Through the Eyeball

Random Thoughts


There are all these little things that happen to you on a daily basis that raise your eyebrow and make you go "WTF?!". Well, they do happen to me on a daily basis anyway. Most of them aren't really spectecular enough to tell a great story about them and usually you just forget they ever happened after a week or two. But I reckon, that's what blogs are for, so here we go.


Attack of the Dustbunnies

So the other night (well, it's now more like a couple of weeks ago) I'm on my way home from my friends house in the Valley. Must be around 3am and I405 is actually smooth sailing. Well, up until around where 405 and 10 cross and suddenly they are everywhere!!! Little, white, fluffy thingies. Falling from the skies (and don't give me any grief about snow, this LA in June!), rolling in from the left and the right. Lots of puzzled drivers, some squished fluffy things. I have no idea what happened. Maybe an 18-wheeler with a load of cotton-balls fell over. Or someone sacrified a cheap matress just for kicks (better than little children and definitely a lot less messy. Not that I would of experience of course.) Or maybe just Gods way of saying "Stop smoking that shit!". Then again, I don't smoke no shit, so maybe not.




You Better Be Dead


So Alikhat and I have been working on those facial prostetics (see Death By Kitchenfloor) and of course things kept going wrong where we least expected it. While curing our beautiful negative cast, it started to crumble to pieces. Dude, the shock of it all could have killed a lesser woman! Alikaht did what she could and saved most of it, before it desintigrated into dust. And found a really nice guy at Buhrman's (fan-frelling-tastic shop for all things artistic/make-up/modeling in North Hollywood. One tip, though: If you go, bury your credit card in your front-yard first!) who helped us save it by doing another cast we could then use to do another negative. Same guy offered to help us do the first foam-latex run (seriously scary shit, you need gram-scales and have to time by the seconds and it's all about being able to smell when the ammonium in the latex-base has evaporated enough to go on, yade, yade, yade). Anyhoo, the only day he could make was 4th of July from 12pm on. So we did grind our teeth, but said "Yeah, great!" because we really wanted someone who has done it before there during the first run. I had some stuff starting at 2pm and wasn't particularly thrilled to drive all the way out to the Valley during the heat of the day and in the thick of traffic, but what can you do. So I got there a bit early so I could set up the video gear. And then we waited. And waited. It got 12pm. Then 12:30pm. Then 1pm. Then 1:30pm. No call from the guy, no show, no nothing. By 2:30pm we decided he wouldn't come anymore (and even if he did, I had to leave for the other thing). So we hauled out of bed early and spend two and a half hours waiting and the guy didn't even have the decency to call that he couldn't make it! We resolved to give him a call and leave a message on his machine: "Dude! You better be dead! 'Cause, really, we ain't gonna except anything less for an excuse!"

Thankfully we didn't have his home-phone number. As it turned out on Monday, he's in hospital: Food poisoning! Poor guy. And one hell of an excuse. Geeez, sometimes I wonder if this project isn't really cursed!



Don't try This At Home Kids!

So on Saturday Alikhat and I get together again to do the latex run on our own. We start off by bitching about about the guy who didn't show up and still hasn't even called (at that point we are still unaware that he has fallen victim of the infamous Curse of the Scorpy-Mask). We watch the instruction video (we got a new copy, this one has not only picture, it also has sound at normal speed!), we read the instructions. Twice. Heh, that was a really dumb thing to do. We get out the stop-watch and the various measuring devices (for thsoe of you who have never lived or cooked in the US: They actually have custom-made devices to measure tabel-spoons [TBSP] and tea-spoons [TSP], they don't use the actual thing). We prep the kitchenmaster (kitchenaide?) (I take it, it's the Royce Royce of mixers) and then we get going. We stick most exactly to plan. We shake things when they are supposed to be shaken, pour exactly for 30 seconds and whatnot. We use a little less gelling agent, because it's pretty darn hot in the kitchen and we're doing it for the first time, so we don't want the stuff to set on us before we got it nicely in the cast! Alikhat starts pouring the stuff in the mixer and suddenly recoils, looking slightly cross-eyed. I stare at her.

"Are you OK?"

"Ugh, yeah...it's just...damn! The stench!"

