Tomorrow morning, I leave for Portland, where I'll spend an all-too-brief week working on Leverage.
For those of you who don't know, I'm a recurring character on Leverage. I play a computer hacker called Cha0s, who is a nemesis to the Leverage team, but especially to Hardison. I first played this character last season in The Two Live Crew Job, which was written by my friend Amy Berg (who also brought me to Eureka this season), and from the first day on set, I hoped they'd bring me back. I'm so excited to go to work tomorrow, I feel like a little kid on Christmas Eve.
I'll be Twittering and Twitpiccing from the set as much as I can without revealing spoilers or losing my focus as an actor. I'm in this episode a lot, which is awesome, but also means I won't get to spend much time doing the PDX things I love (though a trip to Ground Kontrol is obviously in order, likewise a trip to Powell's to get Charlie Stross' latest Laundry book.) Maybe this will be the trip to Portland where I finally go to Voodoo Donuts!
Yesterday, Anne and I pulled up this hideous old carpet that we've wanted to tear up for years. Beneath it, we uncovered a beautiful parquet floor, made from 3/8" mahogany wood. It took us about 3 hours to get the carpet up, pull out all the old staples, and then clean up what we figured must have been at least twenty years of accumulated dust and sand and FSM-knows-what.
I'm incredibly sore today from all the lifting and stuff, but the end result was entirely worth the effort:
We've wanted to do this for years, and waited so long because thought that we'd have to sand it, stain it, seal it, and spend thousands of dollars we don't have on it. A friend of ours who does floors for a living looked at it recently, and told us that it was such good quality wood, we could probably just take up the carpet and clean the floor with some Murphy's soap. It turns out that he was right, and the entire thing just cost us a few dollars and our time.
After we finished, we stood there, in our semi-renovated living room, and looked at it together. Our house felt different; it felt lighter, cleaner, more ours, than it had that morning.
"I love it that we spent the afternoon doing this," I said, "because we got to do something together that wasn't that difficult, didn't cost us anything, and made our house feel more like our home."
"I just wish we hadn't waited so long to do it," she said.
Our dogs wandered in from the family room, and cautiously sniffed around the room, frequently looking up at us for what I assume was some sort of pack leader reassurance.
"Now you guys don't have to compete for space in the entry way, because you have a whole room with a cool floor to sleep on when it's hot," Anne said.
Riley wagged her tail, and Seamus stretched out, lowered his head to the floor, and then lowered his entire body down. He thumped his tail against the floor. It was a moment of serenity, at the end of a decidedly non-serene week.
"I'm excited to go work on Leverage, because I love being an actor, and it's always fun to be in Portland ... but I'm really going to miss my family and my house while I'm gone."
