Okay, so more details on the fires:

Beginning Sunday, the sky was incredibly hazy and what light shone through was red and orange. It was all very apocalyptic, and Wednesday afternoon ushered in the first clear skies in more than three days. On Tuesday, the smoke was so thick that it was dark by 3:30pm. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, ash fell from the sky almost constantly. I had to keep blowing the grey snow off my car when I wanted to drive anywhere, and there is still a layer of chunky ash all over our patio and the two chairs we keep outside. It was weird to walk around outside on Monday because swirls of ash would kick up in everyone’s wake.

Kimiko’s family had to evacuate. We kept some of their stuff at my place because it wouldn’t fit in Kimiko’s dorm room. Sheer luck saw to it that all their finches in the back yard survived what must have been a suffocating environment while Mr. and Mrs. Saito stayed in a hotel after their evacuation. Upon returning, they had to shovel ash off their front patio before they could open their front door. The back yard required the same sort of attention.

Kip’s family was evacuated. Their house survived, although we were nervous for a time because there was a rumor that the house at the end of the street (7 doors down from him) had burned down. As it turns out, one house was leveled a short distance away, but every house on Kip’s street came through unscathed.

Troy’s house burned to the ground. His street was one of the worst casualties, with only a single house standing. Most of his posessions were already at our place, but Troy lamented after the fact over the loss of his high school yearbooks and his collected love letters from past girlfriends. His parents were given 10 minutes to evacuate, which means they left with only the clothes on their backs. It boggles the mind. Kip and Troy took around 150 photos of the street when they were allowed to return Tuesday afternoon and the images are incredible. All the houses are reduced to chimneys, and it looks like a nuclear bomb was set off. Cars sit on melted rims, their paint cracked and peeling like black scabs, and none of them have windows because all the glass exploded in the heat.

Now the fire is in the past, and hopefully things will return to normal. It still makes for vivid memories though, and I can imagine myself telling my grandchildren (metaphorically, since we all know I’m not the type to have children) about being caught in the Great Firestorm of ‘03. Maybe I’ll post a couple photos later.

Shit.

Life is hectic. I’ve been meaning to update Duolab for some time now, but things keep getting in the way and keeping me from blogger. I’ve got about 15 minutes in which to make a post right now, so bear with me as a I try to recap things.

This past weekend was MQ production. Things went swimmingly, and we churned out an awesome paper. Sunday morning Kimiko woke me up at 9am (or so I remember, it might have been closer to noon), informing me that her family was being evacuated. I should explain. Both my roommates, Kip and Troy, plus my girlfriend, Kimiko, are all from Scripps Ranch. Scripps Ranch is a large community in the North half of San Diego County, and it’s rather odd that three people so close to me all grew up there. Unfortuneately, Scripps Ranch (SR from now on) was one of the areas hit hardest by the fires that swept San Diego in the past 4 days. Kip and Kimiko’s houses were lucky and escaped the blaze; Troy’s family was not as fortuneate—their house, along with all their posessions, burned to the ground.

Of course, things have been stressful. As of now, however, the fires no longer threaten us and Troy’s family has already signed a one-year lease on a condo to live in while they rebuild their house. Things seem almost normal already, and I feel lucky for that. My midterm in Music was delayed until next Tuesday, which was good, and I’m currently begging my Vis TA for an extension on a paper that is due today. I’ve been much too busy over the past 4 days for schoolwork, and so far most of my superiors (school and work combined) have been very understanding. Geisel Library was closed (along with the entire UCSD campus) Monday through Wednesday, so I’m going to miss my deadline for QCing slide scans for the Mellon Foundation. I just emailed my boss over in New York to explain the situation to her, I imagine she’ll be very nice about it.

Shit, now I have to run to class. I’ll post more details on the fire later. The essentials are this, however: Everyone is safe and sound here in San Diego. Schoolwork deadlines have been extended and we’re all working to get back into the swing of things after the fires disrupted life for most of this week.

After much trial and tribulation, I have finally mustered up enough courage to replace the site with a slightly more streamlined version. You viewers might not notice all that I’ve done, but you can look at the cover art section which displays all of our working covers. I’ve also done some work on the personal galleries. Take a look, have fun.

Holy shit. My life is entirely too busy right now. It was a struggle to find 15 minutes in which to make a quick post, but here I am.

The past weekend was great. I’m struggling to recall the exact timeline, but Friday night was a quaint house party at Joe Simonis’ new pad (replete with half-hearted pirate theme), where I met up with Marianne, Reid, Tim and more. I slept well that night. I had to wake up early and go to work though, and let me tell you—working in a cubicle on a Saturday sucks. A lot. I didn’t dwell on it though, since Fonty and I later went to Colin’s birthday party. Since we took precautious beforehand, the party was awesome in a cliche kinda way. Lots of weird stuff happened, so we’ve got plenty of stories to tell now. It was too bad Kimiko was in LA visiting her step-brother at the time, but I survived (somehow). After she got back on Sunday, we went out to dinner and stopped by the cliffs above Black’s Beach to catch the tail end of an amazing sunset. San Diego is awesome.

This week has been insanely busy and I’ve yet to make any real progress on my work with the Mellon Foundation. Goddamnit. Additionally, this weekend is MQ production, so I’m going to be tired and grumpy and overworked straight through until Sunday. Next week will undoubtedly be completely packed as well, since I have to finish up my first film project, write nearly a dozen pages worth of essays and cinema responses, all while working in Geisel until midnight every night to try and squeak in under my Oct. 31st deadline for my QC work.

Halloween, though, should be epic. More details on that later.

