Winged Creatures

The budget was low, but the talent was way high. I was an “onlooker” on a feature called Winged Creatures.

I was early. I parked. I got shuttled. I found holding. I ate breakfast. I was forgotten.

I ventured forth to get my voucher and almost ran into Forest Whitaker because I was looking at the ground rather than where I was going. Wardrobe squared me away. I changed into something more boring. I went back to holding.

Where I waited for a few hours. I’m still reading that book about the Wars of the Roses. I thought I’d finish it during this gig, but I actually worked this time.

Or… Well… Here’s what’s kinda weird. And this was a surprising first.

During the first scene I worked, I didn’t know I was actually working. They grabbed all the onlookers, brought us to set and placed us. I ended up the deepest, but I was standing on the ledge of a planter with a tree in it. I thought that was kind of fun. I’d never been elevated above everyone like that before.

But then as I waited for the scene to start, I got bored and started making laps around the tree.

No, I’m not kidding. I was walking around in circles because I was bored and it was kind of cold outside. Around and around and around. I was practicing keeping my balance on the 5″ wide ledge while not looking down at my feet as I walked. Around and around and switch directions and around and around.

Then, the AD called lunch. Huh? Whuh…What?

As I headed toward catering, I asked some of the other extras if any filming had happened because we’d been out there for a couple of hours. Apparently, in the background of Kate Beckinsale, the director wanted us extras too look natural as we struck up conversations and stuff. All the while I’m learning this, my head’s about to explode! They were filming while I was doing laps around a friggin’ tree!!!!!

I never got yelled at for it so I’m assuming that either they couldn’t see me or I was so deep that the movement didn’t look stupid. I dunno. But my mind is still reeling from learning that they were filming while I was walking around a tree.

Yeah. Nice.

After lunch, though, they started cueing us and I got to use my stupid walk around the tree and hop off to move closer to the action. During the course of that, I ended up directly in the path of Jeanne Triplehorn and Dakota Fanning as they left the hospital we were working in front of. That was pretty cool.

And thank goodness I wasn’t still walking around that damn tree!!!!!!!!!!

This was one of those gigs I really gotta laugh about, though. I mean, I got paid to walk around and around a tree. All I can say is wow, I love Hollywood!

Drove to Florida… almost 3K miles… again

I’m trying to post more often, but in that, I end up posting less often. I don’t know how that happens, but anyway, this time I do have a reason. I was gone for a week. I’d done the journey in about 4 days before, but this time, well, things went a bit differently.

I was driving a fully loaded ’85 Cadillac Seville. Yep, that was 135 horses of purebread slowness, following a motorhome towing a trailer–which could smoke me on accelleration! Oh yeah, I was feelin’ sassy in my Cad-O-Lack that had been sitting for about ten years and probably should have been towed, but what the heck, I only live once.

And when Bobby Ore asks if you’d drive for him, the only answer is yes. So I did.

But the car kept breaking down. No surprises there, huh?

30 minutes in, radiator blew.

3 or 4 hours from there, the smog pump belt broke–and it was brand new!

Another 3 or 4 hours from there, we limped into a shop.

…Who among other things didn’t tighten down one of the radiator hoses.

Another 5 hours from there, that radiator hose came loose and sprayed the brakes plus the windshield. Nice.

Limping into another shop got everything patched up, but I think we were both still wary.

The rest of the trip went off without incident. Which was refreshing, I might add!

Somewhere during the first bit, we pulled off to glue the rearview mirror back on. But given that I’ve unsuccessfully done 4 and have a propensity for having them come off in my hand when I adjust them, I let Bobby do the glueing and then I decided to wait a few hours to let the glue dry.

Well, hours turned into days because I completely forgot!!!!! This pic was taken during the last 200 or so miles of the trip:

One of the reasons I forgot about the rearview was because I was concerned with the sideview mirror. The passenger side one was good as gold, but the driver side one… Well, I dunno what was going on with it other than it wasn’t really connected to the guts behind it. Over the course of the first thousand miles or so, I finally set up this sophisticated method of getting it to stay properly aligned. It was quite an engineering feat considering I had nothing but a couple napkins to work with…

All in all, even though it was hellish, the trip was worth making. I mean, if nothing else, it can serve as a memory of times much worse. I survived just fine. A little worse for wear, but the car made it to Florida in one piece after those first three days.

I forgot to take a picture of the car itself…Duh…I know, I know… But here was my view from Los Angeles to Central Florida:

Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

Sometimes, it’s the little things

The day my new coveralls arrived, I was thrilled beyond words. Being a whole lot smaller than man-sized, coveralls are a pain in the ass to find in my size. Even the ones I found online were too big, but they were close enough. Plus, my name is Toolwench, I have the tools to make a pair of coveralls smaller. I haven’t yet, but sheesh, they’re coveralls, not a slinky evening gown. They can be a little baggy.

