Garfield Minus Garfield

My friends Jessica and Dan were kind enough to invite me along when they wound up with an extra ticket to today’s Rose Bowl. The only difficulty was that Northwestern was playing in the Outback Bowl at 8am, and the Rose Bowl was in Pasadena at 1:30pm.

I initially figured I’d just watch the NU game downtown and take the train up to Pasadena after it ended and walk to the Rose Bowl. The problem with this idea was that none of the bars I’d been planning to go to downtown opened until 10am.

So I said screw it, I’ll just go to Pasadena. I can take the express bus to Union Station and the train to Pasadena, and it’ll all be good. I’d make it at about 7:45 for an 8am kickoff and I’d have to fight Rose Parade crowds, but it was totally doable.

I should have known better than to make a plan that relied on LA County public transportation being on time.

I walked the 20 minutes down to the express bus stop and got there at about 6:15 for what was supposed to be a 6:31 bus. With no sign of it at 6:47 and the next express bus not scheduled until 7:31, I said screw it and hopped on a crosstown bus instead.

I eventually wound up on an LA city bus with a bus driver who was either insane, high, or both. He mumbled in misunderstanding if I asked him if he went to the Gold Line, and he literally shut the door on people and took off giggling if they dared ask him questions about the line if they didn’t get on the bus before they did so.

I was very, very happy when someone (talking to him in Spanish and still making very little headway, but at least more than I made) managed to figure out that the light rail stop he was driving up to was at least on the line I wanted to be on, and I could at least get off his goddamn bus.

So I finally got to the Barney’s Beanery in Pasadena at about 8:30am, which was not horrible, all things considered. The game was…the game.

It went badly until I ordered a beer, and then it started going great so I ordered another. I got about 2/3 of the way through the second when the bartender, in the midst of mixing drinks, knocked the rest of my beer onto my lap. And of course that was when it all went completely to hell for Northwestern.

Clearly, the lesson for whatever game I wind up watching next year is that I need to make sure that a) I start drinking at kickoff, no matter how early it is, and b) do said drinking from a sippy cup.

Anyway, it was heartening to see an entire bar full of Ohio State fans having a post-parade, pre-game beer cheering for Northwestern to beat Auburn, and all of them consoling me as I was banging my head on the bar after that stupid fake field goal failed at the end of OT.

After that I blew off steam by walking to the Rose Bowl (a considerably longer walk than I’d anticipated). I actually had quite a bit of fun for a game that I was very minimally invested in, though it probably helped that I was sitting with a bunch of rabid Ohio State fans who were really, really entertaining.

I promised my friends who got me a ticket to this game that I’d get them tickets to the Rose Bowl the next time Northwestern made it, a promise that got a slightly bigger laugh than intended. But they gave me a ride home, so I forgave them that.

All in all, it was a damn fun day and a great way to kick off the year, despite that ridiculously frustrating NU loss. We’ll get ‘em next year.

Click this link to the Air Quality map for the greater Los Angeles area. Hover over zone 2, Northwest Coastal L.A. County.

If the AQI Value is anywhere over 50 (yellow), that’s bad, and I am probably cranky and complaining a bit about my athsma, but mostly just being bored and unemployed and watching too much TV.

If the AQI Value is anywhere over 100 (orange), that’s awful, and I am probably completely miserable and whining about nothing but how much my lungs hate me.

If the AQI Value is anywhere over 150 (red), that’s atrocious, and either a) I’m dead, b) I’m in the hospital, or c) I’ve grabbed the cat and just started driving someplace where I can actually fucking breathe, and will send for my stuff at a later date.

Repeat for the next week or two to know how my life is going.

Nothing quite so brick-shitting as the drive with a clone of your main hard drive up and dying just as you need to reimport its contents onto your main hard drive after doing a clean install of a new operating system.

Thank Jeebus I’m paranoid and made a second backup on a different disk before I blew away the main drive. That’s what’s reimporting to my computer at the moment. If I didn’t have that, I’d be completely screwed.

