16 Tons

Dear Blog,

Now that Mr. Hollister has moved out (God bless him), I have the whole apartment to myself, which is a very pleasant and exciting development. The problem lies with the schedule of home repairs, which I hold myself to strictly in an attempt to advance my personal hygiene and keep myself from getting lazy. After twelve-hour days at work, painting and cleaning are not high on my list of things to do,

List of things to do, in order:

1) Eat
2) See What The Social Scene Is For The Evening
3) Drink
4) Sleep
5) Paint
6) Clean

In a minor coup, I have sucessfully painted his old room and installed a six-foot stainless steel kitchen prep-counter similar to this one as a desk (I hacked the legs down about eight-inches to make it proper desk height) and have nearly finished painting my old room.

The sense of accomplishment is palpable even though I've learned the hard way (is there any other way) that like fucking, painting is best done with another individual, and if possible three or four. Now, the problem with home repairs of this scale is the desire to live like a real boy duking it out with the desire to not improve the equity of the landlords, especially when you consider my ongoing series, The Crazy Lady Upstairs and The Case Of The Flooding Bathroom. Please recall The Crazy Lady Upstairs believes I put a curse on her and feels this gives her cause to fight back by running the water at all hours and occcasionally causing my bathroom and entryway to flood.

I feel confident that the little men coming to re-route the pipes tomorrow (Monday) will finally solve this caper and foil her dastardly plot to remove the curse. She should try live chicken sacrifices.

Thanks for listening to my whining, Blog. I really need someone to vent to now that all my friends are sick of listening to my trials and long, boring stories of work, work problems and relationship issues.

Sincerely,

Richard Gin (dot org)

Happy May

I was working for the last three days for a British company putting together a show about 7 World Trade Center for a series on remarkable buildings. 7 WTC was chosen for its new safety features designed to survive the salad days of terror, and the people in charge of the building couldn't have been nicer or more accommodating -- we could literally run around where we pleased and spent a good deal of time on the roof and scampering about the maintenance decks and tunnels shooting whatever the hell we wanted. Usually the crew is invited into a building to shoot only to spend 60% of our time negotiating access to the freights or reminding the new security shift who we are.

Nick and I (along with Anthony) were the American support crew -- he was AC and I was audio (Anthony was our driver) -- and if you've ever wondered what it feels like to work in television, look at Nick.