Luck and persistence

Sorry no pictures today, blogger is being temperamental...

Well I seem to have caught something regardless of my attempts to sanitize away all the germs in the house. I'm not sure if it's the same thing Tyler had (has) but lets hope not. No fever or anything yet, but lots of congestion and overall ickiness. Chad is loading me up with vitamins which will hopefully kick this thing before it takes a real grip on me! I find it rather unfair that Tyler and I should catch colds twice within a month, whilst Erika and Chad seem the picture of health in spite of our close quarters. I shall seek some kind of recompense for that.

I am really hoping my condition doesn't worsen over the next two days, as I have my first booking through Central Casting, the extras casting agency we all signed up for a while ago! I go in for a fitting tomorrow, and the shoot is Thursday. The film is called The Soloist, and all I know is I'll be playing a "Julliard Student" and I'll have a "70's hairstyle".

I think lightning struck for me on being cast for this, and I will tell you why. The way Central Casting works, you are one of however many thousand extras in their database. You call a hot line where the casting directors leave a message stating what types of people they are looking for ("18-25, Caucasian women, size 0-6, must own a clown costume, scary clown makeup & unicycle"...&c.) If you match a description you call a number and either leave a message or talk to the casting director who tells you whether or not you fit the shoot requirements. Then you call another number with all the information for the shoot, directions & such.

The problem arises when they put out a very general casting call, as they did for this movie (an airport scene, all types). So when you do try to call in, all you get is a busy signal because everyone and their mother is trying at the same time. So we were both trying to get through, and after about 20 minutes I actually did, however Chad kept trying for another hour or so to no avail. So I really do think it is a matter of luck and persistence with these types of calls...

We've also been submitting ourselves for some extras "specialty files" (cyclists, bikers, actors who know ASL...) which hopefully will be used to cast from when the writer's strike is over, in which case they would just call us cold and ask if we are available for a shoot on such and such a date, which in my opinion is preferable to sitting with a busy signal to your ear for an hour!

Tonight the four of us are going out to dinner in celebration of my birthday (belated) and also my getting cast at the Intiman. We haven't been out to dinner yet down here, so it will certainly be nice to get out and celebrate a little.

We're coming home!

Way back before we left Seattle, while Christmas Carol was still running, I was called in out of the blue to read for the role of Margot in The Diary of Anne Frank at the Intiman Theatre. Which was huge. Then I got a call back. Which was huger. Then they told me I was being strongly considered, but they wouldn't have an answer for me for a few weeks still (it depended on who they cast as Anne, as Margot is her older sister).

Well, about a month later, here we are and I have finally heard back that I got the part!

So Chad and I are joyously returning home for a few months (basically March through mid-May). Even though we are finally starting to feel settled in here, we cannot WAIT to be home again! We'll be staying with friends and family while we're in Seattle, as our place is still on the market and we want to keep it nice and pristine for showing. (Speaking of which, if you know of anyone who's looking...) Chad will be working whilst we're in Seattle, though he doesn't know at what yet. If anyone has any bright ideas for a short term job with flexible hours, give us a holler!

I'm really overjoyed and overwhelmed by this sudden change. We knew that it might happen, but I never really allowed myself to think about what it would be like if it actually did. Chad and I kept saying "Either way, we'll be happy and have something to do, something to work at", but deep down this was the wish of my heart; not only that I would be honored to work at such a big theatre, but that we could come home and cure our homesickness, if only just a little.

Our plan right now is to leave on February 22nd, get in to Seattle on the 24th, and I start rehearsals on the 26th! Until then, life goes one here on Waverly Drive... Some highlights:

Yesterday was nice, so we all went down to a park near our house and Chad & Tyler played touch football with our actor neighbor Andre & some of his friends (including another actor from The Wire, who was super nice and actually has done some theatre in Seattle!) The boys came home very muddy and very sore. Moreso today. Well, more sore. Not more muddy.

Today Chad and I went to the mall (as if there were only one... we went to the one in Glendale. Er, one of the two in Glendale.) Chad got some sweet new shoes, and I some basic tees & a cute cap.

Tyler is sick again, even worse this time with a fever of 102. Let's hope the rest of us don't get it...I have been sanitizing the house obsessively to safeguard against germs!

It's been raining more... there are mudslides in areas, and even a tornado warning along the coast the other night.

Tonight the four of us are being good little actor nerds and reading sides (scenes for auditions) together for practice, then we're going to watch the SAG Awards.

