It's Over...

My vacation, that is. I am sure no one here even knew I was on vacation. You're probably wondering to yourself, 'why didn't he blog about it?'

Well, okay, no one is actually wondering that. However, I will tell you why I didn't blog about it regardless. I have not blogged anything about it because I didn't go anywhere.

To borrow a made up word from the world of news, I had a 'staycation.'

Now originally the purpose wasn't to stay at home and watch my ass grow. I had planned on going back to Springfield and spending some time with my folks, Jerry, Troy, and all the people who are allied with me in my struggle known as life.

However, even making a seven hour vehicle trip - which I am wary of to begin with - costs money, and I, unfortunately, had none.

So I stayed at home. I made up a list of things I needed to do. I needed to finish my Operation Clean Sweep, which is a fancy name I came up with for cleaning my apartment. I had plans on starting my anime blog, do some writing, check out part time jobs, clean my car and spend some times with my online friends in Eve.

How much of that did I get done?

Well, I finished my anime blog (link goes to first post!). And honestly, that's probably just due to the fact that I was dying to do something partially creative. That and the fact that I was chatting with Keith and had someone to make go look at it and shower me with praise.

But for the most part I completely and totally wasted the past nine days. To make matters worse, I destroyed my sleep schedule and am completely on the wrong fucking side of the clock. I got up at 8PM Friday! I have to be at work today at 1:15, so I am planning on napping, but that doesn't usually work out for me.

So not only will I probably end up being awake for over 24 hours, I am going to end up having to stay late for work tonight due to the World Series. On the bright side (or maybe not, since not having work to do makes me cry) the show is (or so I've heard) only a half an hour.

Anyway, so back to work I go after spending nine days thinking about how much I don't want to go back to work. Well, I guess eight days since I was at the dentist on Thursday. Drilling and a cleaning. No thinking about work. That cleaning hurt like hell. If you are interested in a job where you cause pain to someone else, consider dental hygienist. Little metal hook and a patient's gums. Not fun.

My Last Saturday...

Sorry, I know it's late. I get distracted by shiny objects and have been dealing with some frustrations.

Anyway... My last Saturday, which was last Saturday... It was just my last Saturday shooting, I still work there, but in case you haven't been keeping up, I was demoted (sorta) to editor. Sidenote: I can't drive still, so the reporters have to drive and it apparently ticked one of them off, so I got sent to editor. However, I didn't receive a pay cut, which is why I say demoted (sorta).

Anyway, I get in and we're sent out the door almost immediately to Okmulgee, OK to cover a homicide that happened the day before. Nice 40 minute drive. Once we get there, we make a wrong turn, which was fine until we cross some train tracks that failed to warn us of a nasty drop on the other side. Doing the speed limit (30ish), it felt like a Dukes of Hazzard jump!

Stuff in the back got knocked around, but didn't seem to be a big deal. Till we got to the police department that was. My reporter went in to find the cop we needed to talk to while I decided to get some b-roll of police cars, since I wasn't expecting to have much at the scene.

I set the camera on the tripod and flip it on.

Nothing happens.

I groan and assume my battery is dead, so I take it off. About that time I look at it and groan. One of the clips has broken off and is still attached to the battery plate! D'oh! I pull that out and get a different battery. Flip the camera on.

Nothing happens. Again.

"WTF?" I ask. Yes, I said W-T-F because that is how much I used to instant message and chat.

I pull that battery off and notice that one of the power connectors has actually broken off from the battery.

"D'OH!!!!!!!" I cry out. Several Okmulgee police officers look at me and move their hands towards their tazers. I assure them I am harmless and tell my reporter the bad news.

"They are going to have to send someone with a different camera."

Let me tell you something about Saturdays. There is no one there. One producer, one editor, one reporter and two photographers. And I was unsure what time the second one was off.

