Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky...

...Stormy Weather. Sung by seemingly everyone, but my favourites are Lena Horne, Billie Holiday and Etta James.


For the last few days we've been watching Tropical Storm Fay as it creeps closer and closer to our coast. Chatham County (the county right next door to us, and home to Savannah proper) is now under a Tropical Storm watch. Am I nervous? Maybe a little, although we are not under any watches in our county.

Truthfully, a tropical storm doesn't scare me as much as the idea of a hurricane. I've often told Ray that, while I know he has to stay and cover the storm for his listeners, the first evacuation order that comes will find me, the kids and the cats making a beeline up I-75 and to his parents house.

I actually did a live broadcast once as a tropical storm came ashore in Charleston a few years ago. The storm was quickly downgraded to a tropical depression, but it didn't make it any easier to stand outside of an oil change place and try to convince listeners they really needed to come on down and see me to win tickets to the Moody Blues. We did get some people to come by, but it may have been that they felt sorry for me. I was almost five months pregnant with TFYO at the time.

"Come on down folks! When was the last time you had your oil changed? Schools are closed and half the businesses in town have shut down, so now's your chance to be first in line to get an oil change for $19.95, and have a chance to win tickets to see the Moody Blues!"

There I was, just starting to show, holding an expensive piece of electrical equipment, while the rain just poured down all around us, and the wind tried to uproot the palm trees. At one point, I was underneath the awning that was over the front door. I walked inside, and moments later the thing collapsed from the amount of water that had pooled in it.

Thinking back on it, I suppose I should be nervous, but we're prepared. We've got all the batteries for our lanterns and radios and flashlights. We have our water supply (bottles, stored in the garage), plenty of canned foods, plus extra ice in the chest freezer. I've even taken in the patio furniture and moved the grill. The grill will be important, because if power goes out, I can use the side burners to cook things.

So blow, wind, blow!

Thank you!

Just a quick post to thank all of you for your well wishes. I worked forty-five hours, thirty-seven minutes this week, and crammed it into five days. It's not too bad, but it's not the easy transition into my maternity leave that I had initially hoped for!

This is also a post to say thank you to reader Saphyre Rose, who sent me a lovely present for Baby J. The generosity of people I've met on the internet never ceases to amaze me. Just when I start losing hope for humanity (at least those that seem to inhabit my everyday world), someone goes and does something like this, for someone the only know online.

This is Rose's gift to Baby J:

She crocheted it herself, and the pictures just don't do it justice. She's a marvelously talented, and feisty woman. I do like reading her point of view. Thank you Saphyre Rose!

For those wondering, I am managing at my new temporary promotion better than I had hoped. There've been no major crises, and no one has seen fit to show me the door, yet. And I do get an office to myself until they hire someone else to do the job. The office has a door which is nice to close while I work through lunch. I've popped in to see a few of you, and I imagine once I finally go on leave I'll have a bit more time to read you all and maybe actually write a bit myself!

St. Patrick's Day is coming up, and it's a big time in Savannah. It's so big, there's even a news crew from TG4 in Ireland doing a documentary on how a group of immigrant Irish Catholics seemed to flourish so well in an area dominated by Baptists. I've always wondered that myself. The greened the fountains yesterday, after having to delay it from Friday (we had storms). We are not going to the parade this year. In truth, the whole festival has slowly turned from a celebration of Irish families into an excuse to get drunk in the streets on green beer. The crowds are usually huge and rowdy, and I'm just not up to dealing with it. Maybe next year, when I'm not in need of a bathroom quite so often.

I'll try to post again next Sunday!

Oh, and I forgot...to Rotten Correspondent, my due date is 56 days away, May 3rd. Although, TFYO was a week early. Judging by my size and how much Baby J has dropped down in the last couple of weeks, she may be early, too.

Breaking up is hard to do...

Oh, ain't it the truth, Neil.


On Thursday, our production director, my immediate supervisor, decided to give two weeks notice. Our general manager, as is her right, decided the two weeks weren't necessary.