Oh this life we will leave behind for three months! :-)

Hip Hollywood Cats

No blog today really, just some pictures of our kitties I can't help but post so you can see how they're getting along in their new home....Gob has adjusted to LA very nicely as you can tell.

And here are some of my favorite kitty sleeping positions of late...

Gob is a big fan of the torpedo look.

And here, a rare occurence: All four cats in the same room, and no fighting! It hasn't happened since, I assure you. This was a one time thing. The three orange cats have made some progress in becoming friends, but Doody is the final hold out. We wonder if he will ever come around...

Goby, thinking of home, watching the rain... We've had nothing but for the last few days, which has definitely made me feel more at home! Also less guilty for spending hours indoors reading and watching movies...

Promise a big blog soon, I know you are just itching...

In this frigid weather

Nothing like a day in Santa Monica to further my resolve that LA is on another planet altogether.

When we were deciding where we wanted to live in LA, anywhere near the beach was quickly struck from the list, since we did not want to be far from the studios and subsequently sit in traffic all day. However, after our beach day I can see why so many people are drawn to living by the ocean down here... it's freaking gorgeous!! Even on a "chilly" day, it was near heaven to walk along the beach with the sun on our faces, dreaming of what it might be like to wake up in the morning and hop on our bikes for a ride along coast, down a nicely paved path. What a very different life that must be from anything we've known.

As you can see from the picture above, we were essentially the only ones on the beach, and it was quickly concluded that we must look like out of towners, walking along in this frigid weather wearing flip-flips and shorts, carrying beach towels. In fact, I feel that way everywhere here. It seems like everyone else is wearing jackets, sweaters and boots, but it's almost 70 degrees out! Who wears a scarf in sweltering 70 degree heat??

The drive home from the beach made us realize all over again why we don't live by the beach. Santa Monica is 20 miles from our house, and it took us an hour and a half to drive back at 3 o'clock the afternoon. See, if I lived on the beach, I'd probably never leave.

A land of contrasts

Our “borrowed” wireless connection has been down for a little while, but finally today I am able to post a little something and to let everyone know that I am still alive! I have not been mugged and left for dead in the parking lot of a Winchell’s outside Compton!

I don’t have too much to report…disappointingly. Life here has been fairly mundane with a couple exceptions thus far, though hopefully with a few important meetings with our agent next week things will start to pick up and I’ll feel a little less idle. We have mostly been exploring our neighborhoods (Silverlake, Los Feliz, Glendale), though yesterday we drove out to The Grove and did a little shopping in that Disneyland of outdoor malls. Driving there I was shocked at how instantaneously the world changed from blocks of graffiti, grimy dollar stores and endless rundown gas stations into the picture perfect world of The Grove with its perfectly manicured palm trees, spotless pedestrian streets, fountains orchestrated to music and even a shiny trolley that goes from one end of the mall to the other. What a land of contrasts this new city is...

Today we made the first of what I'm sure will be many wonderful excursions to Griffith Park, which is basically right outside our front door. We drove up to the Griffith Observatory (made famous in many films over the years, most memorably as Sal Mineo's last stand in Rebel Without a Cause). Parts of the park have been clearly ravished by the fire last year, but much of the park is still green, hikeable, picnic-able, and overall very enjoyable. I look forward to the hikes there (50 miles of trails!), especially the one above the observatory for the 360 degree view, and the one up to the Hollywood sign itself.



And now to entice you with some celebrity sightings!! Okay, it's not Britney or Paris or Brangelina or whatever, but we think it's pretty cool. First, our neighbor downstairs is this guy, a real live working actor on "The Wire" (which none of us had ever watched, and therefore did not recognize him initially). He lent us the first season to watch, and we are all really enjoying it. Second, we went to our first improv show in L.A. (it's kind of a thing here, I guess) at The Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater, and who should be hosting it but Matt Walsh (who you'd recognize from UCB, The Daily Show, and many many commercials), Matt Besser (UCB) and Jeff Garlin (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development). Not all names you'll see in People or Us Weekly, like I said, but still very cool for us to see some talented people we know from the television doing good improv.

Anyway, I am missing home often, which I am sure is partially the result of the idleness of not working. I've been reading ravenously in the hopes of taking my mind off that particular pain (I'm halfway through "The Amber Spyglass", the final book in "The Golden Compass" saga...a very interesting series of books, I must say. ) More than keeping my mind occupied of course, knowing that Chad is here with me tempers the pain of being so far from home, since I know and feel that wherever he is, that's my home, that's my heart. Even so, I frequently have that deep homesickness resonating in my gut. I don't feel it as desperately as I did the day we left Seattle, but it's there. Expectedly, it's there.

