As a way to explain the insanity of that last post, perhaps a narrative timeline is in order.

We could start on Saturday, when Katsu and I spent the whole day in DSP’s pitch-black edit suite, trying by turns to find a way to get our clip reel (that we hope will wrangle a substantial sum from the powers that be so we can continue filming and not be unemployed) out of the AVID and onto a DVD. “How hard can it be?” I quipped, early in the day. “People burn DVDs all the time. No sweat.”

No sweat indeed. Seven hours, my last Ativan, and a spindle of crap transcodes later, we were no nearer to a solution. To work out the residual anxiety from this technological rubix cube, Katsu and I headed to Central Square to see MARS, my friend’s band. I’d planned on making it an early night, since I knew that the upcoming week would be beyond hellish – but instead I decided to eat an oyster and call it dinner then proceed to get shithouse wasted with my husband and my old boss.

Sunday was a hangover of legendary proportions, even for me, and I laid on the couch sipping ginger ale, throwing up ginger ale, and listening to “This American Life” podcasts. Life sucked.

I was still not in fighting shape by Monday, so it was kind of surprising that my insomnia kicked in and kept my head spinning until 8:30am. Or maybe it’s not surprising, actually, given my history.

So Tuesday, I had to get up at 9:15 (that’s a solid 45 minutes of sleep, for those who are counting) to give me ample time to ponder the DVD quandary before Pusser and his editor came in for their graveyard editing shift. Katsu actually stayed home from work to help out, but we still couldn’t come up with a viable solution. At 8pm, during dinner, I had a nuclear-sized freakout, at 10pm we discovered that, for some reason, Nero Vision refused to burn uncompressed audio, or ANY audio for that matter, and at 3am I finally went to bed, where I stared at the ceiling until my alarm went off three hours later. Our deadline to deliver the DVDs was 5pm Wednesday, and, to put it bluntly, I was a fucking wreck.

My plan: get to work by 7am, export the whole timeline, transfer the resulting file to an external drive, go home, burn the DVDs on a system that WORKS, and then drink this bottle of champagne I’ve been saving since my birthday for just such an occasion.

The reality: Pusser & co didn’t finish editing until sometime near noon, so I spent 5 brain-dead hours finishing up our grant letter and sitting around with my thumb up my ass. The file I finally exported from AVID took an hour to generate, was almost 80gigs, and, when I started the transfer, estimated time to completion was three hours (THREE HOURS!). While watching the status bar on the transfer creep slowly towards “done”, I frantically tried other in-house options in an effort to create a usable disc. We have no internet at the office, so I couldn’t do online problem-solving, and my phone spent the afternoon hours languishing on the edge of battery doom, so I couldn’t call all my tech-savvy friends for advice. I was exhausted, hungry, and utterly alone, with an impossible deadline and no communication with the outside world. Pretty sweet.

I had to call our executive producer at 4 and let him know that we wouldn’t be delivering those DVDs on time after all, and between the trip back to Eastie, the offload from the external drive, and the import into DVD Studio, I didn’t have a burned disc until almost 9:30pm. And, when we watched it, I noticed a small video glitch in the last scene, which forced me to drive BACK to work to see if the problem had an easy fix. The answer, of course, was “no”, so I got home at midnight, burned the 6 extra copies I needed for our funders, and passed. the fuck. out.

The champagne had to wait until Thursday. I feel like it was well-deserved.