What a week

Oh, I’m not complaining—I chose to do this stuff and there are those that do so, so much more than me. I’m a light-weight.

Let me try to recap what went on this week:

Monday: This was an easy day. I just had to go to my step-dad’s 85 birthday lunch and then come home to prepare for Tuesday. The lunch was nice—my family is awesome. The prep was easy; it gets easier every time. So I spent the rest of the day tweaking the CSS and layout of MacMerc.com until I ended up with something that looked pretty impressive.

Tuesday: This day was booked off as a Lab with Leo day. I only do 2 segments, which I still find taxing to prepare—like I said “me = lightweight.” But, with only 2 segments, I’m done once we break for lunch. I gotta say, though, it is a pleasure just to hang out at the studio…so that’s what I did. Not because I’m a Leo fanboy—Leo is busy doing the show, you can watch him on the monitor in the green room, but he doesn’t have a lot of time to chit chat. No, I enjoy being there because the cast, crew and staff of Greedy Productions are some of the coolest people you could meet. (Leo’s nice too, don’t get me wrong)

While I was actually on the set, I was informed by one of the Lab fans in the Stickam chat that my site was down—GREAT! There was nothing I could do about it until I got home, but it was a problem that was nagging it me throughout the day.

After the shoot day wrapped, the floor director (Matt Harris), the cheese producer (Ryan Yewell …okay chase producer), Kate Abraham and Frank Linhares went up the road to the Alibi Room to sample the food before Thursday’s big wingding.

In spite of the problems with the website, it was a really fun day.

Wednesday: Did nothing but errands. Anytime I take time off work and don’t actually go away, I’ll invariably end up tackling the big to-do list at some point. For the most part, this involved trying to find out what the hell I’d done to break my website. I’d done that tweak on Monday, yes, but the errors were SQL related… still that was the only change. So I reverted a little to the old layout.

No luck.

So I contacted Pair.com support. Even less luck. They graciously put me on an SQL server of my own, but the errors kept coming and they simply pointed the finger back at me and suggested I put the site on a dedicated server. Doing this would increase my monthly hosting bill by 600%… no, there’s gotta be another solution. So I keep trimming things down, repairing SQL tables, yarding out spam that wasn’t even displaying on the site anyway, disabling features… no luck

Thursday: Facebook has crazy powers; I’ve been found out by a few people I had successfully eluded up until now, but I have also be contacted by some people with which I really should have never lost touch. Today I drove out to have coffee with Mark Busse; a guy a grew up with in elementary school. It was really great to see him and I’m so happy he has done so well for himself; him and his business partner Ben Garfinkle who I also grew up with. I moved away to a different school zone in grade 5 and lost touch with them, and here it is time for our respective 20 year high school reunions and I am seriously looking into attending theirs instead of mine.

After leaving Mark to get back to work, I drove back up to Greedy Productions to hang out while they taped the last show of the day. After which we all walked up to the Alibi Room to eat, drink, and use the bathroom before the fans started to arrive. Most of the cast, crew and staff came along and it was nice to just break bread with these people away from their work.

As fans and friends started arriving, we lined up to pay our bills before heading down to the room beneath the restaurant where we were holding our little party. Man was that place hot and loud. Not even an hour in and I lost my voice. It was a lot of fun to hear people talk about the show that I have a small part in making and hearing how much the appreciate it. I even got recognized a few times, but I suspect that’s because Sean coached these people to come talk to me and pretend they knew me from the show. I’m still “just me.”

It was amazing to watch Leo with the fans. I don’t know how he is able to do it. No, the fans aren’t horrible to deal with; quite the opposite. But consider that this guy travels from San Francisco to Vancouver to do the show once a month. The schedule consists of 4 shows a day for 3 days and then 3 shows on the 4th day—all those shows are bang-bang-bang on top of each other. So it’s Thursday and all of the cast and crew are tired, but the fans mostly came to see Leo and he’s doubly tired. He stuck it out for a few hours, I think, but he had to make an early night of it or he would have been ruined for the 3 shows he would have to shoot on Friday.

After Leo left, the focus turned on Alex Lindsay. Again, I don’t know how people handle that much attention, but both these guys do it and do it well. I talk to Leo quite a bit and didn’t want to take any time for myself that would better be given to his fans, but I had never even met Alex Lindsay before and wanted to just say “hi.” But again, I feel bad interrupting people especially if I have nothing in particular to tell them and that “nothing” I have is going to be impossible to convey with no voice in a dark crowded room. I did get to talk with him at one point and he was very gracious, of course. I hope I get scheduled on the show when he’s on sometime so that we can talk in a more natural setting.

The crowd dispersed and I walked back to Greedy (where my car was parked) with much of the Greedy gang. Drove home smelling of geek musk.

Friday: Woke up sick with a cold. I drank nothing but water last night (yes, again, lightweight) and a wake up feeling like I had a much better time the night before than I actually did. Cancelled by appointments for the day. Going back to bed.

It’s been a hell of a week.