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I brushed my teeth with moisturizer.

The Care Collection came with different items, among them a moisturizer and a toothpaste.  But look above.  The moisturizer and the toothpaste are dangerously alike.  And to a man on both no sleep and emotional distress, these two little tubules are virtually indistinguishable in the early Amsterdam morning.

I would have gotten more sleep perhaps but people kept texting and calling.  And I take full responsibility for that.  Many friends and family back in the US didn't know I'd been waylaid in Holland and so assumed I was back home, and they were reaching out with warm welcome-backs.  And I love them for it.

But I wasn't back.  And I was still certainly on Kiev time and in Kiev it was two in the morning.  So I would doze off and then ring or sound the phone makes when getting a text message.  But I love all of you so it's okay.

In the bathroom the next morning, I stumbled in and grabbed what I thought was the toothpaste.  It didn't take more than a millisecond to understand my mistake.  On the upside, my teeth are now nice and supple.

As many of you may know, Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport is half airport, half galleria.  They really want you to come in their and shop, even if you're not going anywhere.

But I was going somewhere and so were all the people who missed their connections yesterday.  I was fortunate enough to have the angelic help of a KLM woman yesterday so all I had to do was sail through Passport Control.

My luggage spent the night at the airport so the only new item of clothing I was wearing was the white tee shirt provided in the Care Collection.  But getting to the gate I saw lots of people from yesterday whom I recognized as also re-clad in their yesterday garb.

A lovely 747 rested at the gate.

At first we had the City of Seoul.  But then about 20 minutes before we were supposed to board, they rolled it out and replaced it with the Guayaquil.

Don't know what that was all about.

Here at Schiphol they put the Security Check at each individual gate. This is a bit of a double-edged sword in my opinion.  It's good because you don't end up with this massive security logjam the way you have here in the States.  But it's bad because once you're in the boarding area, you're in.  And since you can't bring in any liquids, you can't stock up on water for the flight.  So that's a bummer.

Holland is a very wet place.  Probably works for all those tulips.

We climbed out over the ocean and settled in at just over 10,000 meters for a glassy flight.

I dozed off pretty quick but then some food came and I never turn down the food.  This time I turned down the food.  I couldn't eat.

We were flying over Greenland.

Lonely icebergs, glaciers and frozen wastelands slid underneath.  At some point I must have fallen asleep.  I remember waking up and looking out to see an endless ocean of clouds...

Every once in a while, the reality that 24/1 Red Army Street was getting farther and farther away would wash over me like a drowning wave.  I fell asleep again.

Somewhere over Montana they gave us lunch.

Trying to sleep after lunch was pointless.  We only had a couple of hours left.  I watched an episode of Modern Family on the KLM entertainment system.  I clamored over my seat mates to go to the bathroom.  I loitered near the stairs to the upper deck because I didn't feel like sitting anymore.

I feel like I'm supposed to be saying something insightful about my time in Ukraine.  I feel like I should be writing something nice about all the wonderful people I met and worked with (which I did).  I think I should make some mundane observations about all the differences and all the similarities between cultures and peoples.

But I'm not capable of any of that right now.

In ending this blog I will say that I'm grateful that KLM's City of Guayaquil got me home safely.  I'm grateful my luggage met me here in Los Angeles.  I'm grateful for the limo driver who took me home and understood almost intuitively why I was so sad on the ride home.

I'm grateful for Marius' continued creative inspiration and trust.  But mostly I'm grateful for his friendship.  I'm grateful for everyone in Kiev who helped me navigate Ukraine, including Olya G and Natalie G and Moose and Sasha the driver and all the other ones.  You guys have a beautiful city.

I have no way of describing how much I treasure Ksusha's friendship and her precociously world-wise comfort.  I'm going to need it.

I'm grateful for so many people and times and places that any effort to list them would be pointless.  So finally I just want to thank everyone who spent even a little time with me on this blog.  Maybe for me it's a little like what Virginia Woolf said -- it's not real until it's written down.

But I can tell you for a fact that there are lots of things that are real that will never be written down.

Thanks again, everyone.

Do I Really Have To Come Up With a Title?

We're almost at the end of our journey, friends, and I'm coming home a shell of a man.  I can't and won't go into why but this is a tough trip back to say the least.  A tough departure.  I didn't sleep the night before I was picked up to go to the Kiev airport.  The car came at 3:15am.

I was easily able to check all my excess, overweight baggage.  If by easy you mean they made me pay $260 for it.  Once I got up to Passport Control they were quick to notice that I had been in the country for 96 days.  Technically, you're only allowed 90 days and then you have to re-register.  Production had assured me that everything had been taken care of.  But of course no one gave me any paperwork to present to the Ukrainian authorities so they took me into a little room and told me I would have to pay a 900 Grivna penalty.

They made me leave my camera kit and backpack and walk all the way from Terminal F to Terminal B in order to pay the fine.  I walked back in the pre-dawn cold clutching my little receipt.

Upstairs in the gate area, it was impossible to not notice all the other flights scheduled for after my flight to Amsterdam (connecting to a KLM flight to Los Angeles) leaving before us.

Oh, by the way, why does anyone care about the Duty Free?

