Delivery Day

Today is delivery day.  Once again the long road of a hard earned commercials masterpiece has led to the end of the line.  This was an interesting project as most of them are.  We tried things a little differently this time with me being a one man show for about 2 weeks prior to anybody else coming on.  This allowed me to lay the ground work for the lookdev and lighting team.  I basically did a lot of the tedious grunt work that is no fun at all.  Everything seemed to be moving along extremely well until the final 2 weeks when my bosses decided that we needed to go to 12 hour days 7 days a week.  This was a surprise but they were correct in their change of pace.  We ended up needing just about all that time to finish on time.  When this is all over I'm going to have to figure out what went wrong in the schedule to cause this.

Since our schedule change I have not exercised at all.  This morning I finally got myself on my treadmill and ran 3 miles.  It felt great.  I am definitely getting back on that wagon.  Derek is starting to get interested in the crossfit thing.  I look forward to doing that with him.

Another thing that I have put on the backburner since things got crazy at work is the freelance project I am doing at home.  I am planning on taking 2 days off prior to a 3 day holiday weekend to get caught up on that.

Show Em You're a Tiger

The new year has brought with it the goal/sentence of having to sell of our house due to financial pressure.  I for one am embracing this new adventure.  Our plan is to move in July but in order to get to that point without going broke I have found some freelance work to generate a little extra income.  I have never done freelance from home using the software that I currently use at work and it has proven to be difficult.  The software we use at work is simply not supposed to be used by a one man show like myself.  There is a lot of secret coding stuff that has to be done behind the scenes to get everything working right.  Even now after working on my setup for about a month I have determined that I will have to get the pirated version of the software I bought to get it to work right.  It has been a learning experience however and will help a us a lot in the end.

Derek has been struggling in math lately and we have all been doing our best to help him out.  He retook a test that he failed yesterday and we are eager to find out how he did.  Next week is his semester final so he definitely still has some studying to do.  He has been working really hard these last few weeks and I am proud of him.  I am also really hoping that his hard work has paid off.  Life is not fair after all.

The project I am on right now is the most secretive project I've ever worked on.  They have us locked in a secure room on nobody else can even see our job on the server.  It's caused lots of headaches to be honest.  Other than the security thing this project is going incredibly smoothly.  I feel like I am jinxing myself for writing that but it really is going well.  I attribute this to two main things.  First my entire team is in the same room so we can all talk to each other face to face instead of over email.  We used to say in electronics school that communication is the key to success in battle.  Indeed it is.  Second, there are no weak links in my team.  I have been on other projects that have had one or two guys that couldn't carry their weight and the effects can be devastating since our teams are so small.  This team is making me look really good.

Connecticut

A terrible thing happened today.

Adaptation

This last month has been a bit challenging.  First the layoffs and paycuts were a one/two punch.  To be honest, the major push over the last year or so to reduce overtime has had a bigger effect on my income than the recent paycut.  This has forced us to come to the realization that we will have to move this coming summer.  That sort of thing is tough.  Moving is not fun.  In the past, the houses that I have moved into have always been slightly more than I really wanted to spend.  However, in those cases my income did not take an immediate southbound path after the purchase.  Such is life I suppose.  In response to this challenge Michelle has taken up a bow making business.  This is the sort of thing that you hear about stay at home moms doing as a hobby.  I think most people would hear about this and think that it would probably wind up being a waste of time and money.  However, Michelle has taken it very seriously.  I am impressed with her initiative and determination.
Meanwhile, I have taken up the freelance banner once again.  I saw an email from my old friend Josh Prykril (yes that is how his name is spelled) from back in the Netter Digital days.  In it he said that he needed somebody for a small freelance job.  I responded to it.  A few days later he replied that that email had been sent over a year ago.  The reason this happened was because I had been deleting old spam email from my yahoo account and had stopped around that time.  So in my inbox it looked like I had just received it a few days ago.  After that, I decided to look up the business that he is now running from China.  It is a company that specializes in outsourcing CG jobs.  After a few emails back and forth he offered me a small job to do over the weekend.  I dramatically underbid it by a factor of probably 3 times.  That's fine though because I think it could open the door to a huge amount of work in the coming months.  I am already being offered a big chunk of work to do until February.  The real question is how I'm going to do any rendering.  I don't really want to build a render farm on the scale of what I had when I was working at home and had 16 computers cooking 24/7.  I think I'm going to get one more machine and see if I can get by with just that.

