How To Tell It's Going To Be An Interesting Day

When you come home and find your wife stranded on the roof of the house because the ladder that she was using collapsed, stranding her there for about 20 minutes..

She was taking down the Christmas lights.

God, I wanted to just walk into the house and pretend I couldn't hear her talking to me....

Zumba

This morning started a week long series of live shots for me and my reporter Jacque on Shaping up for your swimsuit. Basically, we're showing you how to get in shape for your summer swimsuit. We were at a dance studio that has classes in Zumba. It's basically fitness dancing to latin music. It started in Columbia pretty much by accident. You can read more about Zumba, here.

Arriving at the dance studio this morning, we were told that we'd have at least fifteen people for the demonstration. Wonderful, we thought. It's usually a whole lot more people that show up for our live shot demonstrations so we were psyched.

Until they showed up. There were a whole lot of 15, 16 and 17 year old girls plus a few women in their early 30's that would be "Zumbaing". Now normally being a red blooded, heterosexual male you'd think I'd be in Nirvana. Well.....

Let me tell you. I've never seen a cleaner dance floor and better electrical work on the ceiling as I examined the conduit work done by the electricians. I just couldn't look at the young girls. I felt....dirty. The moves that Zumba involves made me realize that if I saw anymore that I'd already seen, I'd be showing up on the next Dateline sting.

I'm not usually a prude but damn, I think I'm getting old too fast for my own good.

And it really, really sucks.

Don't You Just Love...

When the replacement(read: not much experience) for your regular assignment desk person misses a fatal police involved shooting and you don't find out about it until four hours later when the other stations have it at the beginning of their newcasts?

Yep. Makes the whole morning just an enjoyable funfest playing catch-up...

Where's the tequila??

Lookeee Who

Look who showed up in the Boy Scout Found package that we aired repeatedly this morning. Yep, it's our own Chris Weaver from TVPhotogBlog. I really enjoy his blog but something about this picture bothers me. I'm hesitant to say why because I like Chris and I don't want to make him angry.

Oh, to hell with it. It's plain old Weaver just showing off his incredible photog skills. Doesn't it just reek of "Oh, look at me...I'm so good, I don't even need to use the viewfinder."

Win Emmys and see what happens??

(Of course this is all tongue in cheek. I respect Chris a lot. It was just a chance to razz him and a shock to see him actually working...)

Test mobile blogger.

Week In Review

The week started off with an interesting story. An earthquake shook Northeast Ohio with a 3.6 on the Richer scale. The epicenter was in a little town about twenty miles south of where I live, named Shalersville. We went out to the town next to it, Mantua, and they never felt it either. Made for an interesting live shot because no one felt it there.

Tuesday was a warm weather day. It hit 71 degrees here and for early March in Cleveland, that is remarkable in itself. Nothing spectacular on Tuesday except for bright sunshine, warm weather and driving with the windows down and the radio turned up.

They say that you've never lived until you've held a three week old black bear cub and had a baby camel suck on your hand (ok, maybe they don't...). We did a live shot at the Cleveland Sport and Outdoor show where we played with baby animals and then got a demonstration of lumberjack sports. My reporter tried her hand at axe throwing. It's always dangerous when you give a reporter sharp objects especially ones that can be thrown but my reporter did pretty well.

Thursday was covering damage from an F-0 tornado that touched down in Elyria. Did a little damage. It rained all night, then the temperature dropped. It turned into snow which caused us to have to change our story from damage to traffic conditions. Thing was, the ground temperature was too warm for it to stick to the roads so there really wasn't a problem with rush hour traffic that morning. But we stood by the interstate reporting on the "bad traffic" conditions for three hours.

Friday was good day for a live shot. Since St. Patrick's Day falls on Saturday, we went to an Irish pub and covered them cooking up lots of good Irish food. It's always nice when you're fed on a live shot. Although, the corned beef, cabbage and shepard;s pie I had is not sitting well with my wife today. As much as I hate Paddy's day, It's still good to be fed.

Hopefully I'll have the time to post more on the actual days that things happen next week. It's just been busy with my father-in-law still in the hospital.

My Father In Law

He's a tough old man. He turns 84 today. He's spending his birthday in the hospital, sadly. He's been blacking out and falling recently. He wore a halter monitor for 24 hours and they found that his heart was stopping at times between 2 and 7 seconds. He was at the doctor's office to gt the results when he passed out in front of the doctor.

So, tomorrow, he will get a pacemaker put in to get his heart back to normal again. My FIL is a member of the greatest generation. A paratrooper on D-Day, he won a Silver Star and 2 Bronze Stars. He will not talk about what he did or saw in World War 2. I've talked about his unwillingness to talk about it, even to record it for his grand children. I have to respect his wishes. If it is that terrible, I'm sure he revisits it many more times than he wants to.

So, please, if you read this blog, say an extra prayer for my Father In Law. We're losing our greatest generation quicker each day. And we're forgetting them.

Back To The Grind

I'm heading back to work on Monday. It's been great having the week off but I'm getting antsy and missing the action of work. I did get to head off to Pittsburgh for a two days to visit dear friends of mine. They both help me recharge my batteries plus, being around them makes me feel like I'm back home again.

I can't truthfully say I'm looking forward to getting up at zero dark thirty after sleeping in for most of the week but it's good to get back into the grind.

Oh, one thing I did do on my vacation was buy a new personal car. It's not really new but it damn sure was close to it. It's a 2003 Mercury Grand Marquis. It only had 12,493 miles on it. For a 2003. It had to have been driven just in the summer because it's a rear wheel drive car. The title is perfect and it was clean as a whistle. I didn't plan on buying a car but my 98 Exploder that had 217k miles on it started to give up the ghost. The transmission was slipping something awful and I wasn't going to put $1000.00 plus into a vehicle with that many miles on it.



So, now I'm driving an old person's car. So, if you see a 30 something photog driving with his left blinker constantly on and only doing 25 m.p.h., honk in a nice manner. It's me getting into the moment.

Can't Come Soon Enough

I'm still on vacation but as I look out the window and it continues to snow, I feel like sacrificing some small fuzzy animal to the gods that control the seasonal changes here in Northeastern Ohio.

I may need to do this because the stories overnight have been few and far between because of the cold and snow. Now stories usually do tend to drop off during the winter time. People generally don't kill each other as readily as they do in the spring and summer. I guess most of them are two cold to want to kill their fellow man. Not that murder doesn't happen. It just seems to be quite less in the winter.

So, in the sake of the prediction of Punxatawney Phil, please let the spring be an early spring. I want to cover more stories over night.

Yeah, call me selfish.

What A Week

After dealing with a bout of the flu that wiped me out for four days and the specter of mass flooding because of rising temperatures and "heavy" rain melting the snow and ice that are around here (didn't really happen...just a little localized flooding), I really needed this day and the upcoming week off.

I'm on vacation until the week of March 9th.

w00t!!