Giovanna Storms the Castle
A tale and a invitation to a celebration
Despite everything generations of architectual idiosyncracies could throw at her, she stubbornly soldiered on like a medieval warrior fighting her way into a heavily-defended fortress. Which, sometimes, I think a medieval fortress was the inspiration the architects of the University Medical Center were using when they put this place up...
It began with the parking. Of which, there is none. Oh, there's plenty of parking in giant structures next to the hospitals for the thousands of patients and their families who come to the medical center every day. But for everyone *else*, this is a place which, with a straight face, helpfully suggests parking on other freaking campuses. I mean, they officially suggest, during peak (read: daylight) hours, parking in the "convenient" lots literally over the river and through the woods on the other side of the valley on the back side of the *Engineering* campus and taking the shuttles in. As the *close* option. They also suggest that the parking lots down by the football stadium, on the literally southernmost reach of the Ann Arbor campus (where the medical center forms the northern redoubt of center part) are a nice option. Of course, since I had entirely forgotten about this after so many years getting used to the place, I had forgotten to warn her. Her first inkling of this insanity was when she logically expected to find parking nearby and instead found gridlock and Gold "Hm, do I pay for parking or the morgage?" Pass spaces.
From this initial setback, she zoomed her car out in a ever widening circle. She discovered along the way the maze of one-way streets, streets blocked off due to construction, and/or *both*, that surround the medical center like a moat composed of concrete spagetti with heavy construction equipment meatballs. She, in fact, ended up being forced to make the Grand road Tour of the medical center. Closed, full, and restricted parking lots mocked her as she zoomed past in a careening course resembling the whirl of a pinball through the machine, all the while the time ticking down. She had left plenty of time to get to where she was trying to be -- for a *sanely* designed locale; I had just forgotten to warn her that our medical center was designed by the love child of Dadeleus and MC Escher on an absinthe pipe dream. Finally, as she later told me, time running out, she just roared into hospital valet parking, threw her keys at the parking guys, and ran into the hospital lobby.
Of course, having conquered the Outer Moat, now she found herself tackling the Keep. She asked people where she could find the Taubman Medical Library. The folks in the lobby stared at her incomprehendingly like she was asking for a locale on the ass end of the universe. Which, actually, wouldn't be an inaccurate description of the relative positions of the library and the hospital main lobby. The lobby is on the extreme northeastern end of the medical center. The library is as far southwest on the medical center complex as you can go without walking outdoors. The two points are something like five or six city blocks apart if you could walk there directly. Which, of course, you can't. But she resolutely soldiered on, plunging into the guts of the medical center.
She briskly tracked down the long axis of the University Hospital itself. She hustled through the glass-enclosed, inter-building conenctors we affectionately call the Gerbil Tubes. She discovered down past the Cancer Center where some brilliant genius had decided that Level 2 in the medical center ought be Level 3 in the research sectors for really no reason whatsoever. She ran into the famous dead end in Medical Science Building I where someone decided that the Infectious Animal Housing facilities ought to be dropped smack in the middle of the primary traffic corridor between the research and clinical campuses. (To be fair, when the facilities were first built thirty-plus years ago, the only thing out in that area was the in-patient psychiatric hospital, and so it made sense to build the Infected Monkey Housing way out in that remote edge of campus. They never anticipated the two-million-plus square feet of new hospital(s) that would get built out that way, too...) She finally got to the right *end* of campus, and saw a helpful sign pointing her torwards Taubman Medical Library. Success! Well, success, at least until she discovered that there were no *subsequent* signs pointing torwards Taubman Medical library...
As you may have gathered by now, navigating the medical center here at Michigan is An Adventure. The place looms above the Huron River valley like a medieval fortress and outmassses and outsizes your average Crusader Castle by substantial margins. Mount some catapults on the mechanical decks and you'd be well on your way to securing the northern approaches to Ann Arbor against the armies of Mordor. It's one of the reasons that when I give directions to out-of-towners I suggest the Geddes/Fuller approach threading the floor of the valley -- I can just tell them to keep driving until they see the Big Ass Pile of buildings on hilltops that just goes on and on and on. The very first thing silmaril remarked the first time she and Breno came up to visit Jesse and I here was "This place is so *big*..."