What does that mean?


It means I'm now the interim production director, half trained, half aware, and half way out the door.


Which wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't almost eight months pregnant.


For those who don't know what a production director does, let me explain. The production director is responsible for producing and dubbing all the commercials that air on our stations. In this case, the production director is also responsible for a nasty little thing referred to as "continuity", and I hate it.


I can make commercials all day long. I love sitting in the studio in front of the board and my audio editing software. I love fiddling with little bits of audio, and making them fit in the right places. I love picking out music, tweaking scripts, doing voice overs and character voices. I've gotten to the point where I can read the visual representation of a wav file the way other people read heart beats on a monitor. I can tell where someone has taken a breath, where the percussion solo is in the music, and where I've spliced in the sound effects, just by looking at the wav form.


What I don't like is sitting in the office in front of my computer trying to figure out which spot is supposed to run at what time of day, how many times, and which sales order it's supposed to be associated with so that the billing is correct. That's continuity. Continuity is sorting through what we call "traffic", which is a piece of paper (or many pieces of paper) that describes which spot runs, when it runs, how many times it runs, as well as any times it is prohibited to run. And I get to keep track of it all on a piece of software that is ungainly and maddening, and not very user friendly. Add in our new internet streaming system, and I spend a lot of time in front of a very angry and petulant computer.


The worst thing about being the production director is that I don't seem to get to do much production! I was at work from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. last night, but I did take a one and a half hour break for dinner with my family. They came to rescue me. The funny thing is, I spent most of the day doing paper work, and trotting from one end of the building to another hunting down salespeople for production orders that hadn't been turned in, or were incomplete, or catching up with orders that had been placed, but didn't have traffic or instruction. I didn't actually start doing production (i.e. dubbing or audio mixing) until 2 p.m. Then we had a ton of orders that all came in at 5 p.m., just as we thought we were done putting stuff in to run for the day. We had at least four clients who had to be added to the broadcast logs at the last minute. Fridays are always bad since we're planning commercials schedules for the whole weekend, but this was probably one of the worst Fridays I've ever worked.


And this leads me to my next bombshell.


Because the hours of a production director are so long, my blogging will be severely curtailed. I may try to pop in now and again before my maternity leave, but you might want to just save yourselves the trouble of checking in here for the next seven weeks. The irony is, now that I've been promoted (at least temporarily), I'll probably have a hell of a lot more to write about!


So thanks to all who read and comment here regularly. I'll try to come see you as much as I can. For those who use Bloglines or Technorati or some such thing, you'll know when I post. I would encourage anyone who hasn't to read some of my older posts. They are much better than the drivel I've been spewing out recently.


But if I have to choose between seeing my kid before she falls asleep and talking to y'all...well, I'm sure you'll agree TFYO is cuter than you. Well, Willowtree might not agree, but I think he's delusional. He thinks dishwasher detergent talks.

I'll leave you with my favourite picture of me at work. Thanks y'all.

All we hear is radio ga-ga...

Courtesy of Queen.

For anyone who wonders what I do at work, here is TFYO's interpretation:

She drew this Sunday while she was at work with me. As she was drawing I asked her where my face was, and she said "Moooo-om! That's the back of your head! And I'm not finished yet, leave me alone."

Please note, she did remember the clock. The giant L-shaped thing is my chair. The loops on my head are not ears, but headphones. And the name of the station is displayed prominently. I am apparently talking to my boss. That is a microphone in my hand. If you look carefully, the squiggles to my left are the board, and the computer, again, with the station name prominently displayed. And just in case you were unsure of what you were looking at, she also wrote "Mommy at Work" on the bottom.

A masterpiece if there ever was one.

One likes to believe, In the freedom of music...

With thanks to Rush for the lyric.

Radio stations go off the air for lots of reasons: transmitter problems, computer problems, power failures (with lousy backup generators), even operator error (as I discovered this weekend, no not my error).

But I have to say the most interesting way I've ever known a station to be knocked off the air involves appliances.