Luckily he was still on the clock and grabbed the only unsecured camera and headed our way. We spent the next 40 minutes listening to the police make fun of us for having broken gear. Once we were done there we headed to the house where it happened. We managed to find some nice neighbors who were happy to go on camera and tell us how nice the victim was and stuff. Beats knocking on doors, I'll tell you that much. We returned back to the station at about 6:30 and got to work on getting the story put together for the 9.

But wait, there's more...

Weather started to roll in, a big chunk of it severe. And it was headed right for Pryor, OK, where Rocklahoma - a rock concert, duh - was going on. Thousands of people and many, many bands.

And the weather knocked over two stages.

Minor injuries, but it was BREAKING WEATHER so my partner and I loaded up in the Nomad and hit the road.

Pryor is outside of our microwave range, so we needed a sat truck. I am not trained on the big one (even though when I started I told them I ran the SNG trucks in Vegas, they still didn't bother to train me on this one) so we took the Nomad, which is what I lovingly refer to as a sat truck for dummies.

Seriously. All you have to do is point it south, turn it on and hit deploy. The satellite transmitter finds the bird on its own and the guy at the sat center turns it on, adjusts the power, all that stuff.

However because of its simple nature, it's prone to failure. Add in storms and well, I think you can see where this is going. Another 40 minute drive later, and after I had stood in a foot of water to shoot what was left of the stage, the fucking thing would not work. So my reporter did a phoner with the sheriff, while I - drenched from a new line of storms rolling through - broke down my live shot.

Final result, NEITHER story got on air. Well, the homicide did a little. They ran a VO/SOT. However, they planned on doing a package on it Sunday; community reaction! Perfect! An easy day for me! Or will it be? Find out in our next installment!

OVERDRAWN!!!

I hate being overdrawn. I even more hate having to deal with returned checks. I miss Washington Mutual, who would charge a bazillion dollars in overdraft fees, but would still pay the check.

Blaine was very, very nice and sent me some money. Of course when I go to deposit it, I find out QuikTrip managed to rocket a check I wrote on Tuesday through the banks and it had already bounced.

Bah!

Hopefully they will go ahead and send it through again, but not until Tuesday. Otherwise I have to deal and fight with people to keep my name off of the permabanned check writing list.

There is a bright side coming soon. First, I am going to get some Friday overtime for the next four weeks. While I will no longer be shooting, I still get to go out and work on 'On The Road', a remote thing FOX23 does during the summer. Pretty much 9A-10:30P work day. I could complain, but they feed us. So I won't.

This Saturday and Sunday will be my last to photog days for a while. So I need EVERYONE'S help in hoping for a couple of good stories! Seriously, I will cry if it ends up being just 'we need something to fill the newscast with, so here you go.'

So place your good wishes in my comments. That way I know that people are still reading this shit.

Miscellaneous Things...

Some of the pictures on my blog are no longer available. For some reason I cannot seem to find them on my hard drive, so they were lost when Douglas Avenue died. I apologize for this, since I know how much some of you loved my maps and stuff. As well, I still need to go through and change the URL for the ones I still have, which will take some time.

Does it even matter though? I sit here thinking to myself that I will start blogging again. I have lots of things to talk about, I think. There are a few interesting stories I have done at work, there are some interesting things going on at work - though if I talked about those I would probably end up on the receiving end of a caning or waterboarding or whatever they do to insubordinates - but none the less, I have no real desire to get up in the morning and go to work; much less blog about it.

I don't know if you noticed, but my last real blog post was back in February. There is a reason for that. In February, I had another seizure. I wasn't driving, as I still wasn't (and still am not) allowed to. I once again took a trip to St. John Hospital here in Tulsa staring at the roof of an EMSA ambulance. On the bright side, at least now I have insurance, so it isn't costing me $1,000.

Things haven't gotten back to normal for me. Work just keeps getting worse and worse. Two weeks ago, on a day that has received the moniker 'Black Wednesday', Newport, our new owners, chopped 7.5% of their workforce - which ended up canning 14 people from my station. I was saved probably by the fact that the photography department was short two people and they were just able to eliminate those positions. Though, I will be completely honest and say I am neither relieved nor happy to have been spared. The severance packages handed out were very good, even for short time employees, and it would have saved me the effort of having to get the motivation to quit.

