Insult to Injury, or: The Not-So-Great Michigan & Ohio Adventure

So, this week was, quite frankly, hell on Earth. It began with bad news, and ended with this:
Yes, that's my parents' red van. Allow me to explain the whole sha-bang.

Monday: My Uncle Mike, my dad's little brother, passed away. Cue "Oh, Shit" number one. This was quite a shock to everyone. Here is the Obituary.

Tuesday: I found out about it and booked a flight for Wednesday morning and made arrangements with my sisters to drive to Ohio on Thursday. My mentor was kind enough to give me an early critique on my assignment so I could work on it Tuesday night before my flight.

Wednesday: I left my apartment at 6:30am to catch my 9:40am flight to Detroit. Normally, even in morning rush hour traffic, it only takes about an hour or so to get from Glendale to LAX. However, I didn't arrive at the airport until just after 9am. Why? There were three accidents and two stalled cars on the 101 and 405 freeways. As I approached the fourth incident, which was only two miles from the airport, I decided that since I know the side roads pretty well I'd just leave the freeway at the next exit. Right when I said that to myself, my brand new radiator cap (installed just a week ago) decided that it didn't want to work anymore, and so it gushed about a half pint of my car's coolant onto the hot engine causing plumes of smoke to billow out from under my hood. Cue "Oh Shit" number 2.

Thankfully it didn't last, and I made it off the freeway only to discover ANOTHER stalled vehicle blocking traffic on Sepulveda Blvd, followed by "unscheduled" construction. So I weaved about several residential neighborhoods until I got to work, which is just a half mile from LAX, and ran over to the Westin hotel to hop on their shuttle to the airport (since we do a lot of company gatherings at the Westin they allow us to use their shuttles without having to rent a room there.) But, naturally, the shuttle was delayed because of some slow-moving rich bitch. When I finally got to the airport, things seemed like they'd go pretty smooth. I got my boarding passes, there were very few people in line at security, and I tossed some change to the missionaries outside the airport, figuring I could use all the karma I could get at this point. But then, go figure, the lady at security needed to run my bags through the machine TWICE. I finally got to the gate just as my zone was being called to board.

I had a layover in Phoenix. There was an older lady sitting next to me on the plane from LAX who was just coming back from her father's funeral, so I figured Id help her find her way to her connecting gate in Phoenix airport (since I know the airport pretty well now.) Again, for Karma's sake. And from there, things went pretty smoothly.

Thursday: The drive to Ohio was going fairly smoothly at first. We took my sister Anne's car, since her Jeep gets far better gas mileage than my sister Amy's Suburban. The Ohio Turnpike is always an interesting drive, simply because of the "Space Station" service plazas:
But after one particular pit stop, my sister decided as we were headed back onto the pike that we needed gas, and so she pulled a U-turn into the semi-truck parking area, complete with a semi headed straight for us. For the second time this week, cue "Oh Shit" number 3. Luckily, again, everything turned out fine.

When we got to my Aunt Judy's house in Canfield we found out that our Uncle Gene (my grandmother's brother) was hospitalized with a heart attack. Cue "Oh, Shit" number 4. More salt for the wounds. Later we went to the funeral home. The same place that hosted both grandparents' funerals (all of the immediate family on my dad's side lived in Canfield, and pretty much the entire family lives in and around Youngstown.) Since my uncle was in the fire department for so long there were guards posted at the casket the entire time. I had never before seen a full-fledged firefighter's ceremony before, other than my sister's graduation from the fire academy. It's heart wrenching, but it may also be one of the most beautiful things I've witnessed. There had to be at least 300 attendees, including the fire chiefs from almost every department within a ten mile radius.

Later, I had a really expensive prime rib that sucked.

Friday: The funeral. At my Grandma's funeral, my sisters, cousins and I determined that we "put the 'fun' back in the 'funeral.'" Not this time. Some woman kept taking pictures of the casket, which really pissed me off.

We always gather for food after funerals; a "wake" of sorts I suppose, during which my cousin's friends tried to figure out how to connect Orson Welles with Russell Crowe (use the animated "Transformers" movie as a starting point.) I didn't get a chance to suggest trying to tie Sydney Poitier with Sydney Pollack. (Hint: start with "Sneakers.")

My sisters drove home Friday night, into an oncoming snowstorm. Cue "Oh, Shit" number 5. I stayed with my parents, and we drove to the hospital to visit my Uncle Gene (who, I'm happy to report, is doing very well.)

Saturday: Luckily, everyone got home alright, and by the time my parents and I left most of the snow had melted, at least off the roads. Along the way we passed frolicking deer, a jacknifed semi in a ditch (probably from the snowstorm the night before), and the oh-so lovely nuclear plant outside Sandusky (at which I always have to proclaim "Everybody smile at the cooling tower!") Before heading to the airport we drove to Brighton to visit my aunt and grandmother (on my mom's side. 94 years old and still kickin'.) We figured with the hour drive to the airport we'd have enough time to drop by a restaurant and eat some delicious food. We thought about calling my sister to meet up for dinner (she lives in Ann Arbor,) but we decided to just head for the airport instead.

