Letting it all soak in.....

Part of me still does not believe what I experienced, but I will try my best to recap it because it was truly something I don't want to ever forget, so if its on Buck's Blog, someone can read it to me when I get too old to remember it... WARNING: this may be a long entry, might want to get a reading blanket or something to eat....

When Nathan Baker told me I was going to the game I was excited, but I got to be honest, I was a little sad that my duties were to stay outside of the park, even though it still would be fun...  Well when our chief photographer ended up taking a live truck with Kylie, that meant that I got to go with Nathan down in a station car and that changed the plans a little bit.  On the way down we were discussing the possible outcomes of the game and the St. Louis game, and you have NO IDEA how much we wanted the Reds to win last night.  As soon as we get to the stadium we grab our equipment and we headed inside.  It was my first time underneath the stadium and it was pretty cool to see the behind the scenes.  Then it happened, before I knew it, we took a door that lead us into the "Reds Foyer," if you will.  We signed in again and after about a thirty foot walk, we were in the locker room.  I have never been so giddy in all my life.  You turn around and Volquez was there and Gomes as well... We ended up talking to a few of them before the game including Brandon Phillips (who never had alcohol until last night), I think we also got Jay Bruce, then to Dusty Baker, and finished off with our home town Hall of Famer, Hal McCoy.  If you couldn't guess, the excitement was just building.  We then walked through the tunnel out to the field passing all of the banners of their previous championships, some a decade old, and before you walk onto the field there is a sign above the doorway: "Expect to Win"... chills, I know!  We shot a little video of batting practice, then went back outside to send back the video we got.

So we hung out outside of the stadium as Kylie and Nathan did their live shots via satellite.  It was still going to be our Cheif Photographer to get the video of the champagne, but I could tell he wasn't excited to get himself and his camera soaked IF the Reds won.  As for me, I couldn't wait...so after a little coaxing, we switched and he was going to stay outside with Kylie later to get crowd reaction.

Once the live shots were finished, the game was about to start.  Kylie, Nathan, and I all went upstairs to the press box, bought our food and watched most of the game.  We were also keeping an eye out in left field to see what the Cardinals score was because it either took a Reds win or a Cardinals loss to clinch the playoffs, but we all wanted a Reds win.  The score got was tied up in the 6th inning and I have never heard the stadium as loud as that with the bases loaded, but they finished the inning still tied up....  Now, we had to run down to the main concourse to tape a few teases to air during the prime time shows.  Kylie went back to the satellite truck to get everything ready to get crowd reaction, and Nathan and I went back up to the press box.  I asked Nathan if I should put on the rain gear for the camera now, or just wait and not jinx us....he smiled and said, "Wait", I smiled with agreement. We watched the next two innings go scoreless and we were headed into the ninth.  Chapman took the mound and dazzled the audience with 100+ mph pitches.  It was like the Superbowl kickoff with camera flashes lighting up the sky.... I have never seen anything like it in my life, strobe lights going off every single pitch... three outs, no problem...  At this point it all turned to chaos and a fairytale ending.

Jay Bruce was walking up to the plate, Nathan said "If we win, we yell hooray, and sprint downstairs for the celebration."  Then he said: "Unless he hits a home run off the Nike sign (high in the center field), then I will need time to clean up the drool..." or something to the extent.  First pitch, you could hear the crack on the wood, the 30,000+ went silent, and the ball was headed for the Nike sign.  It fell just short, but still cleared the wall..... HOME RUN!!!  The place went bazerk, for lack of a better word.  We started running before I realized I forgot my cell phone, I ran back to grab it and was running behind, and we all took off down about five stories of stairs.  We knew we were going to have to wait a little bit to get into the locker rooms, but a LITTLE bit it was...  We got into the Reds Foyer and before I could get the rain gear fully on my camera they opened the doors and said: "Head on in!"  I just got chills typing this and hearing those words in my head....

We ran into the locker room and all of the walls and anything electronic had already been tarped off.  At first it was about ten camera guys and a few sports guys, most of which were wearing waterproof clothes as if they were about ready to report from inside a hurricane.  Then came Gomes...hands down the "most excited" one of the night.  He sprinted in and ran to his locker for his ski goggles.  Before anyone else was in the locker room, he ran back and was shaking and spraying champagne and from there it was a bath.  Other players grabbed bottles and were spraying it everywhere.  Nathan was able to grab a few of them and interview them as other players were dumping champagne or beer on their heads.  It was a sight to see and a memory I hope I never forget.  The champagne rained down for about twenty minutes and the camera was still working fine despite it, and myself, being soaked.  We also managed grab an interview with Hal McCoy and Brandon Phillips, among about fifteen others.  Phillips said he didn't know if he was tipsy from the excitement or the alcohol, but he was tearing up with excitement, rightly so.  We talked to a ton of players and it was crazy.  The players went back onto the field to spray some of the fans that were behind the dugout, and they were loving it.

