#277 - Dessicated Chicken and Invitations

I was up late last night doing some writing, sitting outside on the porch.

I wanted to be around the area where I’d seen the baby raccoons earlier, and it was a fine place to sit and work as well.

The entire time I was there I never heard a sound, nor did I see Momma raccoon hanging around looking for her brood.  All good signs that indicate the furry family has moved on to a new home.

Needless to say, I was tired when I woke up in the morning around seven. I didn’t get up but rather rolled over and tried to get more sleep. I managed to stay in bed until almost nine o’clock, when my Teams app started binging incessantly.

I got to my desk to answer some questions and to get started on the days work. Our supervisor was back from a few days off and called for a quick meeting. Believing I would have a few minutes before everyone got their act together, I snuck downstairs and made myself a cortado. I was going to need the caffeine boost this morning.

Because I was working late last night, I skipped taking the natural sleep aids in case they worked so well I slept through my alarm.

I got back just in time for the meeting to start.

Turns out some of the staff didn’t read the emails and Teams messages instructing them to work from home until the air conditioning was fixed. Not to mention that there was a soccer match in the city and we were exempted from coming into the studio.

It pays to check your messages.

We debriefed our supervisor to catch her up and then she gave us our marching orders for the day. My main task was going to be rendering the files for the next department and making sure all the administrative things were kept up to date.

Almost immediately we ran into an issue where a layer in the photoshop file was not rendering. Almost half the shots had this special layer, so it had the possibility of making our lives miserable. Going into each file to make corrections and then re-rendering them would be a nightmare to deal with.

We thought about our options and eventually the supervisor of our team and the next team came up with a plan. The resulting solution wouldn’t affect what I was doing, and I was able to continue working. Doing work twice is one of my biggest pet peeves so I was glad for the resolution.

By noon it was too hot to go for our usual walk. And I had a bunch of stuff rendering and some revisions to do. It felt like we were finally getting things done. Like a blockage had been cleared and the waters of productivity we allowed to flow free. It was an exciting and liberating sensation that we hadn’t experienced since starting this show.

At one PM, with things back under control, I took small break to get the mail, inspect my garden beds and tap the lower soffits looking for signs of sleeping raccoons. Nothing squeaked or freaked out as I hit each panel, and I took that as another good sign that the furry stowaways had left.

There was nothing of interest in the mail except for a Breck’s Bulbs catalogue of flowers. But since I’d spent my yearly plant acquisition budget, it held no interest for me.

In the garden, I picked three or four red strawberries and a handful of mini cherry tomatoes. A tiny haul for sure, but all the more precious for having come out of my own garden. The little tomatoes are full of flavour, and the strawberries are sweet and juicy.

I had a three o’clock meeting that I was scheduled to attend as a shadow for my supervisor. I’ll be in the meetings when she is on vacation next week. Before the meeting I needed to watch the leica reel of the show and browse all the assets that our design team had ready. A leica is when they animate and time the story board panels into a film with the dialogue track added in. It’s the first time we get to feel the timing and get sense of the episode.

The point of the meeting was to see what assets were missing or needed some clarification. And there are specific questions for the head animators about character poses, expressions and how things are going to be handled. It’s also another chance for us to remove any busy work from the show. We ask questions like, do we need to see the character’s feet in this shot, or can we tighten the fielding of the shot, so we don’t see the tires moving. We have a limited amount of time per episode, so anything that trims away unnecessary work is worth talking about.

That meeting went on for an hour or so, during which time I was still working on the rendering.

I spent the last hour and a half working on finishing up the rendering and administrative work and finished the day feeling like I’d accomplished something.

I came downstairs to find Robyn still working away. She gets lost in time when she gets into a paintng. When she saw me and realized what time it was, she chided herself, saved her work and quit for the day.

She’d made dinner plans with kiddo#2 to go to Swiss Chalet after picking him up for work and aske if I wanted to come along. She had to ask because I am not a big fan of Swiss Chalet. For chicken place, the have dry sticky chicken. Their ribs are pretty good, but I thought I’d save us a few bucks and just eat at home.

I popped a Dr. Oetker’s spinachi pizzas in the oven, but not before adding some diced bacon on top. I guarantee my pizza tasted way better than that desiccated chalet chicken.

While Robyn was away, I watched some useless YouTube videos to help me wind down from the workday. I felt like I should be doing something productive, but I just wanted to do something mindless for a while.

We had two invitations today. One from Robyn’s sister to come up to the cottage for a weekend and the other for a dinner at our friend’s Paul and Laura.

After some discussion we decided to accept both invitations.  I ordered one of those mini chainsaws to cut branches around the yard, but now I think I’ll bring it to the cottage to help do some trail maintenance while I am there.

When Robyn and the kiddo returned from their dinner, we sat down to watch some television. We put on Murder Mindfully and happily watched two or three episodes, or until tem PM. At that pioint I needed to get some writing done.

I headed out to the front porch once again in case I the raccoons were making some noise or bak on the roof. If Momma was still hanging around, then I knew the babies were still inside the attic somewhere hiding.

Kiddo #1’s room is right below where they were nesting, and she hasn’t complained about the noises since the contractors came by. I’ll take that as another good sign.

The only sounds I heard were human made. We are a very noisy species.

It’s amazing how many people are out and about at midnight in this town. When I went to college here in the nineties, even the MacDonalds closed by ten PM. No drive through or nothing. Oh, how things have changed.

My Thermacell just ran out of power, so it’s just a matter of time before the mosquitoes find my delicious flesh. And it’s coming up on one AM, and I think it should go and get some sleep. I have a feeling I am going to need every bit of my reserves tomorrow.

I'll grab a glass of cherry juice to wash down my magnesium glycinate pills, but I’ll skip the kiwi for tonight. I’m not even a little bit hungry, and certainly not interested in two kiwis right now. Although, they do work amazingly well to get me to sleep.

Time to throw in the towel for today.

Until tomorrow.