This time, they actually let me spring him as promised. I don’t know who’s happier, me or him.

He’s doing fairly okay - I have to keep a close eye on him to make sure he’s not trying to lick his stitches or chew off his fentanyl patch (being held on by the blue bandage on his foot), but for the most part he just wants to sit, be stoned, and snuggle.

He does find time to hate his new haircut, which took odd looking patches off of all four of his legs, plus all his belly fur. He looks like some demented person tried to shave him like a poodle and was stopped just before they got to his tail.

But really, he’s being super sweet and cuddly, and really happy to be out of the hospital. Unless, of course, I try to medicate him. This was him after my first round of chasing him down to dope him up:

Anyway, very, very happy to finally have him home and have him apparently be on the mend. Couple more pictures over at my Flickr.

Edited to add: Oh, and his collar’s off because I’m here keeping a close eye on him. He still has to wear the satellite dish when I’m asleep or at work for the next couple weeks, but at least as long as I can keep watch on him he’s free of that misery.

I got a job! I start Monday morning, and since the show has a 13 episode order, I’ll be employed for at least a few months this time. I cannot even begin to describe my relief and excitement.

Especially because I will FINALLY have enough hours to qualify for Union insurance and be able to stop coughing up huge chunks of cash for health insurance as of the end of the year.

Ah, the small joys of adulthood.

I suppose I should say something here before it starts, since I will likely be sucked into a black hole for a couple months once it does: I’ve got a new job starting Wednesday.

I’m leaving the HBO pilot I’m on as a PA up in Santa Clarita to work on a Fox pilot as an APOC (assistant production office coordinator) downtown. The good news on this change is severalfold:

First, this brings me back roughly to the level I was on back at House, though on a wholly different track. This track will have me joining a union and thereby getting health insurance that isn’t tied to my job, which is a huge thing for my broke ass at the moment.

Secondly, my base pay is finally back to where it was. Oddly, I probably won’t take home as much as I do at my current job, if only because I’m not driving 400-800 miles a week for work and getting mileage for it. However, I also won’t be having to buy 3-5 tanks of gas a week, so it evens out.

Thirdly, I won’t have to drive anywhere near as much. 15 miles to downtown instead of 35 to Santa Clarita, and very few (if any) runs. My poor car, which I’ve driven almost eight thousand miles over the last two months, is ready for the break.

Hopefully, if the show gets picked up to go to series, they’ll take me along for the ride, bringing yet another period of random employment to an end. But, if it doesn’t get picked up (or they elect not to take me with them if they do), I’ll at least be in the union, and it’ll be a hell of a lot easier for me to get another job.

So all in all, I’m pretty excited about this, although I’m fairly nervous since I have a short time to make an impression, and I have to knock it out of the park pretty much immediately and constantly.

The bad news is that with the shooting schedule perilously close to the SAG strike deadline, I may be working a Saturday or four, so we’ll see what shred of my sanity remains after we wrap. Whee!

I realized today when I finally shed one very, very tenacious pound: I am lying about my weight on my driver’s license.

The difference from the previous state of affairs? I am now officially one pound lighter than my driver’s license claims I am, instead of being 20 pounds heavier, as I was when I first moved out here.

29 to go. Woo!

Fourteen months after deciding I wanted one, and deciding I should get one at Best Buy because I had a big store credit there, I FINALLY found a Best Buy with Wiis in stock at a time when I could actually afford one.

After the last time I came close to getting a Wii eight fucking months ago, I shoved the difference between the store credit and the cost of the Wii into my savings account, and said no matter how fucking broke I was, when I finally found one, I’d be able to buy it.

Today, work sent me out to buy some crappy CD’s, and while pestering the clerk about whether they had one I couldn’t find, I said, “You guys don’t have any Wiis, do you?”

Finally. FINALLY. The answer was yes.

God bless exurbia and its overstocked big-box stores. This store said they sell out in two days when Wiis show up, whereas the one in my more urban area generally sells out in under an hour.

I set it up. I’m way too tired to start trying to play it tonight, but I’ll be killing some serious time this weekend with it.

God help me when I scrape together enough money to buy Guitar Hero. I doubt I’ll ever leave the house again.

Well, I cracked.

I had resisted taking a PA job for three months, since I didn’t want to take a minor step back professionally just because I didn’t want to sit around the house all day.

That resistance came crashing down yesterday when a friend emailed looking to replace herself, and I’ll be working on a pilot for the next few weeks to months starting tomorrow.

The pay is crap (as all PA pay is), but when you add in the mileage, it’s at least more than I’d be making sitting on my ass and collecting unemployment.

It will hopefully have the added benefit of the restoration of my sanity, which has recently been hanging by a frightfully thin thread after three months of unemployment.