How can I be upset that I wasn't laid off? Pretty much because I absolutely hate my job right now. The why can be chopped up into the fact that I detest being unable to drive, so I cannot ever have a VOSOT day or go shoot anything on my own. I cannot get any overtime, and my current debt level, which was not that cool to begin with, has been exasperated by the bills from my first seizure. Hell, I don't even have a cell phone right now because I cannot afford to pay the bill. I really don't like the stories that I have been doing, nor the live shots that serve no purpose (What we in the business refer to as 'dog lick live shots'. Called that because it follows the philosophy of 'why does a dog lick its self? Because it can.'). Also, the only reasons I came to Tulsa are gone. I can't drive, so I cannot weather chase. Chad was caught in the layoffs, which double sucks for me because he was going to help me get an internet position with the station - and those were eliminated!

So I have applied to go to Tulsa Community College. Hopefully I can get some education into me. I have considered a couple of options. I am entertaining the idea of becoming an EMT and eventually working my way up to paramedic. I was really affected by the way the EMSA people treated me when I had my seizures and wreck, and it would be nice to be able to help people like they did.

However, I would have to find out how squeamish I am first. I am not a big fan of watching people stick needles in me - and God knows I have had that done more than any man should have in the past 8 months - and I am curious to see how I would respond to having to stick them in someone else. Also, I am a rather sensitive person and while I have seen my fair share of dead bodies in this job, I don't know how I would respond to seeing someone die in front of me. For reference, the only person I have actually seen die is my Grandmother, but that doesn't seem like a fair instance to judge by.

It's also a very stressful job. My current job is stressing me out, but being a medic has the bonus of being rewarding. Could that counter the stress? Plus while I am an EMT before becoming a paramedic, I would be the driver. I cannot think of anything more fun than driving an ambulance, except for driving a fire truck.

But that is only one option. Another is getting a degree in Political Science, since I am interested in stuff like that. Of course then the question is 'where do I get a job?' I'd enjoy being a lawyer, but law school is too long and I will probably be dead before my dumbass could pass the bar exam.

Urban planning is interested to me as well, but of course then I would find the sad realization that it is nothing like SimCity. English/Journalism would also be cool, since I enjoy writing. But again, I don't want to work in news, so where would I work?

Finally, there is computer stuff. CISCO certification could get me a high paying job, but it really wouldn't be that interesting. However, I think I could do a good job at it, since I am pretty computer savvy.

Another option I have been mulling around is joining the military. Decent money and they would pay me to learn how to do something, rather than the other way around. However, I don't like the idea of being sent to Iraq (I oppose that war - wouldn't have an issue with being sent to Afghanistan) and I would have to scurry my ass off to, well, get my ass off. I am pretty sure they don't allow big fatsos into the military. And being 31, I am dangerously close to the cutoff ages for most of the branches.

Of course what I would love to do is to open up an anime store. Selling DVDs, books and toys and the like. But that would, as all start-up businesses do, take money I don't have and, in my current financial state, don't have access to.

So, here I be, wondering what I should do. For now, I suppose I should just grin and bear it. I cannot find a placeholder job that will pay me what I am making now. I would, of course, pick the middle of a slumping economy to grow disgruntled with my career.

I would like to make that clear. I don't really hate my job. I don't hate my employer. I don't hate my co-workers. I don't hate Tulsa. I hate my career. I and my reporter spent the day today circling like the vultures we were outside of a funeral waiting to ambush mourners to get their unneeded opinions on the arrest of the deceased's husband. If looks could kill, both of us would have been dead before we had the truck in park.

