The Catpocalypse

My sister Jeanne (and there's still question in my mind about how to properly pronounce her name... after 46 years) took these pictures.

Meydl and Andrew Bellware.

Meydl and Andrew Bellware getting more pettings (Meydl, not Drew).

Pushkin being petted so. He can't keep his eyes open.

Little Orange Freak Machine

Jean took these pictures of the little orange freak machine.

Meydl, since her first day here, has decided her favorite place to sleep is on my dad's jacket. Here she is on my dad's jacket, using his cap (United Flying Octogenarians, if you have to know) as her pillow.

Normal cat.

Freak machine.

That pretty much covers it.

Serious Cat

The cats always look so dang serious when they're photographed. Pushkin, in particular, looks vastly more imperious when photographed than he really is.

Here he is atop his favorite chair.

My sister took this brilliantly composed picture of Meydl and my dad. Meydl has this thing where she has to walk all over my dad's Sudoku, swatting him in the face with her tail.

The cats essentially have free reign to do whatever they want. My parents will put up with anything. Even when my dad says "These cats have got to go." Nobody pays attention. Especially the cats.

The purpose of technology

... whether it's iPhones or the Internet itself, seems to be for one purpose: the posting of pictures of cats.

Here is Meydl earlier in the day sleeping on my dad's chair.

Well, truthfully I woke her up in order to take her picture. I don't have much truck with being mean to animals but I will admit that I do love to wake up cats! They have such grumpy looks on their faces when you wake them! Plus, it's not like they have to work the next day or anything. They just go back to sleep. I mean really, would anyone notice if a cat slept in late?

And then Pushkin later in the day getting ready to sleep on my dad's chair.

Pushkin Sick

Pushkin hasn't been feeling well. Unfortunately the drugs he was on didn't do that much. Fortunately he feels better than he was a couple months ago. My parents describe him as "depressed", which is actually a pretty good, albeit anthropomorphic, way of describing him.

Luckily he's eating well and actually gained some weight -- he's always weighed a slender 7.5 lbs and went down to 6.5 lbs. But now he's up to just a bit over 7.

Yet still he seems down.

So we took him to the vet again today and $139 later got him some analgesics which might help him if arthritis is his problem. But the vet isn't sure. She thinks he might be in the very early stages of having liver issues but that would be very early stages. In short, nobody really knows.

So we'll give him drugs for a couple weeks and see how that goes. We're done trying to give him pills, that just doesn't work. So his new drugs are a thing we push into his mouth ("under his tongue" - ha!) with a syringe and some stuff we put on his food (which means Meydl will inevitably have some too.)

Here he is in the sun. And then he's looking very strange due to the fisheye quality of the iPhone's camera. And lastly he's creeping up on the little orange freak machine.

Chatte d'or

Off my back about French grammar. I don't gender nouns. I barely speak English and my foreign language in high school was Chinese. Of which I basically remember nothing.

In any case this is the soft and fuzzy little Meydl. My sister took this picture.

Meydlcat

Meydl looks a lot bigger in photographs than she really is. But she's about this fuzzy. Today is my-sister-Jean-takes-pictures-of-cats day. Apparently.

I suspect that Jean brought catnip with her from Bedford.

*****

Maduka has about 15 minutes of Day 2 cut.

Worst Movie Director Ever

I still haven't seen Avatar. I finally saw the movie Pandorum. Oh, it was just so close to being good. Funny thing is, it had one of the problems that a lot of our movies have -- being too complicated. It could have used a simplification and clarity pass before shooting.

The other big issue with it is that it felt, to me at least, that the second act didn't really get started until the "team" was put together (if you haven't seen it, that's not really a spoiler, but the next thing I have to say is a spoiler.) And that doesn't happen for about 45 minutes into the picture. It should have happened about 25 pages earlier.

The movie didn't get to a point where things were even worse well either. Indeed, I just now while writing this figured out what happened which makes the protagonists' situation even worse and it too comes way too late.

I'm a bit worried that there are two act 2 breaks in Day 2. I think that can be cleared up by having "Laura" take "Neil" back up to the street with her when she goes looking and finds the Alpha. Neil has to get away from her, of course, so he can make his dramatic re-entrance when... the team is all there.

MetroAmp. They make kits and Marshall JTM45 replicas. You can get a kit for under a thousand dollars. Or for $2500 they'll build you a replica.

Here's a picture of Maydl playing with Chien. My sister Jean took the picture.

Oh. And here is a woodland creature with a cracker.