The people seem cool, and luckily fairly okay with the idea that if I get a better offer, I’m going to take it. The transience of employment in pilot season actually works in my favor there.

The main downside is that the office is in frickin’ Santa Clarita, so that’s a nice little 70 mile daily round trip, before I even start doing runs. At least it means I’ll get a lot more mileage, since it’s way far from pretty much everything.

The people who sell me gas and change my oil are going to love this job.

A year ago this weekend, I got on the scale, and the number I saw almost made my eyes bug out of my head.

I’d had to greatly reduce my gym time because of my ongoing foot problems, and I hit a number I’d sworn I’d never let myself hit. I saw that number, and said, goddamn it, that’s it.

I am doing something about my weight, and I’m getting this shit off for good. I am losing the eighty pounds it will take me to get back to where I was my junior year of high school, when I was swimming a kilometer a day, five days a week.

I am not eating obscene amounts of food anymore, I am drawing a line in the fucking sand, and saying this is the end of being dangerously overweight and horribly out of shape.

Of course, I didn’t actually say anything about it at the time, because I’ve tried to draw these lines before. I’ve dieted and dieted and dieted and taken the occasional stab at exercise. It has always come back with a vengeance.

This time, it’s different. This time exercise is the primary objective, with portion control following. I didn’t go on a diet, I changed the way I live my life. And I’ll be goddamned: It actually worked.

One calendar year later, nine months of working out until I practically fell over at the gym later (plus three months off for foot surgery and related follies), I have dropped 42 pounds. More than halfway to my eventual goal, and a very encouraging distance from where I started.

Two jeans sizes (and close to a third) smaller. Wearing shit I haven’t worn in years. Weighing what I weighed my sophomore year of college, a ridiculous seven years ago.

If I sound like I’m proud of myself, I damn well am. I’ll be honest, I did not know if I could do this. But when I started keeping an eye on calories and actually working out at the gym, instead of just going to the gym, it started coming off.

I can almost leg press my own body weight now. I’m doing bicep curls with 85 lbs, and chest-pressing 90 (after being almost killed by 40 lbs on each at the beginning). And the difference both the weight loss and the strength training I’m doing have made with my bad leg are huge.

When I first tried to switch from the recumbent bike to the elliptical in October, I could barely do 5 minutes without feeling like my leg was going to fall off. Now I can do 25 minutes AFTER doing a strenuous half hour on the bike.

I just feel so much better physically, it’s hard to describe without using a corny and overly literal phrase like “a weight off my shoulders.”

There’s a whole section of my life that’s been throw into ridiculous turmoil lately, but for this to finally, FINALLY, start to go right, it gives me so much more confidence that I can overcome the other nonsense that I’ve stressed so much less about the turmoil than I would have a year ago.

I will now give myself public motivation to finish the job: My goal, and it is a pretty big one, is to lose the remaining 38 pounds by Halloween. That puts me at losing about five pounds a month, which is roughly the speed I’ve been going.

It has to be done, and for once in my life, I can finally say with confidence: It will.

The Strike is dead.

Hooray! My computer is back!

What makes me really happy is that they didn’t wipe my hard drive, so I’m pretty much back up and running immediately, with the exception of a few files I had to move around from the external drive I was saving everything to while I was using the temporary computer.

The really excellent news is that because they turned the repair around faster than they thought they would, the rental place only charged me for two weeks, even though I had it a couple extra days. Saved me another $80.

So basically, for waiting four extra days to get my computer back, I saved almost $700 in the great scheme of things.

I mean granted, this was still a very, very expensive excursion into the world of Setting An Example For People Of Why You Should Not Drop Your $2500 Computer.

But good lord, it could have been a lot worse.

I got a call from the folks at Apple about my computer today.

The bad news is, because I have a matte screen on my MacBook Pro and will not even consider getting a glossy screen, they won’t have a part in until Feb 7th, and won’t have my computer back to me until Feb. 11-12.

The good news is, to compensate me for my inconvenience, they offered me two options.

1. Ship me a brand new computer with the exact same specs for the same amount I would have paid for the repair, and have it arrive Friday (Feb 1) or Monday (Feb 4), or

2. Cut the price of the repair in half, and get it back the 11th-12th.

I have to admit, option #1 was thoroughly tempting, especially because after a week of using the temp MacBook, I’m more certain than ever that I made the right decision to spring for the Pro. The reflections on the glossy screen drive me batshit.

But after calling the computer rental place to see how much it would cost to extend the rental and running some numbers with sales tax, I realized that waiting was going to save me almost $600 to just wait for the repair.

So, the bad news is, I have to put up with the tiny, glossy, pain in the ass rental for a while longer, but the good news is, I save six hundred bucks.

At this point, the option that saves me $600 wins, even if it involves fire ants. Which, thankfully, this does not.