What kills me is that I’d just gotten the computer to boot off the cloned drive half an hour earlier, and there were zero signs the drive was about to die. Second I hooked it up after installing Snow Leopard, it started clicking and refusing to spin up, dead as a doornail.

Now I just have to hope to hell this copy works right when it’s done importing in…1 hour and 15 minutes.

Edit, 2am: Couple nasty bugs in the 10.6.0 version that took me a while and a bunch of Googling to squash, but I think I’ve got the nastiest issues squared away. And even if I don’t…I’m going to bed.

I’ve been back in LA for a few days. My timing was miserable, showing up just as the forested hills around the city decided to burst into flames.

There have been fires here before, and they’ve aggravated my lungs a bit, but nothing’s set off my asthma like the giant fire that’s still burning almost completely out of control tonight.

My one attempt to work out since getting home ended rather disastrously after half an hour on Thursday, having to come home and use my inhaler like I used to when I was a kid and just a little exercise would set my lungs off.

I haven’t had to use my inhaler daily in years, but I’ve had to every day since then. And that’s without working out at all.

What gets me is that the smoke really isn’t that bad in my neighborhood – It’s certainly not as bad as when there was a smaller, much closer fire a couple of years ago. That fire was only three or four miles away at its worst point (I could smell the smoke much more distinctly), and I don’t think I had to use my inhaler once.

I don’t know if it’s the lack of transition after being up in the bracingly clear, thin air of Idaho for a week, or if there’s something in my air conditioner (running non-stop for the first time in well over a year) that’s making my lungs even angrier.

The bottom line is, I’m stuck at home, waiting for the air to clear out, unable to get my stress out through working out, and feeling like my old, fat, sickly self as I manage to need a hit off the inhaler from the strenuous effort of watching TV.

I thought I was losing my mind before I left. I thought the walls were closing in on me before.

I’d been a little reluctant to go to a family event in Denver this coming weekend. Now I wish I’d decided to spend this week there, because at least I could fucking breathe.

I really need to start just bookmarking articles I want to read instead of leaving the tabs open all the time for the rare instance where I do something stupid (like accidentally clicking a link right after Firefox crashes, then quitting when I see that link opening because I think “Oh no, that’s going to fuck up my session!”, and thereby erasing my entire record of the session) and Session Restore can’t save my ass.

Oh, technology. It makes your life so much easier until it fails, and then it totally fucks you.

Very, very little is happening in my world right now, and there are two things to blame for this. One is a usual suspect: Unemployment.

The more unusual suspect is my car. My car has been a rock. Ten years old, eight of them under my care. Other than routine maintenance and a couple cosmetic scrapes, it’s been quite solid.

Now, however, it’s starting to get old and cranky. It all started when my regular mechanic pointed out that the A/C and alternator belts were really worn out, and that I probably needed to get my timing belt changed.

It’s recommended at either 90 or 105,000 miles, and neither he nor I could find any record it had ever been changed. My car is currently at around 134,000 miles, and if the timing belt breaks it pretty much takes out half the engine, so it’s definitely a bit of maintenance I wanted to get taken care of ASAP once I realized it needed to be done.

My regular guy couldn’t do it because you basically have to take apart half the engine to change it. After getting an obscene quote from a dealer, I was referred by Nate to someone his friends had used, who quoted me a third of what the dealer wanted (and less than half of what my regular mechanic had guesstimated).

So I took the car in on Wednesday, and they shaped up the timing, alternator, and AC belts for exactly what they quoted me, to the penny. Great news, right? Except for one tiny detail.

There’s a thing that goes around the axle, inside the wheel (what it’s called is written on the quote they gave me, but I’m currently too hot and lazy to get up and look for it), and it has a bunch of axle grease in it to keep the axle running smoothly.

So the guy opened the hood, took out what’s basically a flashlight on a long snaky pole, pointed out this item, showed me the decent sized crack in it, and showed me the large amount of axle grease it had kicked out.