As we were wrapping things up I managed to get an empty bottle of the champagne and two corks, one for the bottle to keep the air fresh inside, and the second one for Jimmy Noe, one of my good friends.  I remember hanging out with him in elementary school and he would always have the Reds game on, so I thought he deserved it.  What a night!  We finally went back outside (which was extra chilly thanks to my champagne soaked clothes) and finished off the ten and eleven news live from outside the Reds Merchandise Shop. After tearing down all the equipment and heading home Nathan and I just keep saying how we couldn't believe what just happened...a walk off home run by Bruce, champagne shower, and we are heading to the Playoffs!

It is still soaking in this morning... I attached a few photos: two screen captures from the Reds homepage today... see if you can find someone in the background, I also included a tighter photo... The third is after the game, you can see how soaked I still was.  Have a good one!

Best,
Andrew Buck Michael

UPDATE: Someone found another picture and sent it to me via twitter...  It is the fourth photo.

Great responsibility sometimes means great (REDS) fun

And then there was one.  The Reds are one win away from making the playoffs.  They play tonight at home, and sadly I have to work.... BUT, you can't focus on the negative, let's focus on the positive: I will be working at the game shooting video!!  We will OWN Reds coverage tonight, I sure hope they win.  There will be a few of us down there, so it is unclear what my duties will be, but I hope I am in the locker room when the champagne flies.  Make sure to tune in tonight for the best Reds coverage you can imagine.

Anyone chilly yet?  I know I had to wear a sweater last night when I took Dawn out for our anniversary dinner.  We will warm up for Wednesday and Thursday, BUT this weekend is looking very chilly.  I feel the sweatervest making its annual introductions in the weather center this weekend.  The studio is normally much cooler then outside because imagine one of your rooms with about a hundred or so of the Easy Bake Oven lamps.... that is the studio... Just a live size Easy Bake Oven.  After five hours with the lights on for the morning news, the studio gets toasty, so in order to counter-balance that, the studio is cool enough to keep foods fresh that are left out.  I don't mind it too much because I have a jacket that always stays there.  BUT, if you want a little inside information, Mr. Booth came back from Hawaii last year, and he still expects everything to be tropical....ask him sometime how much he likes the cool studio.

Anyway, I gotta work on my moped a little bit, head to the barber, and run a few errands before heading into work later.  Have a good one!

Best,
Andrew Buck Michael

Relief from the heat

Well after a hot and steamy week, it is sure nice to have a cool weekend.  It also will fit in nicely with football on TV.  Buckeyes dominated Eastern Michigan today, but I am still worried when we open up conference play next week against Illinois. Tomorrow will be even cooler than today, with highs in the mid 60's.  I hope the Browns will cool down and focus on the basics and get a win tomorrow.

A look at the week ahead...  Monday and Tuesday look to be pretty wet with a good chance for scattered showers most of each day.  Temps will remain cool as we finish out the week and late next weekend, it is looking VERY cool....stay tuned for that.

I am very excited about for next weekend... After the morning news on Friday, I will be packing up my mopeds with my good friend, KZ, and we will be heading to Pittsburgh for a moped rally.  It will be a lot of fun and I am super excited to get the chance to go to the last Midwest moped rally of the year.  We will ride around Friday night and Saturday to some pretty cool places, then I will be back on Sunday to turn off the moped and forecast the weather.  The weather looks dry and cool, can't wait! Have a good one.

Best,
Andrew Buck Michael

Your Monday, my Friday

Well today will wrap up another week of work.  Usually I try to make the weather more pleasant for my days off, but I decided to make it a little warmer for my "weekend."   Hahaha!  I wish I could have that control.....well, maybe not because then there would be too many requests...snow days for the kids, sunshine and warm temps for others, and rain for the ducks, yea, it would be too hard.

Anyway, I am planning on heading to Cleveland for my days off.  Dawn is heading up there for work and we will be spending Tuesday night at her parents in Strongsville, which is a southern suburb of Cleveland. I am SUUUUPER excited to go to Cleats, a sports bar that has the BEST wings in the world: Six Pepper wings.  It is an amazing mix of, you guessed it, six peppers and is out of this world!!!  It will also be nice to see her parents because with me working the weekends and Dawn off on the weekends, we barely have matching schedules to make the three hour drive up there.