Mondays always get a bad rap; people always hate on Mondays. I believe, however, that Mondays aren’t that bad. Mondays are cool. See now, Tuesdays are shit.

This morning (Tuesday morning, to be precise), I was supposed to wake up at 9am. Instead, I woke up at 2pm. I overslept by five hours. Missed work, missed a class, hated myself all day. To try and escape from the quicksand that is my workload at the library, I went in and worked from 9pm to 11:45pm. Working in a cubicle until nearly midnight sucks. Period.

Also, our URL (www.duolab.net) did not work for most of Tuesday. We’re not sure why, but we apologize all the same.

I drank my third beer of the night while in the shower at 1:30am. What?

Now I have to send out a few emails and fold my almost-done-drying laundry. Life is too busy.

So I’m helping my roommate install a new motherboard, processor and ram in his computer. We got everything in the new case he got, and we even got windows 2k to go on cleanly. Raid drivers, on-board lan drivers, and nvidia’s drivers go on fine. So then Tom, my roommate, puts in the driver CD for his secondary videocard while it’s rebooting from the installation of the first video drivers. CD drive in, hideous smashing sound, CD drive out, and we now have proof that it doesn’t do any good to buy a generic burner.

I’m working against the ugliest deadline right now. Not a tough deadline, just an ugly one. The type of deadline that nurtures and fans my procrastination. I came into work today, Sunday, to try and make progress before my deadline—the end of October. I arrived at 2pm and have accomplished essentially nothing. I am utter shit.

What do I have to do? I have to look at images scanned from our slide archive and make sure they’re up to par with the original. If they’re not, I mark them for re-scanning by the company that has generated these thousands of .tif images. It’s an easy, albeit tedious and repetitive job. I’m only 25% through my batch of 12,500 slides. Goddamnit.

At least I didn’t bill the company for the hours I fucked around today. Damn you lowbrow, damn you internet theatrical previews, damn you white ninja.

Damn me.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I do not enjoy selling myself. I am referring to the job search I’m performing at the moment. Being aggressive is not one of my favorite things to do, and when people tell me that I need to be aggressive to get a job five times a day it gets discouraging. I’m lying about myself every time I send out a resume and followup letter about how amazing I am and how happy I would be if I were working for their company. I know confidence and leadership are good attributes to have, but what about quiet humble confidence? I know I can do the job, so why don’t you give it to me? Rant over.

Went to see Mobius Band and The National last night at Casbah. I hadn’t listened to much of Mobius Band, but they played a good, soothing set. The National was perfect. The lead singer reminded me of actor/comedian Ryan Stiles and the violinist had a creepy Apalacian hill-billy air about him, but both knew how to rock the crowd, which was fairly thin.

I am schizophrenic. I am God. I am an outlying star in the Milky Way, observing the soul of all human kind like a toddler watching ants on the ground, finally becoming aware of his station in life.

My carpal tunnel syndrome flared up like a dragon this morning, wrecking any chance I might have of a pleasant day at work. I feel like an injured member of a herd; the realization that I am now and forever at a disadvantage startled me, and I realize that I must now be more wary of predators. My whole right arm and shoulder ache like a crackling fire in a windy night, the pain ebbing and flowing with each gust of wind.

Today rings in my mind as a moment of clarity. I’m going to credit all the stream of consciousness that I’ve been reading in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn. By stepping inside his head, I’ve stepped inside my own.

If it helps, you can dismiss all this as a weird mood swing.

In more common news, I’m going to a party tonight. Fonty is packing her apartment with random people because their building doesn’t have any managers at the moment. Maybe we’ll get the cops called on us—that would be fun. Kimiko is joining me, and I could use a good bender. I’m looking forward to tonight.

So I’m helping my roommate install a new motherboard, processor and ram in his computer. We got everything in the new case he got, and we even got windows 2k to go on cleanly. Raid drivers, on-board lan drivers, and nvidia’s drivers go on fine. So then Tom, my roommate, puts in the driver CD for his secondary videocard while it’s rebooting from the installation of the first video drivers. CD drive in, hideous smashing sound, CD drive out, and we now have proof that it doesn’t do any good to buy a generic burner.

I’ve got a moment to kill before I leave work, so let me tell you about my weekend.

Friday I went and saw Lost in Translation with Macie, which was cool. I downloaded the soundtrack as soon as I got home, and I recommend y’all go and see the movie before it’s pushed out of the theaters by shitty big-time features like The Fighting Temptations.

On Saturday Jasmine and Colin hosted a little Japanese Jamboree and I had a blast. The lovely Kimiko did me the honor of joining me, and I got mad cred because she’s part Japanese. The sushi and booze was so nice, in fact, that it did a splendid job of cancelling out the earlier pain of going to work on Saturday and slaving away in a cubicle when I should have been sleeping in.

Sunday was all about being lazy—I didn’t get a damn thing done, and I feel no remorse.

Later today is the MQ’s staff meeting, so I get to see a ton of cool people and make dirty jokes with them. Did I mention our last staff meeting had around 70 people? That’s right, we rule.

Greetings all! We are back from the dead. I know that we’ve been out of touch for a long time, but I am sure that you’re aching to hear all the stories of our adventures over the summer. In due time, we will disclose all that information. But until then, would someone please give me a reason to live?

Oh dear god.

We’re back! Holy shit!

So we got some free hosting for the next three years from 1and1.com, and both Mazer and I are feeling the itch—we’ll be working on the page again, since we’re both vain and it hurt us to not have duolab.net for the few months that we did.

Stay tuned!