Under copyright law the person who "translates an idea into a fixed, tangible medium of expression" is considered the "author" so in this case, where the design ideas have already been put into a CAD drawing, the project owner has the right to claim authorship if he/she so wishes and would not be "playing fast and loose with a fiction". However, the phrase "finishing touches" does not make it very clear what modifications the architect will make or if he/she will be professionally responsible for those modifications or if they involve structural, waterproofing, code compliance, and/or material and installation specifications. The architect could just be correcting the roof plane geometry on the roof plan and the elevations and/or adding dimensions with a more sophisticated CAD system. If the architect does not put his/her name (and/or stamp) on the documents and doesn't intend to take responsibility for them (must take all or no responsibility under typical registration law) then the owner can be the author and have a stronger claim to ownership. On the other hand, if the owner wants the architect to take full responsibility for the documents in their entirety and to put his/her name (and/or stamp) on them, then the architect will be the author. In either case, ownership of the documents and the copyright can be established by modifying the typical document ownership clause in a standard Owner-Architect agreement form. I can't advise you which form to use because I don't know enough about the project or the architect's expected role but don't use the term, "work for hire" anywhere in the agreement unless you want to be responsible for the architect's work.

Thank you for the input on the York system. Good to hear from those familiar with it. I've heard it's reliable and yes very quiet but I personally haven't heard as much about York. Warranty is great. I will take another look at heat pump. I have a couple neighbors that got new heat pumps last summer - I'll see how happy they are after the first winter in central Missouri. If the cost is substantially higher that's a factor. Finally, it sounds like I was complaining about Lennox. I have to say my current system is a Lennox, nearly 30 years old and can't remember a service call. The contractor mentioned that Lennox is great and he'd have no problem recommending. Just considering another option I hadn't considered that seems to line up well with the tax credits and maybe a good value.

I've been looking at GTD but running into the old joke about "not finding the time to take that class on time management." In fairness, I have not read the book. I decided to first poke around GTD Web sites, like 43 Folders and davidco.com (David Allen's site), and the Yahoo GTD Groups. There's a fair amount of hype around GTD right now. I've been in the workforce long enough to see many highly-hyped management methods come and go. So I wanted to see what it's about and see what reservations people have about it before jumping into the pool. That said, what I see of GTD is that it requires a fair amount of rigor -- I mean, beyond the discipline to actually do things. There are relatively stringent requirements on how one collects to-dos, when one "just does it" and when one just collects the information for processing later, how to conduct Weekly Reviews -- and a lot of discussion about how much time you spend planning and how much time you spend "doing." I notice in my own job that how I must work can change very quickly. I have seen two days worth of work vanish in the space of half an hour. The notion of coming in on a given morning with a plan to finish a particular project is almost humorous. I'm not sure predefined plans at a "exactly what do I do next?" level will succeed without frequent re-dos rather than just using "navigation made good." I also see a number of GTDers -- ooh, something shiny! -- become so enamored of the hardware (the tools used to implement the system [planner, computer software]) that actually "getting things done" takes a back seat to endless tweaking and testing. Despite all that, I've decided to try GTD. It can't hurt and what I've seen so far indicates that, occasional work reversals aside, it could work for me. I'm already committed to putting everything into one system (my Palm PDA; I tell people "if it's not in there, I didn't do it -- and I won't.") Most of what I see of the system makes sense. So it's worth the trial to me.

You are doing great! And it sounds like you are doing some of the same things that I am! At the moment, I'm procrastinating (taking a break) from cleaning up my worktable so it can get in gear for Christmas. It's been the world's slowest quilting station for the past few months (in that I only get to it a few minutes here and there), but now I need to change gears and put that away for a short while to start getting packages ready to ship- within the next 2 weeks :) Medical stuff is interesting in some ways. It's not something that I've had a great deal of experience with, but am getting a little more. From my perspective, I would keep the more bureaucratic end of things in a 'to be shredded' type situation, and keep information pertaining to your actual medical health in chronological order for the long term. Sometimes it's helpful to look back at your medical reports/results over the long term. In some cases you can probably do this online, but I can say for myself that keeping paperwork that you can lay out and look at can be very useful. I'll give you a very recent example. This week, DH got results from a routine blood test that said it was out of acceptable limits. Very quickly we were able to pull out paperwork results from the last time he had these tests from two different sources (4yrs and9 yrs) and the levels were almost identical- and considered normal then. This was incredibly helpful for us to not panic and to come up with suitable questions regarding what is going on (i.e. was it suppose to have been a fasting test they did, but they forgot to mention that to him?) This is a little bit difficult to write about, so I will try to keep it succinct, but last year a family member of ours overdosed on RX drugs. What happened was he messed up his brain and essentially made himself a dementia type patient for 5 months, unable to care for himself. During that time, we ended up setting out and tracking down as much medical information as we could about him, because he was not capable of answering questions from a standpoint of reality. It would have been much easier had we had paper copies from his home to begin with. For the first few months, we didn't have an accurate medical picture of who he had been for the past years (he is a hermit, for lack of a better word) which made his doctor's appointments a hit-and-miss proposition. In the end, my DH ended up collecting everything we were able to get from the past few years, and filing it in chronological order inside of a binder. I would definitely go that book-style route again with medical records and decide on the topic whether they should be kept for 2 years, 5 years, indefinitely. Right now, DH, DD and I are able to keep all our medical stuff in a small folder, but as we get older and have more things going on, I will probably look into using a binder, maybe even filing by year with page separators? Hope you find a good system and get your packages out on time :)