Back when I first started in radio, I worked in Birmingham, Alabama. It's where I met my husband. I had recently been a traffic reporter and got hired across town to be an actual news anchor for a group of stations. One of my tasks was to do a quick live news cast each morning for our AC (Adult Contemporary) station down the hall. Then I'd record one and they could air it the rest of the morning.

Rob and Shannon were pretty big in the building. They got things their own way, because they brought in revenue. And something that Shannon got was appliances. She'd brought in a toaster, a microwave and a coffee maker just for their studio. Fortunately for them, they had the biggest studio in the building, second only to the talk studio. I was often the recipient of toasted pastries or microwave oatmeal in the morning, which was good, because I usually didn't have enough money to buy breakfast.

One morning, about 4:30 or so, the whole building got rocked by a power surge. We thought maybe someone had hit a power pole, so I dutifully started calling the power company, the cops, anyone who could tell me about a power surge up on Red Mountain where the studios were located. No one had any idea what I was talking about.

Then the building maintenance guy rings the news room.

"Are you guys on or off the air?"

"Hang on a sec....we're on," I say. "Why, who's off?"

"Well, you might have a few stations off, that surge came from inside the building, a bunch of breakers have tripped up there."

I checked with Ray, and most of our other stations were fine, just little blips in the programming, but everyone was still on the air.

Except Magic.

Shannon had tried running the toaster, coffee maker and microwave all at the same time. She had also added a small table lamp "for ambience" that morning, and apparently overloaded a circuit. She'd also made the mistake of plugging these items into the power bar with the computer that ran the music software.

Magic was dead, and had the smoking outlets to prove it.

Why there was no back-up system to prevent the equipment from blowing up is beyond me. How she managed to short out the board is also beyond me, since I'm not an engineer. But I do know our engineer said it wasn't his fault, and that Shannon never should have had all her food equipment in the studio.

And then the phone started ringing.

"Do y'all know you're off the air?"

"Yes, we're aware of the problem, thank you for calling."

"Well, then why don't you say something?"

"How can we tell you we are off the air, when we are off the air?"

And, that, by the way, happens every time a station goes off the air. Someone inevitably tells us, we should get on the mic and let everyone know. It never occurs to them that if we could actually transmit something, we would be playing music.

Eventually, a CD player was brought in and new mics, and a makeshift show happened a few hours later, but it took a while to get the board fixed.

I really missed having breakfast every morning, too.

...and the home of the brave.

It's September 11th. And I've been fighting the urge to do a memorial post for a couple of weeks now. It was a horrible day, and I'm not sure I want to go through it again. But maybe if I do it now, I won't have to do it again next year.

Just like everyone else, it started as a pretty normal day. I was working as a traffic reporter for WSC-AM in Charleston, SC. Our morning host was out, and the program director was filling in. The regular morning show guy had been diagnosed with cancer and was going to be out for a while having chemo but his prognosis was good. We hadn't figured out a permanent solution, so Nate, the PD was sitting in the chair for now. Ray was in his usual place in the newsroom. I was in the control room with the producer. It was all normal.

We had started to wrap up the show, as it was approaching 9 a.m., when Ray cracked his mic and said "Nate, check out CNN." Every studio has at least one TV, ours had three, so we could monitor news and weather. One of the World Trade Center Towers was burning. I took off down the hall to tell the other stations. All of the morning talent in the building came into our studio as we watched and talked about what had happened on the air. And then I opened my big fat mouth and said "What's that other plane doing there?"

And then the second tower was hit.

It was at that point that we began to simulcast on all the stations. Eventually, the morning talent went home, and was replaced by the afternoon folks, still on the air, still relaying news, still taking calls from people who had loved ones in the towers. But my husband stayed. He didn't go home when the morning people went home.

He was involved in a discussion with someone on the air about the structural integrity of the buildings, when he said "Those towers have been burning for hours, I don't know how much longer they can stand". Which was met by a scoff from someone, who replied "They're steel, they're designed to burn."

And then the first tower fell.

