At least the weather's nice on this guilt trip.

I hate turning down work.

If you turn someone down too often, they stop calling you at all ("Oh, she's booked all the time, I'm not going to even bother"), which is a very bad thing.

The job I had to turn down today (my day off) would have been working until 9 pm and then I'd have to be back on the low budget at 6 am tomorrow. The problem with that is that a 9 pm wrap (if they wrap at 9) means I'm not leaving the stage until 9:45, I don't get home until 10:15, and I won't get to sleep until 11:30.

A 6 am call means 5:30 for breakfast, which means I have to leave my house at 5 am, which means I have to be up at 4:30 am. No matter how I crunch those numbers, I'm left without enough sleep, and I used up my carte blanche to be cranky last week.

That and I put off doing my laundry until today, so had I worked I'd have had to walk around in rank clothing all week. Eeew.

I did the laundry, and went to see Jarhead with the Boy Who's Really Cute But Is Way Too Young For Me.

Right after the movie let out, I got called to work on the scale show that I helped load in a week ago. It's a week of work downtown at night - but I'd have to bail off the low budget for those five days (starting December 11th).

Five days at scale is a considerably larger amount of money. Five days on a scale show with a full crew and good coffee. Five days on a show which runs beyond Christmas (the low budget ends December 23rd), so there's a chance of getting work in January, when I know it's going to be slow. Five days with a best boy that I really would like to keep calling me, so I don't want to turn him down.

Five days on a show which would leave my boss on the low budget - whom I like a whole lot - scrambling to find someone to replace me.

I know what he'll say when I talk to him. He'll say "of course you should go to the higher paying show. You'd be silly to turn down that kind of money. We'll find someone", and he'll mean it, but I've seen him in the truck, making phone call after phone call because no one wants to work for this rate when it's busy and there are so many shows paying scale.

So now I feel guilty.

Dammit.

I told the best boy on the scale show to pencil me in, pending my ability to find a replacement for myself. If I have to turn him down, hopefully he'll understand.

If not, I'll have potentially burned a bridge (so to speak), and that sucks.

I'm off to bed.