Especially when they tell you “if you have the same cold I have, don’t work out until you feel 100% better. You’ll just wind up feeling way worse.”

Felt better-ish Wednesday, much better Thursday morning so I worked out, a bit worse Thursday night, worked out yesterday morning because I thought it was just the morning blahs, horrifying all day yesterday, and wound up going to bed at the ever so hip hour of 8:30pm last night.

And now the Martian Death Cold is back and is much more Martian and Deathy than it was before. Whee!

Depending on who you read, talks between the AMPTP and the Screen Actors’ Guild either ended without a deal or completely fucking imploded tonight. You know it’s serious when Nikki Finke breaks out the clip-art alarm bells.

So now, we’re staring down the barrel of another potential strike, this time by the Actors.

A smaller union, AFTRA, is probably going to cut a quick a deal to undercut SAG on TV deals in order to gain a larger percentage of jurisdiction, but the vast majority of primetime TV (which I work in) and all feature films are SAG signatories.

The threat of a SAG strike has already ground a lot of stuff on the features end to a halt. Anything that’s not already filming or that couldn’t use the time without actors wisely (for example, Transformers 2 building more models and working on the VFX while everyone twiddles their thumbs) is not getting greenlit, because nobody will insure anything with a post SAG-deadline end date.

SAG’s contract doesn’t actually expire until June 30th, so there’s about two months where TV shows are going to try and crank out as many episodes as they can, and networks will jam in as many pilots as they can (I’m actually leaving the pilot I’m on at the moment to go work on another in a couple weeks; more on that in a later post).

The difference between SAG and the WGA is that if SAG walks, everything grinds to a halt immediately. With the writers, people could still shoot finished scripts, with the directors making “tweaks” on set.

But without actors? No shows. No movies. No nothin’. No jobs almost immediately for a huge chunk of the already-hurting SoCal economy.

A SAG strike would be a colossal disaster for everyone involved, but SAG and the AMPTP seem to hate each other enough that they’d rather destroy themselves in order to destroy the other than let the other side even appear to win.

That mentality is almost exactly the same one that led to a three month writers’ strike that drove a fair few people I know to the brink of bankruptcy.

I wish I could be more optimistic that both sides are going to pull their heads out of their respective asses and make a deal in the next few weeks, but at this point, I’m stocking up on ramen.

I finally gave up on a couple shows I’d watched every episode of earlier this year, Prison Break and Desperate Housewives.

While in DH’s case I hear I may have given up right before the show creatively resurrected itself, this spoilery item indicates I checked out of Prison Break at the right time.

Because seriously? That’s the most implausible plot twist they’ve come up with, and this is a show that’s pretty much a maze of implausible plot twists.

I eat a lot of Healthy Choice frozen food. I am a terrible cook and I’m trying to lose weight, so their products appeal to me.

One of their more respectably tasty entrées is their “Chicken Margherita”, a nice little chicken and pasta dish. For years, it was served in the traditional small, flat box.

The packaging has recently been changed, however:

They have decided, for some reason, to make this a “Cafe Steamer” dish. This is problematic for several reasons.

The first is that it vastly increases the size of the packaging, to the point where I can’t fit more than one in my freezer at the same time. Why is this?

Because each individual package is now two very large, thick pieces of plastic: A bowl the sauce sits at the bottom of, and a steaming basket that sits above it with the pasta, chicken, and bits of tomato and garlic.

This leads me to my second problem with this change: Did anyone think of how much more waste this whole process produces? To go from one flimsy piece of plastic to two very strong ones a) cannot be cheap and b) is just a wee bit earth-unfriendly.

And frankly, it doesn’t really taste any different from the way it did when you just nuked the traditional flat package.

It does, however, lead me to the most amusing problem: Hilariously obvious instructions.

This is a picture of the directions on the back, which you can click to enlarge:

I direct your attention to the text in italics on the bottom right. If you can’t read it from the picture, it says:

Meal can also be enjoyed by placing steamed food on a plate and topping with sauce.

Wow! You mean I’m not legally obligated to use this giant plastic thing included in the packaging? I totally thought that’s what I was agreeing to by purchasing this Cafe Steamer.

Overall, it adds up to a needless, wasteful, and downright silly redesign of a product that was just fine the way it originally was.

I had put my MacBook Pro on that counter before, a thousand times before. I had no reason to think last night was any different.

No reason until it came tumbling down, open, about 10pm last night. And that’s when today’s nightmare began.

I thought it was fine at first: Everything was working properly, no readily visible damage, at least not in the piss-poor lighting of my apartment.

I always work with my laptop on my lap, so the first, “Oh fuck” didn’t cross my mind until I put the laptop on the coffee table so I could get up and start doing my foot stretches. I noticed it wasn’t quite sitting level.

Okay, that’s not too bad, I thought. Then I tried to eject the DVD I’d been watching, and it bonked against the case in a futile fashion. Crap, that’s bad.

I decided to call and get some estimates in the morning. Taking it in to a reseller (who I thought might get me a better price than Apple directly, since Apple’s warranty doesn’t cover butterfingers), I noticed that when I closed it, the lid was obviously bent at a weird curve.

That was when I knew this was going to be REALLY expensive.