"What..." and that second it hits me. A huge cloud of industrial strength amonium smell! I know it's used in smell-salts, the stuff that wakes up unconscious people. No idea how that works, but getting a full nasal assault of this magnitude can easily knock off your socks. I panicly stop breathing altogether and scramble for a window.

"Gawd! Why didn't they mention that in the video?!?!

Death By Kitchen-Floor

Alikhat is probably going to kill me for this, but it's too good a story to leave untold. First of all I didn't intend to write another blog-entry until I updated the Saturn-reports from Hell, but this weekend (when I was going to rewatch the vids to refresh my memory so I get it all right) shaped up slightly differently from my very best intentions. I blame it on the suction. You'll understand in a bit.

I have come to suspect that I am the female version of John Crichton (if for some odd reason you don't know who that is and you're still reading this: Hi! And check out Save Farscape). For one, I have plans. Lots of plans. I like making plans. But it's a relationship that is someone one-sided. It's not that my plans are bad. It's just that Mother Nature takes great pleasure in making little things not work the way they usually do, such that all my plans go South. More or less dramatically. But usually everything works out in the end. After overcoming huge obstacles that have absolutely no right to be there in the first place.

So here's the plan. Alikhat and I are working on a facial prostetic that will make me look like Scorpius (well, she is working on it, I am gawking and pointing a camera and try not to drool on her work). She finished the modeling of the mask onto a cast of my face last week (there are pix of the version before the final up at docu-dot, if you haven't seen it yet, check it out, her work is awesome! The final version had even more detail then what is currently up, although I hope to get a few shots up, soon). So we were going to do the negative cast Friday night and then have a first go at a latex cast on Saturday. Again, that was The Plan[tm]. Now, the negative cast is a really crucial step, because in the process the model gets destroyed. Anything goes wrong, an entire month of modeling is down the drain. Doing it a week later would have been better, because then another guy could have helped us, who had done this kinda stuff quite a lot and was very confident. But we had a video we watched and a fairly good idea of what we needed to do. So we did it. Sort of. The casting agent set a bit quicker than we expected while making the splash-coat, but we got the model covered and under the cast and I kept telling Alikhat that all will be good (which is easily said if it's not your month of work on the line!). By around 2am we were done and I got on my way home, determined to show back up by 2pm the next day so we could get on the latex-stuff.

The next morning the phone rings and Alikhat informs me that things weren't going as smoothly as we had hoped. First, the video of the latex-procedure turned out to be modern art, rather than an instruction video. It showed lots of bright blue bugs on a bright blue background. Or maybe it only showed a bright blue background, we never quite settled on which. So we only had the rather cryptic written directions. There was sound on the video, but it sounded a lot like whoever had made the video had a run-in with a rather upset Rygel...or maybe the sound was running at double speed or something. Not very helpful without the picture anyways. What was worse, was that it was raining. Which is the one condition under which one should not attempt to make latex-prostetics. Now, lemme explain to you why that is somewhat upsetting. We're living in bloody LA. This is the middle of June. It's not supposed to be bloody raining for at least another five month!!! Fine. Whatever. It turned out not to be all that important, because the latex-kit we had bought turned out to miss a vital component, without which, really, there was no making latex-prostetics. As Alikhat put it "Mother Nature's way of telling you: 'Forget it.'". So we decided to just go and pull out the positive from the negative (the entire thing had to sit for at least two hours and at 2am we hadn't really felt like waiting for it). So I hauled myself in the car and went to her place.

On some level, I felt it was probably a good thing. It would leave me more time to get everything done that needed doing, although it was a bit frustrating, because had we known the night before, we could have held back with the negative cast as well until we had the other person to help us. So I thought, well, an hour or so, hopefully all went well and we can look forward to doing the latex-part next weekend. Yeah, that was The Plan[tm]. So I get there, get the camera and the lights ready, Alikhat turns over the mold and the model doesn't come out. Ehem. So she start removing some of the Super Sculpty that's visible in the gap between positive and negative, trying to find a hold for her fingers. Nothing. The thing's simply stuck.

"Hmmm," I say, "is that supposed to happen?"

Alikhat glares at me.

"Nah, I didn't think it was...ehem".