So all of us Amsterdammers loitered without a shred of information.

They changed the gate assignment three times and so it was like one of those movie scenes where the crowd of people scampers over to one place then scampers back to the original place then scampers back to the other place.

Turns out that weather in Amsterdam delayed our incoming plane and so we were going to leave an hour late.  My connection only had a small margin and I was on fuzzy edge before we even took off.

Beginning our decent into Amsterdam the pilot comes on the PA and tells us that due to poor conditions in Amsterdam we've been diverted to Rotterdam.  Rotterdam.

Well, that's it for me.  My connection is blown.  We sit for three hours on the Rotterdam airport tarmac cooling our heals in a hot plane.

Other divertees gathered around us.  Tempers flared in the back of the parked plane, so much so that the Captain had to come back and try to calm the impatients down.  Eventually, we were cleared to make the 15 minute flight to Amsterdam.  The wind was still churning.  The wind sock was horizontal and unmoving.  So I knew we were gonna get bounced around on this little shuttle flight.  But it was actually kind of fun because since it was a fifteen minute flight, you knew we wouldn't have time to get very high.  So there we were buzzing windmills and it was kind of awesome.

This is where things went from miserable and exhausted to wanting the sweet release of death and exhausted.  Amsterdam airport lands 50 planes an hour (an actual stat).  And the airport was essentially closed for three hours.  So that's around 150 planes each with between 100 and 300 passengers.  So do the math and figure out how many people need to be re-booked.

KLM only had one little place in which five agents attempted to deal with -- no kidding -- thousands of people all with special needs.  I personally waited in a line for six hours, and thank god I got to the Transfer Desk before most others because I moved only 15 feet in nearly five hours, that's how slow it all was.

Sorry I don't have a more illustrative photo but there's no way I was jumping out of line just to show you clods how long it was.

Soon, they were passing out cookies and juice and that helped.  Finally I was rebooked by a little miracle of an agent who did something for me that I can't and won't describe but is related to the first can't and won't above.  But if there is a god, then please bless this woman.

So now I have to spend the night here in Amsterdam.  I got a hotel voucher and KLM's handy toiletries kit...

It's the Care Collection.

I then took my dinner voucher and walked in the rain to the restaurant where all the Strandeds were assembling for their free meal.

I had the Spinach Fettucine.

Ample Make This Luggage

Almost packed.  I'm ending up with one more suitcase than I came out here with.  But that's not bad, actually.  Overall, I seem to have a bit more room than when I arrived.  I'm not sure how that's happened.  I brought ten bars of unscented Ivory bath soap because I really, really don't like getting out of the shower smelling like a gardenia.  Back in LA I did a test and determined that one bar of soap will last me nearly exactly ten days (depending on how much mileage you get out of that last sliver).  So I brought nine bars.  The last one ran out five days ago.

But remember, we went overschedule and I was originally scheduled to leave on the 6th.  So I was pretty much right on in my calculations. Still, that doesn't account for the excess space in the luggage.  And you can't factor in the third piece because that was bought here for Yalta and is now being used to transport a particularly bulky hard drive.

As I wait for my flight tomorrow morning I'm actually getting some work done.  I have the entire Avid project here at home and am spending the time getting the project organized so I can hit the ground running in LA.

When I first walked through the door of this place over three months ago I really didn't like it.  In fact, I thought I had gotten the royal screw job.  But now I kind of love it.

But now I'll really miss it.

Talkin' Ergonomics

Still here in Kiev.  Friday is my travel day back to the US.  This blog existed as a document of my time here in Ukraine while shooting Rzhevsky vs. Napoleon 3D!  Now that principal photography is wrapped and we're finishing up Editorial wrap, we're almost ready to turn the last page on this blog.  But not quite yet.

So when I get back to Los Angeles this is the room in which I will be cutting the movie.  It's one of the fine editing bays at Oasis Imagery, on Sunset Blvd in the heart of glamorous Hollywood.  Oasis is a fine facility, overflowing with not just superior technical and administrative talent but chock full of all the creature comforts (except for 24-hour on-call Thai massage, which I fail to understand).

Now I'm a pretty standard basic editor guy in most respects.  But I do have one particular idiosyncrasy that I happen to share with Oscar-winning film editor, Walter Murch:

I like to stand.

Here's me on location in Nova Scotia during Outlander...

(Sorry about the piece of article attached to the photo -- it's the only version of that photo I could find.)

And here's me on set in Yalta a few weeks ago...

I mean, look at me sitting, all slumpy, slothy and pathetic.  As Judge Harm said, "That crow won't caw."

So I appealed to Oasis to help me stand.  At first I was met by the kindly, blank stares usually reserved for occupants of the short bus (Can I say that?  Can I reference the "short bus" here in a post 'Dilemma' world?). But then they saw that I was about to cry and so decided to help.

Describing some version of a stand-up console to go on top of their existing console, I first received the following CAD.

But then, remembering how much I enjoyed the canted, drafting table feel, I drew this up:

To which Oasis countered with this:

That oughta do just fine.  If the thing actually turns out like that then I'll be happier than a pig in the holler.

And now, because you never want to end a blog post with an angular CAD drawing of me, here's a lovely photo of Sveta.