On any laptop, if you seriously damage something related to the casing around the screen, nine times out of ten you have to replace the whole screen, even if you’ve been lucky enough not to have the screen itself break on you.

Since the screen is one of the single most expensive parts of any laptop, and particularly expensive-ass MBP’s, this was going to cost me.

The reseller gave me an estimate in the mid $1300’s, but advised I go to the Apple store since they’d have to send it in to Apple for a repair that serious anyway, and perhaps I could throw myself upon their mercy and get something at least a little cheaper.

And a little cheaper it was: If I wanted to have all the damage repaired, rather than just the more egregiously fucked bottom part of the case (and the full repair is necessary to keep the warranty in force), it was $1240.

The good news is, the $1240 figure covers ANYTHING else they find wrong with it. If I fucked up the disk drive too, then that’s covered. If they have to just send me a whole new computer, it will still be $1240.

I would also be without my computer for anywhere from 5-10 business days, necessitating renting a temporary computer, since the only work I have right now is freelance tech consulting, for which you need a computer.

The only place they could find that would rent to individuals (as opposed to buisnesses) gave the fairly reasonable-for-these-things rate of $170 for two weeks.

So immediately, I would be out $1460. Considering the computer itself cost $2800, this was a fairly substantial sum. It is also, I’d like to note, more than my incredibly steep rent for one month.

And in case you’re thinking it, nope, renter’s insurance won’t cover it since it was a very obvious drop. If it’d been stolen or lost in a fire, maybe. Not dropped.

I briefly considered just bagging it and getting a new computer for the same money, but the problem is that I didn’t get the cheaper MacBook for a reason: I do audio recording which strongly benefits from more advanced ports (firewire 800 vs. 400), as well as web design and photo stuff that really needs the extra boost of the bigger screen and better graphics card.

Plus, the glossy screen drives me batshit to absolutely no end. I’d been helping a friend set up her new MacBook and had been ever more convinced I’d done the right thing springing for the Pro.

I probably could have sold the busted Pro for parts, but I had no idea if it’d bring in enough money (around $1000-1200) to pay for the difference between the cost to fix it and a new Pro. Without that knowledge, I was kind of up a creek.

So I sucked it up and decided to get it fixed. I’m now typing on the rented MacBook (which, by the way, is good for basic stuff but is heavily reaffirming my decision to just get the damn Pro fixed).

Now I will admit, I’m EXTREMELY fortunate that I have some deep-freeze funding that I’m being allowed to access (which I normally would not have access to, but the parental units who control it deemed this a worthy exception) to pay for this debacle.

I’d be super-duper-mega-extra fucked without that, and I’m REALLY not happy I had to access that in the first place, especially since this was due to my own carelessness.

Lord knows when the busted computer comes back from the shop, I’ll be velcroing the fucker to my desk/coffee table any time it’s not on my lap.

I was famished when I got back from the gym today, so I poured myself a big bowl of milk and Cheerios. I got about three bites into it when I realized, “Gee, despite the fact that it smelled okay, this milk tastes awfully sour.”

I realized how sour as I was pouring the bowl into the garbage disposal. The milk wasn’t pouring, it was oozing. Hopefully the few bites I had aren’t going to come back on me later.

I was out of non-cereal breakfast food besides eggs, so I said, okay, I’ll just make myself some scrambled eggs. So I scrambled up the eggs, and go to turn on the stove. Of course, the electric stove starter isn’t working.

I broke out my headlamp and looked behind the stove, and somehow it’s managed to come unplugged. My arm is neither thin nor long enough to reach back to the plug on its own.

I MacGyvered up a poking stick from some vacuum cleaner parts, but I couldn’t get enough leverage to actually push the plug back in far enough to get it working.

I tried to pull the stove out, but it’s firmly wedged in. Finally, I gave up and decided to use my big long lighter to just light the damn burner.

I looked all over the place for the big long lighter. Couldn’t find it. Finally gave up and used a normal lighter, almost burning my thumb off in the process.

But at least I had my eggs, which I ate while calling the landlord and telling him to send over some guys to help me plug the damn stove back in.

Sweet God, I’m already so fucking bored.

Maybe I should consider this unemployment program in India, at least that’d be a change of pace.

Courtesy Dave Barry’s Blog.

Do not neglect your Netflix queue. I’d done so after going through three seasons of The Wire and nothing but for the last couple months.

The last two discs were checked in today, and then I got the following:

I forgot I’d even put this in my queue. I so do not have enough pot brownies in stock to actually be able to enjoy this film.

I’ve been catching up on the first couple seasons of The Shield, since, thanks to the cheap-ass deals I get at the Fox studio store, I have all 5 seasons available on DVD. I’ve also got the whole 6th sitting on my TiVo, but I hadn’t gotten around to watching the first 3 seasons until now.

I’m also told that it’s a good idea to get a refresher on earlier seasons before watching season 6. For the love of god, tell me no more.

The problem is that the show is so damn good, I keep forgetting to go to bed until the DVD finishes. I’m 2/3 of the way through Season 2, I think at the rate I’m going, I may finish all six seasons by sometime next week.

This cannot possibly be healthy.

I had several people ask me why, instead of the pegleg, I didn’t just get a scooter.

These assholes are a big part of why not. The other part is I don’t think I could get one of those things up the stairs.