It was one of those, “I don’t know what the hell that is or what it does, but I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to look like that” moments. Obviously, it needs to be replaced before the axle gets fucked up, since I do know that if the axle gets fucked up, that’s INCREDIBLY expensive to fix.

And of course, since it involves the wheels, if you change one side, you have to change the other so it doesn’t get thrown out of whack. The quote to get it completely fixed brought the total I’m going to wind up sinking into keeping the car running to just over $1000.

Normally, that would be bad, but it wouldn’t be terrible. But since I have no current income beyond the unemployment checks Unkle Ahnuld’s been sending me, it basically means I am a LOT broker than I already was.

Where I previously thought going out once a week for a night with my friends for $25-40 was a splurge, at this point I’m finding that going once a week to In-N-Out burger ($6.10 for a double-double, fries and a soda) is a splurge.

Hopefully something will come through soon and I’ll be able to start living like a normal-ish human again. Or I’ll finally snap and convince myself that living with a roommate wouldn’t be that horrifying. We shall see.

I’ve written repeatedly about how I hate Sprint and their shitty shitty reception with the fire of a thousand suns, but last night just about tore it for me.

I had what the phone kept telling me were four bars of reception and yet:

• I could not place an outgoing phone call for over 20 minutes, and did not receive an important call I’d been waiting all day for
• When I tried to text people to complain about it, I kept getting error messages indicating said messages had not gone through. Of course, the recipients informed me this morning that they’d all gotten multiple copies of the text.

I really need to line up my next job to be able to afford the switch, but I’m perilously close to flinging my financial rectitude to the wind and just buying a goddamn iPhone.

I’ve said it before (and I’m sure I’ll be saying it again): Fuck Sprint.

When one of the actors starring in your currently airing series has a new job before you do.

I haven’t posted an update on the whole SAG-not-having-a-contract thing in a while since SAG was mired in infighting and nothing was really happening.

Then the board removed the executive director and chief negotiator about a month ago and replaced them with people who were more willing to make a deal and avoid a strike. The parties agreed to go back to the table this past tuesday.

So what happend? The whole thing fell apart over the term of the deal. The studios want the contract to last three years from the date of ratification, expiring in March or so of 2012, whereas the actors want the contract to last until three years from the date the last contract expired – June 11, 2011.

Nine months. The studios have literally gotten SAG to agree to everything except the term they wanted. And these ass clowns want to put half the town out of work over NINE MONTHS.

The studios aren’t stupid. They see if they let SAG get what they want, the DGA, SAG, and WGA will all have deals expiring within 2-3 months of each other, and it’s possible that they’ll get hit with a mega-strike in 2011.

They’re also not stupid because they see that the continuing labor strife gives them all the excuses they need to keep cutting costs like crazy, which they all need/want to do to try to make their stocks attractive in this horiffying shitshow of an economy.

SAG, of course, doesn’t really have a plan on how to respond to this, and since this weekend is the Oscars and everyone’s distracted by that, they’re not going to come up with one for at least another couple of weeks.

So the ridiculousness continues, and all of us in IATSE, the below-the-line union that has about 80% of the workers and gets about 20% of the money, continue to get screwed as projects get held off or canceled because of all this nonsense.

The good news for me personally (since I’ve worked almost exclusively in television) is that most TV pilots have signed on with AFTRA, a rival union for television actors, so most pilots and most new shows for next year would not be affected by a SAG strike.

But still, the SAG stuff contributes to the general sense of economic panic in Hollywood, and anything that does that screws us all in the end.

It’s one thing to say, “Boy, I really had a shit year financially last year.”

It’s quite another have your tax guy explain to you that your adjusted gross income fell by over $14,000, particularly when you weren’t making THAT much money to begin with.

And the icing on the cake is that I get to wait for about 1/3 of my total refund, since California is printing IOU’s instead of checks until the legislature gets off their collective asses and passes a budget.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Fuck 2008.