Mobile test 2

Mobile test 2

I'm Just Watering The Lawn

This Sunday morning, I went out to cut the open 2 acres of my back property. Apparantly I, on my trusty lawn tractor, must have kicked up something sharp. A rock, a stick, pruning shears...something.

What draws me to this conclusion? There's a four inch gash in the side of our above ground pool and currently 12,000 gallons of water are flowing out and watering my back yard the hard way.

Ooops.

What's A Guy To Do?

Yesterday there was a fatal shooting at Cleveland Hopkins Airport. An irate man with a rap sheet about as tall as I am tried to buy a ticket to Chicago at the Delta Airlines counter. Well, for sme reason, they refused to sell him a ticket. He was upset enough that when he left to go to the United ticket counter, Delta called the police. United sold the man a ticket and then a police officer arrived. A scuffle broke out between the officer and the irate man in the terminal.

A second officer showed up as backup to the first officer. The two officers are now struggling with this man. The three of them fall to the ground in a tangle of bodies. Reports say that the man bit the hand of the second officer, taking his service weapon and fired two shots into the chest of the first officer. The first officer falls back, wounded. He wasn't wearing his issued vest as he is required to.

A third officer shows up just in time and shoots the man dead. The first officer survives with a couple of broken ribs and a punctured lung. He now has a bullet in his back which they probably will not remove.

Now why did I tell you all this? Because it happened right after my shift was over and I was pulling into my driveway when I heard it going down on the radios. Now, this morning, I'm sent to the airport to wait for the re-creation of the incident by the Cleveland Police Department's deadly force team.

So there I am in the airport at 1 a.m. waiting for this to happen.

And I wait..

And wait...

Aaaaannnnnndddd wait...

It never happened. I didn't mind staying there. I chatted with a nice lady from Delta who is flying back to Atlanta. It beat falling asleep in an airport.

What I did mind....there are two Starbucks in the airport that weren't *^%$#@!&((%*(!!!! open!!!

Damn.

Maybe Next Year

Reading Lenslinger, LittleLostRobot and FTOJRLST combined posts from NAB 2006 makes me a very jealous man. I think I need to go next year.

Yeah....definitely.

Oh What A Night

Working overnights as I do means that when our overnight desk guy, Russ, takes a week or even a day or two off, they never replace him. So, usually no one is on the desk overnights until at least four a.m. I usually take it on myself to sit at the desk and listen to the scanners. It's not my job. It's not my jurisdiction (different union) but I feel like I need to because I can't stand the fact that we might be missing something.

So as I'm sitting on the desk last night, I hear a call for a house fire. I tell our E.P. that I'm heading out to it because it's a worker. This means that our E.P will have to keep an ear out on the scanners and produce the five a.m. show also.

So I head to the fire.



While here, I find that the fire is a garage on fire. No big deal. Then my phone rings. It's our E.P. calling to tell me that he heard an officer calling "SHOTS FIRED..SHOTS FIRED...MAN DOWN!!!" He tells me it's at E.71st and Mound. That is south from where I'm at and a good ways away. Still in the city of Cleveland though so, off I head.

I arrive at Mound Ave.



To find.....nothing. No activity whatsoever. I drive all around the area looking for anything and don't see a blessed thing. I call back and talk to my E.P. telling him I don't see anything. I ask him if he heard it right and he screams at me...."I KNOW WHAT I HEARD!!" So, I drive around the area some more. I've spent about 15 minutes looking so I call him back again. This time he says he'll call the police and find out.

Then he calls me back twenty minutes later and says, "Ok..E.71st and Superior." So I head there.



Notice where it is? If you need to, go back and look at the first pic. I'll wait.......

Ok, back? It turns out it was E.71st and Myron, not Mound as I was first told. See how close I was to the shooting when I was at the fire? I was at least six blocks or less. And now I was about 45 minutes behind the action.

It turned out to be a good story. A car with some bad guys chase another car, firing at it with an automatic weapon. The bad guys take a turn onto E.71st from Superior and hit a cargo van head on. The bad guys back up and speed off. The car that was shot at turns the same corner and stops in front of the van. Two guys fall out of the car. One is wounded in the head and another is shot in the chest. A cop is coming down E.71st and sees the car shot to hell and the guys laying in the street bleeding profusely.

I just hate being sent on wild goose chases. I didn't miss the story but I could have been there to get the victims and the scene when it was hot.

I was that close. Oh well.

