The Skinny

St. Patrick’s Day, 2007.

I got to see my neice Anna do some tumbling today - that was neat. Then I ran a 5-mile race, and finished in under 40 minutes. Not bad.
My friend Molly performed at McCoul’s, and let me sing one song. I did “Finnegan’s Wake” and got a few compliments throughout the evening for it.
But, I was quickly deserted at McCoul’s, and after watching the Emberella’s perform, went home. Before 10pm. Pretty much sober.
On a positive note, I didn’t pay for a single beer. I got 2 free for running the race and Vince bought me a Guinness at McCoul’s.
I broke in my new kilt, and got plenty of looks and comments on it.

Saturday, March 10

The day started (as all days do) in the morning. Phillip had his call back so I just hung out, worked out a little, wrote a little.
My friend Marie, who had been sick all week, came over in the afternoon and we got some hot chocolate from a woman we couldn’t understand, then some ice cream from Baskin Robbins. I managed to avoid getting sick, too.
Phillip wanted to spend the evening drinking, so we went to the store and I bought some Southern Comfort. You can buy liquor in a grocery store in CA! And it’s cheap!
Phillip, myself and his two roommates proceeded to drink a lot and play XBox. We contacted several women, but none wanted to come over. Bummer.

We were completely well behaved.

Sunday, March 11

I didn’t think I could have a worse experience travelling than I did getting to LA, but I proved myself wrong on the return trip.
First, I bought a ticket for the wrong day and had to pay $100 to get it for Sunday. Then I had to fly standby all day.
I didn’t get home until 12:30am Eastern Time, after getting up at 7am Pacific Time. With the loss of 1 hour due to DST. Fun day.

Sport time is odd on the west coast. Football games start at 10am, for example. The ACC Tournament games start at 9am, apparently.
Jeff and Kat, two die-hard UNC fans, came over at 9 to watch the Tar Heels demolish Florida State. With beer, of course. I did not partake, but I watched the game.
I went with Jeff and Kat back to their place and we all went to lunch at In-N-Out Burger. The menu there is great: “Double Burger, burger, cheeseburger, fries (one size), drinks, milkshakes”. That’s it. No speciality designer burgers, no chicken, no multiple side options. Plus, we saw them making fries from actual potatoes. The food was about what you’d expect, and made me feel like blech most of the day.
After lunch we went to the La Brea Tar Pits, which are conveniently not located on La Brea Avenue. That was pretty cool. While we were there, I got a call from my Aunt Lorrie asking for computer purchasing advice for my cousin Greg. It was fun explaining where I was.
Phillip was the lead in a USC student film, and the screening was last night. A very interesting group of short films. They had to be less than 6 minutes, no sync sound and some other constraints placed by the professors. These were grad students, so they were very creative in working around the challenges.
After that, we met my friend Sue from San Diego for dinner, and then she and I went out for a drink and to catch up. Very good to see her again! She’s doing well and still loves living in San Diego.

Thursday, March 8

Phillip and Daniel both had auditions in the morning, so I got some more writing done on my script. After lunch Phillip and I went up to Canyon Country to see where I grew up as a kid.
We went down Placerita Canyon road, and a wildfire had ripped through the area. The park looked OK, but the surrounding hills were all burnt away. I got some pictures, but can’t get them on my computer for some reason.
We passed the house on the hill and Mint Canyon School, then went down the “back way” to see if the feed store was still there. The building is, but now it’s a Salvation Army Thrift Store.
Phillip really liked the landscape of the area, and it’s only 30 minutes from where he lives in Glendale.
Daniel, meanwhile, got a “Legends of Wrestling” game for XBox, and I proceeded to be unbeatable at it. Phillip finally beat me in a cage match, after saying he wasn’t going to sleep until he won a match.

Wednesday, March 7

Well, instead of heading to New Mexico, the day started off low-key.
Then we had to go pick up Kat in Venice Beach where she had stayed the night with a friend. We had to pick her up in order to give Jeff, Vince and Erin enough time to get furniture so we could all meet at the movies in the afternoon.
We went to the Arclight Cinemas on Sunset to “Zodiac”. They have assigned seating, and each ticket transaction seems to take a minimum of three hours to complete. Not to mention the price.
This was a matinee. Cheaper than the regular evening shows.
$11.
The seats were roomy and comfortable, and it was an enjoyable place to watch a movie. And, we picked a nearly 3-hour movie to watch, so that made it a little better. Plus, the movie was good.
But, $11?

I’m told prices are better in less swanky theaters. I hope so.

Oh - the premiere of Chris Rock’s new movie “I Think I Love My Wife” was happening at that theater that evening. The red carpet was out, and the press was lined up when we left. I dared Phillip to run down the carpet, but he passed.

Later that night we went to the Rainbow Club to see Daniel’s manager’s band play. The Rainbow club is one of the “hot” places to go, supposedly. But not last night. There were about 30 people watching the band, and no one else there. Every female was with a guy, too. Quite a bummer.

Meanwhile, Danile keeps beating me at Madden football. Grrr.

Tuesday March 6

Phillip and I started the day with a light run up the street. And I mean “up” as in that mountain-looking thing I see out the window. It actually wasn’t that bad.
I spent some time working on my screenplay. I’m actually moving along pretty good with the re-write, which is good.
We met up with some folks and played minature golf for a couple hours at night, then went to a cool pub on Sunset with the Greensboro crew.

That’s about it.

