Adventures in Photography!

This morning, we were surfing the Facebook on our phones, as we do every morning before getting out of bed, and Stina saw a friend of ours from New York say a thing about Los Angeles. Being the people we are, we were all like "OMG LOL R U N LA? US 2!". Being the sober adult our friend is, he responded with a phone call. Sooooo last century.
As it happens, he needed someone to take pictures of some cargoes he was thinking of purchasing (he works for a company that does that; he's not an eccentric millionaire, but if anyone was going to be one, I can imagine him as one very well). He hadn't found a photographer via his usual routes yet, and was I interested in doing the work? I was. And this is my story.

I headed out at quarter to noon, because he said everyone was on lunch breaks from 11AM until 1PM. I bought some batteries up the street from Unicorn Jesus.



I caught the Red Line to the Blue Line (and went past the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Shopping Center "I have a dream... of convenient shopping at affordable prices!" (credit to Adam Sauer)) and got out at Del Amo Station, where I saw this sign:


I was At Del Amo and Santa Fe. Remember that. It makes later funny/sad. I ran to the 192 bus, which had just arrived. Showing her my $6.00 Day Pass, I asked if she went to my stop. She did, but my Day Pass was no good to her. I need a $0.35 transfer from the subway. Could I pay her $0.35? No. I could pay her $1.25. I ran back to the subway, helped a possibly blind man buy his ticket to Los Angeles, bought my $0.35 transfer, and ran back to the bus. She took the transfer from me. (Sidenote: my friend and employer paid for all my transportation expenses, so yay!)
I rode that bus for 5 blocks. Then my stop arrived. Los Angeles seriously needs a new Metro trip planner.
Los Angeles (the city of Long Beach, really, but come on, it's Los Angeles) also seriously needs useful sidewalks. I crossed the road to my destination and walked on the vine-age they had in lieu of a sidewalk. Entering where the trucks would because I saw no other place to enter, a security guard directed me to the office where I found my contact on her lunch break. I waited. "I'm looking for the peanut brittle," (peanut brittle is code for what I was really looking for. It's all very spy movie.) I told her when she came to me. "He'll show you where it is," she responded. And he did. He showed me to 50 barrels. They had markings on them, which I took pictures of. They were...barrels. They could have had kittens inside them or the archangel Michael and his cronies. But I assume they had peanut brittle in them. Then I called my friend/employer to ascertain if I had what he wanted. He asked me to ask for paperwork explaining why the barrels said they came from one place when the ad he had said they came from another place. She went to find out. She came back to tell me these were not the barrels I was looking for. They had multiple shipments of peanut brittle. She told me where I could find this other peanut brittle, at a different warehouse. "I'm walking," I said. "Is it far?" She looked taken aback. I swear, there are plenty of people in L.A. who don't have cars and get around using public transit, but the ones who don't can't comprehend it. "I'll see if I can find someone to drive you."
She found the man who had shown me the earlier boxes. I felt like I was on the road again. An adventure and I was hitching a ride! This ride lived in long beach and liked it in the summer and had an ear infection. I answered all his personal questions, but was evasive when he asked about my employer... according to him (and I may be exaggerating for emphasis) evil supervillains win if they can guess who is buying what. We arrived at what were presumably the correct barrels. I took more pictures of kitten-containing barrels, and I bid adieu to my ride. I stepped out the gate of this new place. I had directions from my old place to my next place, not from this place. So I asked the man putting dirt in a hole with a shovel. He didn't know, but his buddy might. They yelled across the street in Spanish. I thought the word that was supposed to be my street sounded like a different word, but chalked it up to my Sesame Street Spanish. I walked the direction the man told me...past the Del Amo Subway Station. The distance she thought was too far for me to walk? 5 blocks. But I'm not complaining, there's plenty of walking ahead. I walked that way for half a block. Why half a block? Because the sidewalk ended in the middle of the block. I shrugged off the impression that I was part of an absurdist theatre piece, and walked jay. I walked past that sign again, the one about the kiss and ride, to Del Amo and Susana. I doubted the directions I'd been given, and went on the Kindle in my backpack to double check. Indeed, I was walking towards not my street. I retraced my steps and found the correct street. No problem, still an hour and a half until the warehouses close. I reach my destination. "I'm looking for a lot of toenail clippers." I say to the receptionist (again, not really toenail clippers). "Are you looking for Awesome Delivery Service?" (also not real) "Yes, yes, I believe I am." "They moved." Oh. "Are they far? Can I walk there?" "You should take a car." "I don't have a car, can I walk there?" "Yes" I follow her directions to...Del Amo and Susana. 3 miles round trip from point A to point B and back.
So get this, I'm walking up Susana, and suddenly: No sidewalk! Okay. I clamber over some bushes and get this: A crosswalk! If I were coming from the other direction, I would have crossed the crosswalk, and come to a terminal point. No sidewalk leading away from the crosswalk in any direction. Who designed this thing? What do people think pedestrians want? Pedestrians want sidewalks! Not just anywhere, we want USEFUL sidewalks.
Seriously.
I go to the warehouse. They send me to the office. They send me to the warehouse. I take pictures of toenail clippers. There are no customs officials present. I come home.

