Spring Cleaning

I accomplished a lot this past weekend. The 2nd Saturday of each month, my neighborhood MUD makes these huge industrial rubbish bins available to toss out bulky items. Meredith and I took Troy to the neighborhood Dog Fair in the morning where he saw a few of his dog park buddies. I ditched out early to get started on my cleanup and be able to get clean up for Meredith's mom's birthday dinner later in the evening.
This 2nd Saturday clean up day is one of those things I always forget about. I either think about it too late and miss it, or think about it too early and then forget about it when it comes around. This time I made a conscience effort to remember. I think the recent break-in kind of made me a little more aware of the disastrous shape my yard and garage were in.
I think one of the factors that made my house a target was that I hadn't yet mowed the lawn. The unkempt grass might have been a signal to the crooks that perhaps the occupants of the house were on vacation, making it a good candidate for thievery. Also, I had accumulated a bunch of wooden pallets, a brush pile and some other junk in the back yard that the thieves built a little step ladder to get back over the fence with my loot. My garage is also in shambles. I don't think the thieves even bothered to look in there, but the Brink's guys were in there to work on the installation of the system, so I felt a little embarrassed that it was such a mess. Most of it is just junk, magazines meant for recycling, lots of empty cardboard boxes (also meant for recycling), pieces of scrap wood and lots and lots of sawdust from past projects.
First order of business was to get the big bulky stuff collected and hauled off to the rubbish bins. It took about 4 trips back and forth but finally got rid of:

• busted back door
• bunch of pallets
• busted chairs
• decayed old patio chairs
• 40 year old grill that was a heap of rust
• old vintage '92 vcr
• decrepit end table
  

Feels very gratifying and cleansing to toss out a bunch of old junk.
I spent the rest of the afternoon up until 4pm mowing the lawn, edging, clearing an old brush pile and sweeping the rust off the patio.
Sunday, I tackled the garage. First order of business was a trip to Home Depot to get a box cutter, some twine and contractor garbage bags. Troy got to come along, he's always a big hit at home depot. Since we've been leaving the porch light on for most of the time I picked up a couple of CFL low energy bulbs as well. Meredith did the make up and some prosthetic appliances for a few magazine ads for a campaign promoting replacing traditional incandescent bulbs with low energy/low carbon CFL bulbs. So I felt a little obligated to do my part to save the planet.
Once I got back to the house, I started to tackle the garage. I started weeding through piles of junk sorting stuff out I wanted to keep by moving it to the other side of the garage, where I normally park the car. The rest was either stuffed in a garbage bag or stacked and bundled for recycling. Lots of cardboard boxes from all kinds of things were broken down and stacked flat. I had quite a collection of Amazon.com boxes, computer component boxes and other packaging. The whole thing was a bit like an archaeological dig. I found a lot of things I forgot I even had. Somethings I thought we lost forever that I 'd already bought a replacement for.
After several hours and a few beers, things started to look pretty good. I could actually see the cement on the garage floor. I swept that area out and started to move back the items I was keeping so that I could sweep out the other side.
I ended up with a full giant garbage bin, three stacks of cardboard, half a dozen stacks of magazines and 4 giant garbage bags. My garage looks so much bigger and brighter than it did a few hours before.
Wednesday is trash pick up day. The recycling and garbage guys are somewhat sporadic and unpredictable. Sometimes the recycling guys with come at the crack of dawn while the garbage guys might not wander through before 6pm. To combat this you pretty much have to get stuff to the curb the night before and hope it doesn't rain or blow away. Last night I dragged everything to the curb, basically lining the whole curb with recyclables and garbage bags. Then said a quick silent prayer that they would take everything.
Now that my garage has had a bit of a colon cleansing I hope to keep it that way for a little while I've already caught myself putting a box in there from a new LCD TV I bought. I planned to put it up in the attic, but didn't drag the ladder out to do it.
We'll see how long it lasts. I have a few other rooms that need a good enema as well.

