London: Surveying and skating in Jolly Old! Summer 2014: Day 11 5/20/14 (I feel like never waking up, BROhan in the morning, traipsing around the Arboretum, surveying the survey office, the original Arboretum, finally doing some work, killing Google Docs slowly, COOK ALL THE CHICKEN, the meeting of the ARA and the wall lady)

This morning was just the same as every other one. I questioned why I stayed up so late the night before and then wished I could freeze time to sleep more. After I ousted myself from bed and showered I had some cereal, toast and a banana with Shoop. We headed over to the office around 8:47 ish AM (as we normally do) and Stefan and Nick weren’t there! Shocker! They showed up maybe 5 minutes later as they had been out the night before clubbing at the Sin club. We had a meeting with Paul in his home at 10 AM so we used the first 30 minutes to prepare for this meeting and get the printing straightened out on the office printer. It was kind of a struggle as it printed the first two pages and then asked for more paper (THIS ALWAYS HAPPENS). It also cost me 31 pence (so now my account is -31 pence). At any rate we printed out the Energize Worcester checklist (for determining the technology in the home to ask Paul about). We then biked over to Paul’s house in about 10 minutes (we had planned for 20). We were sitting upstairs and talking to him by 9:55 AM (which is pretty good considering the fact it was almost 3 when I went to bed). In the meeting we went over the checklist and also talked about heat loss statistics, thermochrons, tips for the demographic survey and some other project progress. After the meeting of about an hour we took our bikes from his garden in the backyard to the front and were deciding what to do next. There was this sketchy dude with a backpack only on one shoulder and balding that was trying to get us to help him as a marketing dude. He was trying to have us call clients at £10 an hour to tie up stock deals and other financial stuffs. First off we don’t have a work visa so if we got caught we would be jailed by the UK government. Second I don’t want to work for no Jordan Belfort/ Wolf of Wallstreet loony. He finally left. We had decided to bike around the Arboretum area and take pictures of the rental (“let”) signs. So we did just that and wandered around on bikes. Shoop broke off and did a loop and then I decided to stop at this surveying office to ask about rentals as the sign said rent and property management too. So Stefan and Nick decided to wait outside with the bikes so I opened the door and entered. Inside I was presented with two doors, a staircase and a dude vacuuming. I knocked on the one door on the left (unmarked) and was greeted by a man on a cell phone, but his receptionist and I chatted about what our team was doing in the Arboretum. In about 2 minutes the guy returned from his call and he led to me through the other door to another office of seemingly the boss for the company. The boss seemed actually very pleasant and happy to talk to me (as had been the receptionist). So there I was in a surveying office dressed in a 32 degree long-sleeve shirt and this guy was in a suit. He and I talked about the project and I asked if he had any EPCs for had done anything like that. At first he didn’t seem like he could help, but then he showed me an old drawing of the original boundaries of the Arboretum as they were established in 1866 (also the charter used to set up the area). This was actually pretty sick!

After this he brought me a file folder with a survey they did on a house and I took the address so I could grab the EPCs later. He then went and got a 40 page file with a 3 page listing of property sales on one of the roads in the Arboretum. So he photocopied that for me and I took this with me. He helped me out with all of this without being rude at all! He was actually a super chill dude and even didn’t take a phone call for helping me. What a boss. Anyways after that I talked to the guys and we went back to the University for lunch as it was now like 12 PM. Before I had gone into the surveying shop this old woman had seen us going into a private parking lot to try and store our bikes and she went into a shop to rat us out for being “sketchy.” It was kind of funny, but also made us glad we are getting approved for walking around the Arboretum so in case the popo turns up we have the City Council on our side. Lunch was a huge plate of tortellini with cheese on the tops of them. It was really good.

Back in the office we chilled and derped around for a bit. I read up on this awesome running robot on kickstarter and wanted to drop $249 on one…I still might. Anyways after lunch I told the team about where I saw the info from the survey peeps going and I gave Stefan, Nick and Shoop each a page of addresses to find and put into a Google Docs spreadsheet with address, sell date, price, EPC rating etc. Since we had the full address we could finally look up some real EPCs! So we spent a good hour to two hours working on this and actually got all the addresses entered into the doc! IT FINALLY FELT LIKE WE WERE DOING SOMETHING!!!!!!! In the time the other dudes were entering this info I wrote up what Paul had said and also changed the demographic survey to match the demographics section on the census (which actually lists a good 15 choices for race). I also added photos to the drive about the rental properties we had seen and worked on helping on the spreadsheet where possible. I also did some formulas so we could determine the average EPC current and potential rating for the property (the potential rating is what it could have with more retrofits as proposed on the EPC). After this all was complete we chatted with Katy about our progress and realized that she had been saying the University has thermo-cards not thermo-chrons (WHICH IS ANNOYING BECAUSE I CLEARLY SAID THERMOCHRONS YESTERDAY WHEN I ASKED AOUT THEM). At any rate we will talk to Paul about thermochrons later. We worked until 5 and felt well accomplished.

After 5 I headed to the gym with Stefan. I did mostly legs and shoulders today and my legs were feeling it after I got off the extended leg press with almost 250 pounds of weight (SKATING IS PAYING OFF)! I left at 5:45 to go back and cook tons of chicken and pasta for dinner. I didn’t take a shower because I didn’t have any time, but I did manage to cook all the chicken and pasta by 6:35 PM (although I told Nick I was meeting him outside at 6:40 PM), so I had to wrap (the food) and run! But the chicken I had cooked was absolutely delicious as I had put so much effort into cleaning off the fat. We had told Katy that only Nick and I would be going to the ARA meeting and we planned to meet her at 7 at the city campus. Once we got there we saw Katy and her daughter coming from the gym. Her daughter really was complaining about working out and didn’t want to move. We then headed over to the Baptist church and got there at like 7:15 PM and there was no one there for the 7:30 PM meeting. So we locked all 3 bikes on a single bike rack and then headed to a pub. I didn’t drink anything but water and saw the restaurant offered a $400 bottle of champagne. Classy. At like 7:28 PM we headed back to the meeting and got there at 7:31 PM right as the meeting was starting. This started a truly slow and painful hour. Nick and I sat at one end of the room and introduced ourselves and then listened as the people there (about half of the 10 in the room being elderly) droned on about various events and issues in the area. I don’t mean to degrade the conversations or the people. It was just very boring to us. The highlight had to be this one old lady (we dubbed the “wall lady”) who brought up this issue that a dude had gated off her walking path between two houses next to his property because vandals had busted his TV cable in the alley. She literally went on and on about this and would not let it go. She was super passionate about this path and said she had been there for 25 years. She also started complaining this one guy was parking 3 cars on his property because they had knocked down this one wall on the end of her road. After Paul (the secretary of the meeting) and the partially blind leader calmed restrained her, we talked a bit about our project and the people seemed interested to help us. We also heard there is a national campaign that installs £2500 memorial benches around the UK! WTF! I could put a $10 (I mean £5) plaque on a £100 bench and call it a profit of £2395. Anyways as the meeting dragged on toward an hour the wall lady spoke up again about the danged wall. As Nick said, “it was almost like the Berlin wall.” Seriously this lady was so adamant that the 26 people on the street had failed their duty to help keep this wall that prevented the serious parking problem of this dude with 3 vehicles. Who knows what she would say about our like 40 cars! O.o finally the meeting was over and we peaced the heck out of there. The meeting was an hour and 10 minutes. Finally I got back and consumed all the tortellini from lunch and got the email off to Brohan with the surveys for those interested in helping us from the meeting. Phew! What a day!