I was at home with a our program director's wife and her son. We spent most of the day crying, and trying not to watch the television.

But my husband was still at work.

At seven o'clock that night, as Nate came home to see his family, he looked really tired. He walked up to me and said "Please. Please, he's going to drop if you don't make him come home. He hasn't turned off the mic for hours."

I went back to the station. I asked. I pleaded. I had to drag my husband from his chair. He went on the air that morning at 5 a.m., and he didn't leave the building until almost 8 o'clock that night. He'd barely eaten all day. He was surrounded by half empty cups of coffee. I tried to convince him that someone else could do the news the next morning, but he wouldn't listen. We both got up at 4 a.m. and went to work.

Two days later, Nate said he wasn't sure if he could host the show anymore. He was looking for someone else to do it. I told him Ray should be the one. And he told me it was going to be me.

Take us forever, a whisper to a scream

With thanks to Icicle Works for the lyric.


There is nothing worse than having a cold when you're pregnant. Except losing your voice when you work in radio. So having both happen at the same time kind of sucks. But it also helps, especially since I couldn't think of anything else to blog about.




Diana over at Piffle recently had a cold and lost her voice. I know I didn't catch it from her (that would be a great trick!), but I certainly feel even more sympathy for her now.


Why is it that everyone in the world wants to call your phone when you have no voice? I started out with a squeak this morning, but by the time I got done talking to family, friends, people at work wondering where I was...I was left with a whisper. And people were asking me what was wrong with my voice.


And I've discovered that both children and animals know that this is a weakness and go out of their way to do things they shouldn't do, because how threatening is a woman in her bunny slippers screaming in a whisper?


Cat scratches the sofa (again).


"Zoe, knock that off!" She looks at me quizzically, and picks just a couple more times at an errant thread to see if I'm serious. And then I find myself whispering, "Damn it, your hearing is better than mine! I know you heard me!" Normally, she'll take off and run around the house like a mad cat when I scold her for clawing the furniture when she has not one, but TWO perfectly good scratching posts. Today, I got a slow blink, a yawn and a stretch, and a casual saunter into my bedroom. You think they've settled in?


TFYO yesterday afternoon.


I'm trying to sort out dinner and her homework and trying to clear the detritus that inevitably collects on our kitchen table. And she immediately runs back to the office and hops on the computer for her favourite activity of typing random words in Notepad, which she knows she is not supposed to do without permission.


"TFYO! Get off the computer, you know you're not supposed to be on there!"

At least, that's what I meant to say. It came out more like "Hiss, hisss, scrtich, hiss, damn it, ow!"

She can't hear me, and my husband chuckles quietly.

They're all against me.


I think I may resort to writing in LARGE letters with a Sharpie marker on brightly coloured index cards. It would make for great conversation. Kind of like Wile E. Coyote. Given the way the last couple of days have gone, I'd probably be using "Yipe!" "Help!" and "Suuuuuuper Genius", a lot. I'd also have one for "Vanilla Chai please", "No, I don't know what happened to that production order" and "Can I please just go to the bathroom by myself for once".

For a person like me who talks for a living, this is murder. It's torture. It's...it's...listening to Britney Spears.

With my head in my lap...

Lyric courtesy of Squeeze...not really about morning sickness, but close enough.


Morning sickness. I wish I had it. Don't get me wrong, I'm kind of happy I'm not heaving my guts out every moment of the morning, but I've discovered what so many other women who have more than one child have figured out: every pregnancy is different. Sounds like a no-brainer, I know, but it really just didn't dawn on my until now.


When I was pregnant with TFYO, I had the most regular, compartmentalized morning sickness, ever. Six a.m., right on the dot for three months, beginning when I was three weeks along. It was so easy.


I was doing morning drive radio in Charleston at the time, and it fit perfectly into the show clock. I hosted the show, and Ray was the news anchor. I'd start to feel queasy around 5:58 a.m., so I'd wrap my segment, say "WSC news-time is 5:59, here's Ray with the news." I'd close the mic, run down the hall to the bathroom, be sick, rinse my mouth, wash my face, grab some water and be back in my chair in time to say "WSC news-time is 6:06". I'd go on with the show, and I didn't have to worry about being sick for the rest of the day.