My Day at the Library

I'm on the job hunt*, and a thing I keep hearing is, “Oh, that's all handled online. You have to apply online.” I find this frustrating. I feel that a personal meeting, being able to shake someone's hand and actually give them my resume and talk to them about it on the spot, is a much better way for them to get to know me and see that I'd be the perfect fit for whatever the job is. It's how I got a job at J. Matheson Gifts, and that was a fruitful, two-year-long relationship.

Anyhow, I'm ranting, and this is meant to be a post about my day at the library. Let's get to it. I went to the library on Tuesday with our laptop so I could spend the day applying online to a bunch of places. Brendan had background work, so I went solo. I took over a small, round table in a back room at our local branch and got to work. This room is where the teen books live, as well as a row of computers which people can sign up to use in one-hour time slots. It's usually pretty quiet.

I got to the library when it opened at 12:30pm. Later in the afternoon, just when I was needing a break from writing cover letters and answering stupid questions like, “When at work, are you seen as more a) interesting, or b) motivated,” I got to witness quite a show.

A woman had arrived in the room a few minutes earlier to use one of the computers. She had a small child with her in a stroller that she had pulled up next to her and sort of behind her, to her right. The child was whimpering and she turned to it and said, “SHHHHHH!!! You stop that!!” then went back to the computer. The child whimpered some more, and she said, “SHHHHHH!!!” some more. The child whimpered. She turned around and looked at the child and said, “Do you see my face? I am serious. You better quit that or you are gonna get a spanking.” A whimper. “I'm not joking. Look at my face. Do I look like I'm joking?” She did look kind of scary.

The child stopped whimpering and I stopped noticing what was happening with the woman. But the show was not over. A man stood behind another man who was using a computer next to the woman and her child. Allow me to illustrate:



So Indignant Man says to Unmoving Man, “I booked this computer, could you please move?”

Unmoving Man: "It doesn't say you booked this computer."

Indignant Man: “If you try to log in, you'll see that you can't because I booked this computer. Could you please move?”

Unmoving Man: “It doesn't say you booked this computer.”

Indignant Man: “I wouldn't say I booked this computer if I hadn't just booked this computer. You're wasting my minutes. Could you please move?”

Unmoving Man's friend comes over and joins in the chorus: “It doesn't say you booked this computer.”

Indignant Man: “I booked this computer. Now would you please move so I can log on. You're wasting my minutes!”

Unmoving Man doesn't move.

Indignant Man then pushes his way past the stroller so he can reach the keyboard and input his information to log on. That's when the woman stands up.

“Excuse me! Get your ass out of my baby's face!” (Indignant Man was showing some major ass-crackage.)

Indignant Man mutters something about wasting his minutes and continues doing what he's doing. Unmoving Man is starting to move, backing his chair out of the space Indignant Man is now occupying.

The woman says again, “Nobody cares about your stupid minutes! You don't put your ass all up in my baby's face! You say excuse me, you say something to me, you don't just push my baby!”
Unmoving Man is standing now, and Indignant Man is sitting.

The woman says, “I'm serious! You wanna take this outside right now? I'm not from L.A.!” She then says to Unmoving Man, “Would you go and tell a librarian this man is getting his ass all up in my baby's face?” Unmoving Man doesn't move.

The woman sits back down, still muttering about ass in her baby's face, then she gets up and says to Unmoving Man, “Would you watch my computer?” He nods, and she gets up and pushes her baby out of the room.

She comes back with a librarian and says to the librarian, “That's him. He pushed my baby and was rude.”

Indignant Man says, “I was just trying to log into the computer I had booked.”

Unmoving Man and his friend say something about Indignant Man being rude.