Catastrophe

Maydle (Meydl, Maydl?) and stapler.

A triumvirate of animals: Chien, Pushkin, Maydl.

Pushkin with one of his beautiful closeups.

Dad and Maydl (taken my my sister Jean).

Guilt

Script Secrets has your screenwriting tip of the day. Even if you hate writing screenplays as much as I do.

TeuxDeux is a web thingy. OK, I'll admit it. I have no idea what it does. I don't actually do it. I don't actually get work done either. I take naps.

I don't like the first four scenes of Day 2. They must become vastly better. Everything else, though, I'm happy with.

We saw three actors today. We are experiencing a surfeit of talent. It's actually hard because they're all so good.

Apparently somebody pished on the cable box in my parent's bedroom. Current consensus is that the guilty party is small, cute, and orange.

Gig Bags and Pussycats

This gig bag from Sadowsky's Guitars looks pretty cool. But I'm afraid it doesn't have shoulder straps -- and that's a deal-killer.

I have a list of script notes to apply to the Day 2 screenplay. I should have gotten on them today. But instead I went to the vet with a sick little Maydl. The vet spelled her name "Meydl". Oy vey. Anyway, she has pinkeye and an upper respiratory infection and, egads, fleas. So we got drugs for Maydl, and flea medicine (for both cats).

Protec also makes a nice seeming gig bag. Although I'd really like a big ol' square gig bag to hold lots o'stuff.

We put a notice on Actor's Access for a couple roles in Day 2. We're starting to get the pile o' submissions one gets for that. Remember, we're non-SAG, no pay. Some nudity.

I'm convinced that the GH-1 can take adequate still photographs. But I'll be damned if I really have a handle on how. Or at least how consistently. I keep setting it sort of randomly and sometimes it works out. These pictures are with my Canon S.S.C. 50mm f1.4 lens. To a still photographer that's the equivalent of a 100mm, but in my world (motion picture) that's the equivalent of an 80mm lens. At least, that's what I understand. Just look at the pretty bokeh blur of objects in the background.

There's also the InCase Slimbag for electric guitars. It's made to hold your laptop too, which I find amusing. I can't quite see how the pocket under the neck works, it seems like it might be kinda large, which is also cool.

Oh boy, Pushkin just sneezed. I hope he isn't getting Maydl's sinus problem.

And of course the $170 Reunion Blues Continental.

Phooey. The gamma between Photoshop (where I brightened up the midrange and sank the blacks in these two pictures) and Windows is just way off. Meh. That's just annoying. I'm going to upgrade our dual-quad-core Mac to Snow Leopard just because it supposedly fixes the gamma randomness from application to application.

The InCase Slimbag would seem to be the winner for me but they aren't made anymore. Of course.

The new cat

is sweet, adorable, and a complete pain in the ass. Keeping her off this keyboard as I type requires a level of discipline which I don't seem to have. If any l;kam;lkjihu cat like typing is detected, don't blame me.

The little fuzzy-butt also has this whole "Hey, did you know I'm nocturnal? Hey -- are you guys nocturnal? Because I'm nocturnal. Yeah, that means it's time to run around. Hey -- why are you guys going to bed, don't you want to pet me? Hey -- you look funny when you're asleep. I think I'm going to sit on your face!" thing going on. And, unfortunately, she has a cold and sneezes.

Pushkin isn't super happy. He sits in a protected (and usually high) position in my parents' grand livingroom and will hiss and growl at Maydel (who has had her name changed to "Maydel" or "Meydl" or something... apparently) when she gets too close. She's apparently too dumb to understand and just trots around with her tail in the air.

Here she is as sweet, alien demon from another dimention, and fierceome (and meow-y).

Pushkin in medium and closeups. I'm using the 50mm f1.4 lens on the Panasonic Lumix GH1. Who knows what color temperature the camera decided on? And exposure is still a matter of me staring quizzically at the histogram display on the camera.
*****
We put out an ad on Actor's Access because we have at least two movies to cast and we want to see some sort of pool of people to talk to.

Kitty At Home

Little kitty Madel arrived in Princeton. Word on the street is that she and Pushkin haven't actually met, he might be waiting out my sister's dog (I just made a typo where I spelled it "god" -- ultimately that might make more sense) who is big and fuzzy but of whom Pushkin is not usually afraid.

We, of course, want the cats to be great pals. They probably will and that's why we're keeping them in separate rooms 'till they're used to one another.

Kitty On Her Way

I bet she can't wait 'till she's out of this cat carrier. It's almost a 4 hour drive.