So what's different?


Well, I'm not actually getting sick for starters. I'm just queasy from the time I get up until about one o'clock in the afternoon. So, I'm probably not eating as much as I should in the morning. Right now, I can usually choke down a bit of juice, a piece of toast and my prenatal vitamin. I just can't face food.


But come one o'clock you better get the hell out of my way, because you might get eaten along with everything else in my path. Even the cats start getting a little wild-eyed around 1 p.m. I'm ravenous. I eat everything. And that's a problem when I'm at work, because we can't have food in the studios.


After I stuff myself for about six hours, then I'm exhausted. And the process starts all over again the next morning.


The good news is, unlike last time when I had a serious pie and burrito habit (I promise, I'll explain at some point), I haven't really started gaining any weight yet, which means I'm still fitting into my clothes.


So thank you all for your kind words of concern. I'm actually not spending much time praying to the god of all things porcelain. But I kind of wish I was. At least it would be done.

And I promise, no more posts about being ill, okay?

WKRP in Cincinnati...

Poetess complimented me on my choice of Paul Anka in my last post...and I have to confess, I'm not a Paul Anka fan. The reason I thought of the song in the first place was because of the pilot episode of WKRP in Cincinnati.

I've always loved this show. It's the only one of two TV shows I've ever seen that got the atmosphere at a radio station right. The other show was Newsradio.

So, I found the clip where Johnny plays the "Hallelujah Tabernacle Choir's" rendition of "You're Having my Baby". It's about two minutes into the clip. The rest of it's not bad either....

And thanks again for all your good wishes, y'all.

Friday Five

Okay, there's been some shenanigans around here. Dear Willow Tree informed me of a little buggy making it's way around blogs which originated in Myspace. If your blog has been hanging up, (or mine for that matter!) that seems to be the issue. You'll find the malignant code in your template and it refers to d5d1 . com Notice I made sure that didn't come out as a link. You can get it by commenting on infected blogs, or, if someone who is infected comments on your blog. You can apparently find the script if you click Edit HTML under your Template settings. If you then hit Ctrl-F, you can find the script by typing in d5d1. You can find some info about it here, in the Google forums. My template appears to be clean now, and I'm not having anymore issues. But it appeared widespread yesterday.

Okay, on to the list:


My Five Favorite Jobs (in no particular order)


1. Tutor

I worked briefly as a tutor during high school, helping elementary school kids to read. Sometimes I became a glorified baby sitter, and sometimes I had kids who just refused to do anything. And there were a couple of parents who blamed me for tat. I did have one little girl who went from not being able to read at all, to being at the top of her reading group in the second grade. I loved that kid.

2. Frederick's of Hollywood clerk/asst. mgr.

I've never been a girly girl, but I really liked this job. It was the best retail job I've ever had, and it got better when we added the plus size collection. It was so wonderful to help women who felt unsexy realize that they were beautiful, and help their husbands see them that way, too. And it wasn't about "dressing up sexy". The lingerie was just a tool to get people to see themselves a little differently. We had one girl who was so happy that we outfitted her wedding trousseau (and that we carried pretty things in her size), she brought us cookies for a month. And all it took was being helpful, and caring about making people happy.

3. Linco, processor/gluer

One summer while in college I worked for a small local company in Michigan that made cardboard products: boxes, tubing, that kind of thing. I used to cut raw cardboard to make boxes in the morning, and then I'd glue up the sides in the afternoon. It doesn't sound nice, but the people I worked for were great and the job required very little thinking. The best part: they fed us lunch every Friday, usually Chinese. I also learned a lot about people who do "blue collar" work. Ken and Linda, who owned Linco, cared a lot about the people who worked for them. In their eyes, we weren't grunts. We were intelligent human beings who deserved to be treated well. Ken always made me listen to Rush Limbaugh with him while we worked, but he also loved Garrison Keilor. When my summer was up, they tried to convince me to stay, but gave me a big party and a huge cake when I chose to go back to school, anyway.

