513

For the past week, Marshall and our nephew Robi have been up in Charlotte working on our house in NODA. Our house number in Charlotte is 513 and we often refer to the house as the 513 house or our "city" house. For the past 3 years we have rented the house, mostly out of necessity since the market has been such that to sale it would be virtually impossible. But, with the market finally getting better, we decided to take the time now to try to fix it up and put it on the market. With the prospect of another baby on the way, we are wanting more than ever to simplify our lives. While I don't mind having a rental house, ideally the rental house would not be 4 hours away from us. If our rental was in Wilmington it would be a lot more manageable and cost effective. Since, I am at work 12-14 hours a day Monday thru Friday, I am of no help to Marshall where renovations are concerned. Luckily, Robi agreed to take his 2 week break in between summer school and the fall semester to come down and hang out with Marshall and help on the house.

Every day, Marshall has been sending me pictures of the work they are doing and the house is starting to look fantastic. Pretty soon it is going to be so nice, we are going to be mad we aren't living in it! So far they have mostly been working on the bathroom. They used the time I was in Salisbury to take the toilet out and rip up the floor. They then laid a new floor and installed a new toilet. Originally, we were going to also replace the vanity, but instead decided on replace the faucet and adding a cabinet above the toilet. Hopefully, we will make it to IKEA this weekend to purchase a cabinet for the bathroom and a shower rod. The apartment I am staying in has the exact IKEA cabinet in my bathroom that we are thinking of installing and I really like them. IKEA is perhaps the best thing about coming to Charlotte. They have so many brilliant ideas and products to make use of small spaces. You can also get so many fantastic design options. I've actually been secretly hoping we could make a run to IKEA this weekend as I have yet to go there at all since I've been in Charlotte. My sole purpose in going there is not entirely for our 513 house though. I think they will have some great options for our Wilmington house too as we have 3 closet doors that need replacing. Maybe tomorrow will bring on a shopping trip!

Rain Delays

It's our last and final day in Salisbury. Before work we all packed up and checked out of our hotel rooms in preparation for heading back "home" to Charlotte after work. The day went fairly smoothly and despite having some night work it looked as though we might get off at a reasonable time. But then the rain came. And boy did it come! It rained so much the pool just about flooded. We all moved inside as the lightening and rain threatened to shut us down for the evening. With only 2 more scenes left to do, we were so close to packing up and leaving "Little Versailles" for good. One scene quickly proved to be a loss cause. With so much lightening in the vicinity, even if the rain did go away there was no way we were putting our actor in the pool and letting him swim around. But there was still that one dialogue scene left to shoot. Originally, the scene was blocked by the pool, but we began to rethink that when the rain appeared to not want to let up. So we moved the blocking to beside the pool but under the covered walkway. That appeared to be a great decision until the generators had to shut down because the lightening was right on top of us. Great. We can't shoot outside without any lights! The wind was picking up too and our giant helium china balls had to come down as they were no longer safe to fly. While the Director and ADs scrambled to figure out what to do, the rest of us moved inside to make ourselves comfortable and wait out the storm.

Fortunately, the Olympics were still on so we all snuggled in on the couches and watched the Olympics. I enjoyed getting the opportunity to get paid to watch the Olympics, but what I really wanted was for them to just let us go home. As the minutes ticked by, we got restless and hungry. Thankfully, props still had some food leftover from the lunch scene we shot earlier in the day. I had already eaten the ribs, beans and potato salad for lunch when the props department invited me to join them in eating the wonderfully catered food that they had brought in for the scene. But, since they dragged the food out again for our actress Morena to have some, I too had another rib. The perk of shooting lunch scenes with good catered food! I'm glad I'm friends with the props department. Not everyone got the invite to join them for lunch. Eventually, after reblocking the scene a 3rd time (this time inside the mansion), the lightening finally went away and we went back outside to shoot the scene. Since the rain was still coming down, we went with the covered walkway scenario.