The librarian looks around at all of them and sees that they all are on their own computers. She says, “You're all on your own computers now. Just try to stay out of each others' way.”

The woman says, “Okay, thank you.”

The librarian leaves and Indignant Man starts laughing uproariously, like he's just won the battle.

The woman sits back down and says, “If my brother were here, you wouldn't be laughing. He would take care of you.” She mutters something else in Spanish and continues working on her computer.

There was one other thing that happened, where a man was prosthelytizing to some teenagers about the Muslim religion and really pissing me off in his talk about women being made after men and therefore being meant to follow man, but there's wasn't much of a show in that. I told the librarian, and she was going to tell him to keep his conversation down, but he was done by the time we went back.

I'm at the library again now. What else might happen? Stay tuned.

*Since writing this Tuesday night, it seems I've found a job as a medical marijuana promoter! More on that to come.

Brendan's Company Makes a New Film

Settling into Los Angeles

Our lives here are slowly getting settled. I (Stina) initially planned to try and find a job, any job, as soon as we had an address here. Then we heard about background acting. We joined Central Casting, a casting company that posts available work for extras on a hotline. If you hear a job that you think you match, you call the number provided until you get through. The casting director pulls up your profile and says yay or neigh based on whether you match the look they need.

There are several good things about this kind of work:

• There is downtime, so it is possible to do other things (ie, edit my book)
• Overtime pay, and frequent overtime (so we've heard, anyway...I've only gotten a little overtime)
• Free food (usually)
• It's super-duper easy
• Rubbing elbows with stars (or sometimes accidentally knocking one's elbow into a star's face--ask Brendan)

But there's a downside, too. It's not regular work, and it's hard to get the work. When I hear something I think I match, I start calling on it immediately and inevitably get a busy signal. I keep on calling, just hoping to get through. Sometimes I do after half an hour and get booked, sometimes I do after an hour and don't get booked, and sometimes I give up after more than an hour. For Brendan calling the men's line, even the hotline is often busy.

We've been hearing a lot about call-in or calling services (they're called both depending on whom you ask). Call-in services are companies that book you for background work, thus saving you the trouble of calling the hotline and trying to book yourself. They cost anywhere from $60-$75 per month. We think we'll try to go with a call-in service for the month of January, just to see if we're able to get booked regularly.

But it's scary, not having a regular income, so I think I'll also try to find a regular job once we return after the holidays. We've got savings to keep us afloat for a few months, but after that . . . well, we don't want to arrive at a desperate situation.

I've been trying to think of jobs I wouldn't hate but that would also be somewhat easy to get. Working at a grocery store, maybe, so I can easily access what would otherwise be thrown out, and so we could get discounts on some of the more expensive fake-meat products I like. Something having to do with animals. Or maybe something that will allow us free access to something fun, like a museum or the zoo or a theatre.

But enough about that. We've been making some lovely friends here. We've kept in contact with the couchsurfers we stayed with when we first arrived, Ross and Dane, and we met another couchsurfer from Seattle, Sydney. We joined a role-playing group and really like the storyteller and other players. We've been getting to know Randy, another UW drama major, and making films with him. I met another writer, Craig Pitchford, randomly in the library, and we're going to start a writing group in January. Los Angeles is filled with kind people, but I guess that's to be expected. We meet kind people everywhere we go.

I guess that's the lesson I can take away from this post. Even with all the stress of money woes, the people we come into contact with brighten our days and offer solid game-playing and/or creative companionship. I will find a job, but more importantly, I will keep these friends beyond whatever job temporarily keeps us afloat.

Ross is in green in the middle (he was a tree, or maybe broccoli),
Dane is wearing the rainbow wig on the left

Sydney and Randy, at a late late dinner or early early breakfast after midnight Harry Potter

Sydney and me with James Dean

Two White Wines

Brendan (that's me) has started a new production company with his friend, Randy Vinneau. Where'd they get that name? First hint: There are two of them (us). Can you figure the rest of it out? Let us know in the comments.

Their (our) second film (still in post-production) has what Stina described as, "a Leslie Nielsen sense of humor" (that's a paraphrase of a quote). Mr. Nielsen passed the day after we finished shooting. I hope he would enjoy them.

We give you:
Two White Wines' youtube channel
Go there and subscribe to get notifications whenever we post a new film.

And our first film:

Our First Full Day in L.A.

Today was AWESOME! Aside from running into a wall about 10 minutes ago, today was ideal. We woke up this morning feeling fine. I had something special on my mind.

