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West Hollywood feral cat colony
Wednesday, April 20 2016
location: West Hollywood, California
Though The Organization has a business-casual work environment, things are less strict in the condemned building where we in the IT department work. So I wore my NASA teeshirt to work, hoping to have a conversation about my Ahmed Mohamed clock at some point (though it never happened).
I received my first actual development task today, an entirely front-end job wherein I was supposed to take a bar of social networking icons and propagate them across a site. All went well until Jo told me they had to do "responsive design," shrinking down the icons on smaller screens. This took me down a rabbit hole of unfamilar CSS that lasted the rest of the day. It was all punctuated by yet another meal at Veggie Grill up on Sunset. (I got the fish tacos, which were kind of meh.).
Marc, the guy I normally work with remotely on a completely different project for a completely different organization, reached out to me today about some lingering issues with that old project, and in the process invited me to attend the Colcoa French Film Festival that just happened to be taking place within walking distance of where I was. Working in the film industry, Marc had access to free tickets. So at 5:30pm, I broke free from my workplace and hiked up to Sunset. At that point I started having trouble with my phone. Not only was it working slowly, but I hadn't yet mastered that answering it required a finger slide in addition to a press (I'm not used to that set of UI actions). But I managed to figure out the direction of Fairfax Avenue, and I walked to the Directors Guild of America. Barricades and a human guard barred access from the front, so I went around the side and the guy at the gate let me in despite the the fact that I was terribly underdressed. Everyone else was wearing black evening clothes and I was still wearing my ridiculous NASA teeshirt. A security guy checked my computer bag for bombs and guns and waved me in, even though I wouldn't have been dressed the way I was had it not been for a terrorist scare in suburban Texas. Eventually I found Marc, who had a sort of hobo formality about him, wearing an oversized dress shirt as a sports coat. Still, he looked like he'd put more thought into his look than I had. "Sorry I'm underdressed!" I said. "Oh well, you're my date for a French rom-com."
Inside the theatre, we sat next to a pair of Marc's friends (a decidedly older couple), though a hot French woman in a short black dress sat to my left. The film was Love At First Child, which was having its American debut. Its plot focused around a busy middle-aged architect and womanizer who is suddenly confronted by an attractive woman of a certain age who tells him that his son has impregnated her daughter. The architect insists he doesn't have a son, and the two quarrel like lovers always do in rom coms before they fall in love. Hijinx ensue, and the lesson is that unplanned pregnancy can be as good of a matchmaker as Tinder.com. It was all pretty nauseating, but the scene in which the two male protagonists attempt to clean a naked baby covered with caked-on poo (it looked like peanut butter) was gut-bustingly hilarious. It went on too long, but, I was living in the moment and enjoying just sitting there not having to do anything or interact with anyone. I also liked that I was unexpectedly participating in something very Los Angeles, very Hollywood.
Marc was going to give me a ride home, but his car was parked in in the garage, so I set off-on foot, giving Gretchen a call and telling her all about my new employer and colleagues. I also detailed the spartan nature of my accommodations. Gretchen's biggest news was that she and all three of the dogs had been allowed into the Garden Café in Woodstock.
As I talked, I crossed the nearly-uncrossable Fountain Avenue and passed a feral cat colony contained between a metal fence and a concrete parking structure along North Orange Grove Avenue (34.0924035N, 118.3603401W there were multiple dishes of cat food put out for the many cats I saw). I
finished my conversation in the parking lot outside the liquor store on the corner of Santa Monica and Genesee and then bought a mid-sized flask of vodka, which I soon added to some orange juice I bought at a 7Eleven. This made my subsequent conversations back at the intern dormitory that much more easy and relaxed.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?160420 feedback
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