Goin' back to Cali...

I have arrived in the Golden State.  The 6:00am flight out of Nashville was a bit early and the 2 hour layover in Houston was a bit long, but I am happy to be out of the chaos that is SpeedWeeks in Daytona.  Now the schedule becomes more routine, and I kinda like that.  We arrived at the track at 2pm PST and got to work.  We first put together all the highlights, interviews, funny clips and anything else we want saved to tape.  That is called a melt.  I have no earthly idea why, it just is.  The melt of all the clips from my hard drive comes to 2 hours in length.  Sanford's melt come in just slightly under that.  Once the melting is done, we do other pre-production, the nuts and bolts of shows, for the weekend...first off is making what is called billboards.  Those are the annoying symbols of companies that go over pretty shots at the beginning or ending of nearly every segment of every show....ie, "American Idol" is brought to you by...blah, blah, blah.  You gotta do it though, because it is the money.  Without them, I don't make my coin.  We'll also put together the lower third promos...the other annoying thing that pops up on the screen that is basically a commercial in between actual commercials.  Sometimes the hosts will read information about them, sometimes they just mysteriously pop up on screen, make some noise so you notice it and read it, then mysteriously fade away.  

After we finish with those, we will do a truckwide fax...that is just a checking of all equipment with the TD, the button pusher at the switcher, to make sure everything is where it is supposed to be, sounds the way it is supposed to sound and looks like it is supposed  to.  If all goes well, that is only a 10 minute process.  Why is it called a fax, you ask...again...I gots no answers.  

If all goes well with all of the above, we can be out of here by 7pm and back to our hotel by 7:15.  That's Thursday on the NASCAR circuit in our truck.

Oh, Dad, "Goin' Back to Cali" is an LL CoolJ song...it's probably somewhere on your Ipod.