favorite, it tastes like gingerbread cookies and pumpkin bread mixed together:



On occasion something fun happens after work and this week my coworkers decided to play darts at a local bar:





Instead of writing our names, Laryssa my coworker drew little cartoons of each person to keep score under and I am the one with the top hat.



Also during the week we sometimes visit other offices, today we went to Swerve Co. which is a product design/architecture firm that has the coolest machines I've ever seen. They have a 5 way rotational CNC router, a 7 way rotational drill, a machine called Ziggy that is automated to pick out the correct metal pieces from random piles and deliver them to the drill station and more... Oh these people make furniture by the way and were the firm who did the prototyping for the Pentagon Memorial Benches.

The machines are either from Japan and the or from Germany (?) and the owner told us that the Germans use the Japanese machines ( which are like robots with arms that move around the shop) to build the big German machines ( which are the routers) but that the Japanese use the big German machines to route the pieces for their robots. So the machine/robot world is very well acquainted and interdependent.

Dad you would have loved all these machines, it was like your basement work shop plus a couple of Swiss bank accounts!









When the metal pieces are first routed they are still rough so the workers place them in this machine to smooth their edges. This tub is full of ceramic pellets. When turned on it is pressurized and shoots the pellets around inside and also sprays water inside. The metal pieces get jostled around with the water and pellets and the process smooths their rough edges, much like rock is ground into sand by the ocean and ocean floor.







The guy who started the firm has been doing this since 1993 and is really happy with his life and work, needless to say we were all inspired.

SO, on the weekends I go on other field trips and hang out with the interns, my room mate, or Shannon.

The PWP interns took me on a field trip to gorgeous Marin County



Lin and I went to the bakery and she loved it as you can see from her plate



Lisa got us all out to watch Spain win the world cup



and I played games with the Berkeley Architecture students in Dolores Park



Of course, Monday always rolls around and the lunch packing and landscape architecture begin again. That's a week for me.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Summer and relaxing with a big glass of lemonade or beer or what have you to relax! Kisses.