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Ok, I missed a chase today, several parties and probably pissed off a few people thinking I blew them off when I was still Kentucky fried after covering the whole bridge event. Staying up for 36 hours sucks ass and for the lack of a better example, this was like a hurricane chase.

Huh, how was the bridge collapse like a hurricane chase? Well, I was up for most of the day waiting and working on other stuff then all the sudden this story hits. You go into adrenaline overload shooting footage and just in the go go go shoot shoot shoot, edit feed work work work mode. Before you know it, it’s 24 hours later and the last time you ate was 24 hours ago right before the story broke. But your not done yet. Even though your body is screaming at you to get some sleep, you have to keep on working and pushing yourself beyond the breaking point to finish up several more tasks that clients want completed before you can go to sleep. Tapes need to be dubed and fedexed out and you still don’t have time to eat because you have to go to the store to get food but you can’t stop working… It’s like I’m doing the running man…

And when I do finally get to stop and rest, I can’t!!! I just can’t stop and get any sleep because as I lay down, the phone rings with friends calling. But I have to answer since I know some are looking to see if I got the story or worse yet, was there when it happened. As one friend of mine said, “just checking in because we know your dumb luck and thought you might have been down there…”

When I did finally get to sleep, I did not sleep well and woke up around 4am so all day Friday I was still fried. So combine Friday and Thursday, I was up for 3 days with little to no sleep. It really hit me Thursday night when my brother Chuck told me I had my days ass backwards because tomorrow was Friday. Staying up all night into the next, it was still Wednesday in my head but now it was almost Friday. Now can you figure out why everything around me is kind of a crazy mess?

So, today I just relaxed and slept most of the day since yesterday was still pretty crazy. But it was great to get sleep and wake up then go back to bed and rest some more. I just wish I had the new website up and running before all this happened. Now I’m in overdrive this week to get it up and running because CNN was blasting the world with my URL.

Ok, still dubbing footage and editing photos but there are some dumb mother fuckers that show up after a major event like the 35W disaster. You can’t see shit unless your with the media so go home and watch it on TV. That is what chopper cams are for, your entertainment… Man there was so many people that should not be there that it was not even funny.  

Here is the news footage that I shot.

Anyways, here are the photos from tonight.

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What is cool about this screen cap. Hint, look in the upper right 🙂

Today I was at the Mall of America to cover the Big Black autograph signing. I shot a bunch of video and took some stills. I’ll edit and post the video tomorrow since I have been up most of the night. But here is some still photographs of the event.

Here is the video

Since I have not chased much at all this season I wanted to get away. Yes I have scuba dived a ton this season and yes I went out Friday and will be going out diving a few times this weekend, but I just wanted to get away and do some photography tonight. I headed up north to my spot that is totally dark and perfect for aurora watching but I went up to watch the stars.

I used to get away a lot to go and look at the stars when I was in flight school and missed that a lot. You look up at them and you wonder who else is looking up at them.

Above is a photograph of the big dipper and I sat and watched that for a while tonight or this morning and just wondered was there anybody out there seeing what I was seeing? Then I pointed the camera up at the milk way and I was lucky enough to catch a shooting star. What did I make a wish for? Well, if I tell you, it wont come true.

Well, it is late, I need to get some sleep to rest up for more diving. I found the dive platform in Lac Lavon lake and I’m going to try and make it back out and put a buoy on it so that crew from Scuba Daddy can find it.

About an hour ago I was just sitting here working on some stuff when POP, the laptop died. 

Dead, would not turn on, no power, nadda, it died and I smelled some smoke.Oh SNAP, the laptop died, but, call me MacGyver because guess who had a spare laptop for parts? ME, YES ME!

When my laptop messed up this spring, I needed a new LCD screen fast and I ended up buying a used laptop for parts for $300 on Ebay from someone that lives in town that night.

Well, I had the rest of the parts for the laptop so I had a spare motherboard and it took me an hour to tear down the laptop, swap parts to see if this was bad or if that was bad and then just do a whole swap and put it back together. What can I say, I’m that freaking good with computers and electronics that I could be on some watch list if I was a idiot.

Not much new happening here. Just working on video stuff. Still going through all of the diving footage from the trip to sort it all out to put it into catalogs. Not much is happening weather wise but it is a good time to get caught up on stuff.

I will be going back out to try and get more fish video this week.

Here is the flooding and chase video that I shot today. 

I shot some sweet flooding in the construction zone on Interstate 35W south near Diamond Lake Road.

While I was seeing and hearing a lot of people heading off to chase the line of storms that were forming west of the metro area in 7/3, I knew that area was going to suck since it was behind the line and the second line of storms that passed through the area. Well, I chased Southern MN and ended up on a couple tornado warned storms. I did not see much but it was not a bust. The storms this year are just lame.

Click here to watch the Windows Media File (WMV) video from July 3rd in Southern MN

www.weatherpaparazzi.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/07032007_short_chase.wmv

Well, you can’t say I am lazy… I’m almost done with the current project for the new site. Had to do a lot of learning at this end but I figure by the end of July I will have it done.

Once the new site setup is up and running, I’m going to be tossing most of BNVN storm stuff to my guys Dan and Bill to run while I focus on the next project.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to be chasing if I see there is something worth chasing but I have a new project that has been sitting in the drydock for several years that Conus has been bugging the shit out of me to get going. It is nothing to special and is pretty hard to do but its pretty simple but a pain in the ass at the same time. It is pretty much researching video and collecting and archive of footage that has nothing to do with the storm chasing or hurricane chasing.

But, since the project involves a lot of work, the pay is going to be pretty decent if I can find what I’m looking for.

Still reviewing all of the dive footage but I did have to pull some more footage I forgot that was on a tape I forgot to dub. It was some footage from the deck cam that had the footage of the sunset of Loggerhead Key as we went past it back to the anchor spot.

So everything is going smooth at this end for the projects. The white board is in overload and I have a ton of notes on the walls on paper.