Saturday, June 19, 2010

The Best Laid Plans....

NOTE:  Seriously, don't bother reading this.  This is really just blogging as therapy... and not even particularly juicy therapy.

It has been a really busy month.  Holy crow, has it.

I've been working on a contract for... well I've lost specific track, I think when I began it was six-weeks until I had to be done because I was leaving the country on holiday.
I leave in less than 24 hours.  I'm not done the contract.  I probably should have been.  I could have found a few more hours to work on it - particularly early in the contract.  But who knew what this past week was going to be like - how capricious life could get.  (I'll get back to that in a moment.)
I've passed some of the last of the work on - stuff that I could technically take with me, but would be incredibly inefficient for me to do while travelling.  I'm continuing to do some of the other stuff in the contract.  Things that I can fit into the cracks - reading on the plane or when I would be doing leisure reading... but I refuse to let it impact on the vacation itself.  That is all work that would have extended past my departure regardless of whether I had managed to tackle the rest early.  Indeed I'm told to expect more in my inbox by the time the plane takes off tomorrow evening.

So... I was pretty much on course to finish all the complicated work as of a week ago.  Then on Monday of this week I was hit by a double whammy.  First thing that happened was I woke up... to the sound of the phone... A message from Craig that our film had been accepted into the Mississauga Independent Film Festival.  This was cool... except that it kind of changed our plans.  We had until that moment been doing the world premiere of the film in the Okanagan over two weeks later... precious time lost.

About 3 minutes later I discovered that one of the two screens I have on my desktop computer was not working.  Worse yet - it was the larger of the two.  So now I had about 40% less screen real-estate, all of it on my most powerful computer.  This in itself was going to make a lot of the work I had to do in this week much less simple.  (You would be surprized just how much time you can lose to dragging windows around and resizing and so on.)  It was a challenge to get everything I had to do done (and I failed) - including day-job, Best Picture episode final editing (I haven't mentioned this yet - I will soon), the contract, and several tasks I had to do before leaving that only I could do efficiently for Provost Pictures, that had now been bumped up by the change of premiere dates.  I did spend some time and effort looking into a quick fix of the monitor - no dice.  It'll have to be replaced... and I was not really going to have an opportunity to do that until I return... maybe even after I return from Mississauga!

So I forge on, working at a slower pace, trying to prioritize and put contingencies in place should I not finish everything in time... but hoping that in fact I'd manage to pull it off in the long run.

Provost Pictures' work in particular - despite the fact that most of it was being handled by other people out of necessity - just would not settle down into an easily managed pile.  But wait!  There's more!  Not that I can really get specific for reasons of efficiency (so many details to explain to make the circumstances clear) and discretion (I'm hardly legally bound, but it would be un-cool to talk specifics on either of these) but both the contract and another item I haven't even mentioned (a grievance I am involved in resolving on another project I'm working on) each got more complicated as the week went on.  Oh, and did I mention the Best Man's Speech (the primary reason for my vacation is to attend a wedding) and an episode of Best Picture that is to be shot in part while I am in England, both still have to be written... and both will now wait for on the plane.  Anyhow... somehow as the week wore on I continued to keep just ahead of the wave.  Until yesterday evening I really thought I would have finished everything in time.  It had been a challenge, but I had some how actually managed my time to the bleeding edge of my capability...

And then the power went out.

No kidding.

And as if that wasn't enough, for some reason the power is intimately connected to our internet in our building, to the degree that when the power went out, the internet was still on.  (I am writing on borrowed wi-fi now.)

That was the proverbial straw.  I should point out, in case you thought I was complaining (venting, yes, complaining, no - subtle distinction, I know), that I am actually rather amused by all of this.  Perhaps if I could actually recreate the precise chain of events in detail and in all its snowballing glory and just how close I came to succeeding, then it might actually seem more amusing than I suspect it does.

Even today on borrowed wi-fi, working solely from my laptop (I swaer, that going from working on two separate computers and three screens, so working on less than half the screen-space and the least robust of the processors make me feel like I'm using a rock to do a hammer's job.) - and coaxing it to perform at the level I need of it in order to successfully do all the stuff I need it to in order to finish up all I have to do before I go - including be prepared to finish those few imperative tasks I have to do while on my way, I have barely kept the engine on the tracks... but as I watch the last few automated tasks complete as I finish writing this, I remain mostly bemused.  I don't know I guess this is sort of a "don't sweat the small stuff" affirmation for myself.

You didn't really read to the end of this did you?  Yeah, sorry about that.

At some point early on I thought I might actually get to talk about the honour of being asked to be Best Man at Demetri's wedding, or the happy complexities of having your world premiere scooped to a festival two weeks earlier than planned... but that didn't manifest.  Perhaps while I'm on vacation.  Afterall, part of the idea is that I'm going to have more time for stuff like this...  but don't hold your breath.

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