Mom Comes To Town...Tornado Touches Down!!!

My Mom came to visit me in Memphis for a week and little did she know what an eventful week we would have.


BRENDA AND JILL

I found my way to the airport, which is a great accomplishment for me since I am so bad at directions. For those of you who know me...you know that I was not born with a human compass to guide me. haha! (you might recall the Dairy Queen story back in high school)

Anyways, I managed to pick her up. I was so happy to see my Mom. I hadn't seen her since the last time I went home which was three months ago.



Tyler was here with my Mom for the first couple of days, but then met up with his family in Texas to see his brother's mission.(pics of Texas coming) I couldn't go to Texas because I had to work, so my Mom decided to come stay with me.

I love my Mom's cooking. We made yummy food while she was here. We had a great time.


TYLER, JILL AND MOM EATING DINNER

Little did my Mom know, that the end of her stay would get a little crazy. Crazy as in cars and shopping carts getting tangled together in strange ways that seem impossible. That's right, a tornado touched down 2 miles away from my apartment.



We had just shopped at the shopping center where you see the car on top of the shopping cart the day before...and about 15 minutes before the tornado hit I was there shopping again alone. I heard the tornado sirens start to go off while I was shopping in Ross and quickly got in my car and started driving home. The safest thing would have probably been to stay put in the store, but the tornado ended up ripping right through the shopping center. When I got home, with sirens blasting and the tornado heading our way, this is what I found my mom doing...





...her hair and make-up without a worry about the storm.

I guess I've read to many severe weather text books and have seen a lot of bad damage after tornadoes...so I made us go to the safest place in the house...







Here we are in the bathtub holding on for dear life and kind of laughing at the same time!!! In case you didn't know...if you don't have a basement, the bathroom and bathtub is usually the safest place to be during a tornado.



MOM STILL DOING HER MAKE-UP IN THE BATHTUB RIDING OUT THE STORM...SHE WAS GETTING READY TO GO TO THE AIRPORT TO FLY HOME.


We made it through the storm...but two miles away from us, this is what happened...



HUGE LIGHT POST DOWN IN PARKING LOT OF SHOPPING CENTER

I took these pictures the day after the tornado hit.



TREES BLOWN SIDEWAYS AFTER THE STORM



KOHL'S SHOPPING CENTER...A BIG CHUNK OF THE STORE IS GONE.



GORDMAN'S SIGN BLOWN OFF FROM TORNADO


My Mom and I ended up making it to the airport after the tornado had gone through and miraculously my Mom was able to make her connecting flight home. What an adventure. Just another reason why Utah is such a great place to live...NO SEVERE WEATHER!!!

But this is what Memphis' sky usually looks like after a big storm has blown by.
The calm after the storm. Pretty, huh!!!


SUNSET AFTER SEVERE WEATHER

Thanks for coming Mom!

Behind The Scenes of a News Station...

The 7-day Forecast and local crime reports are what take up most of my time while I'm at work. I split my time doing both weather and reporting at a local televesion station in Memphis, TN.

On an average work week I do the weather Saturday and Sunday night...and then Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings I'm out on the streets of Memphis hunting down the latest breaking news scene. When I say morning...I really mean early, early mornings. I get to work at 3:00 a.m. and am usually sent out on a shooting or homicide the minute I hit the door. Memphis was recently ranked the 2nd most dangerous city in America, so you can imagine the crimes that I report.

Most mornings my photographer Ben and I are out the door trying to find the most active crime scene. It's pretty exciting most mornings...especially seeing what people like to do at 3:00 a.m. here in Memphis. At times I'm amazed to see that people are still clubbing at 3:00 a.m. on a weekday...do these people have jobs or do they not sleep?!?!? PAAAAARRRTTTY PEOPLE!

(Ben and I in the parking lot with all of the live trucks)

A lot of times we see homeless people sleeping in whatever they can find to stay warm during the winter and sleeping wherever they want during the summer. It's really sad to see how many people are homeless out here. It gets kind of crazy when they see the news truck because they come up to it while we're inside and ask for money. Most of the time I have food with me for breakfast and offer that to them...some of them don't want the food, only money.