Needless to say, it was a much longer night than any of us had anticipated thanks to the tremendous rain delay. However, while I was driving the hour back home in the rain, I remembered the saying I read a while back on a piece of artwork, "Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It's about learning to dance in the rain." Originally, I thought this applied to accurately to my life and spoke to me on how to dance in the rain of the storm of grief that was cast over me. Now I see how it applies to so many things in my life. In the film business, we have to be able to learn to dance in the rain all the time. If we always waited for a storm to pass, no movie or TV show would ever get shot. There are so many obstacles that get in your way when filming, they you must learn to overcome them and dance along side of them instead of waiting for them to resolve themselves. I've learned that this is true with friends too. Not all my friends are going to get what happened to me or ever be able to empathize with me. I could spend my entire life waiting on them to figure it out, or I can just get over it and dance around them. In the end, I will be the better person with more growth and experience. Maybe one day they will experience a loss so great that the storm will hit them too and they will experience their own rain delay. Then and only then will they understand the place I've been in for the past 4 1/2 months.

Little Versailles

We found out that the people of Salisbury refer to the house we are filming in as "Little Versailles." If you don't know what Versailles is it is a palace in France that was built in the 1600s and home to the royal family for some time. It is 67 staircases and 2,300 rooms! Can you imagine? And so the people of Salisbury have coined the Graham home "Little Versailles" due to its grand scale in comparison to all the surrounding homes. It truly is a palace when compared to the rather luxurious homes in the same neighborhood. Today I spent a bit more time wondering around the place as we filmed in quite a bit more of the house than we did yesterday. I even ventured upstairs and had a look at the two expansive glass cases that were built into the walls of the house. I wondered what they were for until I looked closer and saw the plaques at the bottom. Each case was to hold a dress of Princess Diana's that the Grahams' had purchased. I later learned that both dresses were currently on loan to a museum. I'm not sure why exactly someone would purchase a dress of Princess Diana's but I thought it was amazing that they did. I guess when you have the money, why not buy a dress or two. It would be fun to tell people a part of your collection was on loan to a museum.

In talking to the owners of "Little Versailles," I learned a few more details about the house. For one there is this gigantic mirror above the mantel in one of their living rooms. The mirror was so heavy and so large that it was brought in on a crane when they were building the house and it is built into the wall so that it cannot be removed. In the front foyer, there is a cool statue of two children playing leap frog. The statue probably stands a good 3 1/2 feet tall and Mrs. Graham told me it was made of copper. She also said that the movers put it there when they brought it in 12 years ago and it was so heavy they never could move it anywhere else. I learned some other fun trivia about the house. For instance, it has 11 toilets and they are all exactly the same. All the hardware in the house (i.e. door handles) are exactly the same pattern only different types of metal. The house sits on 17 acres of land but not a single tree was cut down on the property when they built the house. They did have to move a few trees, but they transplanted them to other places on the property.

It was so interesting to me to meet and talk with the homeowner. I'm so in awe of people who live like this. The house is so over the top and to learn that only 4 people live in the house was astonishing. And one of the four is away at college and the daughter will be in college next year. What in the world are two people going to do in that gigantic house all by themselves. You could probably live for weeks in the same house and never see each other. I'm curious about the kids too. How do kids that grow up in such a large house acclimate to life outside that mansion? Or do the parents buy them a large house of their own too? They probably do. They are probably the type of parents that when their kids get married as a wedding gift they give them a huge house. Why not if you have the money? It certainly would be nice to not have a mortgage payment. Can you imagine? Oh to have grown up never having to worry about money. By the looks of it, I don't think the Graham kids will ever have to worry about money as long as they don't squander their inheritance away. Some people are just born into a life of privilege. I was happy to hear that neither Mr. or Mrs. Graham came from money but were indeed self-made millionaires. She lived in a house with her parents and four brothers and only had 1 bathroom. He had to work at mill to put himself through law school. So I guess they figured when they made it that they really had earned it and so decided that they were going to enjoy it. I don't blame them. I would too. I would have a really big house with all the amenities I want if I could afford it too.