Anyway, here’s a shot of my new coveralls…

I finally had a chance to use them when I needed to drop my tranny. This was the first time in about 13 years that I’d opened my Haynes manual because I didn’t know how to do something. I was suspicious of either a cracked flexplate or busted torque converter. Turns out, the flexplate was just loose. And it was my husband’s fault!!!!! If you scroll all the way down to when we did the engine swap, that’s him with the torque wrench.

Oh well…At least it wasn’t a busted crankshaft.

I didn’t take a whole lot of pics during this endeavor. It was one of those times when I didn’t really know what I was doing so I needed all my brainwaves focused on the task at hand. I’m little. The tranny’s big…and a big job for me to do. But I did it. Virtually without any help, either. The only things my husband did were because he was kinda bored and I wasn’t goin to turn down free help even if I could do it myself.

But I definitely made sure that *I* was the one torquing the flexplate and re-connecting anything that’d be a pain if he’d accidentally screwed it up. This was a project I had zero interest in repeating…at least not for another 13 years!

Naw! Actually, now that I’ve done it once, I know what to expect and the next time I have to do it, it’ll be a lot quicker and even more fun.

This pic just looks nifty to me. You can see my reflection in the oil pan and, I dunno, that’s just artsy or something to me. I dig it.

Notice how dirty I was? That’s nothin’! My tranny had been leaking and getting steadily worse. On the day I got the car buttoned back up, I kept getting pissed off because it seemed no matter where I grabbed under the car, my hand got filthy and slid off. I’ve since solved the cause of that problem, but she still needs a good steam cleaning.

Funny, how I started this post by mentioning my new coveralls and I’ve gotten this far before realizing that in the two pics, I wasn’t wearing them. That day just happened to be a little to warm. Believe me, my new coveralls saved me from puddles of tranny fluid, pounds of scraped-off grime and provided a nice warm layer of protection from the cold concrete on the days that I did wear them.

Let me go look for an action shot…

Yeah… Here’s one from the early troubleshooting days when I thought I had some kind of engine problem rather than the flexplate/tranny problem it turned out to be.

Special thanks again, to all the people at CarCrazyCentral.com who watched my video and then suggested what might be wrong. This would’ve been so much harder without all that help!

Third Time’s a Charm

So, I’ve blogged about how hard I sucked at stunt driving, but this time was much different. This time, I was more confident and essentially, I realized that stunt driving is easy. My problem wasn’t the driving. It was me. Apparently, I have difficulty thinking. Yes, thinking. How so? Well, I don’t know how to answer that. All I know is that this time around, my thoughts were crystal clear and everything fell pretty much into place.

Bright and early on that Saturday morning, I showed up for class. I learned the importance of tires and various other bits about stunt driving on a working movie set. Then, it was time to go out on the course.

And I wasn’t nervous this time. Not at all. I knew a lot would be required of me, but for some reason I simply didn’t care. I just wanted to drive and learn.

Boy did I ever!!!!!!

It was raining. For me, I saw that as good luck because that’d mean it’d be easier for wimpy little me to get good lock-up. I knew that this was now or never.

We worked through the slalom and learned how to shuffle steer. I’d been practicing my shuffle steer every time I’d driven since my last class, so that was pretty easy for me. I’d also been practicing using a focal point.

Once the whole class was ready, we moved on to forward 180s. Last time, I had a helluva fight to yank up on the e-brake and get the car to lock up. This time, just as I’d suspected, because of the rain, locking up was hard, but not impossible like it had been last time. My arm started to hurt, but I didn’t care because I was finally able to get lock-up and and throw the car around. I know the teacher wanted us all to finesse these to perfection, but honestly, I didn’t care what he wanted. I just wanted to get the damn car to come around. I’d worry about the finesse later. Any amount of progress was more important than finesse.

The next day, we continued our forward 180s left and right and then went into sliding 90s. Y’know, when you slide into a parallel parking job coming at it from the side.

My arm hurt so bad, it went numb and didn’t always work. But the rain continued and I still got good lock-up. Once again, I know the teacher wanted us all to finesse the car right in the middle of the coned-off box, but I was satisfied with just getting the car fully in the box. Whether I was forward or back or side-to-side didn’t matter. Just getting it in the box was progress enough for me.

And that took awhile. For some reason, the whole class had started having trouble with our forward 180s and that sort of crushed our morale I guess when we went into the 90s.

