Oh, Yeah...

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!

'Cause I'm A Liar

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!

Huzzah!

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.

The Return of Employment

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.

One Year Later

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.

Ding Dong

The Strike is dead.

Let's Never Fight Again *Hugs Computer*

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.

Bad News/Good News

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.

One Down, Two To Go

Broadway stagehands: Followers when it comes to calling strikes (having called theirs about a week into the WGA strike), but let's hope they're leaders when it comes to settling them.

Now it's down to the main body of the WGA and the CBS news writers.

It's at least a somewhat hopeful portent, and for the week we finish filming and 95% of the remainder of the people I work with get laid off, I'm clinging to whatever hope I can.

A Light At The End of The Tunnel

Let's just hope it's not an oncoming train.

Although at this point, I consider the two sides sitting in the same room, staring hatefully across the table at each other for eight hours to be a giant step in the right direction.

If they actually to get this shit settled, it'll be a Christmas miracle.

A Sense of Accomplishment

I've lost 27 pounds since mid-February, despite a three-month break from the gym for two casts and a surgery. That's good, but it's not what I'm proud of.

What I'm proud of is that finally, nine months into 2007, I've finally finished reading 2006 issues of Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and Entertainment Weekly.

If I keep going at this rate, I might actually catch up with the present sometime in 2008.

Hobblin'

The cast is off! Sadly, I still can't itch the scar because I'm still gauzed up, but at least the stitches are out (that, by the way, hurt like a motherfucker) and I can wash three weeks worth of crap off my leg.

It's still pretty goddamn sore, and I can see a gigantic bruise peeking out from under my bandages at the site of the incision.

The good news is that for the most part, it doesn't hurt when I'm not putting pressure on it, which is a distinct improvement from its pre-surgical state. The doc also said it's making good progress.

Walking, if you can call it that, is still a fairly slow, painful process because of how badly my leg has atrophied, though it's quite a bit better than it was when the cast first came off yesterday.

I start back with Physical Therapy on Friday, and then I go 3 nights a week for the next month and a half or so. It's going to be a colossal inconvenience, but I'm ready. I want this nonsense done with.

I'm not counting any chickens, but it's looking a lot more promising than it was.

Happy Nerd Alert!

This is why you should not give nerds like me a new computer like the one that showed up on my doorstep two days early today. Because we will do shit like this:


The good news is, by running a benchmark test that compares the same stuff on both computers, the new one is 5x faster (got a score of 107 on the new one vs. 22 on the old).

Now, to finish reinstalling nine tons of software...

Sliced and Diced

Surgery went well, the most painful part of it being getting up at 5am to be at the surgery center at quarter to six. Mercifully, since they just sedated me instead of using full anesthesia, I was out of the surgery center by 9am.

The doctor found that the accessory navicular bone that he was taking out was badly tangled up in my posterior tibial tendon, a complication that he said he'd never seen in 30+ years of being a foot surgeon.

It kind of sucks, because it means the three weeks in a cast I spent hoping it would heal on its own were even more futile than I initially thought.

However, the screwy situation didn't show up on either MRI, so I suppose there's nothing the Doc could have done different, and you always want to avoid surgery if you can.

However, the good news is that such an oddity a) provides an explanation for why it hurt so much for so long and b) makes me more hopeful that this will, in fact, be a permanent fix.

That permanent fix, my friends, is all I really wanted for my birthday.

Technology: Off The "Dead To Me" List

It was officially corrupted data, so I had to erase my hard drive. Boo.

But thanks to Super Duper, I was able to get back to where I was on Thursday when my last automatic backup ran. And it took about 3 seconds to redownload the email I'd received since then, and I hadn't done anything else on my computer since then. Yay!

Although I did come perilously close to buying a new MacBook Pro while waiting for the guy at the Genius Bar to confirm that it was just software and not hardware causing the problem.

I do hope they were able to clean up all the drool after I left.

Oh, Darn!

The office park where the 24 Hour Fitness I go to is located is having its power shut off overnight tonight into tomorrow morning, so 24HF is closed until 8am.

Since I have to be at work at 8, this means I can't work out tomorrow morning. Let me tell you, I am just so very crushed that I won't have to get up at 6am.

I don't know if I'll ever recover from this terrible blow.

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!

The Little Victories

I love Chinese food. It took me two and a half years to find a good Chinese food place at my old apartment. So when I moved, I was sad, because all that effort was going out the window.

I was digging through the near-last of the boxes (I don't think I'll get to the last-last for several months) and found one of the menus, and got a wonton craving.

So I figured what the hell, called them up, and asked if they delivered to my new address. Then the skies parted, and a chorus of angels sang: They deliver to my new place.

That news made me more disproportionally happy than anything else this weekend.

The FDA Answers My Childhood Prayers

Why couldn't this warning have just been in place since 1981?

Drumroll Please

Annnnd the big news is: I'm moving!

After five goddamn months of trying to get away from "GO STEELERS! *clap clap clap* WOOOOOOO! *clap clap clap*", I finally found a place that is a) nice and b) not completely insanely priced (for California...for anywhere else except NYC, I'd be buying at least a condo).

I'm moving to Santa Monica, and while I'm sad to leave behind America's Smorgasboard of the Rationally Challenged, I'm very excited about there being a lot more shit within walking distance of my new place.

I'm moving Saturday, so if you know anyone in the greater Los Angeles area who's willing to help me move in exchange for free furniture and small appliances, send them in my direction.

Pictures of the spiffy new place (new appliances! hardwood floors! granite everything! pool!) TK once I start moving stuff in.