Salisbury

Every now and then while working on a show out of town, we get to go out of that town to film. Ironic I know to be out of town when you are already out of town, but for the next three days we are taking Homeland on the road. Today through Thursday we are working in Salisbury, NC, which is about an hour outside of Charlotte. Why exactly are we in Salisbury you might ask? There is a particular house, I mean mansion, that we are filming at. It reminded me of a miniature version of the Biltmore House in Asheville. This house was unbelievable! I didn't get a chance to explore the whole house today, but the few rooms I did venture in for filming were spectacular. We filmed in the downstairs master bedroom and the bathroom was so large that we set up video village, the sound mixer and a camera all in the bathroom. Their bathroom was larger than our office in our house, which is a normal size room for most people's standards. In the bathroom was his and hers walk in closets (that could easily accomadate a twin size bed), a large whirl pool bath tub, his and her double sink vanities, his and her toilets (complete with telephones and dressers), and a large 3 shower head shower. Don't get me wrong, what girl wouldn't want a large walk-in closet, but the rest of the size of everything was a bit excessive. Oh and I forgot to mention the house sits on 17 acres of land on a golf course. The homeowners bought that many acres so that they didn't have anyone beside them and their backyard backs up to the golf course. I only met the mother and daughter that live at the house, so I'm not sure how many other people live here. Unless it's twelve more people this house is entirely too big for the family that lives here. There wasn't one thing in the house that wasn't on a grandiose scale. Apparently, the guy that owns the house is a lawyer and made his money suing large corporations.

The one good part about being out of town for several days in a row is that the production puts us up in a hotel to avoid having us drive back and forth every day. Usually, this would result in a big party at the bar in the crew hotel's lobby. And I'm sure it did. I, however, didn't set foot down there. Why would I? Besides the part about not being able to drink due to the little person growing inside me, I also was exhausted and just couldn't wait to go to sleep. So I settled in to my somewhat mundane hotel room and turned on the Olympics. Another perk to being in a hotel room - I actually got the Olympics! At my apartment I don't have cable and there is no NBC air channel that my antenna can pick up so I've missed most of the Olympics. Tonight though I caught one of my favorite sports - women's gymnastics. I watched Ally from the US win the gold medal for the floor exercises. After that I turned on a movie, set the sleep timer and snuggled in to my bed in the hopes of a good night sleep.

Kings Mountain

Knowing we were filming in Kings Mountain today, I had expected to see a mountain, especially after my 45 minute drive to work. I was surprised to find there was no mountain in Kings Mountain. In fact, there barely appeared to be much more than hills. What a let down. I had thought that the long drive into work would at least have had a beautiful landscape payoff. But no, we spent the morning filming outside a police station. It wasn't until we moved to our second location that I realized why we had actually come here - for the horses! Yep, we had landed ourselves on a farm. And a very sizable one at that. Not only did they have horses that were part of our scene, but they had donkeys too! The owners okayed us to feed them apples so Kim and cut up some apples and fed the horses and donkeys that were out in the pasture. The two hero horses that were in the stables we just pet and didn't tempt with food as we wanted to make sure they behaved during the filming.


All the horses were just beautiful and I was amazed at how well they "acted" in our scene. The 2 in the stables poked their heads out on cue every single take. Usually working with animals or kids is always the kiss of death when it comes to filming. Inevitably, it takes you twice as long to do a scene with them as it would any other normal scene. Today, however, was the exception to the rule. The only time a horse didn't do what we were wanting was a horse that refused to walk by our camera because the black flag hanging above it freaked it out. It's understandable. If I was a horse I might would be freaked out too by it.

