TBW and I were at a family reunion this weekend in Western PA. We had a great time as we walked around the historical small town of Ligonier. Here’s a fun birdhouse that caught my eye.

I found some fascinating old books, particularly one by Frank Lloyd Wright. As I paged, I found him pontificating on all things architectural, then I came across a small section on choosing a Contractor. He wrote, “I’d rather hire a crook who knows how to build than an honest man who doesn’t. I can police a crook but I can’t get something out of an honest man who doesn’t have it in him. I can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.”

Biblical analogy aside, I was intrigued by this quote. In a back-handed way, Wright indicated how much of a role the Contractor played on his projects. From the Wright drawings I’ve seen, he was mostly a concept guy, not strong on details. Basically he needed a clever Contractor to work out his details. I’m sure his arrogance would never let him admit that, but so many architects give so little thought to how things get built.

I took a photo of a hinge on a church door in Ligonier that helps prove the point. Perhaps the architect selected the look of the hinges, but consider all the details the contractor probably needed to resolve to actually make the doors work. And not just work for a year, but for decades.

I love helping work out those details and love working with folks who are creative and experienced in providing solutions. We are a bunch of problem solvers. As the old saying goes, “Life is short and full of blisters.” Make sure you get yours doing things you enjoy.

I’m not a big fan of excuses. Have you ever sat in a meeting waiting for one person to arrive? Then he comes rushing in the door, talking about the traffic or some other thing outside of his control. I much prefer, “I’m sorry I’m late, I should have left earlier.” As the old saying sort of goes, “Excuses are like anuses, everybody’s got one.”

Nevertheless, I’m about to start pitching a couple of excuses for my lack of posts. First, we had the wedding of our daughter Anna last weekend at our house. People started parking in our yard just as the clouds dropped rain like it was coming out a faucet. I knew that a party for 150 was a bit of a logistics stretch for us. I learned that a wedding involves way more everything than a party. So it goes.

I couldn’t understand why I felt so bad right after the wedding. The ceremony was beautiful and we love our new son and grandson. I thought the stress must have gotten me, but I generally handle stress well. Turns out some little virus (or as my scientist son calls viruses, “Pure malevolence with a hard shell”) started to play with my systems. Eight days later I’m coming out the other end. I don’t know if it was swine flu, but I haven’t been that sick in nearly 20 years.

As for the Oui Vey, I re-read one of my favorite books as I was starting to feel better. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History/Here My Troubles Began just amazes me with its depth and accessibility. It’s a graphic novel (a comic book) about a Holocaust survivor and his story. If you’re going to read one book this year, make it a Pulitzer Prize winning comic book. Among other things, it’s a testimony to the value of competence.

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You have to love a website that recommends using a Sawz-All for decapitating a pumpkin (i.e. cutting the hole in top to remove the guts). This ExtremePumpkins.com website starts with a great video using the professional wrestlers “The Bumping Uglies” to introduce the concepts.

Since we all love to build things, I challenge you to have some fun with your kids, grand-kids, neices and nephew or even just for yourself and carve some kickass pumpkins this year. Here’s a short list of helpful guidelines from the site.

1. Use a power washer to clean the pumpkin, it’s quick and fun.
2. Sawz-All the hole in the top, tilting the blade so the lid doesn’t fall through and cutting a little notch in the lid so you can easily fit it back into place each time.
3. An ice cream scooper gets the seeds and goo out easily.
4. Use a jig saw or scroll saw to cut the various openings.

If you want a few ideas of what to carve, the following video should help. So have some fun, Halloween only comes one time a year.

If you were transported back in time, could you actually help develop some of the technology that you use every day? Do you have a decent understanding of how things really work? This 10 question Technology quiz gives you a score…not that this is a competition.

My son Lex scored 5 out of 10 and I’d characterize him as follows:

Whereas I scored 7 out of 10 and see myself more as follows:

I challenge you to take the quiz and post your results as a comment. We promise not to laugh at you, no, really.

We had dinner with Randy and Dee Miller in Lititz last night and saw an amazing Manspace. Randy’s back story is about as impressive as it gets. Coming from a poor family with a Mom who had never been able to attend school, Randy started working at 9 years old. By 11 years old he had developed a shoe shine business and was renting a small shoe shine shop on Main Street. Besides shining the shoes of passersby, he also had most of the town’s doctors let him into their houses on a Saturday afternoon to keep their shoes shined as well.

Randy endured a serious of tragedies that go beyond the scope of this post. Let’s just say that Job and Randy could talk. Like Job, Randy persevered and prospered. Eventually he saw a niche in delivering water softener salt directly to people’s houses and built a strong business from that concept. At 73, Randy has retired from that business but kept his love of Lititz.

He’s collected Lititz memorabilia for decades. He took the basement of his beautiful home and created a Lititz Museum that simply delights. He has part of the old Lititz bowling lanes (along with the neon sign), an exact replica of his old shoe shine stand, and all kinds of working toys and mementos from times gone by. He created a Manspace around his passions and adds to it regularly.

To learn more about this fun concept of Manspaces, watch the following short TED video:

Do you have a Manspace? What would you build if you could? I’m thinking about a bunch of limestone piles in a circular wall around a tree in the woods behind my house. I’m not sure why…

Our son Lex is coming home from New Orleans today and I’m looking forward to spending some time with him. My brother sent me this video clip that pretty well sums things up.

Perhaps it’s my sick sense of humor, but that video cracks me up. It has the same effect on my brother, so maybe it’s a Pelger thing. Take a few minutes today to laugh at something, to just relax and have some fun. Life goes by fast, don’t be too serious…you really aren’t all that important.

