Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Handing it In (over the internet)


We spent a lot of the last week trying to meet a deadline for a stone sculpture proposal for the city of Saint John New Brunswick. Evan likes to do everything at the last minute. There were forms to fill, bios references and resumes to come up with, designs to rework, discussions over the phone, a whole lot of downloading pdf files and emailing back and forth to bring the thing together to send it off on time today. This was all done between muddy sessions of walling and gathering stone in the rain all day.

There was a time, not long ago, when coming up with, and handing in a proposal in the middle of a place like this, off to the left of nowhere, deep in mosquito infested cottage country would have been impossible. It is a marvel that all the various files and communication back and forth to those involved in this project across Canada and the States, could all take place from this remote place via internet using a little iphone hooked up to a laptop.

We put the proposal package together and emailed it to Evan's mom for her to print up all the text files, while the design images and photos were emailed back to my wife to be burned on to CD (our printer isn't working) and then she hastily collected the printed stuff and got it mailed priority post just in time for it to get there tomorrow. I think its safe to say that our proposal got 'handed in' on time, though the analogy of hands is (appropriately) a bit of a stretch.