But eventually I got it. And then the miracle happened… I started to really understand how to ‘feel’ the car. That’s what Jay and Blaina do when they’re driving. I’d been feeling it all along, but hadn’t been able to really understand it. I hadn’t been able to read it well enough to adjust my input to get a perfect run as a result. I’d come flying at the cone gate for the 180 and be so concerned with getting lock up that I’d forget to crank the wheel into the turn, or I’d turn it too far, or too soon. In the 90s, I’d fly toward the cone box too fast or forget to let go of the wheel once I tossed the car into the box.

This was the day that really had me start asking myself, “What would Jay or Blaina do?” I sometimes even dropped into one of their characters, asking them for advice. I like to think it worked, too!

I can’t say that I’m any good at stunt driving. I can’t say I’m consistent. But I can say that I know what I’m trying to do and learning how to read what I feel in order to make the stunt happen correctly.

Once I realized that, I sort of looked back at the day and a half and was so satisfied with my performance that not only did I not care if I never quite got the finesse right, but I also didn’t need to take the test at the end to be satisfied with what I’d learned.

However, the course was wet and slippery enough that I knew I’d be able to get decent lock-up. And that always seemed to make the difference between executing the stunt correctly or failing miserably. If I was going to pass at all, it would be during this class, so I decided to go for it.

After more practice of the slalom, forward 80s and sliding 90s, we moved on to reverse 180s.

Sadly, I never quite mastered them. I learned a new technique–well, order of actions–from one of the instructor’s assistants which I put to good use and excelled way beyond how I’d fared in my last two classes. But more importantly–I thought, anyway– I figured out on my own what I was doing wrong just before the teacher told me. For some stupid reason, I kept forgetting to let go of the wheel and let the car right itself. Oh well. It’s something to work on in the future.

At the end of that second day, it was time to test. We practiced and I knew I was going to pass. I just knew it. I didn’t allow myself to practice into the ground because I wanted to save my poor little arm and I didn’t think I’d be getting any better that day anyway. I had the confidence. I knew I’d pass. I knew I could make it happen.

So, when the moment was upon me–finish the course in 59 seconds or less–I took off on a practice run…

And screwed it up so badly that I was thankful to take a second practice–which was close to perfect, but I didn’t quite get the car all the way into the final box. My time was good, though…50-something seconds. I wasn’t really worried about timing. I was worried about keeping the car between the cones without touching any of them. Well, and just plain surviving the course!

But now it was do or die. I had to do a passing run on that third one or I’d fail again. Well, before I took off, I congratulated myself for actually testing this time. I didn’t even bother testing last time because I knew I’d fail. This time, I knew that even if I didn’t pass, I’d learned so much and had come so far. It didn’t matter anymore, really.

But deep down, I still wanted to pass. I needed to pass.

I slalomed through the cones, grabbed that e-brake with all my might and whipped the car into the 180 to the right. Slamming the brake back down, I took off right through the center of the cone gate, while resetting my focal point and then yanked the e-brake and tossed the car into a 180 to the left. Dropping the brake and smashing the gas, I had to cheat and use a little main brake to slow the car after locking it as I skidded into the box for the 90 to the right. I waited for the “go” once the guys were sure I was in the box without hitting cones. I gritted my teeth and set up for the reverse 180–trying to make myself believe that it wasn’t my weakest maneuver. I stomped the gas, then as I whipped the wheel, looked back for my new focal point and rammed the car into drive. I still forgot to let go of the wheel, but I didn’t care because I didn’t hit any cones. I blasted toward that final box and threw the car into it to the left.

And waited.

Nervously.

To find out if I was in the box all the way.

And if I’d made it in less than 59 seconds.

My heart was beating a mile a minute and I suddenly realised that I’d done it. I’d made it all the way through the course.
…And I had the fastest time in the class: 46 seconds.

Wahoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All I could think of was, “GO ME!!!!!!!!!!” on so many levels, too!

Spinning Wheels

This was before all the fun started. I like the array of cars and sportbike in the background. I felt like I was definitely in for loads of fun.

I’ll be posting more videos at CarCrazyCentral, but for now, notice my big grin…? I was sitting in the backseat while my Buddy Jim Wilkey from Wagon Train Productions drifted the car every which way and then some.

IT’S INEVITABLE…

Why did I title this entry “It’s Inevitable”?

Here’s exactly why:

Whenever I hand a camera to a guy and say, “Could ya snap a couple of shots of me workin’ on the car?” there’s always at least one of my ass!!!! Oh well… All in good fun, I suppose.

I dunno what it is about me and working on my car, but I really enjoy sitting in the engine compartment while I work. It also seems to cut down on the back strain somehow.

