Sunday, September 06, 2009

Thumbs up

The trouble with stress is that, due to one thing and another, one tends to make mistakes and have accidents. It's the how things are.

And I am in pain.

Last Wednesday I had an argument with our dog. I'm not blaming him, he was confused and upset, and I made the mistake of putting my right hand near a mouthful of a canine's canines.

As a writer I'm always on the look-out for new experiences - for example, exactly how painful is it to have one's hand (and thumb mostly) chewed by a dog?

And now I know the answer. I managed to hold it together while we got the poor puppy sorted out and under control so he didn't disgrace himself again. However I was dripping blood all over the carpet for a while. Then this poor old body of mine went into shock which was quite interesting. The Teacher is a dab hand with the first aid (fully trained and regularly re-certified) so she patched me up.

The thumb came off worst with a 2cm gash crosswise just below the last joint - this has been very inconvenient as I lost the advantage of an opposable digit for a couple of days. It's getting better now but occasional I bend the joint too much and that is quite painful so I end up uttering an "ow" which generally surprises the people around me.

I probably should have had stitches but the prospect of hours in A&E (as a non-urgent case) was not my idea of a good night out. I'll have an interesting scar.

I have finally got around to moving my computer and my nice chair (which I bought when I was working in Reading) to the office so that I can work without interruption. And I need to because I'm falling behind.

Yesterday we auditioned the kids for the Monsters trailer, we needed two girls for important roles, one for a less important role (but a few lines of dialogue), and one boy for three words. The casting call specified 16 or over but we were, of course, deluged with 15 year olds wanting to audition. We couldn't take them, because then we'd have to mess about with licences and that's just horrible.

Did I mention we have a new producer? Unfortunately Kate decided she couldn't do the project justice, but suggested Tiffany who has real TV producer experience, and she's great. We're also having a change of DoP, because the shoot date has been decided (the only weekend all the actors are available) and the current one couldn't do that weekend. We're shooting on the 19th and 20th of this month.

Only two weeks.

And there's so much to do ... and I really don't have to do much, which is hard.

In other news...

The Teacher is now the "Assistant Headteacher" but I'll still call her the Teacher in the blog because it's shorter. The Boy has the dates for going down to shoot Bamzooki for CBBC. No new news for the Daughter as yet, but she's working hard as Production Designer for the Monsters shoot.



What's on the turntable? "Overture" by Bjork from "Vespertine Live" (courtesy of Spotify)

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