:Groan:

Blogger's gone nuts. I spent an hour trying to update my blogroll (which makes me insane - I hate the html cut/paste), only to have everything I'd done disappear.

Any changes made after Feb 2nd won't stay up - posts, template changes, etc..

I'll try again Monday - and no, I'm not really expecting this post to stay up either.

Piles and piles of them.

After my previous rant about Kino Flos and how much I hate messing with them, I got called to help wrap a car commercial this morning - just a few hours this morning to help them wrap out since there was someone else coming into the stage this afternoon.

What did I get stuck doing?

Kino Flos. For five hours, I sorted Kino Flos from four different rental packages (they used a LOT of kinos - car commercials love them because they're a soft directionless light).



Stupid poetic justice.

The one you want is always buried.

When a stage is rigged, we lay the cable down in layers, and when it's time to take the whole thing out, of course the cable that I'm trying to wrap is always at the bottom of the stack - but it tricks me; I wrap about a quarter of it, think I've got a good one and then discover that the remainder is buried under 500 lbs of cable - I then try another piece only to discover that one is buried, too.

No matter how neat everyone tries to keep everything, it always turns into spaghetti.

I've been pulling out a rig that I worked on back in the summer, and it's been fun (it's a great bunch of guys that I love to work with). After sitting on set for the past few weeks, the physical work feels good for a change.

However, I'm still suffering side effects from Thursday's food poisoning. I don't have much of an appetite, and when I do eat I don't want to eat very much.

It's actually kind of funny - I'm normally a pretty good eater, but lately I've been nibbling these Lilliputian portions of food; half a salad and a few spoons of soup, the filling of part of a sandwich, one piece of toast and half a cup of tea.

Even when I've managed to get a good amount of food down, I'm not wanting to eat very often. I had lunch (half a sandwich and two bites of salad) at noon, it's now 7:30 and I'm still not hungry. I forced down a whole turkey burger on Monday at lunch and didn't eat again until this morning.

Good side effect: weight loss

Bad side effect: exhaustion and a complete lack of strength - a serious liability when one is wrapping cable for 10 hours (which is what I did Monday).

My boss pulled me off the 'up high' team today (I don't know if it was because I was visibly struggling of if we were so successful against the spaghetti that he needed another body on the ground), and I spent the afternoon catching cable*, wrapping out some of the smaller lights, sorting the spare globes, etc.

I'm not nearly as tired tonight as I was yesterday, but I'm still pretty beat.

We're going to finish the cable tomorrow (which is my last day), and then I'm going to lay on the couch all day Thursday while I write that article (many, many thanks for everyone's input).

I'm surprised I even had the energy to type this much.


*One end of the cable is dropped out, and it's wrapped as it's sent down. The person wrapping on the ground is catching the cable. For me, catching cable is less energy-intensive than sending it out.

Call for gripes!

Well, not gripes, but I'm writing an article for an actor's magazine about what they can do to help make crew's day go smoother.

Instead of doing my usual lighting-centric thing, I thought I'd poll those of you in other departments and really make this something well-rounded.

So, aside from the obvious general advice (stay on your mark, show up on time, know your lines, lose the attitude), what department-specific advice would you give to actors?

Leave 'em in the comments or email me at randomblogmail [at] yahoo dot com.