Fortress of Solitude

The Brink's Home Security guys were at the house today installing the new home security system.
They arrived at about 8am and went through a bunch of paper work and asked me a few questions - where I'd like the keypad, what doors I enter and a handful of other questions.
On Tuesday when I scheduled the installation I had purposely scheduled it for today since I had a shoot schedule for Wednesday. Figures that just after scheduling the install, my shoot moved to Thursday. I figured changing the install this late in the game would just muck everything up, so I decided to try to work around the shoot.
My house was pre-wired for a security system when it was built back in 1999, so I guess I was thinking that they would just slap the thing in and be done by noon. I was wrong of course.
Luckily, as a contingency plan I had talked my Dad into coming over and hanging out if the Brink's guys were still around by the time I had to leave for the shoot.
Dad showed up around 11:30am and the Brink's guys were still going strong. I split about noon and drove over to the shoot. The shoots were pretty quick. One was demonstrating how to use a notebook cable lock and best practices for using them. The other was a quick demo of the bio-metric fingerprint readers that some notebooks have to increase security and ease of use (you don't often misplace or forget your fingertip). Both were in the can by 2:30pm.
I zipped back home to find that the Brink's guys were getting close to finishing up, running tests and doing some checks. Shortly after I arrived Dad left to run some errands. I thanked him for taking time out of his day to help me out. My parents are wonderful.
By about 4pm the Brink's guys gave me a few lessons on how to use the system, how to turn it on and off, how to cancel alarms, turn the motion detector off, and various options I can set. I think I've forgotten everything by now. I'm sure I'll end up setting it off a few times before I get used to it.
Good thing they left a DVD for me to watch that explains everything again.

Youth of today

Meredith called me on her way back from work. The detective working the burglary had called her to tell her that my gun had been recovered. Someone in a town a little north of Austin reported a suspicious person walking down the street knocking on doors and looking in windows. The cops questioned him and searched his vehicle and found my .40 caliber handgun. He claimed he "bought it from someone" apparently they also found some other items that were linked to another recent burglary as well. Turns out they think that this 20 year old man was leading a "crew" of juveniles ranging in ages from 17-13 years old, driving around breaking into houses. The guy is sitting in jail now. Weapons possession alone is enough to get him some good time in jail.
They haven't recovered Meredith's notebook. They found some other notebooks he had, right manufacturer but wrong model and the wrong Windows login. They'll continue to search pawn shops, Ebay and Craiglist for it as well as the other items that went missing.
I called the detective and asked about the gun. He said that it would be processed at a firearms facility where they would fire several rounds and collect the slugs and casings to check to see if it had been involved in anything after the time it left my possession. They'll call me when I can get it back.
Meredith mentioned to the detective that we thought that the window next to the back door might have been tampered with the night of the burglary. Sunday morning I had found that the window screen had also been removed and a small hole in the screen where it looked like someone had stuck a screw driver through to pop the screen out. Apparently the officers had overlooked it the night of the burglary and had concentrated on processing the door instead. The detective urged us to call 911 to have an officer come out and process the window. Apparently, they are needing more evidence to link the alleged thieves to the scenes.
When the officer arrived he dusted the window and found a couple of prints where it looks like someone with small hands had tried to push the window up...both at the middle of the window and towards the top of the window. Chances are those are our culprits. I haven't messed with that window in ages and the handprints are much smaller than Meredith's or mine.
I'm just happy that the gun has been found and at least one criminal has been taken off the streets.

Thieves & Liars

It's been an interesting couple of weeks since I got back from Scotland.
The analysts meeting was on April 2 & 3. I had to videotape about 10 executives saying short lines. The event production company sent a director from LA to oversee the shoots. We worked pretty well together and got everything done. I had to coach him as to what to expect from our executives. I think he went into it thinking that they would be willing to spend as much time as needed and would tolerate saying the short piece over and over again until the director got what he wanted. It didn't quite work out that way. These guys wanted nothing more than to say it once and get out as soon as possible. A few were willing to work with us and a few got pretty agitated and wouldn't say the line more than twice. I'm sure they had other things on their mind.
On Thursday the director went back to LA with 6 of the ten executives on tape. Plan was for them to cut the ones they had and come back on Monday to tape the rest of them on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We'd cut them in our studio and lay them down on beta tape the by noon on Wednesday to be shown the same day.
On Friday there was a knock on the studio door and I open it to discover an executive all ready for his shoot. Apparently there was a slight miscommunication between the last schedule we were given and what he was given. He was none too happy. He was re-scheduled for 8am sharp on Wednesday.
The weekend rolled around and Meredith and I had a busy day on Saturday. An old college roommate of Meredith's had invited us (and Troy) over to celebrate her fiancé's birthday. They live about 30 minutes or more out of town. We planned on showing up early and leaving before things really got started so that we could make it to film fund raiser.
Everything went as planned. We showed up at the party, hung out for a while and left. We went back to Meredith's house and dropped Troy off and picked up Carolyn (Meredith's business partner and housemate) and zipped off to the bar where the fund raiser was being held.
It was nice to see some old film friends. Really makes me want to find some time to get back into it and help out doing some indie film projects. We stuck around until after the raffle (we didn't win anything) and left to find some dinner. After a nice filling dinner at Texas Land and Cattle we drove back to Carolyn's to pick up troy and drop off Carolyn.
Meredith and I got home at about 10:30pm, opened the door and Troy went wandering inside. We stopped in the hallway and chit chatted about a few things. I continued into the living room in time to see the dog slip out the back door. I called to Meredith..."did you leave the back door open?". Often before we leave we put the dog outside and leave the door open so he can get back in by himself. So since he hasn't learned to close the door when he comes back in, we have to do it for him. And it is entirely feasible that if we weren't paying attention we'd just forget and leave the door open. She says "must of..." and approaches the door. About that time I notice that the dead bolt is still in the locked position and that the door is broken. Someone has kicked the door in. She immediately says "where's my notebook" and looks to the coffee table where we'd left it. It was gone.
I'm standing right next to the house phone, so I pick it up and dial 911. I tell the operator that my house has just been broken into. She wisely tells me that we should leave the house and that she is sending a police unit out. About that time, I say "oh crap, the gun!" which of course causes a stir on the other end of the line. I rush back into the bedroom and open the nightstand drawer to discover that my Berreta .40 caliber handgun is missing. At this point the operator is pretty insistent that we leave the house. At this point I'm pretty sure there is no one else in the house, but we vacate to the driveway anyway.
The sheriff arrives and quizzes me about the missing gun. They do a quick search through the house. We do a quick inventory from room to room.

