We went to see Kung Fu Hustle tonight.  It was pretty good.  It was kind of a mix between a movie, a video game, and a cartoon.  It was interesting to me how influenced it was by American culture.  As an added bonus, Wayne Knight was there watching the movie as well.  You may know him better as TV's "Newman".

We are all packed now, and I've got nothing to do, so I uploaded a set of pictures of our place as of March 12th to flickr.  Click here to check them out.  I wasn't really trying to take the pictures in a virtual tour order, but I've tried to put them together in order as if you were walking into the building from the front.  If you use the slideshow view, you won't get the titles and descriptions I put in for each pic.  The quality is not that great, as I'm just using a free flickr account, and I haven't figured out yet what a good file size per pic is for me.  Also, I didn't notice until I uploaded the last six photos that they have tools that probably would have made my uploading a bit easier.  Doh!

We are almost packed up completely.  What's left is the bedroom and our computers.  The plan is to have everything ready to go Monday morning, go for our second walk-through, pick up our rental truck, pack it up, and head over there.  We'll sleep on the floor Monday night, then start the unloading first thing in the morning on Tuesday.  While packing today, Jamie found something that makes me happy.  It's an essay that Brandon Wilson wrote in 8th grade on February 4, 1991.  It's entitled, "Falling In Love".  With B-dub's permission, I'd sure like to reprint it here.  (He got a 100 on it.)

This was cool to wake up to this morning on MSNBC.

We are still on track for moving in on the 12th!  We're just waiting to get some final papers from the bank to the escrow company.  I've been working non-stop for this place down on Wilshire.  I worked longer hours this week, so I can cut out at noon on Friday to head down to the Siebers' for Easter.  What's new?  Too much.  We went to the Damah Film Festival Awards Night and saw some great shorts.  Two couples from NY that we knew from the Haven are moving out here in the next couple of months.  We went and saw a taping of Norm McDonald's sketch show pilot for Comedy Central.  Next week we're going to go to a taping of the new sitcom "Stacked" with Pamela Anderson, because Tony is doing a guest spot, and he got us on some list.  I've priced out all of the components of my new desk that Scott Coones is going to build for me.  I'm getting two pieces of glass for the desktop and having them sandblasted.  In my head, it's a sweet desk; let's hope it turns out that way.  We got a chair at Z Gallerie that matches our couch.  All we have left to buy for our new place is a dryer and a flat-screen TV, if we can afford it.  Jamie did her first official key position for the agency Zenobia.  She was the food stylist on a Johnson's brats shoot.  It was kind of rough, because the people in charge didn't provide near enough brats for Jamie to cook, and only had two tiny prop grills for her to cook on, but it was a great learning experience and very cool that the agency booked her for it.  There should be more than that after a 2 week gap, but stories about me sitting in front of the computer programming aren't too interesting.

There was a terrible car accident out in front of our place tonight.  Our neighbor came to get us, and we went out where a large crowd had gathered.  Apparently, a car that was driving much, much too fast tried to pass someone on the right while crossing an intersection, even though there was only one lane.  The car lost control and spun around while slamming into the cars parked across the street.  There were four people in the car.  Three of them seemed to sustain only minor injuries, but the person in the passenger seat was apparently killed.  Two parked cars absorbed most of the damage: a big truck that was knocked over the curb, across the sidewalk and through a fence, and our neighbor's smaller white car, which is probably totaled.  Our neighbor's car was knocked forward a couple of car length's and came to rest about 3 feet from our car.  I uploaded some pics to my flickr account.  Some of them are grainy because I had to lighten them up after the fact.

UPDATE: This happened at about 8:00 p.m. tonight.  I just went out there (about midnight), and the street is still blocked off, the cars are still in place, and detectives are investigating the scene.  I asked one of the officers if Jamie was going to have any trouble getting out at 6:00 in the morning to go to work.  He said they'd have it cleaned up in a few hours.  Apparently it is a criminal investigation, because I heard him ask over his radio what the status of "the suspect" was.  I suppose they meant the driver, and that he was in the hospital.

UPDATE: 1:00 a.m.--The street is now clear, and traffic is flowing again.  They towed away the red car and the truck.  The driver of the red car was drunk, and the passenger did not make it.

Jamie and I have been blessed with a ton of work of late.  When last I blogged, we were just finishing up Jamie's Irvine gig.  That next week, she started on another project that is with the same people and the same client that she did her first project for.  She's almost been doing this for a year!  This time, she's hired buddies Clinton and Scott Coones to work on it, too.  I also started last week on a new on-site contract with a company called Zentropy Partners.  It's a pretty cool company that offices out of a great building on Wilshire.  I'll be going in there until the end of April.  Hopefully, by then, I will have won another contract that Mark and I are going to work together on.  It's hard to tell what the chances are of getting the contract, though.

On the home front, I called Chatelaine a couple days ago, and the rain has not pushed back our move-in date yet.  Fourteen more days until the first people close and then we'll know for sure.  We bought ourselves a washing machine on Sunday.  (It won't be delivered until after we move in.)  We found a great Maytag machine on clearance at Best Buy, so we snapped it up.  I've designed a desk for my office, and the aforementioned Scott Coones is going to build it for me.  We've priced the wood materials, but I've still got to price the glass top I want.  It's going to be LOADS cheaper than the one that inspired it at Alan Desk ($3,400).  Jamie and I were picked to be in our builder's magazine.  Jamie was interviewed on the phone the other day, and they are going to take pictures of us out there next week.  On another home-related issue, though not our home, my brother Paul and his wife Christen finally sold their old home, just in time to avoid the sinister two-house-payment scenario.

I would like to announce for Clinton's sake, since there's something wrong with his blog, that he will be doing stand-up Thursday night at 424 again in Beverly Hills.  Let me know if you need info on how to get there.

It's been a crazy week.  We headed down to Fallbrook last weekend, because there was a birthday party for Connie and Aaron on Saturday in Coronado, and because Jamie was booked to work in Irvine all week.  The place was about the same distance from our place as from the Siebers, but the traffic is worse on our side.  Jamie ended up working just Mon, Tues, and half of Wednesday, because she got called to be a key stylist on a reshoot for which she had assisted a couple of weeks ago.  The original lead was out of the country, so they asked Jamie.  This was a big deal, and would have been her first key job, so we headed back up to L.A. on Wednesday.  Unfortunately, the reshoot didn't happen yesterday and today as planned, and we have no idea if or when it might happen.  We're hoping that they get Jamie to do it, even if the original lead gets back from her trip, but who knows?  Backing up a bit, to add to the craziness, Don had to go to the emergency room Monday night.  He was in incredible pain, and for those who know Don, you know that if he even mentions the pain, that it's some serious pain.  Turns out he had two kidney stones.  The next day, Connie came down with the flu or bronchitis.  I'm guessing that she caught it at the emergency room.  Today, I started to feel a little under the weather myself.  I've got a lot of work to do, but I'm going to try to take it easy over the weekend.  We're heading back down to Fallbrook tomorrow.  Who knows what next week will bring?

BTW, it's been raining on and off here lately, but we haven't heard any bad postponement news on our condo, so that counter up there is still on target!

I found out the last time we were out at the condo that the people that are scheduled to close first in our building are scheduled to close on March 16th.  Once they close, they can't push us back because of any type of construction delays.  So, if their closing really happens, we'll know that April 12th is firm for us.  Here's hoping!