birthday wrap-up.

it was this guy's birthday on the 22nd. though our plans to ride space mountain and eat frozen chocolate covered bananas were foiled by rain, we had a pretty good time going out to breakfast and to geek out at the griffith observatory.

the new headshot is only incidental to the occasion, but it was a labor of love. it turns out the process is harder than i thought, but so long as the subject is a patient husband, it's pretty fun. and when c. went to reproductions to have the copies made, they put me in the database as the photographer of record. i actually blushed.

more teachers' dirty looks.

we are back. at school. and magically, this quarter is shaping up to be as difficult as the last one was restful. (not that it was all that restful. just, on the balance, so much better than the year before it.) i'm a research assistant this quarter, plus there's this scary test all the first years have to take, an oral exam over the material covered so far in our seminars. if you pass, you get to keep going. if you don't, you don't. eep.

i'm not truly worried (although not completely not worried, either), but rather apprehensive about the amount of labor the prep for this exam will take. weekly study sessions. constant review. it's formidable enough that i dropped my language class. i can take it later, and one less stressor this quarter is a good thing.

also, it's sixty-eight degrees outside.

13:51:06 of 2008

As of the writing of the title, that is how much of the New Year I have seen. Which is to say all of it. I just got home from what is affectionately termed the "Suicide Double."

The Double, in food service speak, is when you do one shift immediately followed by another. Same company, different company, it doesn't matter. If you have to work two shifts in one day, it's a Double. The "Suicide" Double is much the same but the first shift goes into the wee hours, let's say 2:30am, and the next shift starts very soon after, let's say 4am in Pasadena. The reason it is thusly named is either because you have to have some kind of death wish to do it, or by the middle of the second shift you want something heavy to fall from the sky and strike you dead, or it will simply kill you.

I was bartending a very laid back but expensive party in an artist's house at the foot of the Hollyw00d sign (Ichir0 could get it from center field) when the clock struck 0:00. Perhaps tellingly this arty crowd counted down by iPh0ne. Everyone was very kind, and several of them asked me how I was doing having to work on New Year's Eve and all. With the part still going I left at 2:30 so I could get to my next gig at the R0se B0wl parade. This was a private affair on the second and third floor decks of an investment banking firm, overlooking the parade route. I was also bartending this job, but was much less popular. Go figure that few of these bankers wanted vodka at 7am.

The reason – the only reason – to go through this little brand of hell is that the money is out-freaking-standing. Add to that the very generous tip I was given at the artist's house and I made more money in the last 27 hours then I have made on a weekly basis for quite some time. I only faded once, at about 7:30 or 8:00am, when I realized that most of my time in Pasadena would be spent watching 25% of the parade. By that I don't mean I could only watch a quarter of the parade's length. I saw the entire thing end to end, but from my vantage point I could only see 1/4 of what was going on at any given time. When a marching band went by, and boy did they, I could only see 12 or 13 people for every 50 who walked past. I saw some very interesting pieces of floats, too.

I could go on – hell, I probably won't even remember that I wrote this come tomorrow morning – but I find I must go into the next room and collapse into a jelly-like heap. Time: 14:11:31. So far, what a swell party it's been.