Wow... now I feel boring

Cody's life being so busy and comparatively exciting, all of a sudden the little bit of news I wanted to talk about is very mundane. Oh well, here goes nothin'.

Branden put in a solid week of 10-12 hour days last week with not nearly enough sleep- or fun-time. Unpredictably, he's sick today, miserably at home playing miserable video games with a pair of miserable cats (right?). Excitingly, The Big One has committed to ThinIdentity and they're shipping out something like 3,000 units for their Proof-of-Concept (initial trial, essentially). Once the PoC is complete they'll be needing something like 50,000 units... yay! ThinIdentity is anticipating this influx of cash and is moving into a bigger office with AIR CONDITIONING so that the programmers no longer have to melt. Happily, it is just as conveniently located as the current office--right off 16th St in Denver!

I got up at 7 yesterday and went to work out at the Rec Center--very good workout, it always makes me feel so good. I've made a New Month's Resolution to work out daily, so today I got up at 7 to go work out again, but apparently they don't open till 8 on weekends! Booo! So I went home and did a Wii Fit yoga workout instead. Not quite as good, but... getting there.

I've also made a New Month's Resolution to floss, brush, and Act every day, and that's been going well. It's not so bad if you just do it.

Anyway, that's all I got! Love you guys!

Another day in the life of a Fool . . .

Allright, let me walk you through my yesterday . . .

5:30am-The alarm goes off and the morning dance begins. I had stayed up late reading, and quickly calculate the four hours of sleep. Pull myself into my "Kutting-Weight" suit (sort of a neoprene surfing-style getup), pull on the sweat-stained shorts & shirt . . . find the keys & out the door.

Is it overcast today? . . . No, that's just haze from the fire . . .

How is it 6 am, and traffic on the Highway is averaging 80 mph? That'll wake you up in a hurry!

15 minute drive to Sherman Oaks, followed by an hour of sweating. Half-way through bootcamp, the sun has popped over the horizon and the cooking begins.

7:30-Drive home from Bootcamp. This trip can take between 20 and 40 minutes, but today, it takes almost an hour. Stop-and-go on HWY 134. Finally get to the intersection of the 5 and see the reason . . . a pretty nasty 2-car pile-up. In comparison, my morning is looking all right.

Get home, drink my 3rd and 4th bottles of water of the day (we keep them refilled and in the fridge), get the coffee going, and jump in the shower. Rinse the super-suit, rinse the man-suit, and back to the kitchen. Grab a big bowl of Granola, a redundantly hot cup of coffee, and hit the office.

Two new emails about auditions . . . nothing major-student films-put them in the audition book.

Check the on-line audition submissions, LAcasting.com, and Actorsaccess.com . . . no new postings . . . there are rarely auditions posted this time of the morning.

Catch-up on the news, check-in with facebook, print up some resume's, staple some headsots. Print up my Thank-you card for Monday's audition at Kathy Knowle's Casting.

Bundle up the couple of changes of clothes I'll need for the day.

9:20am-The drive to Groundlings. I like to ride my bike to class when I can, but on days like today, when there's multiple things to do, I'll drive. It's about eight miles away, and takes at least 30 minutes either driving or biking.

Class is great. It's a morning class, and that energy is pervasive, but we're doing fun things. During our 15 min. break, I consult my friend Iphone for new news. None.

1:30-Out of class and into the car. Back to Kathy Knowles casting. It's a sauna outside . . . the walk from class to my car (one block) just about kills me. I had just made the trip to Kathy Knowles on Monday, and it's a small relief to know just where I'm going, and where I'm going to park. It's about 15 miles away, which translates into 30-60 minutes, because I have to take the 10. Today, it takes 45, and the closer I get to Santa Monica and the coast, the cooler the air gets. Ahh. I'm happy with my choice to drive shirtless.

On the drive, I try to prep for the audition. All I know is that it's for AT&T. I've learned quickly how important it is to get to these calls with plenty of time, because I often don't get a chance to look at the sides until I'm there. The only prep I've done is to peruse AT&T's advertising to try and milk any little details that will help me out. I've got a couple that I feel good about.

2:15-Head into the office and sign-in. This includes logging in to "Casting Frontier" with my super-special barcode (no headshots needed!), and snapping a picture with their computer camera. Often times, there will be a "session runner" who takes care of all this, but I've been noticing that more and more offices are just leaving that up to the actor.

After signing in and grabbing a copy of the sides, I repair to the washroom to give myself a once-over. Damn I look good.