That is what television journalism has become. Random sound bytes with random people for random reasons. It drives me nuts. There is really one thing that I miss about working for WICS in Springfield. We told stories. There wasn't enough death and mayhem to turn a chicken little the sky is falling story on a daily basis, so we actually did stories about interesting people and things that affected people in the community.

Shame I only made $8 an hour.

I think I have rambled on long enough for one post. This is another reason I need to blog more often. If I do it more than once every four months, I won't feel the need to blubber on for 18 paragraphs.

Couple of things before I go. First off, congrats to the SCOTUS for their recent decision confirming that the second amendment protects an individual's right to bear arms. I find it ludicrous that people could think that our founding fathers placed, in the middle of a document securing individual rights, an amendment that applied to the government.

Secondly, if you have a chance, pick up Neil Bortz's book 'Somebody's Gotta Say It'. Good reading, especially if you have any libertarian leanings.

See you in the next post, hopefully sometime before fall.

Calling In Sick...

I hate doing it. I really do. Unless of course its for a good reason, like there is a party to go to or some girl is wanting to sex me up. But since neither of those things happen, calling in sick sucks.

Woke up this morning, kind of early (10am, but that's early for me). Drug myself out of bed and was messing around on the computer. Suddenly, I just got super light headed. I pretty much fell over when I tried to walk to the bed, because my legs felt so heavy. Very strange sensation. Went back to sleep for a bit, got up and still felt like shit, so I some how drug myself to the phone and called in - ever since 7 Dec, anytime I feel a little weird I get freaked out about driving.

So I then went back to bed, and woke up about 4, not remembering if I'd called in or not! Cell phone didn't have 152 missed calls, and my email showed the newsroom wide email about me not coming in, so that was a sigh of relief.

Went back to bed for a bit, got back up at 7 and now I feel fine. Legs still feel a little heavy for some reason, but whatever.

I considered going in for the last 3 hours of my shift, but I really didn't think there would be much for me to do, so here I am still. Nothing much for me to do here either. At anyrate, hopefully tomorrow will be thrilling enough to make up for today.

On a semi-related note, still waiting for my insurance card to arrive (stupid Clear Channel/Newport sales failure) so I can get in and get my brain tested. I am sure they will find a chipmunk sized tumor there. What a pain in the ass that'd be.

Where Did I Screw Up?

How do I end up doing the same old mediocre crap like stolen air conditioners and shoplifting sprees, and people like Angie get to go into an airplane with Buzz 'Mother Fuckin'*' Aldrin and float around?

How the hell do you get out of GA and in to KA?

*Not to be confused with Mother Fucking John Glen. If you don't get this by now, time to log off!

2006 & Why Everything Sucks...

There are several reasons for me not blogging much recently (see at all). Most of which were the fact that I really didn't want to subject you guys to pointless ranting and raving about things. Things that range from the disgust and disappointment I have of both myself and my life, and the contempt and down right hatred I have for humanity as a whole anymore.

I'd like to try and blog about what happens on the job, but for fuck's sake, it's the Christmas season, and I don't really want to be Johnny Killjoy. And nothing that has happened in the last few weeks has been positive at all. Even the positive stories I have covered have come with a negative consequence.

And example, I covered the retirement of some METRO officers who were around back in the day when there were two police departments here (Clark County Sheriff's Office and Las Vegas City Police). But having covered that we were force to not cover the North Las Vegas police department's Shop With a Cop. That kind of bothered me considering how good they are to us, and how crummy METRO is usually.

But most of what I have been on has just been terrible. A Christmas Eve triple homicide. Hit and runs where assholes did nothing but leave people in the street to die. Robberies turned shootings turned stabbings turned whatever.

Stack that load of cheer onto the issues I have with myself as well as problems my friends are having back home and you can see how I can be so frustrated.

At any rate, I hope the new year will change things around (probably won't, but I like to remain at least partially optimistic!). I will probably post the St. George story then as well. And this post is actually going up later than I planned for it to, since it appears that the new blogger stuff is having issue with posting to my server.

Someday, something will go my way!