When good cats get bad haircuts

Here's Blackout with his sexy summer haircut. I just tried about 8 times to get this picture to upload correctly, but apparently Blogger is so fond of sideways cats that there can be no other option.


His fur, formerly up to 3" long, is now about 1/4".












In this one you can clearly see his fur go go boots. On his front legs, the boots are taller.


It's a good thing the poor kitty doesn't know how silly he looks. :)

Movie fun

Serenity last night was good fun. The theater is pretty neat. It's small so the viewing experience is much more intimate. The sound sucks, but I can overlook that. The show was at 9:15. We got there about 8:30 to try and get in on the comfy red leather recliners they have. There are about 12 of them, and you have to be super early to grab them. We weren't nearly early enough, so we sat in the row behind them. It was a good spot. The only drawback was that the movie drew some annoying fans. There was a woman behind us who kept talking to the movie. She didn't bother me as much as the guy behind me with stinky feet. You're happily watching a movie, and the last thing you want to smell is foot funk, dammit. But it was a good time. Cheap too, the tickets were only $6. They're showing the Princess Bride week after next!

Screenland website

Serenity tonight! (shiny)

Robyn and I went shoppin' yesterday. I tried on many things, and finally found a skirt. Yes, I got a skirt! We also went to a craft store to get scrapbook stuff. I can't believe how damn much scrapbook stuff they have, and how totally overpriced some of it is. I wish the art store in westport hadn't closed. We could get paper there for much less, or at least more of it for our dollar. But overpricing aside, I'm pleased with the doodads I got. I got several different sheets of pretty paper that I'll use strips of to make borders for the pages; and a few stickers and little flower dealies. I'm actually pretty excited about it. I like to get out my x-acto and my rulers and cutting mat and cut stuff. :)

More pictures, less words

Here's the diploma. Names have been changed for no particular reason, considering that you can get all the information you want about just about anybody from the internet. Notice how the thing reads like a business letter?
How weird is that? It may as well say "Dear sir or Madam, Margaret has graduated. Love, UMKC."










I forgot I also got in the mood to decorate my planner yesterday. Then when I was done, I still had some paint left. I looked around for something else to paint on, saw the cat, decided it wouldn't be worth the scratches and picked my sketchbook instead. I used different colors of acrylic paint mixed with acrylic gloss medium to make it transparent, and a bit of silver paint to make it shiney. Because I like shiney things. It was kind of interesting to paint because the planner has a pebbly surface but isn't porous, being plastic; where the sketchbook is fabric covered and very porous. I'm really pleased with it. And this was hours before I had the motivational coffee beverage!


Here's the tile mosaic that I made a long time ago in a crafts for kids class at the library. Okay, so it was like last year. Robyn went too! It was actually really fun. The gray looking bits are mirror. I like spirals.













Anna helped.







Here's my handy dandy paper mosaic. Having no tiles, I cut up some paper. I used acrylic gel medium for glue. It's basically clear paint. I'd brush some on underneath for it to stick to, then over the top as well. Great stuff for collages.













I hung up the stained glass replica that I bought at the Metropolitan Museum. It's in the window (duh) so you can see through how pretty it is.

And here's a picture from when Joe was here. Look at how Donald deals cards faster than a speeding bullet and whatnot. Stupid phase 10 cards ought to be plastic coated, dammit. They're getting all grubby. Fine then! We'll play rummikub.

Diploma means Done

I guess I've really graduated. My diploma came in the mail today. I guess I'll buy a frame for it and put it on the wall. I'm kind of annoyed at it, for some reason.

I bought a skirt at the thrift store, in hopes that I had a top that might go with it. I don't, but the skirt cost me all of two fitty so no big loss there. SOMEBODY's gettin' married so I feel like I oughta wear a skirt to the damn thing... :) I have a top that might be nice, but no skirt to go with it. Almost all my dressy clothes are black, but that's not really appropriate for a summer wedding so more shopping is in store for me.

