Poe

12:15 pm: Happy Turkeyday!
Our plans have been jumbled a bit for the day due to a sudden illness, so it looks like we'll be having Thanksgiving here. (Fortunately the market was open and we could pick up fixings for four.)

This afternoon we'll be packing up for Loscon. It'll be another busy one: three panels for yours truly plus kids craft activity plus OASIS party Friday night plus the "Lab Rat" party on Saturday night plus table staffing. No rest for the wicked I guess.

In other news, "The Wedding Enforcer" is coming along. Had a mini-screening last night that seemed to go well. People laughed where they were supposed to and nothing seemed to fall flat. Lots of funny bits. Still need to do some sound editing. (I was up all night on Friday with that.) But its getting close.

Hope everyone out there is having a good weekend with family, friends, and good surroundings.

10:40 pm: Zombieland
We just got back from seeing Zombieland - It was a lot of fun. And Bill Murray acting like a Zombie!

We were two of the four folks left in the theater when they showed the little Easter Egg at the end. Au Revoir!

10:37 pm: Visited States
I've been to these:


visited 36 states (72%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

Looks like a big cluster in the middle, most of New England, and a few scattered ones are missing from the group

12:49 pm: A Good Halloween (Or "Welcome to the La-BOR-a-TORY!")
We decided to turn our front yard into the Mad Scientists Lab this Halloween. So I hauled a bunch of stuff out of the garage and storage unit, bought a two-headed creature mask and some glowsticks, set up the strobes and multi-colored lights, donned the lab coat and welders goggles, hefted the cordless drill with the spade bit, and came up with this:




and this:



and this:


Add in the New Wave Halloween CD, some corny schtick from yours truly ("We take Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Black Death, and All Major Credit Cards", "Do you have a headache? No? Would you LIKE ONE?!?!?") delivered with a Boris Karloff/Riff Raff voice, mix in the dry ice that betnoir picked up and the candy bowl that she wielded and you have a very successful evening. I'm guessing that we got something like 80 kids.

07:25 pm: Movie Update
I spent yesterday logging the shots from the short The Wedding Enforcer. Most of it looks very good. Some tweaking of light levels and some creative editing will be needed to fix some sound problems caused by a boom operator with a shaky hand. But it should go together very well. And some of the performances were freakin' brilliant!

Now I've got to start uploading and actually editing the thing . . .

10:05 pm: You Can't Go Home Again
A friend of ours was giving a lecture today on the 50th anniversary of the X-15 over at the former North American/Rockwell/Boeing facility in Downey where they built the X-15, Apollo command & service modules, and Space Shuttles.

The talk itself went okay and they had a pretty good turnout. But the facility itself has changed A LOT. What used to be an aerospace factory has been converted to other uses: one large section has been turned into a movie studio (Downey Studios) and another large section has been converted to the headquarters and hospital for Kaiser Permanente.

Whole buildings have been torn down and dozens of acres have been completely transformed.

What makes this especially jarring for me is that I grew up literally down the street from the Rockwell plant while they were building the Space Shuttles there. Our street ended at the plant (on Imperial Highway) and I had to walk past the facility every day when I went to school from 1975 until 1980. I studied for years hoping to become an astronaut and that dream was reinforced each day when I walked past that plant. My first job was as a busboy at the Pizza Hut next to the plant, where I'd listen to stories from the engineers and technicians who were building the Shuttle.

There are no more rockets coming from the plant and the Pizza Hut is long gone. The house where my family lived is still there, but its undergone a lot of renovation just doesn't feel the same. (Plus they finished the Century Freeway, which runs past the house, just a block away, several years ago.)

My Mom died over twenty years ago and stepfather has been dead for ten years (I just found out this year) and my siblings and I have scattered to the winds.

Things change. That's an inevitable part of life. Just sometimes the changes are a little more jarring than others.

02:33 pm: Something I've never seen Before
I was out watering the tomato plant this afternoon and spotted something I'd never seen before: a green spider. (Most of the ones around here are brown, black, grey, slightly reddish, etc. But never green.) I thought that it looked kinda neat.

01:53 am: Re: This whole nonsense about Obama's School Speech
Methinks we're headed toward the world depicted in Mike Judge's movie Idiocracy

Be very afraid!

11:46 pm: Couple of things
Had a good workout today on the elliptical: 90 minutes at max loading. My heartrate was above 140 for the entire period. Good for both building the leg muscles & endurance as well as burning calories.

Went to see District 9 tonight. Good movie. Looking forward to the sequel.*


*One down part: Why the F*#K do people leave on their cellphones and/or text while they're at the movies?!?! For Chrissakes people, if you want to do that crap, GO HOME!!!!!

11:25 pm: The Dude Abides - R.I.P.
We had to put one of our cats to sleep tonight. He'd been suffering a slow, painful decline over the past week and had gotten substantially worse in the last two days.

We did the best we could to keep him going but the vet couldn't come up with anything to help him. Best guess is that he had congestive heart failure. He was 18 years old.

