The Excitement Never Ends

The past 3 days have proven to be very enjoyable for the most part!  On Tuesday morning, I got myself to Karga Seven.  I did my usual work in postproduction.  A good portion of the time was spent working on a final edit report and watching a soon-to-be-aired episode of "Tornado Alley:  I Survived a Tornado".  The last portion of the episode covered the tornado that hit Pekin on November 17, 2013.  I've also watched some of an upcoming episode about Washington.  It reminded me to be thankful that all my family in Pekin stayed safe.  I have a lot of family there, and it was scary to know that part of their town was destroyed.  After I was finished there, I went on home.  I got a couple loads of laundry going, and then I prepared dinner.  After I ate dinner, I did an assortment of tasks.  I made copies of some items I'll have to take to the post office when I get my passport renewed, and I did my homework for New Media & Emerging Entertainment.  I think there were a few other things in there, but it was all small stuff.  I went to the hot tub shortly before it closed, and I did some more work before going to bed.  All the excitement came on Wednesday.  Instead of going straight to Glassman, I went on a tour of the Writer's Guild of America Library!  UTLA announced the tour a long time ago and said they could have 15 people come, so I jumped on it and made sure I got a spot.  There ended up being 8 students on this trip.  I got a ride over there, and our tour began soon after we arrived.  We started out in a hallway outside the library, but we got into the library pretty quickly.  They had all kinds of cool artifacts on display!  As you might have read, I watched "Psycho" for the first time ever on Monday.  Interestingly enough, they had the typewriter used to write the novel "Psycho" on display!  (The movie came out the year after the book.)  They also had the letter opener the author used, and it was creepy!  There was one other artifact with a carved skull and skeleton, but I forgot what it was.  One of the coolest things about the library is that they have scripts from many movies and TV shows over the years.  There were some on display on the main tables.  They told us quite a bit before they let us run free, and I was getting anxious!  We only had about an hour for the tour, and I wanted as much free time as possible!  After about half an hour, they let us do as we pleased.  Most of the movie and TV scripts are behind glass doors, but they told us they would unlock them if we wanted to see anything.  I asked them if they had any "Cheers" scripts, and they had a bunch!  They had the script for the pilot and a bunch of other episodes!  I grabbed 4 of them and excitedly went back to the table.  I took a bunch of pictures, and you can see those if you're friends with me on Facebook.  It was just so neat!  I read through the pilot and one other episode completely, and I looked at the other two for a short time.  I laughed out loud at several points just reading the scripts!  I probably looked a little strange to everyone else in the group, but I couldn't have cared less!  We stayed about 15 minutes past the time we originally thought we would leave, and I liked that.  After that, we walked over to the nearby Farmer's Market where Phil (the Executive Director of the UTLA program) bought us lunch courtesy of UT!  We got some food at a South American BBQ place.  I enjoyed it!  Some people had to leave soon after that, but the rest of us talked for a while and then got some ice cream.  We found a place that looked really good, but it was cash only.  Phil needed to use his credit card, so it couldn't happen there.  They had a really good-sounding "Brownie Sundae Monster" or something like that, so I bought my own with cash.  It was well spent!  The rest of them went to another ice cream place where Phil could use his credit card.  I probably would have gone there and gotten free ice cream, but the people at the first place warned us that most places were cash-only.  While the rest were getting their ice cream, a guy who did the UTLA program in 2009 came over and said hi to Phil.  When Phil asked him how things were going, he said he works for The Price Is Right.  Yes, I'm serious!  It's not a joke!  He said a bunch of other UT people do, too!  I immediately asked him if I could contact him, and Phil asked if we could get together a group to attend a Price is Right taping and then go backstage and learn more about what goes on.  The guy said yes!  I'm obviously in, and Phil said we could get about 5 or 10 students total!  You don't know how excited I am for this!  Not only will it be a great experience, but I can talk to all the guys who work there and have a good chance at getting a position there!  I've been very fortunate here so far, and the good stuff just keeps on coming!  After we were finished there, one guy went back home, and the rest of us got in Phil's car.  He took 3 of us there (including me), and 4 of us squeezed in his car for a ride back.  However, we ended up getting a nice tour before he drove us back to the UTLA center!  The first place he took us was a nice restaurant and golf course in Burbank.  He recommended it as a nice, romantic place to eat!  We just went there so we could see the view.  It's nice and high up!  They also have some conference rooms there, and there's a little chapel-type area where people get married!  