We stare at the offending piece of art for an extended period of time, elaborating on why this could not possibly be happening and the throwing ideas around of how to address this impossible situation. We can't use a screw-driver to pry it out or the mold would break. We could attach a plaster-made handle to the back of the positive, which would allow is to pull, but that would take half an hour to make and at least three hours to dry. Finally we decide to drill "finger-holds" into the back of the positive, kinda like in a bowling ball. Alikhat gets out the drill, plugs it in, sets it on the spot and the drill goes "BRrrr..rr.r....r". We discuss for a while that it really shouldn't be doing that, because it's plugged in, but the bloody drill insists. After all else fails we consult the manual and it turns out the damn thing only runs on battery and those need to be recharged before using it. For three hours. I think that's when I first started to giggle hysterically.

So we watched a video and talked a while and lost patience after an hour and a half. As it turned out the drill had recharged enough to drill three finger and half a thumb-hole, though under protest. Alikhat puts the drill down, ushers her mom out of the kitchen (who looks like she's about to suffer a stroke after seeing the plaster-dust powdered mess we had turned her kitchen-table into), graps the positive and gives a first cautious tug. Nothing. She repositions herself and starts pulling much stronger. Nothing. She wedges one hand against the negative and pulls in full force on the positive. Little pulsing veins start popping up on her forhead together with beads of sweat, her fingers look like they're about to tear off. Nothing. She tries the other hand, with just as much luck. Even I give it a try, but all I manage is to almost cut open my elbow while using the sharp edge of the plaster for leverage. Where the frell is the Hulk when you need him?!

Alikhat kept trying for a bit longer (while I concentrated on picking up a few new swear-words) and we decide that the mask moved slightly, but only downward and not out and that if wanted to get this done we would need the grip after all, so we could apply force in a more even way. Half an hour later we had scoured the house for something that could be used as the basis for the plaster-grip and we ended up with some thick wire and a thin wooden plate. Alikhat took on the challenge of modeling a somewhat asthetically challenged grip on the back of the positive, using some of the left-over plaster (because it bonds very well to itself). With her hands totally covered in quickly setting plaster, she asked me to take the container with the remaining wet plaster and put it out of the kitchen. So I take the one and half by one foot container, try to squish through between a kitchen chair and the kitchen table and that's when Gravity struck. Actually Gravity is a myth. The truth is: Earth sucks! I don't tend to fall a lot, I would reckon I take a fall every five to six years on average. Well, discounting last year when I fell a few hundred times, but that was mainly because I took an Akido class and they told us to. But it just has been one of those years. A gravitational year. Just ask all those poor souls who came down with their airplanes this year. Anyhoo, seeing nothing underneath the container, I had totally forgotten about the drill, which was still lying on the table and still plucked into the wall, with the cable hanging low between the table and exactly the chair I had chosen to pass through. And as had to be expected, both my feet got entangled in the damn thing.

Now, I can't stress this enough: Kids, don't try this at home! It hurts. No really! I'm not entirely sure what went on in my head or what I was thinking, but it was most likely "Oh shit! I'm falling!". I can be a keen observer of the obvious. But I was also confronted with the fact that, if at all possible, I should miss the chair to my left, the kitchen table to my right, the kitchen counter-top ahead left and the shelf with all the kitchen-ware and pots and things to the right ahead, while not loosing grip of the container with the not yet quite set plaster, because Alikhat's mother would have suffered a stroke had I decided to remodel her kitchen that drastically. Oh, and I thought it might be a good idea to not split open my head either, because that would have been a bloody mess. Very literally. I can now claim with some confidence that I came down on my left knee first, then twisted slightly sideways and to the right, thus missing the chair, then twisted slightly backwards while further stopping my fall with my right hip, thus missing the table and finally absorbed the remaining kinetic energy with my right elbow as it scraped over the floor. And there I ended up. Lying on the floor. In an elegent S-shape. The plaster container still held high above my head and not a single drop of plaster on the ground. Or blood. Now That was a fall well done! And in case you wonder how I know so precisely just how I fell: It's the varying degrees of dmage my various body-parts have taken ;)