He came into our home with the ex-housemate and he stayed when she left. He was a big, sweet, lovable doofus of a cat who loved everybody and had a purr like a diesel engine. (Hence his name: Diesel.)

Our nickname for him was "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski, because he had much the same worldview as the main character in that movie - very easygoing and always wanting to get along with everybody.

We'll miss him . . . :(

11:43 am: Montreal Vacation & Pix
Okay, so here's what we did over our vacation in Montreal from last Thursday to this past Friday, with links to photos

Wednesday/Thursday (they kinda blend together)
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Friday
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Saturday
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Sunday

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Monday

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Tuesday

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Wednesday

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Thursday

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Friday
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10:07 pm: Been Busy
I haven't been posting too much lately due in large part to work commitments & other stuff going on.

I've started working in earnest to prep for the Whitney hike next month. I was out at Griffith Park again today. It was pretty hot and humid when I got there at 1 and parked across from the Greek Theater at the start to the hiking trail. There were signs posted saying that cars would be towed if they were still there by 3 pm. So I had to do a speed hike up to the top of Mt. Hollywood along the eastern trail. Not much time for resting along the way. I made it up to the top just after 2 pm, snapped a few photos, and then started back down. I made it back to the car with three minutes to spare, sweating ALL OVER the place.

Nights have been spent with editing the short Wife of the Bad Guy (or should I say, re-editing, since the I couldn't get the earlier version to synch properly.)

In the meantime, there's household stuff to do, taking care of the animals, and dealing with "stuff."

Oh, yes, I'm also working on a documentary and a Webseries and using the elliptical machine to exercise during the week when I can't hike.

10:30 pm: The DO EXIST! AHHHH!!!!!!
For those of us who always thought that they emerged fully-grown from the rat-infested caves of the Fourth Circle of Hell, we bring you proof that BABY PIGEONS DO EXIST:



A pair of "rats with wings" built a nest in the rabbit's foot fern in our backyard and apparently hatched these two. Ugly suckers! And with them being "baby birds" and all, we can't just get rid of 'em, ya know!

04:49 pm: Other People Rooting Through Your Stuff
In the end, that's what our lives come down to: family, friends, strangers poking through the things we've left behind - deciding what to keep, what to give away, what to donate to Goodwill, and what to throw in the dumpster.

We've been spending much of the day doing that with my father's things. betnoir and I went over to the facility where he was staying and, with the help of a couple of the attendants there, put all of his things into boxes and bags and brought it over to the house.

We hadn't realized until we started loading stuff how damned many movies he had. There were upwards of two HUNDRED films, including eighty VHS tapes. And it would be one thing if they were all uniformly good or uniformly bad, but they ran the gamut of quality and genres from Slumdog Millionaire and The Departed to major schlockfests like Infested: Invasion of the Killer Bugs and Sleepaway Camp 1 & 2.

Out of this, it looks like we have multiple copies of some movies. If anyone wants ALL of the following movies, let me know: 3:10 to Yuma (the remake), Serenity, X-Men 3, Hellboy 2, Apocalypto (we don't have one, but we don't want it), Mission Impossible 3, and Doomsday.

There was a sizable box of paperbacks as well. My Dad had a penchant for political thrillers (ala Ludlum, Forsythe, and Dan Brown), hardboiled (disposable) murder mysteries, and westerns. We're keeping about six of them and donating the rest.

Going through his clothes was probably the most difficult part. Most of us just don't wanna contemplate sorting through our dead relatives' socks and underwear. And my father had a thing for T-shirts with corny and/or inappropriate sayings on the front, particularly red ones. We'll keep a few things and get rid of the rest.

On a semi-morbid note, both of the TV's in use were inherited from our dead relatives: the wide screen TV came from betnoir's late aunt and the new HD set was the one that I'd purchased for my Dad a couple of months ago.

We found in his things a photo album that I'd been scouring our house and storage unit for. It has pictures of my parents, grandparents, cousins, and other family members. I plan to scan a bunch of them into the 'puter and put them on a digital picture frame.

This experience pointed out what was important in my father's daily life and what was ephemeral. It also shows how ill-prepared most of us are for leaving this mortal coil.

07:52 pm: Thanks
Thanks to everyone for their support after my father's death. Still coping. Still have to figure out what to do about a funeral.

The hospital only gave me 24 hours to make arrangements to pick up his body. Not much time. So I had to scramble yesterday to find a funeral place. (I decided on the Neptune Society as providing a decent, respectful service at a reasonable price.) Then the hospital started giving me/the Neptune folks grief about claiming the body because the hospital had his name as "Ron" and his actual name was Ronald and they couldn't figure out that Ron was short for Ronald!!! (Mind you, they had my name and signature down as his son and the Neptune people's paperwork had my signature as well.)

Another complicating factor: My father never actually divorced his third wife. She just left and hasn't been seen in almost twenty years. I don't have her last name or anything further on her. So it may make things more difficult.