Stuck On You

What is this stuff, you might be asking yourself. Or you may not. Well, I'll tell you. It's glue. Industrial glue to be precise. It leaked from a tanker that had just left the plant where it's made. The driver of the tanker truck pulls into a Speedway station to fuel up. He notices that he's leaking a good amount of the glue from his tank and calls his boss. His boss tells him to return to the plant and they'll take care of it.

So, instead of staying put like any sane person would do, he decided to drive back to the plant and have it looked at, thus putting about another mile and a half of glue down on the road AGAIN.

So, after spreading glue over three miles on a round trip drive and causing a few cars to slide and spin, the company calls the police.

It closed the street for about six hours as the fire department and an enviromental cleanup company tried to get the glue off the street. I'll avoid the obvious pun about it being a sticky situation and just leave it at that.

TAXI !!!

The other day I was sent out to a huge fire at a cab company. They once ran their cabs on propane but they were pretty much converted back to normal gasoline by this time. They still had a few cars in their fleet that ran on propane and they still had a 30,000 gallon tank of the stuff on their property. And the fire was raging out of control.

As I'm headed that way, the desk informs me of the tank and the potential explosion hazard. A half-hearted "watch yourself" echoed in my ear as I arrived on the scene.

I had to park my live truck two blocks away as the Cleveland Fire Department had sealed the area off pretty well. I got out and looked up to see no wires overhead, set the mast heading up and started to pull cable. I ran the cable down the street and around the corner and ran into a mass of people headed towards me. A firefighter is herding people in a mass away from the fire. "Keep moving!! The tank may explode!! Keep moving! " I stop dead in my tracks and wait for the people to go by. The firefighter looks at me, nods his head in a quiet hello and says, " You can keep going..."

Yeah...this thing is going to explode and he tells me that "I can keep going.." Riiiiiiighhhht. So, what do I do like a dumbass with a death wish?? I keep going down the street and set up my shot. Thankfuly the CFD had pretty much isolated the tank from the flames but smaller tanks inside the garage that had propane did set off small explosions that could be heard from about a mile away.

Turns out that the fire was set by an arsonist. There were two homes torched in the surrounding blocks a couple of days before this fire. Looks like we've got a firebug in the area and we'll be busy until they catch the little pyromaniac.

Quote Of The Day

My 5 year old yells to his 4 year old brother while getting ready for their bath...


"HEY JOE!!!! WE'RE NAKED SUPERHEROES!!!!"

Yet Another Fatality

I was sent down to Akron a few days ago to cover a fire. Turns out it was a fatal fire. Seems like careless smoking was to blame. The fire started in a couch on the first floor. Couches don't seem to spontaneously combust that often



An elderly man died. Another person and 5 dogs were able to get out.

If I'm keeping count on the fatal fires, this is at least the sixth this year.

Lovely.

Boy....You Ain't Right

I've been feeling like crap. Absolute crap lately. Run down. No energy for a long time. Irritable....you know, the same feelings all photogs have. So I figured it was just partly because of my job and my schedule of weird hours.

I went to the doctor and he ran a battery of blood work. Turns out my cholesterol is fantastic. Shocked the crap outta me. My blood pressure is right on the money. Again, for a guy my size, those factors were shocking. What wasn't registering right was my thyroid. Seems that my thyroid levels were way low. So I headed off to get an ultra-sound of the little glands. Turns out, like me, they're big and irregular. They're not working correctly. Seems they're trying to work too hard and not accomplishing anything. Sounds like me at work.

Anyways, I thought I was gonna need a nuclear scan of thyroid but my doc said that would be an option if the medication doesn't work. So, now I need to take a thyroid pill of 100 micrograms every day to help me regulate my thyroid.

Turns out that hypothyroidism is a pretty common problem. Estimates put it at 11 million people suffering from it. Many people go living with the problem and don't know it.

Like I said, I ain't right....yet.

Opening Day...

I HATE opening day. I absolutely loathe it. The madness that ensues around the mystique of this time honored tradition just drives me nuts. Things never go right. The plans of the producers who say that they have things all "set up" for the crews in the field, never are set up. It's always up to us to save the show and make up the things as we go along. We always have to grab our own interviews and basically make things work of our own accord.

This morning it just rained and rained on us thus enhancng my love of opening day. I'd much rather be in the stands or watching it at home while drinking a beer. Hell, I'd like to be drinking a beer while working the morning show for opening day. But I guess that is frowned upon by management and the public who get in the way when you drive down the sidewalk on the way back to the station.

As I write this, I am at home watching the Indians beat up upon the Twins but alas, I am currently beerless.

Ah well, there is always next year.