We went on to try to get some antibacterial solution on the scrape-wound, but the bottle had a child-proof top and we didn't have any children around. After some five rather frustrating minutes of trying to get the bottle open (and a lot of giggling, because really, there didn't seem to be anything not to go wrong) Alikhat eventually found another bottle and that one decided to cooperate. Thankfully the little stunt didn't cost us any time as we needed to wait for three hours for the plaster to set anyway, so no harm was done (although Alikhat refused to let me carry anything afterwards). So we went to dinner in the meantime and spent a fun-filled couple of hours imagining how Alikhat would take the terminally stuck model to the place that had sold us all the ingredients to plead with them to help her to get it out. We even had a story. We would blame it on the fumes of the mold-release agent. We would claim to have absolutely no clue how the things had gotten stuck together and where the really ugly grip on the back came from. One minute we were preparing to cast the mold, spraying the mold-release all over the model and the next thing we know, we're in the kitchen and the cast is stuck in the mold and there is this butt-ugly handle sticking out the back. Nope, sir! No idea what kind of imbicile could possibly have botched things THAT badly! Yup. We had it all covered. We had out story straight and we were going to stick by it (no pun intended)! We giggled a lot, and I'm afraid the underlying hysteria was clearly audible. The waiter looked at us rather disconcerted more than once.

It wasn't until 9:30pm that we finally worked up the courage to go and give the butt-ugly-handle[tm] a try. Alikhat took a deep breath, set one hand against the mold, took a secure grip of the butt-ugly-handle[tm] and started to tug with all her might. Nothing. The damn thing didn't move a millimeter! More swelling of veins, more pearling of sweat and more swear-words I had never heard before (although I recognized a lot more this time round). After a few minues of this, we're once again standing around the kitchen-table, staring at the offending piece of art, which, despite our best efforts, hasn't even tried to accomodate our wishes.

"OK, here's is what we'll do:" I say "We'll sit down on the floor, opposite each other, I'll be holding the mold, you'll be holding the butt-ugly-handle[tm], we'll put out feet against each other and pull in opposite directions as hard as we can!"

Alikhat stares at me, there's a distinct expression of "You're nuts." but also increased sings of desperation. Afer all, she's the one who will have to take this mess to the mold-experts.

"Should it suddenly come apart, the worst that would happen is that we fall over, but we'd still be holding the pieces!"

"OK, lets try that..."

So we head into the living room with the soft carpet, take place on the floor opposite each other and start pulling. Slowly first, then with increasing strength. Stronger and stronger we pull, groaning as we're going (Gawd! I don't even wanna imagine what her parents were thinking!). Muscles bulge, veins push through the skin, then suddenly I can feel the release! Mold and cast come apart as we both roll over backwards. We collect ourselves and turn around the mold to look just where the heck the thing could have been stuck, but we find nothing. The mold is a perfect copy of the model, perfect down to every little wrinkle and skin-pore! Absolutely beautiful and astonishing! And in all that detail is the explanation: A huge surface that created enough contact-strength to hold both parts together against everything but the most brutal application of force.

It took us around 9 hours to get that baby out. 9 hours, nine month, hell we had to pull instead of push, but dammit! It was a labor of love! I'm telling you: Scorpy IS a difficult character, no kidding there. But at that point, like most people after a particular difficult birthing, we were just euphoric about the fact that the most critical part of the casting process had worked out. Everything downstream from here we can try multiple times, if something goes wrong: Try again. But for this, we only had one try. So, yeah, just another JC-plan. Nothing worked quite the way it should, we spent all day battling problems that shouldn't even have been an issue and in the end it all turned out wonderfully! So next week we'll get going on the foam-latex and I will hopefully finally get to see what I actually look like with the prosthetics on!


Oh, and I'll be watching that kitchen-floor closely. I don't forget cowardly attacks from the blind-side that easily. I got my eye on you buddy!


Love and Peace and Gentle Kitchen-Floors!


