So, on Friday my buddy Cloverdose and I will be loading up The Green Lantern* with some of The Doctore and driving to Chicago. We plan on returning Monday, which doesn’t give us a whole lot of time in the windy city, but, as far as I’m concerned, the real reason I’m off on the road is to have a the trip itself. This whole thing quite literally started by me going “I want to drive somewhere. You know what sounds good? The Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Company. I think I’ll ask my best bud if he wants to go.” Of course he did. This isn’t as spontaneous as a I’d really dig, but life is getting to complex, too responsible for that anymore. I’ll have my laptop with me, so there is a slight chance that I’ll be able to update while I’m off, but probably I’ll be incommunicado.
This week has been really very stressful, half because I’ve been doing stressful things and half because the GF is stressed and that makes me stressed. But there is good news in the wind. My talk of a road trip with a male friend has sort of segued into talks of a possible day trip with my best lady friend down to Houston to pick up, of all things, another rat (who will be the GF’s in all senses of the word but will reside in my cage with my rats). Plans are still loose on that because we don’t know when she is going to be roped into doing family stuff**.
And, once again speaking of Road Trips, my bosses requested that I go to Weatherford to shoot a property on Friday, which as you can surmise, conflicts with my other trip. I respectfully requested a reprieve. On the job front: I bought a new tripod to replace the 9,000 year old model I’d been using and it worked like a freaking dream. Cut my time spent leveling down by half. Now if only I could get a flash that didn’t take an eternity to recharge, I would be poised to slash my time spent at the actual job site to a mere shadow of its former self.
I picked up “The Movies” this week, which is a PC game that’s a bit like a cross between The Sims and Dungeon Keeper. I have issues with the interface. They seem to have decided that everything in the game should be done by picking something up and placing it elsewhere. In certain scenarios, this can be intuitive, but when you are trying to compare one actor’s Sci-Fi experience to another’s attractiveness, you are fucked. I am also really pissed that they limit the number of people you can hire not by how many people you can afford to pay, but by the number of willing applicants. I really don’t feel like a Hollywood mogul when I have to wait for somebody to come knocking at my door asking to be a star and that I feel obligated to hire them because I have no idea when the next one will be along. I feel the metaphorical cigar in my mouth even now, and the words curl on my lips: “Get out of here kid. Starry-eyed yokels are a dime a dozen.” All the disappointment really dies out when you start making movies. There isn’t any dialog (unless you add some yourself) but the system is surprisingly good at letting you craft a story through just a visual treatment of a tale. Sure there are some moments when one ready-made action doesn’t flow smoothly into the next one you choose. But when it works, it just sort of clicks. “A Graveyard of Stone” Starring Matt Woods and Molly Carper*** was seemless and really pretty fun to both watch and make.
I could regale you with sordid tales of my teachers and fellow students, but it bores me just thinking about it. I will treat you only to the factoid that my Archeology of the Ancient Aegean professor does cross-word puzzles by memory.
I will finalize this post with a tale of being a rat owner. I bought my boys a wheel. We all know how much rodents like wheels, yes? Hamsters love them and mice will run all day. Rats are a little smarter, but still get some amount of enjoyment out of it****. However, I bought a solid wheel (as opposed to a wire one) because I read tales of rats getting their legs caught and breaking an ankle. My slightly older rats (Freak and Rowdy) don’t bother with the wheel at all really but my youngest and smallest rat (Nugget) loves it and will run for a half hour at a time before getting bored. The problem is he poos in the wheel and, since it’s a solid construction (with only holes on one side for entrance and exeunt), the poo just stays in. When the young rat begins to trot along happily, the resulting sound it a bit like a badly made rain-stick. This is extremely annoying, so I endeavor to remove any poo from the wheel when I’m by the cage. But damn if that rat doesn’t just replace the missing coprolites and begin to run like he was headed to California, very pleased at the sound he’s making. When I was bleary with sickness and medication over the winter break, he actually managed to convince me it was raining outside.
* My 1999 Ford Taurus SE (with the 24 valve engine).
** No decisions on if we are to take The Green Lantern or the GF’s white chevy malibu barbie car.
*** A sci-fi epic the likes of which will never be seen again. It had German soldiers fighting Zombies and Ninjas.
**** Especially when they just pile inside and sleep.