The second challenge of the past month has been all of us being sick.  I have personally been coughing up phlegm since early November.  A little over a week ago I felt like I was just about done with it.  That was a friday.  When I woke up the following Saturday it was like I had reverted all the way back.  I don't know if this is a getting old thing or what, but I am sick and tired of being sick. 

Chili Fail

One of my favorite cooking shows is Tyler Florence Ultimate.  Mr. Florence had a show last week about his best Texas style chili recipe.  It looked great so I thought I'd try it out over the Thanksgiving weekend.  It had a lot of ingredients.  I think it cost something like $30 for all the ingredients.  Spices sure are expensive.  So I got it all home and spent about 3 hours on Saturday putting it all together.  After the allotted time was over I eagerly picked up a spoon and tasted it.  My first reaction was that it was really spicy.  This was a surprise because one of the ingredients was 2 tablespoons of ancho chili powder, which I forgot to get so it was never added.  I could have overlooked that if it had tasted good but really it was just spicy and had no real chili flavor.  It was a bit of a disaster.

As I was writing this I wanted to reference the recipe that I followed.  Low and behold I think I discovered the problem.  This is the recipe that I looked up online:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/beef-chili-recipe/index.html

Notice that it is on the official food network site and has tyler florence at the top of it.  Looks legit right?

Now look at this one:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/tylers-texas-chili-recipe2/index.html


This is what I believe was the correct recipe.  On the surface they both look fairly similar but they are not.

One thing I know I got wrong was the 3 canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce.  I read that as 3 cans of chipotle peppers.  I actually only had 2 cans but I put them all in.  This was quite an effort.  Someday I'll try again.

Lunch Run Proposal

On Monday I decided to go on my favorite 6 mile run.  From DD to the Marina jetty.  It was maybe the worst run ever.  Most likely it was a perfect storm of factors that contributed to this run being so bad.  First, I am still getting over this cold/cough thing and my stomach has been really irritated the last few days.  Second, I had a small bowl of cereal and a glass of a day old smoothie for breakfast, that was all I had until I ran at lunch time.  The one thing that I didn't do wrong (or so I thought) was good ol rule #1 when going on runs.  Always go to the bathroom right before you run.  Well, I had already gone around 9 in the morning, but not wanting to break the rule, I tried and did go.  I don't think I made it a mile before I had to go again.  Then again at mile 4.  It was awful.  I walked probably 20 minutes of it because my stomach was cramping up so much.  A run that usually takes me about 50 minutes wound up going over 1.5 hours.

Tuesday, I took the day off.

So today I decided to head down to the pier and maybe say hi to my friend the pull up bars.  Got rule #1 out of the way and headed out.  This time I felt a lot better.  No cramping, no urges, and no wind.  I made my way up the stairs of the pier and down the side of the pier where the roller coaster is.  I was nearing the corner where you turn to go onto the main walkway when I noticed a couple standing near the railing.  When I was about 40 feet from them, the guy goes down to one knee, holding a small box.

It was a good day.

That's them down at the very end.

Back to Venice

I have been temporarily relocated back to the Venice office.  The one thing that stands out to me about this place is how alive it is compared to Playa.  Playa feels like a quiet retirement community in Irvine.  Venice feels like a hipster college town.  I really miss running on the beach here so today I decided to go on out.  I have been running on the treadmill for so long that I think my body has adapted to it.  Mainly to the cushioning or give that my treadmill provides.  With every foot strike on regular pavement it felt like a shockwave going through my body.  Like somebody was shaking me every time I took a step.  It took about 2 miles for that to ware off.  Unfortunately, this might have been the windiest run I have ever been on.  Wow, was it windy.  Tough going out, easy coming back.  Another thing I have been wanting to do is stop by my old nemesis, the pull up bars.  You may recall that my old best on the bars was 7.  Today I did 10.  I have a feeling I could have done more if I hadn't run 3 miles to get to the bars.  I am satisfied with 10.  I would have been happy with 12.

Sure feels good to be working again.

Had my white balance set wrong so the picture go messed up.  Windy day.