Before the smog sets in

By my count I think this is our fourth day in Los Angeles, but it feels as though we left Seattle weeks ago, it seems so far away. That's probably because everything is completely different here. I'm betting it's even more different than I know right now, since our lives so far have been basically limited to putting our house together. I did go with everyone to run some errands the other day, but besides that I have been either sick in bed or organizing our many consolidated belongings. It's been nice to work with Erika on a lot of that--she is so great with all this "home" stuff that I feel just hopeless with at times. Together the four of us have put together a nice little place! I'll have pictures very soon, I promise! For now, here is a picture of the view out our bedroom window. As you can see we have a nice view of the hills...before the smog sets in, that is.


I failed to mention before that our Seattle-turned-L.A. friends Matt and Gusta were generous enough help us unload our moving truck the day we moved in. What a HUGE blessing. And no small feat either, as we have not 1, not 2, but 3 sets of stairs to get up to our unit. Matt even came by and helped more the next day (when Tyler and I were essentially useless due to this bohemeth cold/flu whatever it is we are still getting over). They live not 2 miles from us, so hopefully we will see a lot of them! They also have a lot of encouraging words and seem to be getting along well here, which is much needed with this huge transition.

The kitties are handling the transition better than we thought they would! Better than us, actually. Of course there are some cat fights and hissing to deal with (particularly over food-related issues) but overall everyone is surprisingly laid back. We had worried that a big move, combined with living with other cats for the first time would change our boys, but they are the same crazy felines we know, and they still have their little idiosyncracies that we love (as well as the ones that we don't love, like Gob eating plastic bags.)

I am feeling much better healthwise now, though I've developed a horrible cough that won't give me (or Chad) a moment's peace. Thanks for all the well wishes from everyone! I could definitely use your prayers right now for health so I can start focusing on the reason we came down here in the first place!

All I can muster

Welcome to Cal-ee-for-nee-a!

We made it! Battered and bruised and sick and sore, but we made it. We are actually in Los Angeles now. We are Los Angelites. Or Los Angelinos...I don't know. I'll have to google that.

There is no way on God's green earth that I could put into coherent words right now all of my thoughts and everything that has happened since we packed up and left Seattle, so our trip may spill over into a few more blogs.

Several things about moving went better than we could have possibly expected, but most of them went downright awful to be perfectly honest. I think it all started with Tyler getting sick... Or with a moving truck that was too small. Our solution to the latter was to load up Erika and Tyler's belongings into that truck, load our stuff into the bigger truck, then consolidate the two in a parking lot near our house at about 11pm that night. Perhaps at that point we were all just too delerious from exhaustion to care, but somehow we finished it (with the overwhelmingly generous help of our friends Don and Dayna.)

driving over the pass...yuck

And the next day (Saturday) we were on the road in our little caravan: Chad in the moving truck, Erika and Tyler in their car behind him, and me in our little Subaru bringing up the rear. We stayed the night in beautiful Creswell, OR, and the next morning I woke up with the same cold that Tyler had. We pushed on that day, over the Sikiyous (which were thankfully clear, even though that ridiculous storm had come through not a few days before--one of the few things that went well for us!) By the time we made it to our stopping point for the night, beautiful Williams, CA , I was not doing so good. I spent the night tossing and turning with a fever (Chad said my skin was uncomfortably hot to the touch). On top of it all, our wake up call never came in the morning, so we rushed out the door without a shower, and with no clean clothes left. That third day of driving was a little weird for me, as I felt odd from being sick...like my limbs were disconnected from the rest of my body or something. But we trudged along, and by 3pm we had made it into the city, and I had officially gotten lost in LA for the first time. Thanks to our Magellen (a much appreciated gift from Chad's cousin Bryan) I eventually found my way and arrived home.

Of course it doesn't feel like much of a home yet...the whole place is filled with boxes...boxes I had very little part in moving in. I spent most of today (our primary load-in day) sick in bed, trying not to move since I felt very queasy and weak to the bone. I can't tell you how bad I felt, knowing that Erika, Chad and Tyler were loading in all of this stuff and here I was lying in bed. But as the day wore on I did start feeling a little better and helped out more. And I feel about 20 times better now than I did this morning!

That's really all I can muster for an entry at this point, but I wanted everyone to know that we made it safe and somewhat-sound, and now I am going to sleep for a very long time.