Finally there were the Vultures: Within ten minutes of my father's passing, one of these tissue donation/harvesting places was on the line asking to start carving him up, even though he didn't have an organ donor card. Mind you, I don't have an objection to organ donation (I have an organ donor sticker on my own driver's license.) But why they couldn't have spoken to me about it in the days before he died, when I was in a less emotional condition, I will never understand. Their "You've just suffered a major loss. Can we start cutting now?!?!" approach turned me off so much that I told them no.

Last Saturday I was explaining to him why he wasn't picking up all the stations on his TV (during the digital changeover) and on Friday I'm confronted with people who want to start cutting up his body?!?!?! For F%#k Sake, Have a heart people!!!!!!

12:51 pm: Ronald Bartlett - R.I.P. - 4/20/40 to 6/19/09
My Dad died this morning at the age of 69.*

He'd coded about 8:15 and they were barely able to bring him back. The hospital called me at work and, while I was headed to the hospital, he coded gain. At that point, he had essentially no pulse and was kept alive by meds. I got there and signed a "Do Not Resuscitate" order. He faded pretty quickly after that.

It's been a helluva week. Happy Fathers Day, everybody!




* Ironically, on the same day that my father died, the wire services ran a story that the world's oldest man had died at 113 years. That's almost double the number my Dad had. I hope the guy enjoyed 'em.

09:58 pm: My father had a massive stroke on Monday and I didn't hear about it until Tuesday afternoon. (They'd transposed a couple of digits on my phone number and could reach me until they figured that out.) He's in a coma and unresponsive in the ICU. It looks like the blood vessel that caused a brain aneurysm about ten years ago ruptured, causing substantial bleeding into the brain. The prospects for recovery aren't good, but we're doing what we can to engage him. They were asking me whether I wanted a Do Not Resuscitate order put in place in case he has a heart failure. They're talking about transferring him to a long term care facility shortly.

It took me 2-1/2 hours to drive down to see him tonight. I'm not in the best of moods tonight.

So how has YOUR week been?!?!?

08:17 pm: Interesting Weekend
Had a good hike in Griffith Park today, my first in two years. The weather was cooperative, so it wasn't too hot or too windy. (The cloud cover helped.) Did a decent trek from the Greek Theater parking area up to the top of Mt. Hollywood. It also pointed out how far I have to come to be ready for Whitney in August.

Spoke on the phone with a friend who lives out in Cocoa Beach while I drove to Griffith today. Said friend puts all of my complaints about being short of time to shame:
- Full time job doing security at Cape Canaveral AFS, frequently with 12 hour shifts
- Teaches law enforcement at U. of Phoenix
- Has nearly finished her THIRD Masters degree and will start on her PhD shortly
- Raising three kids alone (was four until the oldest got married & moved out)
- Works part-time at the local P.D.
- Remodeling her kitchen after it suffered major hurricane damage
- Goes to the gym daily
- Sits on a city commission and plans to run for City Council in the fall

Yesterday I contacted my sister, with whom I haven't spoken in twenty years, and got a nice email back from her.

Did some more editing on Wife of the Bad Guy. Its looking good. Still have to resolve some "rubber lips" problems with image/sound synching.

We watched Flushed Away last night. Cute flick with some VERY funny little in-jokes. (Look for the Wolverine costume that the lead character (voiced by Hugh Jackman) is thinking of wearing.) The Aardman folks have a knack for good, fun little movies.

02:08 pm: Strangeness in the Modern World
I'd recently opened a Facebook account because several folks had sent me invites. Thru some peculiar twist of social networking, someone found me whom I hadn't seen/heard from since I was in fifth grade! This despite the fact that I hadn't listed anything about my ELEMENTARY school in my background info and that my name isn't particularly unusual.

12:54 pm: Shaun of the Dead and Zombie Walk
We went to a late night showing of Shaun of the Dead last night at a theater on 4th Street here in LB last night. The organizers had arranged for a Zombie Walk beforehand. We'd planned to dress up for it ahead of time.

Unfortunately, our dinner with betnoir's dad ran long. So we had to rush things and didn't get to the meetpoint until just a few minutes before the start of the walk. I dropped betnoir off and went looking for parking. Only there wasn't any.

I must have driven around for four miles around the neighborhood looking for a spot and couldn't find one. As I drove past the meetpoint, I saw that the walk had started. But instead of a slow shamble, they were all moving at pretty good clip.

I ended up parking six blocks away from the theater (on the OTHER side from where the walk was taking place) and doing a fast walk over to the theater. By the time I got there, the walk was done. Ah well.

We waited in line for tickets, saw some great zombie costumes, got photo'd & video'd by several folks, and went in for the movie. Needless to say, it was a VERY enthusiastic crowd, with folks doing zombie dances on the stage, shambling down the aisles, hooting, groaning, and generally having a great time. Oh, and the movie was fun, too. We'd never seen it on the big screen.

I was in such a hurry to get to the theater that I didn't have a chance to grab my camera, but here are a couple of photos of that we took afterwards. (There are lots of other photos and videos at alivetheater.net and mondocelluloid.com.)