Not Dead Yet

Most of the fleas I've been battling, however, are. Huzzah! I hit a bunch of the rest with a big-ass can of Raid this evening, and they do not seem to have recovered...yet.

Unfortunately, because of my high sensitivity to the bites, I'm still absolutely covered in them. Even the smallest ones take well over a week to go away, and the bigger ones will probably last much longer.

The intense itching is driving me completely insane (even taking a crapload of antihistamines), and I've been downgraded to Flamingo from Gay Leopard - It's not just pink spots anymore, I'm totally covered in calamine lotion.

Anyway, hopefully this will prove itself resolved in the next week or so, and y'all will never have to hear about this nastiness again.

Things I Did Not Need To See

...at 5:30 this morning as I dragged my sorry ass to the gym: A freakishly gigantic spider dangling from my porch light RIGHT AT EYE LEVEL.

I considered stomping on it when it rapidly descended to the ground, but the damn thing was so big, I feared I would only make it angry.

I'm just praying that leaving it alone will cause it to never actually try to get in my house. I was too tired to scream externally, just to give a brief "Euugh!", but in my head, and if I ever see that in my house, I was giving a full-throated horror movie scream.

Ruh Roh

Two things causing concern.

First, I got on the scale, and was happy to see I'd lost another pound. The bad news was, I realized I hadn't weighed Chaplin in a while, so I picked him up to do the whole "weigh self holding cat, weigh self, subtract" method to see how much he weighed.

The big fucker weighs 18 pounds! Somehow, he's put on two pounds in the last few months. I've been feeding him roughly the same amount, so I'm a little mystified as to how he's porked up so much.

Second, I'm trapped in my apartment. After months of fighting with my landlord, they finally replaced part of my rotting doorframe. However, when they re-hung the door, they did a piss-poor job of it.

At first, the door was just sticking, which I could live with, but it's deteriorated badly. Now it takes a ridiculous amount of effort just to enter and leave the damn apartment. It's worse than it was before, which I didn't think was possible.

What's sad about this is that it really doesn't affect me too much at all, since I've barely been leaving the house anyway. Hopefully they'll get this fixed by a reasonable hour tomorrow, and I'll be able to at least take the trash out and go to the gym.

Not Dead

Just not doing anything terribly interesting, and have had a serious drop in motivation this week. After working for a couple weeks, to go back to doing nothing is awfully frustrating.

I will note a few random things I've noticed in the last few days:

- Chaplin falling asleep on my chest means I will, without fail, be asleep within 15 minutes as well.

- If ever you're cleaning out your apartment and you find old letters or printed-out emails from your ex, for the love of god, do not start to read them. Save them if you must, but shove them in the drawer before you start reading them. Do not do that to yourself.

- I have to vacuum up dirt and cat hair substantially more often now that I have hardwood floors, but I doubt there was actually any less dirt or cat hair when I had carpet. I'm not grossed out by much, but that thought grosses me out just a bit.

- Apparently the new guy next door to me is some sort of classical pianist. It's kind of interesting when the music bleeding in matches up with whatever movie or TV show I'm watching. And sometimes its hilarious when he's playing some delicate thing while I'm watching an action movie.

- No matter how much food I buy for a party, it's inevitably way, way too much, and I wind up freezing a bunch of meat and throwing out a bunch of buns. I just cannot get the calculus right.

- I have several hundred DVDs, most of which I never watch, so I thought I could sell some to bring in some extra money. But combing through them, I can only find about a dozen that I'm actually willing to part with, most of which will not bring me a damn dime because nobody else wants to watch them either.

Free Stuff!

The company I used to work for (not the show itself, but the much smaller company that technically employed me) has hired me for the week to clean out their old offices, which were basically unused by more than one person for over two years.

They're selling much of the old furniture to the incoming tenants, but they've decided not to store any of the remnants, so they're giving away what they couldn't convince the new kids to take.

I scored a very nice lamp, which will now bring light to my attempts to read on the couch, and a great overstuffed chair that conveniently matches the color of the couch.