Even though Fall officially starts Wednesday at 11:09 PM, it will not feel like like Fall. It will be rather warm for the coming days with temps in the mid and upper 80's for the rest of the work week.  We do have a SLIGHT chance for a LITTLE rain Wednesday and Friday.  Don't expect the grass to be green because with our current dry pattern, these disturbances will be much of the same, and lack ample moisture.  The good news is the weekend is shaping up to be dry and cooler with highs back into the mid 70's.  I will be back bright and early Thursday morning to anchor the news; so, see ya on the flip side and have a good one!

Best,
Andrew Buck Michael

Walking through tornado damage

As some of you know, Athens County, OH, was hit hard with severe weather on Thursday.  I was sent there Friday morning after the morning news to do a story on the damage that the area had seen.  Driving up to the small town of The Plains you would have no idea that they were hit hard.  As a matter of fact you wouldn't even have known it had rained the day before, at all.

When I got off the exit, so were hundreds of other sight-seers in their cars, so traffic was slow. It took forever to get off the exit and get into the town, that was home for just under 3000 people.  You could tell things were bad because all the traffic lights weren't working at all, and they seemed to be the least of the worries.  Dump trucks full of limbs and debris kept passing by as I continued into town.  Ahead you could see police cars blocking off all the side streets but people still crawled along less than a mile an hour looking out their windows.  I pulled into an Ace Hardware and decided to walk.  Looking at the store, the front siding was ripped off and branches littered the parking lot.... but that was only the beginning.  I grabbed my gear and headed towards the blocked off roads and continued on to the worst hit areas.  Sheet metal was wrapped around poles, or hanging on power lines that still held strong.  The strong hanging lines were few and far between because many of the power lines lay across the ground, no doubt with the power cut already.  As I continued on, some of the townspeople were cutting the limbs and trees that were laying sideways on the ground now.  Others were confused and just sat on their door steps staring in amazement.  Stop signs and speed limit signs were bent level to the ground.  It seemed that the hardest hit area was where there were mobile home trailers.  Four of the mobile homes were flipped over onto their sides or their tops, some of them on top of the vehicles that were once parked next to the building.  Across the street, the school's field goals were bent until they were resting on the ground.  The bleachers were a tangled shiny mess.  The fence around the football field was plastered with sheet metal and branches.  The final thing I noticed when I was walking back up Main Street was an American flag right in the middle of the path of destruction.  At once it stood erect, on the side of a utility pole, hoovering over Main Street, but was now bent 180 degrees, but still stood strong.  It was amazing to see that it was still mounted and did not break in the storm.

When I was walking through the damage it just tears you apart.  Many of these people seemed to be living one paycheck to the next, and something like this would be worse than their wildest dreams.  Through it all though, the rest of the community was out helping everyone else.  They were cutting limbs and organizing scattered belongings.  I even noticed a few of the older residence sitting in lawn chairs and telling jokes to try and raise spirits.  The most important thing is that no one lost their lives.  While the warning was only a short advanced notice, a minute or so according to some, it was enough for people to find shelter and save their lives.  Count your blessings and have a good one.

Best,
Andrew Buck Michael

Finally......................Rain!

I know we really need the rain, but I am not going to lie, I love not mowing the grass.  Wednesday should be dry and a little warmer, but the rain will finally arrive early Thursday morning.  The morning commute looks to be wet, with a few breaks, and another round of rain in the early afternoon.  Currently it looks like about half an inch of rain, so it will not make up for all the rain we have missed, but it will at least put a dent in our deficit.

Week one of the NFL is over and my four fantasy teams did very well.  Three of the four won, and only one team, with the Darke Journal league, lost, but still put up a tough fight.  My projections for next week are looking very well again with at least three wins, and the fourth game very close.  This is my first year with this many teams and it is sometimes hard to remember which players I have playing.... but it is nice being able to root for other teams and players that you wouldn't normally watch or cheer for. 

Find the umbrella for Thursday and have a good one!

Best,
Andrew Buck Michael

Lot of things going on.......

Well I guess the best place to start is at the beginning....

I had Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday, and Thursday off of work this week.  Tuesday I had another fantasy football draft with a few friends, went fairly well. I then gathered my surplus of moped parts and posted them for sale.  Later Tuesday evening Dawn and I went up to Sidney to pick up buckeyes for Weldon so he could mow the grass.  We were joined by Dawn's nephew, Jake, who is 6 years old.  I asked him if I looked much different from television, he said that by wearing contacts I look different and that my head looks bigger on TV.  Classic.  He helped us pick up over 4300 buckeyes bringing our final total to 7117.