I do always enjoy filming at farms and getting to pet and play with the animals. When I was growing up in Virginia, our neighbors had what I always called a mini farm. They had chickens and pigs and our other neighbors had horses. As a kid I always imagined that I too would one day live on a farm. At least in the aspect that I had land and could have some animals other than just our dogs. Maybe I still will one day, who knows? If I ever do have enough land, I know for certain that I will at least get myself a pot bellied pig. I know it sounds like a weird pet to have, but it's one I've always wanted. Marshall thinks I'm crazy for wanting one, and maybe I am, but that doesn't stop me from wanting one.

Sunday Drive

Whether I'm at home or out of town, if I'm working Sundays are never long enough. They always tend to be over before they've even began. If I'm home it seems like I have to leave long before I'm ever ready and if I stay in Charlotte it's always time for bed long before I'm sleepy. Today was no different. We did get up early as we were meeting Shea and her girl friend Gloria and a few of Shea's friends for brunch. Shea wasn't in town the previous weekend and Marshall and I hadn't yet had the opportunity to meet Gloria, so we decided upon brunch. The brunch was also an unofficial celebration of Gloria's birthday, even though her birthday wasn't until later in the month. The company at lunch was great and the food was great, but boy did we ever have the worse service. So horrible in fact that Marshall finally had to get up and complain to the manager. We had to ask multiple times for refills on our drinks and when Marshall's order came out and it was the wrong thing the waitress snapped, "Just take it!" Who says that? My favorite was when I asked her how the special was - the turkey bacon quiche. She rudely told me she didn't know they don't feed them before they start work so she hasn't tried everything. What a smart ass reply. I've never had a waitress give me such an answer. I ordered it anyway and then told her it was good so she could tell her future customers it was good. The bonus was that the entire table got gift certificates out of the debacle.

Shortly after brunch it was time for me to pack up and get on the road. Typically, I wouldn't leave so early but I was exhausted and have a very early call time tomorrow. Plus, Marshall is coming up to Charlotte tomorrow for a couple of weeks so I was only going to miss him for one night. The best part was I wasn't leaving home alone this time. I had the dogs to keep me company. Since Marshall needed the space in his car for tools he was bringing up to Charlotte, I had to bring the dogs with me. We stopped by our house in Charlotte (the Patterson Street house or the City House as we call it) before going to my apartment. Our renters had just moved out over the weekend so I had to meet them at the house and pick up the keys from them. It was still daylight when I got there so I let the dogs out back to run around in the yard while I waited for the renters. I took a peak around the house and saw it had been left pretty dirty. I just don't understand some people. When I rented before I owned a house, I was so afraid of not getting my deposit back that I always cleaned the place from top to bottom. I even had my mom help me steam clean the carpet in a couple of places. Owning dogs I always tried to make sure there was no evidence they were even there. Of course, our dogs never chewed on molding or blinds or anything else that our renters' dog did. It's people like them that don't crate their destructive dogs that give all pet owners a bad rap. If we end up renting our house again, I believe our pet policy is going to be much stricter from now on.

Eventually, the dogs and I made it home and settled in for the night. It felt more like being at home having them there. It truly is amazing how much company a dog can be. Even though they don't talk, they communicate in so many ways. I imagine it's much like having a baby around. They can't talk, but they depend on you and make noises and with them around you are never alone. I can see how a stay at home mother would feel as though she never has any time to herself. With a young child, you never really do. Throw in a dog that follows you around every where too and you too would probably lock yourself in the bathroom just to have some free time. I can only hope that I have to do that one day. It would definitely be a good problem to have.

Meeting Harper

I knew this day was inevitable - the day I have to force myself to go meet one of my best friend's brand new baby girl. Tina and I had been pregnant together and knowing she was due August 4th, I had been trying to prepare myself for this day for some time. After Harper was born on Tuesday, I was positive I would be going home this weekend and that part of the reason would be so I could meet Harper. It was the right thing to do in so many ways. Tina, despite feeling a bit like the pregnant elephant in the room, showed up at the hospital to support me when Nolan died. She, her husband and her in-laws all showed up to Nolan's memorial service. Tina gave me a get out of jail card for her baby shower, knowing it might be too difficult for me to attend and she sent me the most thoughtful care package when I left for Charlotte. She's been there for me through the loss of my son and I want to try to be there for her and share in her excitement over the birth of her first child.

