Man, I am no good with this heat. It’s after midnight now and the temperature has dropped to a tolerable 20 degrees. But the days are brutal for me. I can barely get through them. Today I didn’t leave the house until 10:30 p.m.. There’s just no way I could handle dealing with daytime Sunday crowds in this heat. So at about 10:30 I went for an exhilarating drive with the windows down. I’ve got those little triangle windows that you can angle right back so the wind blows right into your face. Ah, refresh. I even missed an episode of Seinfeld just to get out into the somewhat cooler air – that means something. Definitely the high-light of my day. Not that it was necessarily high-light reel worthy, but relative to the rest of the life-sucking day, the late night cruise was the thing.

And hey, by the way, you will never hear me complain about the rain or the cold. September through April I’m completely fine, except my general malaise, which is mostly career-based. But outside of that, the other three seasons are great for me. I LOVE the cool. I LOVE the rain. In almost every form: drizzle, downpours, whatever. Love. love love. Big love. So you say, well considering how rainy Vancouver is, you’re in the right city. Maybe. But you thought Vancouver was rainy? On the edge of the mountain we enjoy so much more of the rainy goodness. I love it I love it. So my complaining is restricted to the summer heat. Grumble grumble.

Grumble again. So to frame this positively and proactively, how does a cool lover deal with this heat? This challenge has two scales to tackle. The micro scale would be a time work around. So I should be sleeping when it’s too hot to be a functioning human being and up when the temperature has returned to civilised; considering that work hours are not really flexible, this time shift would entail coming home from work and immediately going to bed. Hungry and grouchy. So let’s see, I’d wake up at 1:00 or 2:00 even more hungry, then come alive in the coolness. It would be the quiet and still of the night, which work well for me.  That’s manageable. What about the other scale, the macro. I.e. wouldn’t it be a hell of a lot better to actually be living in a cooler place during the summer months? Yes, it would. Where would that be? And how would you work out that kind of life where you can just get up and split when the temperature rises? Not sure.  But worth looking into because as it is right now, I am just throwing away months of the year. Just miserable, useless months.

Penny-wise, pound-foolish

Here’s something that I was previously considering writing a bigger piece on. I was going to include it in some kind of sarcastic “how to get a development permit” kind of post, but right now I just want to get to the point becasue the principle I want to talk about has been popping up elsewhere in life. Oh and the principle ain’t exactly new, but I observe it being hammered home on a daily basis at work. I am a Development Planner, which means I navigate building projects through to a development permit at the City of Vancouver, negotiating with developers and architects to massage their design to something that is supportable by the City’s policies. Over and over you see the same pattern: developers hire low-fee designers, because the broad perception tends to be that designers or architects are interchangeable. Some even charge by the square foot. So if you lack the sophistication to differentiate good design from mediocre, and to differentiate a professional who can provide the required documentation for a permit, then you will probably want to select a designer based on fee as your primary criteria. Penny-wise. Thing is that not every designer has an equally strong track record getting projects successfully through the development permit stage. I’ll leave it to you to assume why that would be. As a result, some projects end up sitting in purgatory on my shelf until the design evolves into the realm of the supportable. And so some developers get absolutely killed on the carrying charges on the site they purchased as their permit application gets shelved because their designer isn’t delivering. So yeah they saved a few thou on design fees and ended up getting their ass kicked by inactivity on their site. Pound-foolish.

And so I thought of the notion of investments and how we avoid making them. The things we do to avoid having to spend the money to do something right in the first place. And then paying the price of inaction becasue such and such project never got off the ground because you didn’t give it a sufficient kick start or such and such project ended up costing a hell of a lot more in time and effort spent attempting fix earlier foul-ups that could have been avoided had the proper investment been made in the first place. So that’s the life lesson that keeps slapping me in the face as I am seeing evidence of it all the time these days. people cheaping out and trying to save a bit in the short term and in so doing making their lives so much more difficult and costly in the longer run.  Actually there are a couple life lessons here: the basic one is that very generally speaking, the culture in Vancouver does not value or understand design services or how and why architects charge what they do. The value is not generally perceived as it is in other parts of the world. That’s pretty much not even a lesson because it’s so obvious. But the other one is: ok what then should I be investing in now in order to give something life and have it spread its wings later? Or more accurately, what am I not yet investing in that I should be?