I got coffee tonight and felt like doing something artsy. (liquid motivation, seriously) I wanted to make a mosaic, but I have no tiles, grout, or anwhere to make one, so I cut up some paper and made one in my sketchbook. It's kinda nifty.

Dinosaur joy Day 2

I did go back for more. Mostly because I left my tools there, but whatever. I got this job completely at random. This guy sent Victor an email asking if he could throw some people his way to focus lights. (Let me say again how inadequate that job description is.) Alex got the email too, and called the guy, then called me to get another person. (Working with Alex is funny enough for me, because he's a couple inches taller than Kevin even. We look like a clown team or something.)

Right now I don't know if we're going back today. It depends on whether or not some equipment arrives. Either way, there will be some more work the first week of July, so I'll try to remember to take my camera. I don't think it would be a problem, people look in the 3 story windows all day and night, and even stick their heads in the doors. So nothing is really a secret.

Yesterday started and ended later. I started the day on a ladder trying to put some templates in lights and do a rough focus. No big deal normally. These lights were in 2 rooms where the ceiling is covered in cargo net with fake plants attached. In order to get the template in the light, I had to stuff my arms through small openings in the cargo net, all the while getting scratched up by dusty greenery. I couldn't see what I was doing at all, so I had to do this by feel. No problem, until the damn lights get hot! It was all I could do to reach the template slot, and there was no way to get to the top of the light at all. Half assed focus at best, and NOT the right way to do things. I just hope the lights don't fall off. I have no idea if they even had safety cables on.

I spent a lot of the day in the scissors lift, putting dichroic glass color in track lighting fixtures. To elaborate, a dichroic filter has the advantage over gel that it will never fade or burn out. If you are using a very dark color, like a purple, you'll have to replace gel often. If you use a piece of dichroic glass instead, you'll never have to replace it. You also pay a LOT more. One 5" round glass is about $50. So it makes sense to use it for long term stuff. However, the color that I was installing was not a dark color. It was R3408. Those of you with swatch books, get them out and you'll see a very pale amber. A color so pale that a normal person won't even notice it's there. I probably installed $800 worth of these yesterday.

I also spent some time on top of a wall trying to point some little architectural fixtures, which wouldn't move, and tended to pop out of the track when I tried to adjust them. They were also mounted in such a way that they mostly lit the walls of their trench and didn't make it to the ceiling they were supposed to light. Did I mention that everything in the place is covered with plaster dust? I'm really wondering who's going to clean it all before people go in there to eat food. And how will they ever keep it clean?

There must be thousands of dollars of LEDs in there. One whole room is ice themed and has Color Kinetics iColor wash fixtures all along the walls, top and bottom. I believe a 12" unit is around $80. These fixtures are RGB mixing, so the color is controlled by a light board. They can be controlled individually, so you can do effects where the colors chase along the walls. In another place, the same units make a fire effect. I'm guessing that there are well over 100 LED fixtures. Fat cash.

We finished the day doing the outdoor fixtures. Along with a bunch on the ground in plantings and such, this involved getting at lights mounted on a tower, which was on a second story level to begin with. We rolled a one person genie lift up there, through use of an elevator. It was windy. Then Alex went up another 2 stories in the lift. I'm pretty sure OSHA wouldn't approve. It was scary just to watch. It didn't help that the guy kept wandering off to look at other things. In general, if this idiot could focus and just tell us what to do instead of wandering around trying to get his shit together, we'd be done hours sooner. We left at 12:45 am.

I can't even imagine the cost of this operation. In the end it's going to be a major spectacle. It'll fit right in to the garish suburban mega shopping "experience!"

That was unexpected

I had the most ridiculous day yesterday. I've bitched before about working on clusterfuck jobs, with people who didn't have a clue, but this one was taken to a new level. All I knew is that we were going to be focusing some lights. I knew it was at a mall or something. I knew it paid many dollars per hour. So I gathered my toolbag, my snacks and my bottle of water, and considered myself as ready as I was going to be, and waited for Alex to pick me up.

