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.

Here’s hoping this was just a rather expensive overreaction on my part, but Chaplin’s back at the animal hospital. I won’t go into too much detail at this point because I’m just too drained, but they’re keeping him overnight for observation.

They’re going to call me in the morning after the doctors and surgeons get a better look at him and tell me what’s wrong, (I hope to fucking god) how they can fix it, and how much nicer a car I could have bought with the money I will now be adding on to my already egregious total.

I can’t take this anymore.

Update, 10AM: Phew. Just an abscess, which is easily treatable by draining it and giving him a bunch of antibiotics. The site of all the initial problems is doing just fine. I can hopefuly get him home late tonight or early tomorrow.

One of my PAs who’s going to be in town for the holidays agreed to come by and feed Chaplin for a couple days (for a nominal fee, obviously) while I’m gone. In order to make sure he knows where I live and where everything is, I had him come by this morning.

So as I’m showing him around, Chaplin walks up, says hello, then immediately proceeds to the corner to go puke up a GIANT hairball along with a bunch of food. It was one of the more disgusting piles of puke I’ve encountered from him.

Of course this guy has never had cats, so he was like, “Uh, is that normal?”

Yeah. Yeah it is. Thanks, kitty!

Many people assume that because I have a relative facility with technology, it does not randomly decide to hate on me the way it seems to with everyone else. To that, I counter with the events of this evening:

I fought with a writer’s crapware laden-computer for half an hour at the end of the night, ultimately forcing it to abandon its efforts to spit out all kinds of random pop-ups but not without going through several attempts at removal.

Massive problems with my phone (which randomly refuses to switch off roam, draning the battery pretty much immediately when it gets into that mode, thanks, Sprint!) have given way to coming home to no internets tonight.

Drove me crazy trying to figure out what it was, particularly after getting disconnected THRICE from Time Warner Cable’s lovely automated system which decided there were either “technical difficulties” or that my “call could not be completed at this time” at every turn.

However, I seem to have narrowed it down to a DNS issue – For the nerds in the house, I was pulling an IP address just fine but I couldn’t connect to squat, so I put in the OpenDNS.org DNS servers and it’s been smooth sailing from there.

Anyway, I have managed to fix (I think) two out of the three issues, but just because I usually have a half-wit idea on how to fix it doesn’t mean this shit doesn’t break on me.

I don’t know if it’s been reading about the potential SAG strike or the fact that we’re going to have a double-unit Monday to welcome us back from Thanksgiving, but apparently my problem of grinding my teeth has gotten a bit worse.

And by “a bit worse” I mean, goddamn, the tendons in my jaw are killing me. It started early this afternoon (I thought it was a cavity until I realized I could push on the teeth I thought were affected and felt nothing, but opening my mouth absolutely killed) and has been getting worse throughout the day.

I mean, perhaps it’s a good thing for my continued weight loss attempts that at the rate I’m going I’m not going to be able to open my mouth on Thanksgiving, but goddamn it, I want to be able to eat at least one of the three Thanksgiving dinners I’m stopping by.

Bah.

You know, if you’re a federal mediator and you give up on trying to get SAG and the studios to agree to something after TWO DAYS, you’re not very good at your job.

I seriously can’t believe we’re about to go into another round of this craziness.