I'm About to Be Famous

Except for the part where I'm not, at all.  A little over a year ago, I wrote about how I kept getting recruited off the sidelines to be an extra in various films my daughter had dragged me to.

One of those movies--the one that inspired that post, actually--was a little bigger scale than the others, in that it starred Dennis Quaid, Zac Efron and Heather Graham and was directed by some guy apparently famous for shooting a plastic bag blowing in the wind or something like that.

I did not meet any of them or even see Quaid or Graham, but I did stand across the street from Zac Efron for a couple of hours while he filmed a scene over and over again. Between takes, he rode a borrowed bicycle around in the street, which was kind of cute.  Up close-ish, he still looks like a skinny teenager and I kind of suspect that photoshop or something similar is behind all those ab shots the magazines were showing us a couple of years ago.

It's called At Any Price. Here's the trailer.

If you go see this movie, you may or may not catch a glimpse of me standing on the street in front of a restaurant with Luke from the Post Office while Zac Efron jumps into a car and screeches off down the street about 15 times.  Oh, wait...probably that will only happen once in the movie.  If you do spot me, I'll look like hell, standing out in the cold wind in a sweater that makes me look huge and flat shoes that don't match my clothes--the nice heels that go with that outfit are in my car a mile or so away.

Exciting Developments

I never meant to let more than two months pass without at least dropping by to post a picture or a quick update, but it's been a crazy few months.

First, as you already know, my new grandson Caleb came along at the end of August, just a few days before my last post. Here's a picture of Caleb, even though you've already seen him, because I just like to look at him they change so fast at this age.

Naturally, all that hanging out waiting for Caleb to be born and then hanging out looking at Caleb cut into my work schedule a little bit, which left me playing catch-up a bit. It wasn't so bad at my day job, since I work for Total Attorneys, a company that made a name for itself with concepts like corporate culture and work / life balance and puts its money where its mouth is. But, as luck would have it, I also had a freelance project in the works with a hard deadline at the end of September.

I was working with the founder of MadeinUSAForever.com, editing an eye-opening book called Re-Made in the USA: How We Can Restore Jobs, Retool Manufacturing, and Compete with the World. The tight deadline was a downside in the wake of Caleb's more-time-consuming-than-anticipated arrival and all of the other things that had fallen by the wayside in the interim, but the material was both fascinating and frightening and I'm very glad to have been a part of the project. I hope everyone in America takes the time to read this book and think about the decisions most of us make without conscious thought every day.

With that wrapped and homeschooling back on track, I kept telling friends who wanted to get together that things would be back to normal in late October, and we did manage to fit in a little bit of Halloween fun:

But then, just when I thought it was over, it was right back to work. Tori landed a strange role in a crazy movie, Motivational Growth. Thus, she spent more than ten hours on Friday vomiting repeatedly while sitting on a cheerful looking couch with a bunch of kids playing video games. Nah, I'm not going to explain--you'll have to see the movie. Little inside bit of humor, though: she accidentally puked on the knee of the kid in the striped sweater. He was very good-natured about it.
I thought I had time for a breather, now, but it turns out Tori's entertainment schedule is going to break November for me. The "one day only" Les Mis tribute concert is on the 17th, and Harry Potter 7A comes out at midnight the next night...and then we're going to see Miranda Lambert on the 19th. Anyone want to borrow a teenager for a few days? The week before Thanksgiving looks good....