The sides look good too. Lots of copy (lines) for a commercial, and we get to read it a few different ways-different characters. That's not always the case, so it's fun when it happens. My name is called, and I head into the studio.

Commercial audition studios are generally the same. There's a Mark where you, the actor, stand, a small camera on a tripod connected to a monitor and a laptop. The lines are generally written out for you on a large piece of paper so that you don't have to hold you sides the whole time. When the Casting Director is ready, you give your Slate (your name, and sometimes your agency), sometimes your profiles (like a mug shot), and then you often times get a chance to run it once or twice with the CD while the camera is paused.

I audition. I'm awesome.

When I'm done, I take a moment to thank the CD, and to drop off a Thank-You card for my audition on Monday. The more I stick my mug in front of these folks, the more I'll get to know them. And Them me.

3:00 Back in the car. Back to Hollywood. I decide to take the diagonal route of Santa Monica Street to get back to where I need to be. I think that it'll be less annoying than the 10 at this time of day. I'm totally wriong. It's a nightmare. I've got about 90 minutes before my next audition. It takes me about 70 minutes to get there: 15 miles. On the way, I pass Beverly Hills.

4:30-First time at this casting office, and it took me a little while to figure out where to park. I ended up scoring a metered spot directly across the street. Awesome. I even remembered to fill the meter! 25 cents for 15 Minutes. I give it half an hour.

I enter the building and head downstairs. It's a madhouse. Turns out this is a father-and-son spot, so there are kids everywhere. Perhaps more terrifying that the kids . . . the mothers. Now, I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure that for every 5-7 year old boy there to audition, there were 2-3 younger siblings. I sign in. I prep my barcode. No Headshots needed.

They're running late. I go upstairs to put more money in the meter. I call my next appointment to let them know I'm running late. I descend into the pit once more.

When it's my turn, there's some confusion as to who my son is. I meet this 5-year old charmer just moments before I'm tossing him around like some sort of teddy bear. I don't generally make it a habit of meeting kids and then manhandling them, but after this experience, I just might.

Saw a few dudes from the last audition. They had just had the same awesome driving experience that I had. I had a vision of the four of us sitting in shoddy clothes in a shoddy OTB bar with a race ticket in one hand-eyes glued to the horse race on the old TV, "Come On! If I keep putting money down, I'm bound to win One of these Days!!"

I walk out of this audition thinking I could have done it differently . . . and better. Oh well.

5:20-Back in the car. The next call, for a graduate Thesis Film is only a mile away. I could have walked, but I was running late already, and didn't know how long it would be, and I had to change anyway. . . so I drove. Took me twenty minutes. Ug.

I had downloaded the sides for this audition a few days before, and had been "working them". The character was a redneck "peckerwood". On this one, I actually had a chance to read the script, and understand how my character fit in to the story . . . a rare luxury at this stage of the game! Above and beyond that, I liked the script, and I'd been to this casting office a few times now, and I felt comfortable with my audition clothes. It was a good feeling.

And so I read for the camera. I had to adjust a few of the moment's that I had prepared, because the pace of the Reader (off-camera, delivering the other lines in the scenes) was different from what I had prepared, but I felt pretty good about what I did. There were a few other guys there reading for the same part, and everybody looked . . . well, like "peckerwoods". I feel good about what I left on tape in that room.

6pm-back in the car. Back home. Traffic in Hollywood is not as bad as it could be. Takes me about 25 minutes to get home. Since the granola, I forgot to eat all day. Damn.

6:30-plate full of sandwiches, and I'm back in the office. Over the past 12 hours, the on-line submission boards have filled up. I'm going through one-by-one choosing which to audition for. I submit to anywhere between 5-20 projects per day . . . and get called by a fair percentage of them.

I print up my Thank-You cards for my commercial auditions today. I map out my day tomorrow-nothing scheduled . . . a blessing or a curse? We make a delicious dinner, and tune into the news. . .

Yeah, it's long, and being in the car for a significant part of the day is a drag, but I love days like this. The mixture of the art and the business. . . after a couple of years of days like this, who knows . . . I might book a job!

Love You All.

A Thousand Degrees in the Shade!!

Los Angeles is Burning.

If you've tuned into national news recently, you've no doubt heard of the "Station Fire" burning just outside of LA. It's amazing . . . This mushroom cloud has been looming over the city for about a week, and it sounds like it's going to keep burning for a couple more weeks! We're not in any danger, other than breathing, which apparently is dangerous. The further east you travel, the more you can taste the smoke, and this morning, my car was sprinkled with white ash. I'd like to reiterate that we're not in any danger, it's the size of the fire, not the proximity that's so amazing.

