25-JUL-24 Thursday

[DiveMilw]

The temps in TX have cooled off a bit.  We are down into the 90s.  This is much better than last year when we were over 110 for about a month, dipped below for a day, and then right back above 110.  To celebrate I hope to overnight in AZ tomorrow.  The forecast is 104 or 108.  The only time I will be outside is early in the morning on Saturday and dashing from the car to an air conditioned store or house the rest of the day.  

[KathyB]

It is in the 90s here as well. At least it cools off quite a bit at night, but it take until the sun goes down to really feel any cool down. This week we have been going out for walks around sundown, which is around 8 pm this time of year.

So far this week I have had delivery from Domino's and King Soopers, which turned out to be a dollar less if I ordered for delivery on Thursday. It was another dollar less if I wanted to receive the delivery at 6 am, which I could not bring myself to do.

[scenicdesign71]

It's actually been very pleasant here this past week, rising to mid-80s during the days and dropping to low 70s, or even into the 60s, at night.  The coming week is supposed to be similar — and of course, since my job is currently spending twelve hours a day on air-conditioned sets, the mild temperatures outside don't make much difference, though it has been nice to be able to step outside into the beautiful weather during slower moments.  Going by Murphy's law, I expect the heat will return at full force just as we move back out to do another block of location work for a week or two in August and/or September.  (Even interior locations, if they're cramped enough, sometimes leave most of the crew out on the street; and exteriors, of course, offer no shelter from the elements beyond, occasionally, a tent).

Aside from the twelve-hour days with a two-hour (each way) commute, and the physical exhaustion of being on my feet all day and pushing my 500lb cart of scenic tools and materials around — less often, now that we're in the studio for a spell — this job has been fascinating.

With nine more weeks to go, at some point I'll find a way of writing more about it here without violating my NDA.  For now I'll just say — at risk of becoming a broken record — that this show has one of my favorite kind of settings, centered around one discrete location inside which the substantial majority of the action (of which there's a lot!) unfolds, and which we thereby get to explore in great detail over the course of the series.  To invoke another of my favorite clichés, the setting here really is one of the main characters in the story.  And even while filming scenes completely out of order, it's been intriguing to see how the scenic architecture meshes with the storytelling on a beat-by-beat level.