Celebrating my first real case of bloggers block. Usually a bottle of wine could cure it, but I have a very long drive ahead of me tonight, so I have sworn off wine for an entire week. I started so many times this week to write a post but everything I wanted to say needed a lot of time to develop, and time is one thing I have been without.
I am working on a project for a friend of a friend. Last year when friend's husband died, I took some photos, scanned them and made a slide show in Windows Movie Maker for the funeral. (Don't we all?) It was a little show, maybe five minutes long in a loop. Friend of friend asked if I could do the same for her husband who had passed away earlier. Off-handedly I said sure.
Here's what she gave me: 200 photos that needed to be hand scanned. Text to accompany each photo. The text needs to run an appropriate amount of time to be readable, and finding a color for the text to show up on a varied background is probably the most time consuming of the chores. Plus, the text renders in the completed movie completely differently than it does in the edit window. It's like designing with a blindfold on. This little muvee is 52 minutes long. Thus far I have spent about 80 hours, and still am not done. Tomatos have gone uncanned and apples are rotting in a bushel as we speak because I have been working on this. And my kids! I don't even want to talk about the temper tantrums. Sadly, mine, not theirs. She said she would pay me, but if she actually paid me for my time, this movie would cost her several thousand dollars. So I am in a circle of hell. We'll see how it works out.
I'm going to leave Maison de Wundrun quiescent for the next week. The situation in our country has really been working up a case of the mean reds for me. The fight or flight meter has moved way over to flight lately, as I think we have passed a turning point. The greater the Hillary love the MSM shows the deeper my funk. Time to renew my subscription to Ode, the optimists magazine, I think. Cause I am the editor of Pissoff, the pessimists magazine right now.
Miss me. Write often. Leave pithy comments! I'll answer every one when I return, except of course if the little troll shows up. (Bait: I have seen the Gotbaum videos. They don't show anything you describe. Odd, huh? No tearing of clothes, no throwing of cell phone. Just apparently yelling. Which we can't hear.) I'll see you all next week.
Much love,
Jess.
17 comments:
It sounds like an enormous ordeal constructing that slideshow. I hope you get it done soon, and have a little rest.
I miss you already. Come back my little stinky cheese.
oh my gosh, that's terrible. Perhaps you could charge her a flat fee--might make it more bearable for you. I had a similar situation when I agreed to help a friend out with her wedding arrangements. She ended up calling me the "wedding coordinator" and treating me like her personal bitch-slave the entire day, at one point spitting out at me, "you need to go back to my house and feed my dog." At that point, my partner said, "That's it. Go drink up as much of the booze as you care to, and then I'm driving us all home. She can rot in that dress for all I care!" Needless to say, I haven't spoken to her since.
I miss you already too--have a good little vacation, my friend.
jess,
Why did Carol Gotbaum's husband send his suicidal alcoholic wife off to Arizona by herself, without the obviously necessary assistance of people who knew and understood the depths of her problems?
A number of curious people asked the same question in Letters to the Editor of the NY Post newspaper.
He sent a deeply distressed woman off on a cross-country trip alone when he could have had her admitted to a facility less than an hour from home. That's as smart as letting a child play in traffic.
Because her direct flight didn't work out, he relented and let her go on a connecting, which she missed by one minute.
45 minutes before she was dead she was talking to family members who described her as upbeat.
My first instincts, it seems, were correct.
happy trails
Be well dear Jess - you will be missed. Hang in there.
Loved your Breakfast at Tiffany's reference.
Enjoy the hiatus- sometimes you just need a break.
I'll miss your optimism...
XO
Somewhere in the middle of the slideshow you should slip in a picture that is slightly inappropriate and completely unrelated, but not so strange that anybody will say anything. Subliminal advertising!
Oh only a day and already I miss you a lot! Hope you are well.
And I like dr. z's idea!
jess, you wrote:
"Because her direct flight didn't work out, he relented and let her go on a connecting, which she missed by one minute."
He relented? Do you mean that you heard the conversation between Noah and Carole? You heard her importuning him for permission to fly alone to Tucson?
Meanwhile, it does not matter whether she missed the flight by a minute, an hour, or according to one report, she wasn't late, but was told at the gate that the flight had been overbooked and she would depart on the next plane an hour later.
What matters was her reaction to having been bumped off the flight. Her reaction was to create a disturbance that led to calls to security. She is responsible for setting that segment of events into motion.
You claimed:
"45 minutes before she was dead she was talking to family members who described her as upbeat."
This is pure fabrication on your part. The audio-tape of her husband's call to the airport was played on the news. He explained to the operator that his was was suicidal and a deeply troubled alcoholic who needed special consideration from airport personnel.
Was he lying about her alcoholism and deep suicidal depression? However, as any review of suicide literature shows, cheerfulness is frequently noted among those who have finally decided they are going through with it.
Her problems were the reason she was flying to Tucson. Her problems were not in "time-out" because she was traveling. If she were able to control her problems, she wouldn't have needed a $35,000 visit to a rehab center.
People heading to rehab are not people who might otherwise spend a week or two at a spa. They are people whose lives -- and in her case, her children's lives -- are in danger as a result of the total loss of control of their lives brought on my their problems. In her case, alcohol. But I'll bet there were other substances involved. The results of the autopsy will reveal the substances in her body. However, it will come as no surprise when the Gotbaum's refuse to release ALL the facts of the autopsy.
Jess, really missing you here... hoping you're okay. I'm sending some good juju vibes your way.
Me too me too! Hope you are well and I send thoughts of good things.
Hurry back dear sister we miss you and we need your voice.
Dear Jess,
There is no such thing as blogger's block.
This is why the little baby Jeebus invented lolz cats.
Just sayin'.
Splotchy it is done.
Dr. MvM sorry I missed your birthday! Hope it was grand.
dguzman thanks. the muvee is done, but I haven't heard from her at all. Too bad about the wedding thing. I actually had the reverse happen at my first (practice) wedding. A friend of our parents wanted to do centerpieces for the table. I didn't really want much, and I didn't want her to do them but she insisted, doing up these frou frou things that weren't me. Then she handed me a bill for a lot of money. People are wierd.
dcap the trails were happy, merci beaucoup.
franiamB at T's reference? I love that movie, but frankly I'm not sure what you mean. I was picturing myself in Dante's inferno where I think the sixth circle was good intentions. Ah well.
whisky obvs. you have been hitting the bottle again if you see me as an optimist. Save a shot for me, neighbor.
dr. z Now you tell me. You know, pygalgia always posts that cactus giving the finger, that'd be good!
franiam hey, when you went on vacation I felt adrift. And jealous.
trollie you are a moron. the woman was already dead when those phone calls you are discussing took place. you continue to prove my point. and alcoholism is not the same as paranoid schizophrenia as much as you incorrectly make it out to be. You need to let it go. When you go into the gabillions of paragraphs I don't even read them.
dguzman and fran thanks for the ju ju bees. when I eat them I stick them on my teeth so that I look like Billy Bob.
matty which baby jeebus? because I could go back to church for lolz cats. "R ladee uf purpechul wizdum"?
Watch it sister...I have a spiritual Lolzcat message for you!
And yes - In B'fst at T's, she gets the "mean reds". Dante works too.
Oh. You're right, I did say the mean reds. And I was channeling Holly Golightly then. Brain shrivel.
going to look for the lolz cat jujubees now.
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