Oh, except I finally beat Daniel at Madden 2002 Football on his Xbox.

The weather’s been awesome out here! Barely needed a jacket last night.

Monday March 5, continued.

(On the way home last night, we nearly hit a coyote. This was in the middle of Hollywood, too, not out in the desert.)

Vince had to return his rental car in nearby Burbank, so Phillip and I went to pick him up there. We had to finish casting the new Greene Picture’s movie, so Vince and I spent the next hour or so reviewing audition tapes and coming to a final casting decision. Then we wandered down the street looking for food, found a deli and I confused the Eastern European owners when I asked for a sandwich with no bread. They caught on after a couple explanations, and then made a great lettuce-wrapped sandwich for me. Yum. I still have half of it to eat today.
Speaking of leftovers, Phillip and I went to my cousin Tricia’s house for dinner. Her parents (my aunt and uncle) also came, and it was quite fun. My Uncle Bob had heard through the grapevine that I like Glenfiddich, so he brought his prized bottle and we shared a dram. We were loaded up with leftovers and came home.
Meanwhile, Daniel (one of Phillip’s roomies) had gotten signed by a big agency earlier that day and wanted to celebrate. We were all for it, but then realized several things:
1) none of the women they knew were around
2) it was 10pm on a Monday
3) we didn’t want to spend a lot of money
So, we played Madden 2002 on Xbox for a couple hours. Woo.

This is the sunset last night from the back yard of my cousin’s house.

Sunday, March 4.

Today I was lazy. Except for the working out part in the morning.
The three amigos I am crashing with were all out (working or sleeping) so I watched the “Richard Donner Cut of Superman II”. Very very cool. I highly recommend it. It’s a completely different movie than the one you are used to.
Vince flew in today, and we met up with him, Jeff, Erin and Kat and walked up Hollywood Blvd to find some food for them to eat. I stepped on Buster Keaton, which was cool.
Jeff and Erin taught us a crazy card game called “kalucki” or something else that sounds like “kabuki”. So, we played that and that was it.

Monday March 5,

Phillip got his call back! For this Saturday at 11am. This is a big one - for NBC, so it’s very exciting. Meanwhile, that means no trip to Alburquerque so I have to change my flight and stuff now. I’ll just be hanging out in LA all week. Which is totally fine.

I spent the majority of Saturday in shorts and sandals. Ha ha.

Phillip had to work on Ventura, so I wandered up and down the street hoping to be discovered. Didn’t happen, but I’m optimistic. Still a couple more days here.
He took me on the touristy route down Hollywood and Sunset, but there was something going on and they’d closed parts of the streets and traffic was awful. I know that’s hard to believe out here, but there you are.
We met up with some UNCG folks we know later on and hit a bar with turtles on it. Jeff and Erin have just moved out here in the past month, Jannatha’s been here for a couple years and Kat just flew in for a visit earlier in the day.
Vince will be in today, so there’s half of the crew of Gi Ho Lo hanging out here. Very weird.

I’m hoping to be fully over jet-lag today. We’ll see.

Well, well, well. Here I am in sunny Cali-4-ny-aye! But what an adventure getting here.

My flight was supposed to leave at 6:55am, land in Memphis at 8 and I had a connection out of Memphis at 8:30 to get to LA at 10:40 LA time.
This was my view for the first three hours of my trip.
The first plane we were on had a sensor go off, so they had to get a mechanic to look at it which took forever. Fortunately they had another plane that was empty due to all the storms up north, so they transferred us over to that plane. Unfortunately, someone didn’t do something and the weight balance info never got to the pilots. So we sat, and sat, and sat. About 90 minutes later someone drove up and handed the pilots the weight balance info. But for the wrong plane.
At some point, I swear I saw our original plane pass us and take off.
They finally got the info for our plane and we headed for the runway. Then stopped again, because the info was 500 pounds off. Twenty minutes later we finally took off.
Now, mind you, this was a total of nearly 5 hours stuck on a tiny little plane, not comfortable at all. Ugh.
Meanwhile, I have missed my connection out of Memphis. I tried calling Northwest to get that taken care of while we were sitting in Greensboro, but they wouldn’t do anything since I was still on the flight.
So, in Memphis we all get off the plane and get in line to get new flights. However, the original flight was marked “cancelled” in the system and the people could reserve us seats, but couldn’t get us boarding passes. I was nice and let a young lady go ahead of me, and wouldn’t you know she got the last seat on the next available flight to LA. They had to put me on a 6:11pm flight, instead of the 2:20 that I really wanted to get on.
Thankfully I made it on the 2:20 via standby and four hours later landed at LAX. No movie on the flight. That was odd.
Phillip picked me up and we had dinner at Acupulco, a Mexican restaurant right around the corner from where he lives in Glendale. Best Mexican food I’ve had in over 10 years!
I had been up since 5:15am NC time, and round about midnight NC time (9pm here) we headed out to a bar for a b-day party. We started at Jillian’s, a grown-up arcade, then went to a duelling piano bar. There were a dozen or so folks in the group, mostly Elon grads and I actually knew a couple of them. I drank a lot, and danced and had a blast.
Went to bed after 2am (5am NC time) and woke up at 9am (noon NC time). Not hungover in the least, thankfully.
The view has improved tremendously since yesterday morning:
That’s what you see out the window here at Phillip’s place. He has two roommates who I know from back in NC, Pat and Daniel. Daniel and I were in a movie together, and Pat auditioned for a movie I directed.

Anyway. Yay!