This is my least favorite thing to do. I dunno why, but I hate scraping gaskets off and cleaning the surface. It’s not that I suck at it or anything. And I have lots of patience for it, but I’m thinkin’ maybe I just like to have a tool in my hand rather than a rag.

I figured that while I was there, I might as well retorque the heads. Sadly, I’ve only got a hundred pounds to put behind a torque wrench. Leverage is my best friend.

The next couple shots are the struggle to get the intake back in. Yeah, it’s easier to pull the distributor so it’s out of the way, but as of late, it has been easier to work around the distributor than have to re-stab it. So, here I go, getting the manifold back in without smearing the silicone.

Not too shabby. I’m leaving out the oddyssey of the bolt hole that needed tapping in the head, the metal shavings everywhere, the second oil change and the initial silicone mess during my first failed attempt at getting the intake on. Those aren’t important…*cough, cough* (Yeah, they’re just what working on cars is really all about: adventure!)

The next shot was from when everything went smoothly…

Okay, smoothly except when I accidentally sprayed carb clean on the Band-Aid over my busted knuckle from the day before. Yeah, I hit it so squarely that the pad soaked up the carb clean and transmitted it to my open wound before I could get the darn thing off and quit being grumpy about it. (Hey…it stung…a lot…)

After a few more grumpy faces and a whole lot more cussing, I got back to torquing down the manifold.

And at the end of the adventure, I was one seriously happy little chick. I love my car. I love my car. I love my car!

Imtake Manifold Off. 20 Minutes. Done

Jason didn’t think I could pull my intake in 20 minutes. Well, here’s proof. (We didn’t have a stopwatch running, though. It might’ve taken me closer to 25 minutes because I wasn’t actully in a hurry to proove anything. I mostly just wanted to show Jason that I could do it and it really wasn’t that big of a deal.)

There’s really not much involved… I started with the fuel line so that I could get the carburetor out of the way.

I don’t recall how, but I’d already busted a knuckle. Can you believe it? (Okay, yeah, so it’s not hard to bust a knuckle while working on car. At least it wasn’t bad enough to drip blood everywhere… I just kept on workin’.) And it’s not like I’d be sticking my middle finger in puddles of gasoline or carb cleaner or just about every other automotive fluid–’cause they all hurt!

The car was still kind of warm… Luckily I had a few shop rags close by to use as…uh…potholders.

I was trying to beat the clock while not actually rushing. The first socket I’d found happened to be quarter inch, so I ran with that instead of digging out my three-eighths set up. I’m an equal opportunity tool wench.

And here you have it… Me climbin’ in to get better leverage and yanking out my intake manifold. Yippee!!

Putting it back together took more than 20 minutes, but after cleaning everything up, I could’ve easily done it…had my engine been a little more cooperative, that is…

A little more Leeloo

I gotta limber up again for these last couple pics… Let me put my corset on, too…

Special thanks to Lawrence M. Green for taking this pic of my stretching out. He was always at rehearsals helping out with whatever we needed and I truly appreciate all his hard work.

Okay, now to WorldCon, waiting to head over to the Masquerade. Chaz (aka Hazel) shot the following pics, too. I swear if he hadn’t been there, I might not have had any documentation of me in my costume. Thanks, Chaz! 🙂

Jason was nice enough to go with me…

I was kind of nervous, and by this point very tired. The nervousness was more like an old friend to me, though. Back when I did a lot of theatre, even though I was running the light board, or sound board, or pulling the grand curtain, or running a followspot, or being ‘the person who clipped in Judas before he hung himself in Act II’, I always got a twinge of nervous energy. When the audience was ready to be entertained and it was my job to support the entertainers, there was a certain thrill in that. And this time, I was actually an entertainer!

My number one goal–one that’d measure the amount of success I had on stage–was to not fall off the stage. It’s no secret that I can’t dance, so as long as I just did the best I could and most of all, had fun, I’d be fine so long as I didn’t fall off the stage. It was a pretty good drop and I didn’t want to get hurt. In all honesty, I have no idea if I did the routine correctly. The darn wig killed my peripheral vision, so I have no clue how I did. But even if I screwed up, I did it with gusto. I did it like I meant it and I had fun while doing it. And no, I did not fall off the stage. Therefore, in my own mind, I was a huge success!

And there’s just this funny thing about cancan dancing…and wearing a cancan dress. It made me do something I would never do in my regular life. I always had this strange compulsion to hike up my skirt! Even before going on stage to dance, I must’ve flashed the entire audience. Guys took pictures and I proudly held up my skirt. I dunno what came over me. While wearing a cancan skirt, all I wanted to do was hold it up. That, in itself, was a little adventurous experience for me…

There you have it. I…as Leeloo from the Fifth Element…danced the cancan at Worldcon 2006.