There's only one minor issue: The chair has been sat upon by two dogs in the fairly recent past, a pug belonging to my former employers and a husky/Aussie shephard mix belonging to another employee.

This was slightly concerning, since I know Chaplin doesn't get along very well with other animals (this is a large part of why I have him in the first place: while he's a sweet kitty on his own, he didn't get along with his previous owner's other pets).

After I dragged the chair into my apartment this evening, Chaplin flipped a bit, sniffing and scratching and scratching and sniffing at it, and seemingly generally concerned.

At least he was until he decided to bury himself in the chair, working his own little groove into the seat. It'll be covered in cat hair in no time.

And that's when I'll know that the chair is definitely mine, since the defining characteristic of about 90% of what I own is that it's covered in cat hair.

Spring Cleaning

Here's how bored I am right now: I cleaned. And not just "sprayed some Lysol over the bathroom" cleaned. Like, threw out tons of shit I don't need anymore.

You know how, when you move, there's always a few boxes that never actually get unpacked until you move again, and you wonder, what's in here that is actually worth moving?

I unpacked those two boxes today. Turns out the answer was: not much.

I also went through my magazine and newspaper collection and threw out anything that wasn't of legitimate historical value, meaning about 95% of the batch is now in the dumpster.

Let me back up for a second: I've had several boxes of old magazines that I kept around for years (as in, the oldest one I found was the issue of Newsweek right after the '95 Oklahoma City bombing).

I've dragged these boxes all over the country, since my mother moved out of the house I grew up in and into a much smaller condo, depriving me of much-needed storage space.

I started hanging onto this stuff after my dad showed me a newspaper he'd kept from the day Kennedy was shot, something I found really fascinating. I wanted to save similar stuff for the future.

But I went a little overboard: I saved dozens of issues of Guitar World, Rolling Stone, and other magazines that really are of no use to anyone. I saved every Oscar issue of Entertainment Weekly. I saved everything even moderately historic from Newsweek.

I'd long considered selling the collection on eBay, but when I went to look online today at what I might actually get for some of these magazines (answer: very little to nothing), I decided to just pitch them.

So I went through, saving a very few truly historical items, but otherwise pitching everything. I threw out four bankers' boxes worth of crap.

What's funny is that when I checked my email after doing that, there was email from my dad, who'd been looking for my Social Security card. He didn't find it, but he did find a massive pile of other stuff, including correspondence from summer camp, report cards from elementary school, and various other pack-rat items.

At least I know where the hoarding instinct comes from.

After that, I went through the aforementioned drag-around boxes, digging up dozens of documents that needed to be shredded, and a whole lot of trash.

I wound up with so much stuff to shred that two things happened: First, my shredder overheated badly enough to be unusable for about an hour. Second, I filled a medium-sized moving box completely with the shredded remains of all that paper.

My bedroom is now almost disturbingly clean, and my cat is really, really confused, since all his hiding places are gone. I've kicked up enough dust to be sneezing like a madwoman, but it's nice to feel like I've actually made progress on something.

Tomorrow, I'm attacking the living room. I expect to finish filling the dumpster sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Budgetary Realizations

Two things I realize now, after going through my budget with a fine tooth comb to try and kick out a few extra pennies, that I probably should not have done:


1. Moved out of my old Russian-Mob-Owned shithole apartment in Venice. I might have wanted to strangle my neighbors on an hourly basis, but I'm paying almost half again more rent than I was, which is definitely in the category of Not Helpful when unemployed.

Also, the dipshit management company here is just as unresponsive to maintenance issues as the mobsters were, so why the fuck am I paying them all this money? I mean, other than to live in a neighborhood with fewer drive-bys.


2. Fucked up my ankle, requiring me to pay exorbitant COBRA rates instead of finding cheapo individual insurance because my ankle turns into a monstrously expensive preexisting condition if I get the individual coverage.


These two things alone are absolutely killing my unemployment budget. I've just looked at how much I've spent so far this month, and realized I can't leave the house again until approximately February.

Breaking Out An Old Meme

You're all now officially On Notice.

You Would Think...