Complicating the fire is the extreme heat we've been dealing with. It's been in the hundreds for a few days now, which is difficult to deal with. We've got several fans going pretty much 24/7 at strategic spots throughout our apartment. Pretty much, from midnight to about noon, it's cool in here, but as the afternoon and evening progress, our place becomes a sauna. Though it's not pleasant, we've determined to put up with it for now (should break soon), and take more drastic precautionary measures-swamp cooler/whatever!-next summer!

Enough whining!

We had a nice weekend with the Lane Ladies in town. We spent a day at the beach, a sunset at the Griffith Park Observatory (not the Mt. Wilson Observatory, currently in jeopardy of burning down), and a lot of time shopping. I was able to escape a couple of times for auditions-couple of student film/independent shorts-which was a nice break from the . . . shopping. Ug. What with the heat and all, we generally had a siesta-a-day program . . . sleeping through the hottest part of the afternoon.

This is my final week of bootcamp, and I'm planning on using it to roll into a self-motivational workout plan starting next week. I've also started my second week of my second session at the Groundlings, which has been great so far. This week's assignment was to find a magazine that I wouldn't normally buy and base a character off of it. I found a sweet Karate Magazine with Bruce Lee on the cover. Tomorrow it's bootcamp morning, Groundlings class, Alka-Seltzer commercial audition, indy film audition, and who knows what the evening will bring!

Here's a couple of "home projects" we've done recently . . . the chairs we found on the street. We've thoroughly cleaned them, and T is covering them in a spiffy black material. The floating shelves I made out of a hollow-core door (just the top and bottom shelf-the middle one is from Ikea). You can't really tell from the picture, but they're cut on an angle, so they taper towards the wall. They still need to be stained or painted, but they seem to be working! Now, will they be earthquake-proof?

Hope everyone is doing well! Love to all!

Life and more life! Not as awesome as Cody, but...

Some possible exciting MS news: Scientists reversed MS in mice. Here and here. Sounds like research is still years away from even trying this on humans, and it says it's only effective while MS is in its earliest stages, but you never know what the future may bring...

Also, more MS/health news.
I've had 7 infusions so far, 5 more to go (the next is on September 8) before going off Tysabri in order to ensure that PML does not infest my brainmeats and turn me into a superhero with x-ray vision. I spoke with Dr. Vollmer about this exciting (?) new transition this past Monday the 24th of August. For the last 3 months of the treatment, I'm going to be overlapping Tysabri and Copaxone in order to avoid a "rebound" effect from going off of Tysabri. In addition, the good Doctor said that there is no problem with going off Tysabri and then going back on it at some point later in life; meaning, the body doesn't build up a resistance to it. Also, the negative effect that I felt from Copaxone is apparently part of how the drug works, and is one of the reasons some people go off of it; the injection sites were so itchy, for me, that I would unconsciously itch deep bruises into my legs and arms. It is an allergic reaction that is part of its effectiveness. I don't know; maybe I can take benedryl concurrently with my injection to lower the effects, or maybe I'm doomed! Doomed to a life of unending itchyness!

By the way, don't try to read patient reviews of MS medication. It makes me want to move into a cave and just let the disease take me because so many people have had such bad reactions... Anyway.

So, everything's going great in our new apartment. It's close enough to being "complete" that we've gotten pretty behind on putting in the finishing touches--hanging pictures, putting the last few things away, etc. Every week we make plans to finish it up but every week something comes up. It doesn't help that the only day off we have together is Sunday. But Eventually, We Will Prevail.

Noah, I'm starting to use the shampoo that you and Cici got me for my birthday tomorrow (I wanted to finish the stuff I was using before switching) and I'll keep you updated on how awesome it is. Though the bottles are so small I may actually end up saving them for travel shampoos. =)

In other news, everything's going well with Branden's job. It's demanded some late nights from him recently, but it's the good kind of working late. He's going to be getting a promotion/raise after they complete the project they're on, so that's exciting.

Branden's brothers are safely in Longmont. Their new apartment is very cute, sort of like a mini-Horizons. The apartment is very small but nicely designed, with in-unit washer dryer and on-site workout facilities, very exciting. I'm so happy those guys are on their feet again and doing well.