We drove to the area where Nebraska Furniture Mart is, an area I have never been to before in my life. It's also where that Great Wolf Lodge is that I've heard commercials for on the radio, but nevertheless felt no real need to "answer the call" and actually go to. Looks like your basic suburban monstrosity. It turns out that we're focusing the lights for a restaurant opening next month called T-Rex. Guess what that means? You're right! Huge animatronic dinosaurs. Outside is a gigantic fake dino skeleton, and fake rocks are everywhere. There are tons and tons of things hanging from the ceiling, lots of painted walls. It looks a lot like being inside an aquarium, actually.

This restaturant/shopping experience isn't done at all, and it looks like parts that were done were chopped open again to work on something else. Baasically, construction everywhere. We meet the guy who we're supposedly working for, and within moments we can tell he has no clue. He just isn't "in charge" of anything. He spent half an hour telling us what each area was going to look like, which ones would have pyro, what the themes were. All completely irrelevant. More than half of the lights we're going to "focus" are architectural fixtures of some kind. Most of the stuff to focus the lights on isn't even there yet. He actually sent us outside (in the hot) to blind point some lights at stuff out there. The lights weren't even ON and the sun WAS, so this was a completely pointless waste of time.

There are actual construction people all over the place, and we're told we should be wearing hard hats, which had to be hunted down. The guy didn't seem to know how to get the lights turned on. Another guy showed up who hooked up some kind of lighting control, and we finally got some lights on. By that time, most of the construction people were gone so we could get some lifts, but in order to go up in a lift we had to get harnesses on. I rode in a genie boom lift, which has about a hundred switches to steer the damn thing. I drove a genie scissors lift myself, and that's also pretty tricky. At one point a construction guy told Alex, who was wearing shorts, that he would have to wear pants tomorrow, or all the guys are going to want to wear shorts. We had no clue we'd even be on a damn fool construction site! I spent the last several hours next to the dimmer rack with a walkie talkie, turning them on one at a time so Mr. Idiot could try to see if the lights worked. I won't even go into the "paperwork" we're using.

We were there from noon to 9:30, and in the end, we focused maybe 8 lights. We spent huge amounts of time waiting around. I can't believe we're being paid to stand around like this. I came home grubby and exhausted. I was just glad to be somewhere quiet and clean.

Quixotic- (KWICKS-ah-tick)

Last night we made it to the second and last performance of this year's Quixotic Performance Fusion. We barely made it in at all, the place was sold out and packed. We only got us in because one of the Artistic Directors walked us in. (I got the connections and whatnot.) The 4 of us ended up standing in the back, but we had a good view. It was a good show, and keeps growing every year. Check out the website: www.quixoticfusion.com The lighting was better than last year, but still not as good as it could be it they choose to do the show in a better space.

sort of working

I dreamed that I was in scene design class, and we were supposed to do a rendering. All I had on my table was a copy of someone else's rendering, and class was almost over. To make things worse, I was sitting next to the wall where the original was hanging, and I was thinking that there's no way he wouldn't notice that it was the same thing. I was going to make my own version of the drawing, but after spending a lot of time trying to find a piece of illustration board, I gave up. Then it turned out that the drawing I had was mine after all. I guess I got away with it.

Yesterday I sat in on tech for KCAT, since the LD had to be in another tech that evening. It was an easy job, since in the end I took a half page of notes at best. I also got to watch 5th of July, so now I don't need to go see it. :)

working

Yesterday was a long one. I managed to not set my alarm, so I woke up later than I wanted to. I took a fast shower and got out the door on time. I got to Union Station a little before 9, where we were focusing lights for 5th of July. This one didn't go as quickly as the last one. We had to focus more lights this time, and the paperwork was updated wrong, so it went slow at times. After lunch, the light board decided to crash several times, so a couple hours were wasted trying to fix that. We managed to get done about 4:45, so I rushed over to Costco to pick up the photo prints I'd ordered. Then I rushed home to change and get my tools and have dinner.