...that going to Best Buy at 3pm on a Tuesday, it would be at least a little calmer than it generally is around the holidays.

You would apparently be wrong, as evidenced by the HUGE line there when I stopped by to pick up gifts for my cousins this afternoon.

You would also think that since I only moved downstairs in September, a thorough cleaning of my apartment wouldn't take me two days.

You'd be right in one sense: It's going to take a third day. Seriously, where the fuck did all this damn dirt and cat hair come from? Chaplin sheds like I live in the jungles of Belize with no air conditioning.

You'd finally think that it would at least be nice to relax a bit when you're unemployed.

I think you'd be right about that, but between the cleaning and the errands and meeting people for lunch and the other nonsense I have to take care of, I really couldn't tell you for sure.

Signs That Perhaps It's Time To Start More Seriously Cleaning Your Apartment

When chasing down tumbleweeds of cat hair with a dustbuster, you vacuum up enough of it to create an entirely new cat.

An Inauspicious Sunday

Two items today that together are a real great way to kick off the week:


First, last night there were some serious Santa Ana winds blowing, and my power (and the power to the rest of my block) went out. To SoCal Edison's credit, it was back on within the hour.

However, one key item in my apartment building seems to have been permanently injured by the flickering of the power before it finally died: The hot water heater.

That's right, my apartment building has NO hot water. I lived with having cold water for laundry, figuring the soap was fine for most dirt, and the heat from the dryer would kill just about everything else.

The real problem occurred when I first discovered the lack of hot water...when I jumped in the shower after I came home from the gym, and thought I was about to freeze solid.

I shower at home when I go to the gym because the showers at my gym are horror-movie level disgusting. After freezing my ass off, waiting in vain for the water to warm up, I briefly reconsidered going back to the gym. Then I decided it was better to freeze.

After considering options (although forgetting a few: I thought of a couple people I could have called later to beg for the use of their unfrozen showers), I decided to run a bath, and then boil a bunch of water in the hopes of at least making things livably lukewarm.

That worked decently, except for the fact that my bathtub doesn't really seal off too well, so there was a slow draining that caused a minor race against the clock in terms of completing my ablutions.

I still had to gut out a minute of rinsing in the ice-cold shower water, but all in all, it could have been a lot worse.


Secondly, this story went up (and continues to go up in pieces), which makes me rather pessimistic about the strike. Nikki Finke, who runs Deadline Hollywood, can be rather full of herself, but she's also usually right on the money in terms of predicting what's going to happen.

The gist of that story for those who don't feel like reading the inside-baseball account is that a large number of the moguls are willing to let the writers walk, losses at the box office and the ratings be damned.

The whole thing is shaping up to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions, although I can't imagine that either the Governator or Mayor Villaraigosa won't step in and try to smack some sense into these people, given how fiscally disastrous a strike would be for the L.A. economy.

The last big Hollywood strike, a 22 week writers' strike in '88, cost the studios alone over $500 million, and the ripple effect into the local economy was well over a billion.

I don't think it's a stretch at all to say between inflation and the significantly larger entertainment business, this strike could cost L.A. a billion dollars a month.

As for me, I'm stocking up on Ramen and canned goods and cat food, and battening down the hatches.

I'm lucky enough that I think my bosses will have enough for me to do (and enough reserve funds) to keep me at least partially employed through the end of the year. But if the strike drags on for four or five months, I don't know how long they can continue to justify paying me.

The sad thing is, I'm far better off than most. If the writers walk November 1st, most of my friends will be out of work by Thanksgiving. And accepted wisdom is if they walk then, there's no way they're back before the first of the year.

There will be some feature production, as anything that's already got a script is going to get made, but it's not going to be nearly enough to make up for the huge number of TV people who suddenly become unemployed.

I keep hearing the argument that I shouldn't stress about it because there's nothing I can do about it. While it's true that I have no control over this mess, that just makes me stress about it even more.

I tend to get more worried about things I can't control because I can't do anything about them. If I can do something, then I get up and do it and it's done. All I can do now is sit on the sidelines and hope these guys don't wind up driving this whole industry over a cliff.