Branden and I went up to Placerville, CA a few weekends ago to visit his grandparents. His grandpa is in bad shape; they're pretty sure he has Parkinson's though he doesn't have the classic Parkinson's symptoms. He's not able to walk anymore (really, not able to move at all without assistance), so he stays in his hospital bed all day, except when the nurses come to bathe him. He's pretty demented as well. Branden's grandma spends all day in the house, trying to feed him and make sure he's comfortable. Her life is very focused now, and she doesn't have anything to say that doesn't have to do with Grandpa and his illness, so being there was very hard for me. I only went into Grandpa's room once, but I couldn't stand to see the state he was in, so I left after just a few seconds. It was really sad, more than anything else, so it was probably a good thing that Grandma shooed us out of the house more of the time than we were in it, to go to Lake Tahoe and Sacramento. Those parts were fun.

Work's going fine, nothing really to report there. Squish and Tayler are now allowed out of the house on their own; Squish likes going out at all times of day but Tayler only wants to go out after dark. Last Saturday, Squish killed a bunny on our balcony--a baby bunny, about the size of a hamburger. I heard a weird thump and went to open the door, and there was Squish and the bunny, who was on its side kicking itself around in a circle. We think Squish must have broken its back because we didn't see any blood. It died pretty fast and we cleaned it up; it was with a heavy heart that I named Squish "mighty hunter" and gave him an admonishment to only kill things he wanted to eat. I don't think he got it.

Pretty much every night since then I've had to go out and collect Squish at about 10pm because I hear him yodeling, which is the sound he makes when he's establishing his territory to another cat or similarly large animal that he hesitates to attack outright. Every time I've gone out to get him, he seems pretty thankful that I was able to remove him from the situation without hurting his pride. Silly cat. If he doesn't want to fight, he should be less territorial.

My workout routine has been sporadic at best because I seem to have misplaced my iPod. I don't like working out without it =(

Anyway, that's about all I have to say for now. I love you guys! Hope everything's awesome forever!

Taking this Caveman thing a bit too far . . .

Well, this past Monday was a doosie . . . not as busy as it was supposed to be, but crazy none the less! After getting just a few hours of sleep, I woke up at 2am for a 2:45 make-up call for this "viral video shoot". Two and a half hours in the make-up room, a pot of coffee, and an hour drive later, I found myself in the desert-the crew was hustling to get set up for a sunrise shoot.

The spot was about a caveman who was frustrated by technology (it's for a French Product called "The Hubster"), so he hauls his TV, clock radio, picture frames, and Internet router out into no man's land, and smashes them all with a bone. What a blast. I found myself mostly naked in primitive glory monkeying around and crushing things with the thigh bone of (I'm assuming) a cow. I've always had a sort of daydream/fantasy about being able to smash up a store with a baseball bat . . . there is something so satisfying about wrecking havoc . . . and it was nice to be able to sort of play out that fantasy in the desert.

The shoot went much longer than I anticipated, so I ended up missing another audition (for a student film, no big whoop), and also my first day of the new session at Groundlings. I hate missing class, but this was the first one I've missed out of three sessions. Later in the afternoon, I auditioned for Duraflame, and had a really good audition. This commercial spot felt a lot like the Comcast spot I did last year . . . just a slightly older version. We'll see.

After that, it was up to NYFA (New York Film Academy) for another student film audition, then off to an evening bootcamp.

Yesterday, we spent time getting the house ready for weekend guests . . . still so much to be done! Nothing too pressing, just using this weekend visit from the Lane Ladies as an excuse to finish projects that we seem to talk about, but never quite get around to doing. I got a call from my agent for a same-day audition for Sprint, and hustled out in the early afternoon . . . sounded like fun . . . supposed to dress "like flight of the Conchords" and bring my guitar. It wasn't until I got to the casting office that I realized that I was expected to play and sing . . . "Take Me On" by the Ah-ha's. This was not a good experience. Painful for all involved. Oh well.

Last night, we drove down to Anaheim for a screening of a film I was on in Minneapolis. "Mysterious Ways" was accepted into the "Indiefest" movie festival. Though turnout was very small, and the quality in the theatre was not great, it was fun nonetheless. This marks the third time I've seen my work on a big screen, and though I was nauseous, I haven't left the theatre in tears yet. More, more, more!

Boot camp is over this morning, and it's off to the Groundlings. Will there be laughs today? I guarantee it!

Love

And, oh yeah.....

We also saw "Julie & Julia"on Sunday.
We enjoyed it alot. Very easy to watch...
kind of a break from the usual angst.
Probably be a just fine rental also.
I would love to be able to find the old
J.C. cooking classes that were on TV.
Might have to explore that a bit.

Then on to "Inglorious Basterds". PHEW.
Tarantino all the way and really good, we
thought.

Talk atchyez later Carpe Diem!!!

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