My first few weeks here I found myself routinely muttering about how useful it would be to have wall-mounted talking computers like those found in Star Trek. ("Computer! Where the f**k am I?") In subsequent years, about two or three times a month confused visitors will catch me in a hallway to help them find this or that locale on campus (which has led to some embarassingly amusing stories). Happily, about the time m'Lady Giovanna finally got close enough to her final destination to actually *see* glimpses of the medical library through the long narrow hallway windows like arrowslits along the exterior wall of Med. Sci II, she also ran into some very helpful classmates of mine. They helped guide her the rest of the way around the last six or seven quick turns, squirreling down staircases into the back-behind-bowels of the library where RM 2901 had been tucked. After a long, long, *long* series of journeys, she arrived just in the nick of time for my thesis defense, and a gift and a big hug afterwards. :-)
Here's my SCAdian friends Giovanna and (Dr.) Gregoire (Ph.D) at the party later that evening my mentor hosted for everyone at her home, which they very kindly came to as well. I tell the story of Giovanna's Quest in part out of apology for not remembering to *warn* her about everything she resolutely stormed through to actually *get* to my defense that morning. But I also tell it because it exemplifies something really important...
Giovanna and Gregoire kindly dropped by my defense and my (mentor's) party last Friday, in part because they'll be out of town next weekend when charles_midair and elaine_alina are very generously hosting a 2nd, more silly celebration, and many other friends are coming by. (Midair had proposed some very silly ideas for the party, which I am leaving him to detail.) And before all of that, there was littleholly helping out big time on the day of the defense, and magda_vogelsang's help as an audience member for my pre-defense practice talks, and then before that there was dreamsquirrel helping me out tremendously by driving me around Ann Arbor to deliver the thesis drafts to professor's mailboxes the week earlier, and so on and so forth. Lots of folks taking lots of time out of their very busy schedules to help me out or cheer me on, in person or virtually, in this last bit of my thesis run. Just as y'all have over all these many past years, in countless tales I've told and more I never got the chance to. :-)
Which is why you all are invited, through the generosity of charles_midair and elaine_alina, to the party at their home that they are kindly hosting -- the two of them generously opening their home to the so many of you whom they've never met. It'll be this coming Friday night, September the 14th, at 7:30 PM; LiveJournal not being a place I'd want to leave directions or the like, just drop me an e-mail and I will send you further details.
Despite everything generations of architectual idiosyncracies could throw at her, she stubbornly soldiered on like a medieval warrior fighting her way into a heavily-defended fortress. Which, sometimes, I think a medieval fortress was the inspiration the architects of the University Medical Center were using when they put this place up...
It began with the parking. Of which, there is none. Oh, there's plenty of parking in giant structures next to the hospitals for the thousands of patients and their families who come to the medical center every day. But for everyone *else*, this is a place which, with a straight face, helpfully suggests parking on other freaking campuses. I mean, they officially suggest, during peak (read: daylight) hours, parking in the "convenient" lots literally over the river and through the woods on the other side of the valley on the back side of the *Engineering* campus and taking the shuttles in. As the *close* option. They also suggest that the parking lots down by the football stadium, on the literally southernmost reach of the Ann Arbor campus (where the medical center forms the northern redoubt of center part) are a nice option. Of course, since I had entirely forgotten about this after so many years getting used to the place, I had forgotten to warn her. Her first inkling of this insanity was when she logically expected to find parking nearby and instead found gridlock and Gold "Hm, do I pay for parking or the morgage?" Pass spaces.
From this initial setback, she zoomed her car out in a ever widening circle. She discovered along the way the maze of one-way streets, streets blocked off due to construction, and/or *both*, that surround the medical center like a moat composed of concrete spagetti with heavy construction equipment meatballs. She, in fact, ended up being forced to make the Grand road Tour of the medical center. Closed, full, and restricted parking lots mocked her as she zoomed past in a careening course resembling the whirl of a pinball through the machine, all the while the time ticking down. She had left plenty of time to get to where she was trying to be -- for a *sanely* designed locale; I had just forgotten to warn her that our medical center was designed by the love child of Dadeleus and MC Escher on an absinthe pipe dream. Finally, as she later told me, time running out, she just roared into hospital valet parking, threw her keys at the parking guys, and ran into the hospital lobby.
Of course, having conquered the Outer Moat, now she found herself tackling the Keep. She asked people where she could find the Taubman Medical Library. The folks in the lobby stared at her incomprehendingly like she was asking for a locale on the ass end of the universe. Which, actually, wouldn't be an inaccurate description of the relative positions of the library and the hospital main lobby. The lobby is on the extreme northeastern end of the medical center. The library is as far southwest on the medical center complex as you can go without walking outdoors. The two points are something like five or six city blocks apart if you could walk there directly. Which, of course, you can't. But she resolutely soldiered on, plunging into the guts of the medical center.