Up next… I…as the non-skirt-holding-up car chick I really am…remove an intake manifold in about twenty minutes just to prove I can do it. Although putting it back on took a little longer…

Cancan Leeloo…

Let me warm up a little…

A little more. I was at the center of the cancan dance finale, so I had to limber up a bit more than I already was.

Okay, now let me get into my costume. This is a dress rehearsal.

Colleen, Amy, Maria, Myself and Wendy… We were the dancers of L’Etoile Rouge.

My costume isn’t even all the way together at this point. The 20 safety pins holding my suspenders up didn’t show up in the pics, but you can kind of see the sides flying off in the breeze. As a geeky costumer thing that doesn’t show in the pics either, I built the suspenders out of two pieces of vinyl. The front from shoulder to bottom of skirt and halfway around is one piece and so is the back. Yeah, royal pain in the ass, but ultimate challenge at which I succeeded! (Can you tell I surprised even myself?! I’d never worked with vinyl before.)

Notice my lack of rhythm? If I wasn’t holding my skirt so high, you’d see that I had a big grin on my face. I can’t dance, but I sure can smile!

I built my stockings… To give you an idea of how tough they were, imagine working with a fabric so stretchy and sheer that no less than twenty times, I had to disentangle it from my coverlock machine. I only had to cut the fabric out of the machine once, though. The needles would go right through it and hang up and snag and piss me off!!!! Grrr… I still shudder at the memories. The stockings turned out great, but in my opinion, they were kinda hinky. I was just very lucky that they turned out as well as they did.

Okay, remember I said I was the center of the finale? There isn’t a pic of the fantastic tableau at the end, but here’s an action shot. Yes, that’s my foot in my hand and my leg is straight. I’m also wearing a corset under the dress. Yeah, ouch… But I did it!!!!!!! Not bad for a gal with zero dance experience, huh? Oh and did I mention that I spun around and then switched legs and spun again?

I tell ya, I love a good challenge and this adventure afforded me several. There are so many things about it that I just can’t believe I did! Too many to count. The experience was downright incredible as far as learning about sewing, designing, thinking ahead, dancing and driving (I had to drive an hour each way for rehearsals.).

Special thanks to Chaz (aka Hazel) for snapping these pics and letting me post them here.

Cancan, part 1

I gotta start at the beginning when it comes to my cancan adventure. Not that starting at the beginning will make the adventure more understandable, but I like to think it helps.

I get this call from a friend of mine, “Hey, would you mind putting on some fancy clothes and having your picture taken? It’s for the Hugos.”

I reply, “Ummm…yeah, okay, sure.” and head down to the LASFS clubhouse with a pile of gowns and a couple of oddities. They loved the get-up I’d built for the 1999 Grammys for when I was a seatfiller.

And quite frankly, I love it, too. I rarely wear it because I really gotta have a reason to. It’s bright teal velvet and never fails to stop traffic because it’s so unique. When I designed it, there wasn’t supposed to be a shawl, but while sewing the neckline, I screwed up. By that point, there was no turning back. All I could do was hide my mistake by piecing together my scraps into the shawl. In the end, I’d created a sort of superhero look, but I still think it kicks ass.

This was probably the closest I’d get to having a Hugo of my very own…and how cool is it that I got to pretend they were magical weapons? (Or at least that’s what was going through my mind as I posed. I was conjuring a Hugo rocket-powered forcefield or something!)

Anyhow, during the course of this mini-adventure, Maria randomly asked, “Do you dance? …Or…wait…would you like to dance? You can sew and we’re doing a halftime show in the Masquerade at WorldCon. It’s a lot of fun and we make our dresses. Wanna do it?” (Or something like that. I just remember she kept describing it long after I’d stopped truly comprehending what she was saying. I was stuck trying to wrap my brain around dancing in front of people while wearing some kind of costume that I would build.)

And then this little thought goes through my head: “How utterly strange to be asked. When else would I ever be asked to participate in such an adventure? I should do it. I can’t dance, but so what. This’ll be fun, a great experience and probably an even better story to tell.”

In the end, Maria (second from the right) and Wendy (second from the left) roped me in and I’m so glad they did. The experience was everything I’d hoped for and more…it gave me a good excuse to put my yoga flexibility to work.

Y’know, putting this entry together makes me want to dust off some of my other clothes and snap some more shots. I wish there were more hours in a day.

Special thanks to Chaz Baden (aka Hazel) for all the wonderful pics.

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