We should've had dinner in Ann Arbor, because literally two minutes after we passed my sister's exit on US-23, the guy next to us lost control of his car, swerving directly in front of my parents' minivan. Cue "Oh, Shit" number 6 - (Actually, I think all three of us - mom, dad, and me - said it in unison.) So, down we all went into the ditch, up an embankment, and back into the ditch. I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by the superior off-road handling of the Grand Caravan. When the car stopped, before either mom or I checked if we were OK, we, again in unison, asked dad if he was having a heart attack, which, thankfully, he wasn't. We were all perfectly fine - no bruises or whiplash (at least as-of this writing, which is less than 24hrs since the accident.)
Surveying the damage showed that even the car was pretty much OK, at least visually. The guy never hit us, so the only damage we could see was from a couple of saplings we mowed over. The other guy was OK as well, other than some soreness from the airbag (though his car was in bad shape. Part of his bumper can be seen in the upper right of the image near the sign in the background.

And, as luck would have it, the guy behind us who witnessed the whole thing was also an EMT. He stopped and checked on everybody, and stuck around for the police. This is the big difference between California and, pretty much, everywhere else. People actually... CARE. They see something happen, and they stop to help. While we were on the side of the road, both a regular physician who was driving by, and a nurse who was involved in a gawker accident a few minutes (and a few feet) from ours, stopped to help. That's something that you just don't see in LA. People out here don't care about anyone but themselves, and then they wonder, when they're in a jam, why no one stops to help THEM.

Since my sister lives just five minutes from the accident site, she came to pick us up and finish driving me to the airport. And no, we didn't get to eat.

Luckily as well, the flights back to LA went smoothly. I even lucked out and was able to do the $50 upgrade to First Class on the last leg of the flight.

Sunday: I got back to my car around 1:30am to discover that, yes, I still have a cooling system leak. I made it home in time to put some more work into the week's homework before it was due at Noon today, but at around 4am I fell asleep in front of the computer (which has never happened to me before.)

I did manage to get some work done and turn it in, but I'm definitely not finished with it yet. Here's the near-to-final version:

I still have more work to put into it this week.

So this winds up the end of a very long week, as you have seen. I'm not planning on leaving the house for a while. We certainly don't want "Oh, Shit" number 7.

I'm THAT Jerk

I saw The Spiderwick Chronicles again today while my muffler was being fixed, and I made probably the silliest, dorkiest complaint to management possible.

I complained about a slight buzzing and overall weakness in the analog sound during the trailers before the feature, and suggested that "upping the LED voltage" was probably the solution. Allow me to explain:

The film was presented in DTS sound, which is the highest quality possible in theatres. However, since DTS equipment is expensive, theatres equipped with DTS systems probably do not have a backup Dolby Digital system (the OTHER common digital theatre sound system, other than SDDS, but that never works), and so, if the digital signal drops out, the sound system will automatically revert to the optical Analog soundtrack on the film (technology that's been relatively unchanged since 1987.)

Since DTS soundtracks are stored on CD-ROM synced to picture via a timecode track on the film print itself (unlike Dolby Digital and SDDS, DTS soundtracks are too big to be stored on the film itself), most trailers do not come with their own DTS soundtrack discs, and thus will be forced into analog playback (if you've ever noticed a big difference in sound quality and volume between trailers and the feature, this is probably why.)

This is great for us dorks, because we get to hear how well the theatre in question keeps up their old analog systems (which, in most modern theatres, is pretty bad.) One easy way to boost the level and crisp reception of the analog signal is to boost the voltage level of the LED reader that scans the optical soundtrack (until about five or so years ago, most theatres used white light to scan the optical soundtracks on films, which worked well since optical soundtracks were made of a thin layer of silver embedded in the film, and were the only part of modern mylar-based film stock that was not environmentally friendly. Now, film prints are starting to use a biodegradable cyan dye soundtracks, which will not work in white light systems. So now, they use red LED's to scan the film soundtracks.)

Now how many assholes in the world are gonna say THAT?

:-)

Drip

Just a quick update with this week's assignment. I almost forgot last week to introduce you to the new character we're using - Bishop. Right now we have the "light" version (no facial controls other than a puppet mouth.) We'll get the full version next quarter.

So anyway - here's how we've progressed this week. Nowhere near done, but anywho....



Next we start smoothing things out.

I also got rather bored at work this week while encoding the first season of The Smurfs for the internet, so I did a quick ol' sketch:
Turns out Smurfs are remarkably easy to draw.

Well that's it for this week, kids. Now its off to watch this week's lecture, and then figure out why my car is leaking coolant. :-(