A Week in the Life of Walshman V7.1

Monday
4:00am - wake up feeling like a rock star (even though at this stage I am strangely not hung-over) and can't get Bon Jovi's "Dead or Alive" out of my head for some reason, too many episodes of "American Idol"
4:30am - Robin Hackl picks me up in The Batmobile (his suped-up Audi A6 Avant) and we head to the airport
6:00am - on the flight to Toronto I watch "Children of Men" on the 5X8 inch LCD screen in the back of the seat in front of me and confirm that Alfonzo Cuarón is a brilliant but flawed director and I still love him more for "Y Tu Mama Tambien"
2:30pm - eat an outstanding burger at the Grand Hotel where we are staying - the burger: a simple yet complex symphony of taste
3:30pm - go for a long walk through downtown Toronto on a lovely (though still smoggy) sunny afternoon and take in a bit of the University of Toronto campus
5:00pm - have a beer with Robin while a Bohemian woman sits next to us packaging small plastic envelopes full of dried lavender for "resale" and I recall for her my experience in Paris at the lavender festival in Place de Voges in Le Marais
6:00pm - watch painfully as a Quicktime I am trying to download from Image Engine's FTP website to my laptop in the hotel room chokes on the hotel-crapola wireless connectivity and eventually abandon all hope that it will download successfully, head off to meet up with prospective clients for dinner and a beer
7:30pm - meet up with said prospective clients at The Bedford Academy pub and shoot the shit about their project and visual effects projects in general for the next several hours
11:00pm - head back to the hotel for some much needed sleep

Tuesday
4:25am - cruelest of all hotel in-jokes, the alarm goes off unexpectedly causing expletives to fly freely from both Robin and myself
4:30am - try to get back to sleep... unsuccessfully
6:00am - wake up having not slept for the past hour and half and begin to prepare for the day ahead of on-set Supervision for Image Engine's ongoing work on "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium."
6:00am - ah, the beloved hotel breakfast buffet
7:45am - Robin and I arrive on set and hook up with Visual Effects Supervisor Kevin Tod Haug (photo on left) and Visual Effects Producer Camille Celucci who are now at the helm of visual effects for Zack Helm's directorial debut
1:00pm - finally have a chance to meet Zack personally and thank him for involving us in his project, he seems much more open and gregarious than our last meeting
2:00pm - we wrap up our participation in the shoot having completed a full old school tape-measure driven set survey, Digital SLR multi-exposure reference photography of the set lighting, reflection ball and gray ball passes on film in-camera, Digital SLR general reference photography, and a series of HDRI Spheron captures of the set lighting... A bang-up job if I do say so myself
2:15pm - just before we leave Robin and myself, as well as the entire on-set crew watch in stunned silence as Natalie Portman 'switches on the acting chops' and delivers an incredible, endearing amidst the chaos of the re-shoot, leave believing a little bit more in 'acting'
3:00pm - meet with the aforementioned prospective clients again to review our test shot that is ongoing at Image Engine, all goes well... We find out later that the visual effects supervisor show the director for the first time! A new level is achieved...
4:00pm - head back to the hotel for a very late lunch and some roof-top hot-tub R&R in the sun (taking in the fabulous, exotic Toronto skyline, of course... Uh, yeah) Robin and I talk extensively about where Image Engine was a year ago and where it is going
8:30pm - head for another walkabout in downtown Toronto and dinner, end up at a place called "kultura" and eat some spectacular modern fusion tapas and have a few glasses of very nice red wine... Not surprisingly talk revolves mostly around the trails and tribulations of Da' Engun...
10:30pm - meet up with Reynold "Bo" Mosley at a seedy Queen St. bar called The Bovine Sex Club, apparently a famous hard rock bar... More beer... Uh, yeah... Did I mention more beer?

Wednesday
1:00am - arrive back at hotel and decide that microwaving the hell out of a two day old slice of pizza - and eating it - is a far better option than waking up in 5 hours with a huge hang over, having eaten said slice of pizza, I question the aforementioned logic
6:00am - wake from the dead feeling like David Lee Roth in 1980
6:30am - thank god for the hotel breakfast buffet, alcohol neutralizing savior that it is... Except for the curdled milk, of course
8:30am - flight back to Vancouver, get stuck in a middle seat and suffer like a caged animal all the way home
10:30am - arrive in Vancouver and head straight to Image Engine for a debriefing of the trip
3:30pm - head out of work with my brain in a serious hang-over-jet-lag-fuzz to meet Meg and Mateo who I miss like mad by now and have some refreshingly sane real life flushed back into the system, along with some spectacular Indian fusion food at Vij's cafe
5:30pm - home at last, Mateo fed, bathed and to bed, I crash...

Thursday
6:45am - Mateo is up, thank god he slept in!
11:00am - somehow rouse myself enough to stick to the run-though of a project meeting with some chaps from The Queen's own country, first time we show clients anything internally on the 2K player, it all goes really well and we hope to see them again soon
1:30pm - spend the rest of the day in a daze

Friday
12:30pm - Lunch with Bucket at Calabria Caffe on Commercial Drive, the usual conversation subjects apply - messed up projects and/or studios, self-propelled two-wheeled bliss of one kind or another, and the politics of cafe etiquette
5:30pm - skip the call of the pub and head home for the wind-down phase of Mateo's day, dinner, tub, stories, sleep
10:00pm - decide to get some rest and prepare for the next full-time job: the weekend!