She briskly tracked down the long axis of the University Hospital itself. She hustled through the glass-enclosed, inter-building conenctors we affectionately call the Gerbil Tubes. She discovered down past the Cancer Center where some brilliant genius had decided that Level 2 in the medical center ought be Level 3 in the research sectors for really no reason whatsoever. She ran into the famous dead end in Medical Science Building I where someone decided that the Infectious Animal Housing facilities ought to be dropped smack in the middle of the primary traffic corridor between the research and clinical campuses. (To be fair, when the facilities were first built thirty-plus years ago, the only thing out in that area was the in-patient psychiatric hospital, and so it made sense to build the Infected Monkey Housing way out in that remote edge of campus. They never anticipated the two-million-plus square feet of new hospital(s) that would get built out that way, too...) She finally got to the right *end* of campus, and saw a helpful sign pointing her torwards Taubman Medical Library. Success! Well, success, at least until she discovered that there were no *subsequent* signs pointing torwards Taubman Medical library...
As you may have gathered by now, navigating the medical center here at Michigan is An Adventure. The place looms above the Huron River valley like a medieval fortress and outmassses and outsizes your average Crusader Castle by substantial margins. Mount some catapults on the mechanical decks and you'd be well on your way to securing the northern approaches to Ann Arbor against the armies of Mordor. It's one of the reasons that when I give directions to out-of-towners I suggest the Geddes/Fuller approach threading the floor of the valley -- I can just tell them to keep driving until they see the Big Ass Pile of buildings on hilltops that just goes on and on and on. The very first thing silmaril remarked the first time she and Breno came up to visit Jesse and I here was "This place is so *big*..."
My first few weeks here I found myself routinely muttering about how useful it would be to have wall-mounted talking computers like those found in Star Trek. ("Computer! Where the f**k am I?") In subsequent years, about two or three times a month confused visitors will catch me in a hallway to help them find this or that locale on campus (which has led to some embarassingly amusing stories). Happily, about the time m'Lady Giovanna finally got close enough to her final destination to actually *see* glimpses of the medical library through the long narrow hallway windows like arrowslits along the exterior wall of Med. Sci II, she also ran into some very helpful classmates of mine. They helped guide her the rest of the way around the last six or seven quick turns, squirreling down staircases into the back-behind-bowels of the library where RM 2901 had been tucked. After a long, long, *long* series of journeys, she arrived just in the nick of time for my thesis defense, and a gift and a big hug afterwards. :-)
Here's my SCAdian friends Giovanna and (Dr.) Gregoire (Ph.D) at the party later that evening my mentor hosted for everyone at her home, which they very kindly came to as well. I tell the story of Giovanna's Quest in part out of apology for not remembering to *warn* her about everything she resolutely stormed through to actually *get* to my defense that morning. But I also tell it because it exemplifies something really important...
Giovanna and Gregoire kindly dropped by my defense and my (mentor's) party last Friday, in part because they'll be out of town next weekend when charles_midair and elaine_alina are very generously hosting a 2nd, more silly celebration, and many other friends are coming by. (Midair had proposed some very silly ideas for the party, which I am leaving him to detail.) And before all of that, there was littleholly helping out big time on the day of the defense, and magda_vogelsang's help as an audience member for my pre-defense practice talks, and then before that there was dreamsquirrel helping me out tremendously by driving me around Ann Arbor to deliver the thesis drafts to professor's mailboxes the week earlier, and so on and so forth. Lots of folks taking lots of time out of their very busy schedules to help me out or cheer me on, in person or virtually, in this last bit of my thesis run. Just as y'all have over all these many past years, in countless tales I've told and more I never got the chance to. :-)
Which is why you all are invited, through the generosity of charles_midair and elaine_alina, to the party at their home that they are kindly hosting -- the two of them generously opening their home to the so many of you whom they've never met. It'll be this coming Friday night, September the 14th, at 7:30 PM; LiveJournal not being a place I'd want to leave directions or the like, just drop me an e-mail and I will send you further details.
- It's been a marvelous few years since I first began my sabbatical from the medical school, in which time I met most of you and had more adventures than can be counted. I hope as many of you as can will join in one very last celebration as it all comes to a close. :-)