I spy: A new building!

We've mentioned this briefly in the past, but when Ben arrived, his office/lab was in temporary housing while a wonderful new building was being built. And now it's finished (more or less, depending on who you ask) and we've moved in!

Entrance to the new building - you can see the old trailer-office in the background.

It's very spacious and clean and bright, and we don't have to walk to another building to go to the bathroom. But my favourite part (well, right after the big huge windows) is that when you enter the building, you flash your card and then the double doors automatically swing open for you - I don't know if I've ever felt so special! (OK, I probably have felt more special, and in all honesty, I think it's a bit of a waste of electricity, but it still spices up the morning routine a little!)

So the only drawback to the new building is that after spending twice the proposed time and 3 times the original budget, it's far from ideal. The idea was to build a nice lab building with a few offices attached. So the university hired a company that has never built a lab, and they decided to build an office building and oh, maybe throw in a few empty spaces that they'd call "labs." So they did things like cut out the insulation and sound-proofing material (for the thermal and sound chambers, respectively) and instead, they used the money to install $500 door handles. (Yes, that cost is PER handle - and they keep cutting up everyone's knuckles because they're installed too close to the metal door frame.) The other charming feature is that they installed all these fancy monitoring devices, like a motion detector in the animal room (because birds never move, so you'd want to know if they did!), temperature sensors in the uninsulated thermal chambers to make sure temps don't fluctuate too much (guess what - they do!) and a smoke detector that was installed right next to the exhaust outlet. This means that alarms are going off all the time! Luckily we can mute them, and hopefully it will get sorted soon. I won't recount the myriad other problems, although there have certainly been some ridiculous ones. But all-in-all, we're enjoying it - and we even have some Christmas decorations up!