End of a short week photo(s)

Since we have six electricians and eleventy billion carts to carry our gear, instead of pushing them across the lot (which would take, like, forever) we hook them together and tow them with a forklift.

After dark, this leads to some fun photo ops with a slow shutter.

If you’re in the US, Happy Thanksgiving. If you’re not, Happy Thursday!

Filed under: camera, Photos, studio lots, Work

Really quick update.

The apartment thing’s still a complete cluster fuck, which started out being kind of funny but now has now become bad, bad, bad.

It’s not completely resolved yet, which means it can’t go on the blog, sadly.

On the bright side, work’s really busy. I’ve got the rest of this week and two out of three days for next week, which makes my bank account happy.

I’m off to work, then home for my nightly three hours of sleep, then back to work again.

Money is good. I can sleep and explain everything later. Much, much later.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Knives

We all carry knives on our tool belts. Not the big ‘backwoods hunter’ knives,  but smaller ones – some people carry the hardware store style utility knife, but I prefer an actual knife – a folding 2.5 inch blade that’s half smooth and half serrated. The reason for this is that a smooth blade won’t cut things like rope (well, it will, but not easily) and a serrated blade won’t cut gels.

Since I try to keep the tool belt as lightweight as possible, I go for the item that will do two jobs.

Normal use dulls knives, of course, and it’s not worth it to pay to have my army surplus store folding knife sharpened, so I generally wait until the knife is really, really fucked up and then I replace it.

My old knife was really, really fucked up. So dull that the blade wouldn’t have cut butter even if I’d put my back into it, and at some point the tip had broken off (I lost my screwdriver and was trying to make the knife do the job).

So over the weekend I stopped in at the trusty surplus store and bought a new knife. One with an actual edge and a tip.

Oh, joy.

Except that during a lighting set-up today, I was hurriedly cutting gel and forgot that the new blade, being actually sharp, didn’t need to be applied with quite so much force as the old one.

I stabbed the tip into the gel, pushed too hard and ran the tip of the knife up under my fingernail.

If you’ve never had the misfortune to stick a knife blade under one of your fingernails, I can assure you that’s it’s excruciatingly fucking painful, but surprisingly doesn’t bleed very much.

After biting my tongue to hold back the world’s loudest swear, I finished cutting my gel, went in, handed the gel off and then went outside for a really good scream.

The nail’s turning black now (guess that’s where all the blood went), but it doesn’t hurt at all anymore.

Oh, joy.

Filed under: mishaps, Work

Half work, half vacation.

After guzzling coffee in order to be conscious for work at the crack of dark,  our crew managed to over-achieve and get 10 hours worth of work done in six. Coffee shakes make wrapping cable go much faster.

When we found ourselves done before noon, most of the crew dispersed to go home and nap, but one of my co-workers and I decided to go to the beach.

Despite the fact that it’s currently hotter that my oven’s ‘broil’ setting here in Los Angeles, the beach was relatively empty. Mostly locals mixed with a few brave off-season tourists.

Because the Santa Ana winds blow east to west, the beach was just as hot as downtown (usually, the winds blow from the ocean east, which makes the beach areas 10 or 20 degrees cooler than the rest of the city), but since the break’s currently about 300 yards offshore, it was like swimming in a lake.

No giant rouge Pacific waves (they sneak up on you and sucker punch you), and clear, cold, extra refreshing water.

We even found free parking.

After walking in the sand for a while (gotta get in that leg workout), we just floated in the water and looked at the sky.

Eventually, I went numb from the cold, which felt extra wonderful even though the ocean stole my sunglasses (I forgot to take them off my head).

Sadly, beach time ended and we crawled through rush-hour traffic in the parched, sweltering city, still brushing the sand from our shoulders (hey, I wasn’t in *my* car) and regretting that we had to leave the ocean at all.

Filed under: crack of dawn, life in LA, locations, Work

The day’s too short

I was going to try to post something clever tonight, but I got a last minute call to work tomorrow. Which is fine, except that I have to finish my laundry (since I have no clean clothes as of right now) before I have to go to bed for a few hours and then get up before dawn.

Yay work!

Filed under: Work