4. Capital Broadcasting, Raleigh, NC Part-time air talent

This was the best company I've ever worked for, hands down. As a part-timer, I still accrued vacation and sick time (paid!!!), and they were always throwing parties for the employees and their kids. The Easter Party was wonderful, and TFYO got to go twice. All paid for out of owner Jim Goodman's pockets. Capital is privately owned, which is a rarity in the media business today, and it allows the company to be actively involved in employees lives on an unheard of scale. I also worked with some fabulous people there, including my APD Jim, who taught me more about programming in three months than I learned in seven years of radio. I can honestly say I truly liked everyone I worked with. It was the toughest job I ever left.

5. K-mart, receiving dock grunt

I did a lot of temporary light industrial work early in my college career, mostly because it paid better overall than working as a file clerk. I also don't like wearing dressy clothes. I wasn't supposed to be assigned to the receiving dock, I was supposed to be sent with the other women to "repack" where boxes were unpacked and goods repacked for shipment to stores. There was me and one other girl who accidentally got sent down to the docks to unload import trucks. We did it by hand with the help of a mobile conveyor belt called "The Goose". Hence, we were called "The Goose Crew". The first couple of weeks, we had a lot of traffic down our end of the warehouse, as every guy seemingly had a reason to come talk to me and Amber. I even had a company VP ask me what the hell I was doing there and if I wanted to transfer up to the office. I told him no. Even though the floor foreman hated me (and tried to give me some of the dirtiest jobs), I loved the guys I worked with. I loved the fact that they never cut me slack because I was a girl. I lost twenty pounds on that job, and I also learned to drive a forklift. If I'd stayed and become union, I would have been making $50,000 a year driving that lift, but I went back to school.

Okay, there are my five, have a great weekend!

PS I've been thinking about a new template fo rmy blog, but I'm rubbish at HTML. If anyone has any suggestions or would like to help me attempt to write a new template, I'd be most grateful.

....and I bring you...FIRE!

With thanks to the Crazy World of Arthur Brown for the lyric. Go find this song and listen to it. My Dad used to scare the hell out of me with that 45.


I'll get to my main post in a minute...



But I've been given another blog award! I'll have to redesign the sidebar to make all this stuff fit. This one comes from Poetess with Humour:




I am now a Thoughtful Blogger Times Two. I'm still not sure where I'm going to put it, or who I would pass it to, as I think just about everyone on my blog roll has this award from someone. Either way, thank you Poetess! If you haven't checked out her blog, head over there. She writes some amazing poetry, and has a gift for putting almost anything into rhyme.


A little while back, Rotten Correspondent had asked for some radio stories, and I've been wracking my brain trying to think of one that might be even remotely interesting to someone not in radio. So, gather 'round, my children and I shall tell you the tale of ....

The Great Wake Up Crew Fire of 2004

A few years back, we were living in Memphis. I was sort of the all-around part-timer. I did production (commercials to the layman), I did traffic reports, sometimes a newscasts here and there, and I filled in for vacationing and sick air talent.


One of my gigs was to fill in for the female voice on our classic rock station's morning show, "The Wake Up Crew". It was fun. The guys were obnoxious, but in a sweet DJ kind of way. There were lots of boob jokes, jokes about sex, and jokes about the mayor of Memphis who was affectionately referred to as King Willie. I liked doing mornings with these guys, although I was acutely aware of my "role". My role was to read a sixty second news cast at the top of each hour for three hours, and to aurally nod and laugh at whatever anyone else said. There was no star billing here, and I was cool with that.