I was trying to the to the other theater I worked at yesterday at 6. I did, barely. I wired things there until midnight, then came home and watched an episode of West Wing with Donald. I was going to be in tech today at Union Station, but since the light board isn't working, they've changed the tech schedule. Wiring things was kind of fun, but since I did almost all of it under the set or in some other dark place, I really wished I had a headlamp.

Today I need to buy stamps so I can send more thank you notes.

Pictures ahoy

I've been setting up photo albums on Flickr. I have wedding pics, and a few from our NYC trip. Want to see? Go here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/11395262@N00/sets/

It would help

I got up this morning, all ready to go work for a few days. I got to the theater at 10, with my laptop and stuff I might need, only to find out that I'm not needed. All weekend. It seems that the plan changed, but the LD didn't tell me. (I just knew I should have called him last night.) Boy did I feel stupid leaving the theater again 5 minutes later. The dollars I was going to make went poof and vanished. Now I feel like I should go help the Quixotic people. I just can't bring myself to do it though, it's just way too hot.

Instead, I went downtown to pay $10 for a certified copy of our marriage license so I can have insurance. Then I did laundry. And made another smoothie. This smoothie is my finest creation yet. I added cherries this time. I got frozen tart cherries from the grocery store last time, and they make for yumminess.

why do I hate outdoor theatre?

Because it's friggin' HOT. Even if it isn't outdoors.

I spent some time the last couple of days helping set up for Quixotic. The show is in some empty building where they've built some platforms for a stage and hung some screens to project on. Oh, and there's no A/C. The dealie is indoors, but when it's 90+ outside, you're still so damn sweaty that it seems about the same. Did I mention it isn't a theater? The collection of miscellany they have this year for lighting is truly amazing. Last year, the amount of stuff was small, but of good quality. This year's stuff is just a lot of random lighting crap that people happened to have around. I'm so glad not to be in charge of it this time. Tomorrow I get to go work in a place with A/C, where they'll actually pay me to work. Sweeet.

Getting better?

I think I'll get better today. My insides are still making loud gurgles, but not as violently as before. I ate some real food yesterday, and my stomach seemed content to keep it in. In fact, I finished the day by eating microwave popcorn. No ill effects. I want to be not sick now. Sick is boring.

sick, joy

Since we got back, I've been sick. It's no fun.

I should get a dream interpretation book

I dreamed last night that I was setting up my portfolio yet again at a thing. It was in a big-ish room, and Gene was in there giving a lecture in a pseudo-British accent. (Kind of like Madonna) We were supposed to listen and set up at the same time. One of the other students came over to me and complained that gene had mispronounced several things, and I said to her that he was only getting started. (The guy mispronounces and misspells so many things in his "history" class that it's comical.) (And sad) Donald was outside in the hallway somewhere, and Victor had been there earlier but was currently nowhere to be found. I was trying to set up, but I didn't have enough fabric and everyone I asked from UMKC wouldn't help me. I was looking for the 2 pieces of gray fabric that I used at clambake, and wondering why they hadn't packed it. Also, my T-pins were too big and 2-pronged somehow, so I had to get different ones. My table was too deep, and the width was different. I was hoping that they'd brought all my stuff that I needed, since I knew that I hadn't seen it since I packed it up and sent it all back to Kansas City.

So! We're home. We FINALLY landed last night (this morning) about 1:30 AM. Twelve hours after we checked out of the f'ing hotel (factoring in the time change, 12 actual hours that we experienced). I am so sick of airplanes right now. Long story short, we left the gate in NYC, to sit on the runway for FOUR HOURS waiting for weather to go by. We are pretty lucky that we took off at all. We both ran out of books, and I ran out of laptop battery. Donald and I had lunch at 2 yesterday, and have had nothing more than nibbles since. I'm debating whether to eat or shower. Shower!