Tiriel

Pigeons. Now there's an enigmatic bird. Or not. In the very least they are very puzzling birds. They do all kinds of crazy things, like trying to woo a mate, in the middle of the road, while an 18-wheeler is thundering in their direction. I mean, even if the wooing works, the only thing that's gonna happen is SPASH!! Two dead pigeons. Generally pigeons deserve all the bad reputation rabbits get. And then some. Mainly because rabbits never swoop down on you and then drop something on your new jacket.
But I'm starting to think it might be a big city kinda effect. Maybe it's the air-pollution or something. When I tell people what the pigeons in my neighbourhood are up to, they usually just stare at me and then start to giggle uncontrollably. Like there is this traffic-light that leads onto the Freeway feeder. I have to stop there every morning. I really don't know what it is with pigeons and traffic-lights, maybe it's really the red light, but they always seem to be getting it on when I get there. I can't really tell if it's always the same ones or if they take turns, but they're always at it.
I know what you're thinking "Yeah, yeah, whatEVER! They're pigeons! Give them a break! Just look the other way if you don't like it!" and usually I would agree, but a bunch of them have adotped the red-light as their, well, pigeon hole! It's really disturbing, particularly at that time of the day. Here I am, not quite awake yet and the first thing my weary, dry and sleepy eyes get assaulted with is early morning pigeon porn with a red-lit background! Then again, maybe I should be happy that I only see the sillouettes and not the entire show. I just don't know, I considered calling 911 for the fraction of a second, but I somehow doubt that they will share my assessment of degree of emergency represented by this situation. I mean, it's not as if we are particularly short on pigeons! You let them breed like that and hell knows what's gonna happen next!

But maybe it's just me. I might just be particularly senstive against wrong-doings by pigeons. I had this pigeon-stalker for almost two years. I called him The Pigeon From Hell (OK, gimme a break here, alright?! I will not be ridiculed for my name-giving abilities by a people who named a big-ass, hugely impressive mountain range "Rocky" Mountains!). He'd be sitting on the powerline ouside my bedroom window at 4:30am, cooing his head off! Those suckers are loud! I kid you not! Particularly if you want to sleep, which at 4:30am on a Sunday morning is a not too surprising thing to want to do. He'd be sitting there cooing his head off all bloody summer long! I mean, fine, they're dumb birds, but puh-leeease! How dumb do you have to be to keep coming back to coo in the same place day after day, if you're obviously not getting any there! And then do it again the next year! That's just plain stupid.
Anyways, so I decided that he wasn't actually sitting there to get some (like all the other pigeons, who were out there actually doing it), no, he was there to annoy me. Test how serious I actually am about being a pacifist or something like that. A karmic undercover pigeon. I first suspected it when I went to a friend's place, over in the valley, and we were sitting on her patio and talking when I suddenly realized the damn cooing was still there! I couldn't see the sucker, but I could hear him alright! Back then I tried to calm myself that it was all just a coincidence and that there are so many pigeons out there, it just had to have another one. I'm quite reasonable at explaining those things away. Until I took a friend of mine to Joshua Tree. I mean, we were like out in the middle of the frelling desert! It was 116F in the shade, except there was no shade. And there he was. Cooing his frelling head off. Musta hitched a ride on the top of my car or something. I mean, seriously! What's a frelling pigeon doing in the middle of the frelling desert?!?! Cooing for mates?! I think not! And I have witnesses! My friend can vouch that it really happened! That trip must have been pretty exhausting for the Pigeon From Hell, he was gone for almost two days and I had already started to hope that maybe he had met a desert beauty and decided to stay, but he was back. 4:30am on a vacation day. I actually considered including pigeon into my vegetarian diet. Kind of "eating in self-defense is permissible".
Well, they changed the powerlines in front of my apartment and replaced them with thicker one. I saw the Pigeon From Hell fall off a couple of times and then he didn't come back. Those birds have all the grace of a red brick when they loose grip. But of course, in contrast to the brick, they can fly, which helps tremendously, I would think. Thankfully I'm not in the habit of falling off powerlines, so I don't know this first-hand.

Anyhoo, I think you probably heard more about pigeons than you ever wanted to and this is getting long (which means my computer should crash any minute now and take all I typed into Electronic Nirvana).
I might be talking about squirrels next time. I work on Campus, where they are large enough to take your lunch if you don't hand it over voluntarily.

Love and Peace and Screw The Pigeons :D

Tiriel

So, there! My very first blog entry and I'm already suffering writer's block.
Shuggs.
Fine, I admit it, I'm only making this entry so I can then go and edit the layout of my blog.
There. That's a good explanation for a pathetic beginning. Ehem.
Uhm, well, I'll be off to play with the colours then. But I'll be back later to tell y'all about the weird guy who drove in front of me on the way into work and I use the term "drove" in the loosest possible interpretation. Oh, and the pigeons. For some odd reason people like my pigeon stories. Damn, I hope no pigeons read this.

Love and Peace and Pigeon Porn.

Tiriel
PS: Rats! Where are the emoticons on these things! How am I supposed to work properly without a single bouncy?!