It's been said by someone far more altruistic than myself that we should try to leave the world a better place than we found it. This is a lovely idea, but I think my fellow students and I may have blown it this past weekend. We shot a movie in an old building full of rusty nails, splintered wood, over one thousand various athletic t-shirts, bats, beautiful antique wood panels, and water damage worse than the Lusitania. It did not have heat, running water, or electricity in the traditional sense.

I started a post about this after the first weekend of shooting, but it occurred to me that the post would contain spoilers galore, and some of my blog audience will see the movie at some point. It's a shame, too, because there were some good stories involving me in the back of a cop car and a temperamental fog machine.

This past weekend was my second weekend working on the movie. The presence of feeling in my legs was a sign that the weather was better. We worked for over twelve hours a day both days, relying on flashlights to work where the work light didn't reach. There was a funny incident on Saturday night when an actor stepped into a dark hall and two bats swooped right over his head. He wouldn't go down to the other end of the hall where his next shot was, so I took my flashlight and the fog machine to smoke the bats out. This must have worked, because we didn't have a problem with bats for the rest of the weekend.

For some reason, many of the eating establishments in Hartford City do not take any sort of magnetic card payment. The first weekend we ate at a recently opened Chinese buffet where the young woman at the register claimed that they could not accept electronic payment because it was Sunday. I'm not sure what that meant, but we figured that since they had only been open for a few days that their system wasn't perfect yet. I'm also not sure what was significant about it being Sunday, but it would be funny if the bank owner was a burn-out turned born-again fundie who refused to let his computer work on Sunday. The next weekend we went to Subway and my order and my friend's order were half done when we learned that they didn't take cards either. This is a national chain, mind you. My friend commented that he and his girlfriend had paid with a card at a Subway in the hills of Virginia just a few months prior. Fortunately, Pizza King was up on current technology circa 1995, so we enjoyed mediocre pizza and luxuriously standard indoor heating.

It was a good weekend for me.