Yea For Good People

My friend Nancy got the job she wanted yesterday! I'm so very happy for her and her husband Jeff. They're the Godparents to our kids and thoroughly wonderful people.

Nancy was in a job that she hated. Not because of the job itself but because of her boss. I can certainly understand that feeling....TRUST ME.

But now things are getting better for her and her husband. And it couldn't happen to nicer people.

Don't You Hate...

Getting something for yourself(presumably)to enjoy, only to have it usurped by a family member?

Not that I have all the time in the world to fritter away on my Xbox 360 but I'm highly peeved. I searched high and low for Guitar Hero II(it's a big seller and goes fast), a great game....or so I'm told. I just haven't been able to get close to it all friggin day today.

Reason? My wife has been playing it pretty much non-stop.

While I've been relegated to sitting in front of my laptop. Since the weather sucked today, I couldn't take the boys outside and mess around with them.

It's completely ruined what enjoyment I was hoping to get out of it.

Yeah, I'm petty and pathetic. So what? Can't a guy have some things just to himself?

Crap.

Morning sunrise.

HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!!

Cryptic, isn't it??

The Smell of....

Another smoky fire. Excuse me, another EXTREMELY smoky fire and I come back to the station reeking of woodsmoke. Yes, it's a smell reminiscent of camping out and it brings back good memories but I smell like I was hoisted on a spit and rotated slowly for hours, but not basted in my own juices.

Wherever I went, I left an stagnant odor. Even being sprayed down with Lysol air freshener didn't help. Earlier, driving back from the fire, I had both windows down in the live truck, trying to blow the stink off of me or at least air out the truck so the next person wouldn't have to tolerate the smell being stuck in the truck through the day. I tried as best as I could but I couldn't take too much of the 20 degree air plowing into my face. When I went to pick up my youngest at his pre-school, his teacher wrinkled her nose and looked at me, her face asking a question without vocalizing it.

As the day wore on and I came home from work, a shower was the first thing on my mind. As the Dial soap started to take some of the smell away, I started to think. Yes I know, a dangerous thing. But getting back to my thoughts, I sort of see what I went through as a badge of honor in my chosen profession. Whom else runs to a fire scene except the emergency workers and us? Lookie Lous do also but aside from their morbidity, we're there next to the fire, police and rescue units doing our job.

It's a smell that regular people hardly ever come back to work smelling like. Maybe that's a good thing. But I guess I'll choose to wear it as a badge of honor for my chosen profession.

I'll still complain about coughing up black crap. That's just annoying.

Captured on Cell Phone

The massacre at Virginia Tech was captured on cell phone video by Virginia Tech grad student Jamal Albarghouti as he was walking to class. He came upon police officers running towards him, drawing their guns and telling him to get down.

You can see the police approaching the building and listen closely, you can hear gunshots. Remarkable video.

How Did You Spend Your Morning

This was supposed to be posted by Blogger Mobile a week ago but for some reason, it keeps being sent to the nether world of the internet.

But, this was how I spent my morning by watching some very good looking young women belly dance and others do a little modern hip-hop dancing.

Hmmmmm, watching women dance at 5 a.m. and getting paid for it?? Like I've said before, sometimes I love my job. I am a very lucky guy sometimes.

This Can't Be Good

I covered a fire on Monday. Pretty basic really, just your run of the mill house fire. Except this was a pretty smoky fire. I got to the scene, took my camera and tripod and headed around the back end of my live truck.

I turn the corner of the truck and look up just in time to see a wall of thick black smoke headed right at me and nowhere to escape. I took a deep breath of fresh air and held it as the smoke enveloped me. My eyes stung and watered as the toxic smoke worked it's way into my nose, eyes and eventually my lungs as I ran out of clean air.

I shot the fire, even got them reviving a dog with oxygen, in between coughing jags but I thought I'd be ok after a few hours. I was blowing black crud out of my nose and coughing up black crap for the rest of the day.

Well, two days later, I'm still coughing up black crap...

That sucks..

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!!

A Night At The "Still Mill"

I grew up in Pittsburgh which in it's heyday was known as the steel capital of the world. Today however,my hometown is now a technology and medical city. I'd never been in a working steel mill(pronounced still mill to you non-Pittsburgh people) while working in Pittsburgh. I've driven by a few, the closest was the Edgar Thompson works in Braddock, PA but never been inside an actual working mill. Until yesterday.

All this week, I've been shooting these stories, "A Night At....". Basically a take off on the movie A Night At The Museum. We've been showing the things that come alive at night when you are asleep. Last night Obie, my reporter, and I shot at the A.G. Mittal steel mill here in downtown Cleveland.

It was fascinating to say the least. What I didn't expect was to be able to feel the heat radiating off these slabs from so far away. Things are kinda hot at 2000 degrees even when doused with water and being flattened into giant rolls of steel.

Another thing I didn't count on was waking up this morning with aching sinuses and blocked nasal passages. Pardon me for being graphic here, but I've been blowing out black crap today every time I blow my nose. I really don't know how the guys that work these mills can stand it. Maybe they're so used to it by now. God bless them for dealing with it. Lord knows, I couldn't.

I just want to be able to breathe normally again and stop expelling the black crap out my nostrils.

Ever Give A Mast A Bear Hug?

What am I doing in this picture?



I'm pressing the azimuth CCW button, for the dish on our satellite truck, in vain. Our truck operator, Gary, is up on the roof stomping his foot when he wants me to press the button. Why are we doing all of this? We're trying to save a live shot at the Kalahari Water Park that I mentioned in a post recently. Our dish has frozen. It will tilt, but it won't pan at all. It is so cold and windy outside with below zero temperatures for both air temp and wind chill that the dish is refusing to work. In all reality, I couldn't blame it.

We worked on the dish for a good two and a half hours and it wouldn't budge. Gary and I were constantly alternating between outside the truck and inside the truck, trying to thaw ourselves. I felt horrible for Gary who spent most of the time on the top of the truck because he's the shop geek and knows the truck backwards and forwards.

I had brought our tallest masted live truck and I thought while Gary was freezing his ears off, I'd try a desperate live truck shot back to Cleveland from Sandusky. So, as intrepid as I am, I went for it and set up my live truck.

The mast extended fully into the air and I talked to our signal acquisition or sig ack, as we call it, to bring the microwave signal in. I panned, tilted and prayed we could we could get a signal out of Sandusky. Sig ack saw me but we couldn't bring in a strong enough signal that was passable for on air quality.

So, I drop the mast and head to higher ground. By this time, I'm frozen so I set the mast in the up position (yes, I did look up and live), went inside the truck and set the air vents on melt. About three minutes later, I figure the mast should be up so I head outside and look up. The mast is only two sections up and not moving. I hear a psssssssshhhhtttt coming from the mast and I ran my hand over my eyes in frustration. This is air escaping because the seals have constricted because of the cold and the mast has frozen.

I was so fed up at this point, I muttered a few choice four and twelve letter words and climbed up on the top of the truck and grabbed the mast in a bear hug and tried to lift the mast out of it's frozen grip. I couldn't make it budge but I did succeed in covering myself in the grime of northeastern Ohio's finest road salt residue. I couldn't get the mast up to get a signal tuned in. I was left standing there dejected, looking like a human salt lick.