That's how it's been going all day. I've had a song in my heart, and a smile on my lips. We set out from our couchsurfers' place and walked to the Ralph's to buy our bus passes for November ($84 each). Then we took the bus to Wilshire center. We missed our stop by one, but the day was beautiful and the walk was pleasant.

Our first apartment was on the north end of Koreatown (hereafter referred to as K-town). It was close to some shops; a grocery store in particular encouraged us. The apartment was the same deal as so many others - run by Statewide Enterprises, $695/month, a $2.96/month admin fee, utilities included, no refrigerator. What's that? Where are we, Germany? No fridge? Indeed, place after place (with a few exceptions, like Germany - thanks, Sven!) had no fridge. No big, though, we can use our Amazon wedding gift cards to get a fridge. The place was (in hindsight) largish, it had a space for a breakfast table, and had a "first two weeks free" special. Also, like every place that follows, it had laundry on the premises: $1.25 wash, $1.00 dry.

Just around the corner, Stina had contacted someone about another place, not Statewide this time. We stood outside the building and called. Then someone let us in. Then we stood outside the manager's apartment and called and knocked. No answer, so we moved on. It will turn out, I am sure, that that apartment had a magic sink that grants wishes.

Proceeding on to the southern part of K-town, we saw another studio. This one had a nice outside entrance and bigger kitchen, but overall it was smaller and had carpet instead of hardwood. It just didn't make us AS happy, so we left quickly.

Heading East now, we checked out a pad WITH a fridge. The kitchen was significantly bigger, and this one was $670 instead of $695, PLUS the laundry was $0.75 and $0.50, so over 24 months, we'd save $700. It was smaller, though.

By this point, we were about an hour ahead of schedule, so we sat and discussed the places we had seen. The 3rd place we saw and the first place were the 2 contenders for the top spot. After figuring out the money and envisioning our lives in each, we walked to lunch. Our next appointment was the immediate neighbor of our last, but we're speedier than we expected and were 1.5 hours early. I mean, we'd been early for the last couple, but there was someone on site; this lady said she could come later. So we walked to lunch and decided that the first place was better than the third, though we were still kinda up in the air and hoping something would jump out at us so we wouldn't have to make that awfully close decision.

We ate at a market/taqueria/pupuseria. I had 2 tacos, and a pupusa. All were delicious. So delicious, they musta had to violate a health code to do it, 'cause I noticed after the meal that, while every other place we had passed had a grade of A posted in their windows from the health department, this place had a C. A delicious C.

We walked back to the apartment. No lady. We called some other numbers we had for Statewide people ('cause her voicemail was full...). Sergio picked up and sent someone over from his office, which was, we later learned, half a block away. Saw the apartment. It was okay. It had a nice big closet that we almost thought we could sleep in. And I noticed a wide windowsill that I'm sure we could grow plants on. Ultimately, it was smaller though, with none of the perks of place number 3, so we proceeded on to apartment number 5.

We walked through MacArthur Park. We started telling ourselves to get used to the idea that this apartment was going to be smaller and worse than all the others, because the area is so nice, if it's the same price, it must be crappier, right? WRONG! Perfect! It even has a second room that we'll use as a studio, and a breakfast nook. No fridge, or really ideal place to put a fridge, but the VIEW! And a fridge can go anywhere, and we don't need a large fridge.

So we called Sergio. He summoned us to his office. We spent an hour relaxing with him, filling out paperwork and chatting. He was super nice, and he gave us a ride back to our couchsurfers' place. He likes the observatory, and came to L.A. when I was 1 year old. He only has a sister or two still in Mexico. Almost all the rest of his family did what he did, and moved to the U.S. - L.A. and Chicago. We know more about him than that, but you'll learn more if we get the apartment and he becomes our property manager. We're crossing our fingers that happens. We have great credit scores, but no income... so...

In all, we walked 5 miles today, and my missing appendix is tired. Oh yeah. And the place where we're staying has a pond. I slipped, almost fell in, didn't fall in, but "oh no! a wall!" I'm fine.

In other news, our CS hosts are awesome. One of them owns a car, but only uses it once a month. They bike everywhere. They're at the end of a 30-day dumpster challenge. They've eaten only dumpstered food for the past 29 days.

We saw couches and mattresses on the roadside. Not as many as in Magdeburg, but plenty. We think we'll use our Zipcar gift from Nikki to wander about the city picking up useful trash to furnish our new apartment.

I can't wait to chop veggies in my own apartment!

We wed