Our group of stations had recently moved into a new building outside of downtown. We were up on the top floor, the fourth one. One of the elevators kept getting stuck, and they'd been testing the fire alarms all that week. It was really annoying, especially because they'd beep for a second and then stop. I had just finished doing my 8 a.m. news when the damn things went off again. Now, in a studio, we don't hear the screaming of the alarm (makes for bad radio, y'know), but we do have an annoying strobe light that flashes fast enough to send any epileptic into a seizure. So it flashed. And flashed. And flashed. And it wouldn't stop.

I started to get nervous, throwing Tim these "Shouldn't we be doing something about this?" looks, checking over my shoulder. During a commercial break, I poked my head out into the hall, and the sound was deafening. No one knew what was going on, so we started talking about it on the air. "Bad Dog" (second guy on the show), took his cell phone and volunteered to find out what all the hubbub was. "Bad Dog" called back in a just a few seconds from the bottom of the stair well.

Turns out, the elevator was on fire. The elevator that kept getting stuck. The elevator I had ridden up to the fourth floor at five o'clock that morning.

"Dog" had already taken the advice of management and evacuated the building, leaving me and Tim, and Brian our producer/phone screener upstairs, on the air, with the fire alarm blaring in the background. Once it had been established that there was in fact a fire, I yanked my headphones off, told all our listeners to have a nice day, and got the hell out of there. I think I had made it to the bottom stair before Tim had managed to put on Peter Frampton "Do You Feel Like I Do?" and the station into automation.


We were eventually given the all clear, and made it back up in time before Frampton was over. I then got to be heckled by Tim and Dog for being so scared (fire and elevators are two of my biggest phobias), but I was not the object of derision for long. It turns out, one of our Traffic and Continuity people, Judy, was stuck in the elevator where the fire had happened. The fire was actually in the elevator shaft, just below where she was. It was a minor fire, just some scorched insulation and wiring, but the elevator was stuck just shy of the fourth floor. So what does Dog do? He walks down there and calls her cell phone. She wisely refused to go on the air with us. Judy wasn't a small woman, but they managed to get her up through the hatch in the roof of the elevator.


I took the stairs for the next six months.



If you want audio of this, I have it saved somewhere, and I'll be happy to e-mail it to you, since I still haven't found a reliable audio host yet. If y'all find one, let me know.

You've got double trouble coming down

A double post today, because I saw a story I wanted to share, and because I wanted to address some of yesterday's comments on radio stuff.

First, the radio stuff. jrh, from Turkey on Whole Wheat, was nice enough to say this: "I believe you greatly underestimate your appeal, my friend..." and it was in response to this : "If you actually knew what I looked like you might not be so quick to call." While I appreciate the compliment, dear, what I said still holds and this is why:

I will never look how people expect me to look.

It is the way radio is, but it I think it's worse for women. No matter where I've gone, no matter what jobs I've done, I always get the same reply, even from people who work in the business:

"You don't look like what I imagined."

And then it's followed by something like this (these are just a sampling of some that I've heard)

I thought you'd be taller.
I thought you'd be blond.
I pictured you as a red head.
I thought you'd be thinner (!)
I thought your hair would be longer.
I thought your hair would be shorter.
I pictured you as a brunette (when I had red hair).


Usually, they're all saying the same thing (especially if they're guys): "I pictured a six-foot tall swimsuit model wearing a bikini standing behind the microphone". I once had an intern say those very words to me. And I am none of those things.

I'm 5'6", I weigh more than 150 lbs, I wear jeans and t-shirts (not bikinis!), my butt is a little on a the ample side, and I favour Converse high top running shoes in various bizarre colours. I occasionally wear heels, but generally not to work. Not when I have to stand for fours hours. And this doesn't mean I think I'm hideous, I just don't look like Pam Anderson or whatever fantasy babe our listeners have in their head.

So I think maybe putting me on our website might be a good thing, because then it would shatter whatever preconceived notion people have of me, and I wouldn't feel like I'm disappointing our listeners every time I meet them.


Okay! Now on to this story...

Oscar the Cat is the Angel of Death. No really. There's a story about it here, although you may have already seen this somewhere else. It's a little uncanny, but I also think it's nice, especially since he's apparently not a people cat. I always liked the idea of animals working in hospice care, but then, I like animals.