After we left there, we drove by a nice place in Glendale (which is right next to Burbank).  It's a museum that used to be the house of the guy who founded Glendale.  It looked like a big, fancy tourist spot!  They also have a big garden, tennis courts, a public pool, etc. on the property.  I would like to go there sometime!  Then he drove us by the first house he owned in the L.A. area.  It was modestly sized, but it sounded like a great deal!  The rent sounded ridiculously low for L.A., and it also included water!  He only had to pay for gas and electricity in addition to rent!  The house also had a small backyard, which is all you can ask for in a big city.  He told us there was a powerful earthquake just after he and his girlfriend moved in, but they only lost 2 small things because most of their stuff was still in boxes.  Some other people who suffered a lot more damage came over to the house, and he let them stay there for a while.  Phil has so many cool stories!  I think his old house was the last stop on the second tour of the day.  He took us back soon after that, and I went back to the apartment to grab my laptop.  Then I went to Glassman so I could work there for a few hours.  I had a nice time there.  When it was time to go, I went home and ate a quick dinner.  Just after I got back to the apartment, I got a call from Glassman.  They want me to work at a presentation they're doing over the weekend after Spring Break!  They also want me to be there on Monday morning, but I don't particularly want to miss class.  Still, it'll be a fun weekend!  Then it was time for New Media & Emerging Entertainment.  The first hour or so of class was just watching videos that the professor liked.  Really, that class is mostly watching videos on YouTube or from other sources.  It could easily be an online class!  Later, a guest speaker came and presented to us.  He's had a lot of experience in horror movies.  He's made some of his own, and his strongest skill is special effects.  He showed us a bunch of videos from a YouTube series he's helped to produce.  They showed how to create some of the gory, ridiculous special effects seen in horror movies.  He said he got a deal to make a feature film because of his work on that series!  That's great for him!  It was cool, but I wish he wouldn't have shown so many videos.  I got the point pretty quickly.  He could have wrapped it up a little sooner, but he ended up going late.  After we got out of class, I went back to the apartment.  It was late, so I chilled for a while and then went to bed.  Thursday was okay - there were good and bad things.  I met up with the girl who gives me rides to Karga Seven on Thursdays, but this is the last one - she's dropping her internship at Karga Seven for another one she found!  I'm all on my own from now on!  I'm planning on switching around my hours and days that I work.  Once I got there, I received my transcription assignment.  There were a few other things they thought they would give me, but they had me transcribe instead.  Transcription is not exactly what I would call "fun", but I got to it.  I had no clue how much talking there was in the clip she gave me!  They actually wanted me to transcribe 3 different clips, but I was maybe 2/3 of the way through the first one at the end of the day!  Good luck to them with the rest of that!  I've never had anything that bad before!  The nice thing (as always) was lunch.  Since it was the other girl's last day, some of our supervisors took us out to lunch!  We went to a shopping center close to our building, and they had a bunch of great food options there!  I got some food from an Asian BBQ place.  I've had a lot of exotic BBQ lately!  And it's all been delicious!  After we ate lunch and hung out there, we returned to Karga Seven for the rest of the day.  I continued working on my monotonous, demoralizing transcription assignment.  It would have been nicer if the guys in the video at least weren't so repetitive!  At 5:00, it was time to go.  I asked for next week off because it's Spring Break, and I got the time off!  Woo hoo!  Some people probably had horrible drives home from work today because the President was in town to be on Jimmy Kimmel's show, but our drive home was fine!  He was in a different part of town, so we didn't have to fight through the bad traffic!  Traffic will continue to be bad over the weekend because of the L.A. Marathon on Sunday.  After I got home, I ate dinner and then went to the Line Producing class I'm auditing.  It was a great class!  We learned that the professor in that class is producing a movie that will hopefully start filming in the fall.  I'll make sure to go out and see it!  After I got home from that, I put one more load of laundry in the washing machine.  Then I watched a couple episodes of "The Middle" to prepare myself for the set visit tomorrow!  I signed up to visit the set because my mom is a fan of the show.  I had never seen it before tonight, but it's funny!  I should watch more of it later!  What I didn't know is that Neil Flynn, who plays Mike Heck, is a Bradley alumnus!  We're probably going to get to meet him tomorrow!  That'll be so awesome!  I'll have to get a picture to show my mom!  I'm not working at Karga Seven tomorrow because of that visit.  It should be a "heck" of a fun day!  And I'm going to Universal Studios on the weekend to kick off Spring Break!