• Meredith's notebook and about 10 DVD's from the middle of my collection (S's from the Sci-fi/fantasy section) from the living room.
• My camera bag with my 35mm SLR film camera, 28-135mm lens and flash from the spare bedroom. (luckily I had had my Scotland film rolls developed already)
  
• And older notebook I was using as a print server for a color printer I use for printing the surface of DVD's from the front computer room
  
• The Berreta 8040 .40 caliber handgun, a box of loose change (pennies, nickels and dimes) and a jar full of Euros and British pounds sterling from the bedroom.

Oddly enough they left a lot of stuff that if I was a thief I would have taken...high end home theater audio gear, Wii, PS/2, Xbox, desktop computer parts and my large King Richard the Lionhearted replica sword. Makes me think they were looking for things of high value that could be easily slipped into a backpack or duffel bag.
The police dusted a few things for prints, took a report and left. I was expecting Grissom to come in a find microscopic epitheliums they'd get a one hour DNA analysis and arrest Col. Mustard before the night was over. Not so much.
Meredith called her parents who came over and boarded our broken door shut as a temporary safeguard for the night until we could put in a replacement.
We didn't sleep much. You feel so violated. You wake at every little noise. You dream about people sneaking into your room while you are asleep.
Sunday we went to Home Depot and bought a new door. Meredith's Dad was nice enough to help put it in...I say "help" when really I didn't do much at all. I'm grateful that he knows what he's doing with a hammer and nails. The door fits better and feels a bit more solid that the old one.
We slept a little better that night.
Monday I had to start dealing with the insurance company. First task was to come up with all the receipts for the expensive items.
Meredith was able to get a copy of her notebook invoice, I had the receipt for the gun and the camera lens...but couldn't find the receipt for the camera and flash.
I hardly throw any receipts out. I have mountains of receipts. I have receipts from trips to the grocery store from three years ago... Of course, I can't find what I really need. I gave up after a couple hours.
I called the store where I bought the camera and flash. They went out of their way and spent some time searching through their archives from 2001 until they found the invoices. I was reminded about how important good customer service is when considering purchasing decisions and repeat purchasing. I'll definitely be going back to purchase another camera even though their prices are higher than others, their customer service is top notch.
Tuesday and Wednesday brought about more executive filming. I felt the pressure on Wednesday. Not only did we have 3 executives in the studio to film, I had to turn around an edit for two of them recreating what had been done in LA for the other 6 all by noon. Somehow I was able to pull it off.
Thursday was rough as well. Occasionally we do live broadcast interviews with executives out of the studio to the national news like CNBC and Bloomberg. This executive was scheduled to appear live on a couple financial morning shows. TV runs on NY time, so everything is an hour earlier than ours, which of course meant a very early morning for me.
Friday was a bit more relaxing. I'm in pre-production on a new project that has to be done pretty quickly. This is one of those cases where their budget got cut at the last minute. So they come to us at the last minute wanting a rush job on something that they were willing to pay a dedicated full-time editor handsomely for. We get it thrown on our plate...and we have a lot of plates spinning at the same time.
Saturday Dad brought Grandpa over and we went our for breakfast. Dad and I have had a tradition of going out to breakfast on Saturday morning for several years now. He got the idea one year when he was up in Baudette, Minnesota, my mother's home town and residence of my Grandparents, Aunt and Uncle and my cousin. My Uncle and my Grandfather have been going out for breakfast on Saturday mornings for quite a long time. Even though my father and I live in the same town I don't get to see him much throughout the week. It's just a good opportunity to talk and catch up. I'm sure as the years go by I'll value these Saturday mornings even more.
My Grandparents are getting older and I should really try to make a point of spending more time with them before I no longer can.
Maybe next week.