And speaking of the animals, we've discovered that Chloe has an intestinal buggy. It's called Spirometra erinacei (don't read that if you're just having a meal, really). It can eventually turn into a tapeworm thing. It's actually fairly rare (our vet said he sees a case maybe once a year). How did she get it? By eating an "aquatic animal", such as a frog, or a lizard. She's going to be fine, but I'm left wondering how the hell a cat who's been in a shelter for six months could eat a frog or a lizard!

Invisble airwaves, crackle with life

An Open Letter to All Radio Listeners

Dear Radio Listener,

I have a few things I need to discuss with you in order for us to have a pleasant working relationship.

First, I know change can be hard. I'm sorry the guy that "always" plays your requests is on vacation, and that I'm the one filling in for him. If I don't get your request on the minute you ask for it, there's no reason to become abusive. Because if you do become abusive, I just won't play your song. Tough titty. And also, please don't request songs you know damn well we don't play. I will not play Amy Winehouse "Rehab" on a Classic Rock station.

Secondly, I know there hasn't been a female jock on this station in a while, and though it's always nice to hear a raspy voice on the other end of the phone telling me how much you'd like to have me on the back of your pick-up truck, calling once an hour is more than enough. Six times an hour is excessive. Please arrange a schedule with other listeners so I only need to deal with one of you at a time. I will endeavour to have my picture placed on the website. If you actually knew what I looked like you might not be so quick to call.

Lastly, if you don't know the answer to whatever trivia question it is I'm asking, please don't call in for the contest. Even though you need to be caller nine, you still need to answer the question as well. I only have four minutes to get caller nine, record caller nine, and then put caller nine's information into the computer. If I have to take caller nine through fifteen, of people hemming and hawing, and saying "Hell, I dunno the answer, I just wanted to be caller nine", no one ends up winning, and I get very cross.

I think by following these rules, everyone's radio experience will be more pleasant. If you do not follow these rules, you FAIL at radio, and I would thank you to turn in your listener card.

Sincerely,

Jen, the Fill-in Chick

Spam, it's pink and oval

Lyrics courtesy of Save Ferris.

I recently got a coupon in the mail for this. I don't know why someone thought this was a good idea, but Spam in a POUCH? A single serving of Spam. A Spamlette, if you will.

Just so you know, this is not a sponsored post (although, if there's someone out there who wants to pay me to write, email is in the profile!!), because I'm really not crazy about this stuff. It's very popular down here in the South, though, as it is a pork product, and we do love our pork down here. It's also apparently more popular in Hawaii than in any other state in the union, partly because it was so ubiquitous during WWII. My mother-in-law said they seemed to serve it almost as much as macaroni salad while she was there.

The last time I came anywhere near Spam, I was doing a morning show in Charleston, SC. I had recently found myself hosting the show alone, and our program director thought he'd be helpful by giving me a topic to talk about, rather than us discussing the news of the day. That topic : Spam, the food, not the e-mail trash. His brilliant idea was to get me to eat the stuff on the air.

What I didn't know at the time, was that I was already 3 weeks pregnant, and had just started to feel the first effects of morning sickness. He waved that open can under my nose, and I just about tossed my cookies into his lap. There followed after that a wave of phone calls from people extolling the virtues of the wobbly pink brick, including a lady who said she always made Spam salad on crackers as an hors d'oeuvre, and no one knew it wasn't really ham. I got to meet her a few weeks later at a remote, when she brought me a Spam cookbook. She would call the show once a week and refer to herself as the "Spam Lady". She was always very sweet, but thankfully never brought me any of that Spam Salad. Perhaps my ever-expanding waist line and descriptions of dealing with morning sickness during our morning show kept her at bay.

I still have the cook book, by the way, it was one of the first books my child pulled off the shelf to look at before she could read, I think she was about 8 months old or so. I still can't help but wonder if that first whiff of Spam during my early pregnancy is what turned off the four-year-old to meat.