Sadly, the consensus seems to be that both sides are so pissed off at each other that they don't realize they're about to do just that.

The Thing Under The Stairs

A photo essay, starring Felina, my neighbor's cat:









Felina now is just about as tired of my camera as Chaplin is. Although I did get Chap to do this, which amuses me to no end.

Dear Asshat Neighbor

You are not the same neighbor over-alarming his 1989 Nissan. You live in the building across the alley from mine, and you park in a spot under your building that's not walled in, directly across the alley from my window.

You have a new car, but you have purchased a very similar but infinitely louder alarm to the one has already caused me much consternation. You have not figured out how to use your new alarm. The goddamn thing goes off every five minutes.

The sound echoes through the alley, and becomes unbelievably loud in this apartment, to the point of actually being painful when I'm in the bedroom.

I am tired, I am cranky and hormonal, and I am in pain. I need sleep more than anything right now, and you, my dear neighbor, are preventing me from getting it.

If you do not learn to use your alarm properly, I may have to come across the alley and duct tape you to the hood of your car so that you can hear exactly how annoying it is.

That is all.

Hmmmm....

Monday I sent a complaint to my landlord about the fact that a fence got torn out and while it had been replaced with some bamboo, it wasn't exactly secure.

Last night, I came home to find a three ton dumpster that had previously been in a vacant parking space now sitting in my parking space.

Coincidence? Or just the maintenance guys being dumbasses?

Heat Rises

I love my apartment, but being here all the time points out to me with a flashing neon sign its one very glaring flaw: It's fucking hotter than hell in here.

I live on the second floor of my building. There's very little shade, the airflow is poor, heat rises from downstairs, and when the marine layer burns off, the sun just flat-out bakes my apartment.

Consequently, even though most of my windows are open and I have 2 fans going and it's 62 degrees outside right now, it's still over 75 degrees in here. It was over 80 this afternoon.

When I run my window unit a/c, which I try to do minimally, it creaks and sadly fights to keep the place under 75.

There's an apartment that might be coming open downstairs, a little more money but it's already remodeled and it has a small patio.

I'd been considering moving down because of the foot, but right now I'm thinking I might melt before the foot gets better if I don't move.

Dear Dipshit Neighbor

I know you prize your '89 Nissan, but when moderate rain sets off the alarm repeatedly, you've made it too sensitive.

Because People Like To Say Salsa

A couple days ago, a new vehicle arrived in the parking lot behind my building.

It's a bright blue PT Cruiser, wrapped in an ad for a small salsa company with tons of bright yellow chips and bright red bottles of salsa.

And bright yellow New Mexico license plates. I am so very, very confused.

Ice Ice Baby

When I was looking for an apartment, I was super-excited when I found mine. The main thing it was missing was a hookup for the icemaker in my fridge.

This is a ridiculous convenience, but one I'd gotten very, very used to. The ability to have a giant pile of ice just sitting there, awaiting my next drink? Quality.

I asked, if I get the kit for it to be installed, could you guys install it? "Sure, no problem!" was the answer I received from the building manager and her bosses at the leasing company.

As the weeks went by and the leaves...well, here in SoCal, they don't fall. They just turn sort of a dark green color and look tired.

Anyway, a considerable amount of time passed, and after an enormous amount of hectoring from both the building manager (who's been a fucking saint about all this) and myself, guys finally came and hooked up my icemaker earlier this week.

I'm so very excited. Just in time for my Oscar party, too. Martinis for all!

Numb13rs

They painted the outside of my building in early January, and they took the numbers off the doors when they painted.

I've been without numbers for a couple weeks now, which was fun when I tried to order in and had to explain to order-takers where in my building my apartment is, only to have them repeatedly fail to relay this information to the drivers actually delivering my food.

I was happy to see numbers back on my building when I returned home Friday night, but something was a bit off when I got to my apartment:


I wasn't alone. Almost everyone else with a 1 in their apartment number ended up with the same black one with their silver last number. Well, Apartment 11 just got two black ones, and then the folks next door to me got off easiest:


At least to the unobservant or colorblind, theirs look normal. Mine look like the numbers on a cheap motel in a bad horror movie.