Marshall, having already met Harper in the hospital on Wednesday, was not interested in going with me to Tina's so I called my friend Stacey to accompany me. As fate would have it, Harper was hungry just as we got there and despite Tina's best efforts to pacify her, she eventually had to leave us to go breast feed. So we spent some time chatting with Jamie and his parents and watching the Olympics. When Tina and Harper rejoined us, Tina asked if anyone want to hold Harper and I told her I did. I'm know Tina wasn't sure if I would want to or not and I appreciate her asking in a way that did not make me feel obligated. But the truth was, I did want to hold her. I've held many, many babies in my life and lots of them were my brand new baby cousins. I knew this was going to be different and I wanted to test myself and see if I could handle it. I felt like if I couldn't, this was the place to find out. There was nobody in that room that wouldn't understand if I started balling while holding her and handed her off. Nobody would judge me or think any less of me for it. But, to my surprise I held myself together. It helped that Harper looked nothing at all like Nolan to me so I didn't draw a comparison at all. She was heavier than him, even though he was a bit longer. He was long and skinny and Harper had some fat to her. Fat that Nolan might would have had if he had lived until he too was full term. Shortly after I held her and she fell asleep in my arms, Stacey and I left. I thanked Stacey for going with me as we drove back to my house and I knew she knew it was hard for me. She asked me how I felt about it and I told her it was a lot of mixed emotions. I'm happy for Tina and Jamie, but it reminds me of what I had and lost. As if I need any reminder.

Back at home, we met Marshall, my Mom and Billy and decided to all go grab some Fuzzy Peach together before Marshall and I took Mom and Billy out on the boat. This was the first time we ever took Billy on the boat, even though Marshall had mentioned to Billy weeks ago about taking him out. We had a pretty great time swimming in the cove at Masonboro and looking for shells. I had decided to go take my shells back to the boat and ended up sitting in it hanging out until I heard Marshall and Mom yelling at me from the beach. It took me a moment to realized what had happened. We had lost our anchor and I was quickly drifting out into the channel! Yikes. I started to freak out. I tried to start the boat and it wouldn't crank. I looked around trying to trouble shoot why it wouldn't start and couldn't figure it out. So, I stupidly jumped in the water and tried to tow the boat. Yeah, right. Sure our boat is only 17 feet long, but the tide was rapidly coming in and there was no towing the boat anywhere. I climbed back in the boat and toggled the drive shaft and realized it wasn't fully clicked into neutral. I tried to crank it and it started right up. I drove towards Marshall who was wildly waving his arms at me but I couldn't hear anything he was saying until I got near to him. Apparently, Marshall had tried to swim out to me but got caught by the incoming tide and had worn himself out. He too was freaking out but while I was freaking out inside a floatation device, Marshall was freaking out in 20 feet deep water. He had was convinced he was about to drown and by the time I got to him all he could do was hang on to the ladder. It was a scary few moments indeed. Gladly, it all ended well except for the loss of our boat anchor. Oh well, I hated that anchor anyway. Maybe our next one will work better.

I drove the long way back to the marina and the ride back was breathtakingly beautiful. The water was calm and the sky was packed full of low hanging clouds. It was as if there was no boundaries between the sea and the Heavens. There were far less boats on the way home as there were coming and the ride was peaceful and pleasant. All and all it was a great afternoon out on the boat. Exhausted from swimming, sun and the boat/drowning disaster, Marshall and I were pretty unmotivated to do anything other than lay around our house. We ordered take out from Thai 2 and watched Olympics on the couch and had a great evening just being with each other at home. It was a packed day full of emotional stress, but the ending to the day was just what we both needed to relax and rejuvenate.