With a 1.5M US construction jobs lost in the past 2 years, ENR just reported that the September 2009 unemployment level is 17.1%. The August level was 16.5%, so that’s a substantial jump.

The federal government claims the Stimulus funds have saved or created 122,000 construction jobs. So the Stimulus helps a bit, but what we really need is a functioning economy that demands facilities in which to live, work and pray.

In my own microcosm, we are busy and work keeps coming in. I’ve anticipated a big economic downturn for the last 20 years and tried to be prepared for it. While studying the Great Depression, I realized that the 20% unemployment rate meant 80% were still working. I determined that I wanted to position myself to be one of the working 80%.

To try to accomplish that goal, I’ve run my business with 3 simple guidelines:

1. Keep overhead low, pay attention to costs all the time
2. Stay near the bleeding edge with technology innovation
3. Deliver fantastic customer service

Of course I fail at all those from time to time, but strive to keep them in focus.

If you are out of work, don’t expect a quick fix turnaround. It is a tough economy and construction recovers slowly. Time will pass, though, and things will get better. Remember the words from a wise old contractor, “When it’s good, it’s never as good as you think, and when it’s bad, it’s never as bad as you think.”

Start now to position yourself for a better future. Read some challenging books, go to the library, develop a plan for becoming who you are capable of being.

Then take some time to consider some people who are truly suffering, like the flood survivors in Philipines. A couple photos I found made me smile as I thought about people’s ability to smile in the face of struggle.

By the way, why is it always boys that do things like crawl up on the power lines?

Have you ever had the opportunity to work on any novelty architecture projects? It’s fun and challenging to get out of the norm of construction and work on some odd ball projects. This Appetizing Architecture post shows lots of fun food buildings and structures. A few photos below give you a taste…

Like a drive through donut shop in (where else?) California

Or a giant milk bottle ice cream stand in Boston.

The Longaberger Basket building below is a much more substantial project. Built over 10 years ago, the corporate office building became a tourist destination for Longaberger basket devotees. This project really helped build their brand.

Most of us aren’t going to get to work on projects this wacky, but we may have some fun things come our way. I did an Isaac’s Deli building a few years ago and had to figure out how to design and build a steel gull wing sculpture/canopy above the entrance.

At the time, it seemed like one more thing to do during a busy time. It didn’t feel like a fun challenge, it was a pain, something that took time I didn’t think I had. I look back, though, with fondness and a bit of nostalgia.

As you struggle this week, doing more than you think you can get done. Take a moment to stop and appreciate the fact that you get to do some challenging work. Look back on some things you’ve completed and let yourself feel good about your accomplishments. This is your life, baby, enjoy it.

Mark Twain said, “It is a little thing – glass is – until it is absent, then it becomes a big thing.” As I stood on the clear glass floor at the Corning Glass Museum, I read the quote and thought of all the times glass becomes a big thing. When a window breaks on a cold night, when you live/work in a space without natural light, when you stand on a glass floor.

Then I thought I was glad TBW didn’t wear a skirt today. We were touring the amazing Corning Glass Museum in Corning NY. If you have a chance to visit, I highly recommend it. They spent $65M on a cool industrial style building that teaches and delights.

For example, we all know that fiber optic cable carries more data (bandwidth) than copper wire. Do you have a sense how much more? The fiber optic cable is the size of light nylon fishing line. The photo below shows how much copper wire carries the same amount of data as a single fiber optic wire (about 8′ diameter).

Another thing I liked about the Glass Museum was how well they involved us in hand’s on projects. We watched several demonstrations of glass experts making some great artistic and functional pieces. They start working with this honey like substance and end with these beautiful creations. It’s one thing to watch others work the glass, it’s another experience entirely to make a piece yourself. We enjoyed getting to start with molten glass and end with some nice pieces.

Of course, We also loved seeing the museum glass pieces. What a delightful day, to wonder and wander, appreciating the creativity of others. If you don’t visit museums, you should consider it. See photo below for example motivation. And yes, I do realize my mind tends to be of the one track variety.

TBW and I are traveling for a few days, we headed north up Route 81 and stopped at the Lackawana Coal Mine tour. They take you 250 feet below grade into a deep anthracite mine. Riding in a coal car down the tracks, being lowered by a steel cable gave me the beginnings of the willies. I’m not crazy about enclosed spaces and wondered how I’d feel that far below grade. Like most anxieties, it was unwarranted. I was too interested in how things worked down there to be scared.

The mining process reminded me of a construction site on a day when one of the nastier jobs has to get done. Basically, it’s a big demolition project in which the coal veins get removed (except for a grid of coal columns that remain as structural supports) and the sandstone remains.

The wood posts, which I always thought were structural supports, aren’t near capable of supporting the rock and soil load above. The sandstone arches over the mining tunnels (about 15′ wide) and supports itself (until it doesn’t).

If the sandstone cracks or subsides in some way, the load above is huge. The wood posts start to snap, crackle and pop, acting as warning sounds that subsidence is occurring. The old saying goes, “When the props start talking, the miners start walking.” They also watched the rats, who had keener senses than humans and starting running for cover before the miners heard anything.

The photo above gives a sense of those supports while the donkey shown below shows how they did it in the old days. Some of the boys started working in the mines at 7 or 8 years old and were called “Nippers”.

Generally the drilling, blasting, waiting for the dust to settle, then cleaning the debris doesn’t seem too different from construction demo. Then I heard about monkey veins. Sometimes the coal veins were 10′ high and easy to work in. Other times, though, the veins may only be 2′ to 3′ high. Then the miners needed to work all day on their hands and knees or on their bellies. They only got paid by the car load, so working in a monkey vein just meant you had to work harder for the same pay. The photo below shows a monkey vein.

So you may be tired after a hard day, but remember it’s not a day in the mines.