They're a sign that you should yell at the screen, admonishing the idiot characters not to enter, because there's totally a guy with a hook inside waiting to disembowel them.

Welcome To The Neighborhood

Fuckin' kids.

I was sound asleep about an hour ago and was awoken by the cat yowling. This isn't anything out of the ordinary, but I heard a police radio, so I figured the cops were busting up the guys who hang out in another part of the alley that runs behind my building, and rolled over to go back to sleep.

Then my phone rang. "Hi, Miss Shapiro, this is Officer [X] of the Santa Monica Police Department, I'm outside behind your apartment and it appears your vehicle has been broken into."

Turns out someone on the alley heard someone smash my passenger-side window, looked out and saw the guys futzing around and called the cops. The cops scared off the thieves, who were apparently just some shithead kids.

They weren't particularly smart kids, as the only thing they got was a $30 electricity inverter, and if they'd thought for about five seconds, they wouldn't have even had to break the damn window to get into the car, as both the driver's and passenger's side windows were cracked.

I mean, I'm glad they didn't get my stereo which I went to so much damn trouble to install, and there wasn't really anything else of value in the car, so I suppose that's good.

But I was speaking to my next door neighbors, one of whom has been living in the apartment for 17 years, and he said this was the first time someone had smashed a window in the parking lot that he could remember, though he noted that someone had let the air out of his wife's tires this morning.

Nice to be the new guy in the neighborhood. Now I'm going back to bed, to get up even earlier to try and figure out how to clean up all this glass when I haven't gotten around to purchasing a new broom or dustpan.

Old vs. New

A brief comparison of my old and new apartments, and the neighborhoods containing them:

Time to Work
Old: 20-35 minutes, depending on traffic.
New: 10-15 minutes, depending on traffic.
Winner: New

Flooring
Old: Grody, easily stained and horrific to clean carpet.
New: Hardwood floors.
Winner: New

Kitchen
Old: Termite-infested cabinets, linoleum from the 70's, barely enough room to turn around.
New: Brand new everything, marble floor, granite countertops, decent size.
Winner: New

Bathroom
Old: Tiny, with the sink and mirror in the hall for some reason.
New: Still fairly small, but self-contained. Marble tile on the floor and in the shower, brand new fixtures.
Winner: New.

Bedroom
Old: Large room, tiny closet.
New: Moderate size room, huge closet (which I've basically turned into a storage area.
Winner: Draw.

Owner/Management of Building
Old: Extremely sketchy company that is quite possibly a front for the Russian mob (How many legit property management companies do you know that operate out of a PO Box?).
New: Single owner that people have actually seen, using a property management company with actual offices.
Winner: New

Closest Fast Food Restaurant
Old: In-N-Out
New: KFC
Winner: Old.

Closest Store
Old: Costco
New: 99¢ Only
Winner: New

Closest School
Old: Massive public high school, right out my window.
New: Language magnet school four blocks away.
Winner: New

Distance From Beach
Old: 1.7 miles
New: 2.3 miles
Winner: Old

Cat Control
Old: Cat couldn't get out of the building, could only see other cats in the building.
New: Cat keeps trying to run out the door into the neighborhood every time I leave the house, other cats come to the window and mock him until he starts yowling at them.
Winner: Old.

Tangent alert! I took Chaplin to get chipped this morning, and I found it odd to be putting a chip in him the week we aired an episode with a kid trying to cut a chip out.

Parking
Old: Gated and underground, but with a tendency for the gate to get stuck at inconvenient times.
New: Off street.
Winner: Old, but not by much.

Vertical Transportation
Old: Elevator, prone to breakdowns and squeaking like a crying child.
New: One flight of stairs.
Winner: Draw.

Bottom line, there are a few things about the old place that I'll miss, but the new place is far, far ahead in all the areas I really give a shit about. And I probably shouldn't live two blocks from an In-N-Out Burger anyway.

World Exclusive Photos!

I've got a some photos of the new place up at Flickr, along with several photos of Chaplin helping me move. Enjoy!