Wednesday and Thursday I helped out Dawn's cousin clean and paint an apartment.  It was a lot of fun, but man was it a mess when we started...  We finished up fairly early Thursday so she could take the kids to practice, which left me enough time to moped down to the barber shop. 

Friday I anchored in the morning, then shot high school football in the evening at the Carroll and Oakwood games.  Today I went home to visit the family and look at all of their pictures from their vacation in Florida.  Then after returning home, Dawn and I turned on the Ohio State game and we worked on wedding preparations.  VERY happy the Buckeyes pulled out a win today.  Pryor really acted like he knew what he was doing this game for the most part.  I was worried he would make rushed decisions and it would cost us, but he played smart ball.

I currently am here in the weather center and just finished the forecast and I am suuuuper excited for the Browns tomorrow.  I love the Buckeyes, but the Browns are just a little more special to me.... whether it be all the ridicule I got for being a Browns fan through school, or my dad sending to me to school for my second grade pictures in a Browns sweatsuit (mom was not pleased to say the least).... but I love the Browns.  I was offered tickets to the game next weekend, but couldn't get anyone to cover my shift.  Oh well..... Go Brownies! 

Enjoy the next week, the warmest temperature is 81 on Monday.... I am glad to leave the windows open and enjoy the comfortable temperatures as I moped around town.  Have a good one!

Best,
Andrew Buck Michael

First Anniversary of Blog

A year?!?!   Doesn't seem like it has been a year since I started this blog, wow.   A lot has happened, we had about four major snow storms, as many of you remember, and the blog was updated several times a day with updates on the forecast during the winter fun .   Then we had a few severe storms in the spring.  Not a lot this year, but still a few.   I got engaged, continued to work on my mopeds and the Browns keep building as a team to be a playoff contender.  I just wanted to thank all my readers from the Miami Valley.  I know I have a strong viewing from Darke County where I grew up and especially thanks to the help of DarkeJournal.com for keeping everyone up-to-date with my blog updates, especially in the snow storms.

I hope everyone has enjoyed the blog so far.  I always love to read the comments, so keep sending them in.  Enjoy the great weather for this Labor Day and have a good one!

Best,
Andrew Buck Michael

Grab your jackets!

Buckeyes stated the football season last night and fall temps are moving in fast!  The game was a lot of fun. We went through the new student Union before the game, and even went by where Dawn and I are getting married on campus.  Buckeyes looked strong and hopefully they look like that against all of their opponents this season. 

As I said the cooler temperatures are moving in... Saturday we will only top out in the upper 60's and then Saturday night we will dip down into the mid 40's for lows.... brrrrr!  Maybe about time to start getting out the sweatervests!  Temps will rebound nicely as we head into next week.  The temps will max in the mid and upper 80's but the air will be VERY dry, so no worries about humidity.  Enjoy it and have a good one!

Best,
Andrew Buck Michael

Last Heat Wave?

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday reached the 90's for highs, which technically makes it a heatwave. Today and tomorrow are forecasted to reach the 90's again, and this may be the last of the heat for the year, or at least the last heatwave.  This year we have had three of them, and last year, we didn't have any at all.  The models are showing that cooler weather looks to stick around for a while, and this may be the last we actually see of the 90's for the year.  So if you are a fan of the warm temperatures, then get out there and enjoy it before it cools downs.  We are still watching a cold front swinging through Thursday night in to Friday morning leaving us in the 70's for highs for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

While it will be nice to finally get some rain, I wish the timing was off by about 12 hours.  As many of you may know, Thursday night is the first Ohio State game of the season, and since I do the weather on the weekends, this will be my only chance to go and watch the Buckeyes this year.  I am going with Dawn, her cousin John, and his friend Tim....all alums.  I have went to a game with the group before and we had a lot of fun.  I do not expect it to be a close game, but regardless it is Ohio State and I am super excited to be able to attend a game this year, especially the season opener.

Been working on the mopeds lately.  I recently got a few new parts to help them run a little "quicker."  We all know mopeds are considered slow moving vehicles, so I am just helping the speed a little bit.  Actually the pipe I ordered will help my low end, so basically when I take off from a stop it will have much better acceleration and mid-range speed.  This is very important because where I live now is very hilly, so it will additionally help getting up the hills. 

Well stay cool and I will have an update after Buckeye game. Have a good one.

Best,
Andrew Buck Michael