Good afternoon everyone! How are you?
Okay, so I’ve been making a lot of yummy food recently, but before I tell you about this I gotta tell you about what happened this morning!
The Dumpster Fire
Okay, so I’m totally convinced that I jinxed this morning, okay? So I’m producing the morning show like normal, everything is going well, no big hiccups or anything, pleasant conversation with my directors and meteorologist — it’s all good, right? I’m texting my friend during commercial breaks, like, “it’s all going fine, should be a calm morning, yadda yadda. . .”
Well. It was a less than calm morning. I’m archiving the show (which is when we take our show rundowns and put them in our archives), I’m posting on social media, everything’s fine, I’m chatting with my boss and meteorologist. . .and then the police scanner goes off. Now typically during the hours of 12 a.m. to 9 a.m. the police scanner has two possible calls: medical and fire. Medical is usually someone falling or having some sort of medical emergency, and fire is. . .well, fire. Big or small.
Anyway, so the police scanner goes off saying there was reportedly a small explosion and a small fire. So we wait a few minutes while I get a camera bag together until we hear the words “flames,” or “we are sending a firetruck.” Once we hear those words, then it’s go time. So meteorologist heads off ahead of me to get some phone camera shots of the flames while I finish getting a full camera bag and tripod together.
I do, and I drive to the scene, where I see firefighters starting to pack up and meteorologist leaving after sending our boss the phone footage. So at this point I can already tell it was something really small since they put it out so fast and all, but naturally I still get as much footage as I can. Now at this point I’m still a bit flustered (in fact I typically am when this sort of spot news happens) because I need to get good footage for our shows while also getting as much information as possible as soon as possible. But anyway I funble around with my camera bag and get some good shot of the firefighters, the fire truck, them putting the hose away, the dumpster, the whole shebang.
So here’s the skinny of what happened: some people took still-warm ashes from a wood-burning stove and threw them into a dumpster that had empty aerosol cans in it. So there was a small explosion and a small fire. No major damage. Took literally a minute to put out. No big deal. And the firefighter I interviewed was like, “Remember everyone to make sure your ashes are cooled before you throw them away.” The print story is here but that’s really all that happened. So I drove back to the studio (following the firetruck, funnily enough) and downloaded the footage for the 11:30 a.m. show and chatted some more with my boss before taking off.
But it’s true, police scanner calls between 12 a.m. and 9 a.m. are about 90 percent medical calls and 10 percent fire calls. The ones I’ve seen/covered have been these small, accidental fires without a terrible amount of damage.
But anyway, that was this morning — the dumpster fire. Next we can move onto the cooking I’ve been doing! There’s a good amount for just a week so let’s do bullet points to make this easier:
– One-Pot Mussels: cooked with white wine, garlic, butter, crushed red pepper and parsley. I don’t get eat mussels very often and these were so good.
– Chocolate Chip Cake Batter Waffles: a standard batter with added cake batter extract (which I didn’t know existed but bought it at Walmart to try it) and chocolate chips. I cooked up some bacon and an egg and made myself a breakfast sandwich!
– Guacamole: I could eat avocado every meal, every day, and I really wanted to make another batch of guac for myself, this time with jalapeno peppers instead of Serrano peppers.
– Mousse: I made two batches; one with mascarpone cheese and peanut butter (pictured below) and one with mascarpone cheese, melted chocolate and the cake batter extract.
– Honey Garlic Chicken: eaten with oven-roasted potatoes. This one was AMAZING. The skin was crispy, and I loved the flavors, and I can’t wait to make it again! I actually made this on Saturday night while sipping some of my Feather River Vineyards white wine. Drinking while cooking is the bomb.
– Chocolate Fudge: because I like to cook and Valentine’s Day is coming up, I thought I would make chocolate fudge for my coworkers! All it really is is melted chocolate chips mixed with sweetened condensed milk and then refrigerated. That was gone in less than two days.
Let’s see, what else. . .oh! I’m getting back into embroidery! I used to do it awhile back and now I’m getting back into it a bit for stress relief. I also bought this amazing weighted blanket — sleeping with it is 10/10. Oh yeah, I also worked overtime on Monday to go to a commissioner’s meeting, ended up putting in about 12 hours, and it was less than fun. But hey, stuff happens.
Now, as far as this weekend goes, I HAVE PLANS! So just a preview: I will be going back home to celebrate my early birthday with my family – – we’re going to have a nice dinner and all that jazz — and I’m going to visit my friend again! It’s going to be such a fun weekend and I honestly can’t wait!
I’ll tell you all about it later!