As Ben(my photographer) is driving to the scene he's usually ripping through the streets while I'm trying to put on my make-up. HA! It's probably a very funny sight to see. Nonetheless I've gotten pretty good at putting make-up on in a moving vehicle.

One morning we were covering a guy that was shot...a woman had shot him. We started knocking on neighbors doors to see if they saw anything and wanted to talk on camera, keep in mind it's in the middle of the night. Finally a woman came to the door. She was really nervous when she answered and seemed wide awake. We later learned that she was the shooter. WHOOPS!

Other times you have to knock on family members doors that just lost a loved one. That’s probably one of the hardest parts of my job. They have just been through tragedy that struck the night before or hours earlier and you want them to talk to the world on camera. You almost hope they don’t answer the door, just so you don’t have to face them and ask them how they are feeling.

As a reporter and covering someone’s death, you want to handle it with sensitivity. Sometimes you cover so many murders that you start to lose that emotion and become numb to the fact that someone was brutally killed. Then there are days when you meet the victim’s devastated mother, their tear-streaked sister, and broken down brother. That puts things back into perspective for a reporter or at least it does for me. It makes me realize that someone has just lost their son…daughter, brother or grandson over senseless gunfire.

This is the control room where all the "magic" buttons put video on tv.

I don't know how to run any of this equipment...that's Jay's job.(He's pictured on the left)

And then there's the weather... it's such a relief to not have to shove a microphone in someone's face at least 2 days a week.

This is the green screen...It's a wall painted green. I have to look at the television monitors off to the side to see what I'm actually looking at. It takes a while to get used to. I can't wear green when I do the weather...if I did that part of my body would blend in with the wall and I would disappear. That would be a good April Fool's joke.

The weather is CRAZY here! Before I moved here I had endured a -30 wind chill in the land of "ICEBURG" or otherwise known as REXBURG, Idaho. All of you that have lived there know what I mean when I say that the wetness in your eyes freeze. Utah of course has a lot of snow. And Hawaii...heavy downpours and gorgeous temperatures. But in the south you deal with TORNADOES! And because we get such severe weather here...being a weather person is like being a doctor...kind of...because you are constantly on call. There are some days where we will be on television reporting weather for 6 hours straight without a commerical break. Now that's crazy stuff. And if you happen to break into programming that is really popular...watch out! Angry viewers will call and want the weather people to get off their tv screens.

So far I haven't had too many people get upset with me for not getting the weather right. I've heard that one weather guy here in the Memphis market got punched in the face, which broke his nose, because the viewer was mad he didn't get the weather right! That's a little extreme...and hopefully I won't be faced with that situation! HAHA!

I love forecasting the weather. Most of the time it's pretty laid back. HOT and HUMID is what I'm usually talking about in the summertime.

Overall I really like my job. It's definitely an experience that I will never forget.

Joining The Blog World...

Well I finally decided to start a blog. I thought it would be a fun way to keep a journal. Props to Jesse and Kara for helping me figure out how to use technology! haha!

Tyler and I recently got back from a trip to Tampa, Florida. It's actually not too far away from Memphis, so we thought we'd go explore. Plus one of the perks...Tampa has a major league baseball team and Tyler and I want to go to every baseball stadium in America. We'll see if that happens...So far we've only been to 4 stadiums.

Here we are watching the Tampa Bay Rays. We loved the stadium because it has a dome over it. This means no sunburns or scorching hot temperatures to deal with while watching the game. Instead we enjoyed the air conditioning behind home plate, hot dogs and the Rays won.

Oh by the way, Tyler was excited when we saw Dick Vitale sitting close to us attending the game with his grandsons. He's an ESPN college basketball analyst.

We also went to Busch Gardens to see the animals and ride all the big rollercoasters.

And this is the greatest picture of all...Tyler pretending like he was stung by a Stingray. Take a good look at the sign...if we would have followed directions, we might not have found ourselves in the predicament we got into. See story below...

Day one of vacation...our hotel was right across the street from the beach. Tyler and I were excited to go get into the ocean and enjoy the water. We saw the sign above as we were walking onto the beach, but really didn't pay much attention to it.

We started splashing around in the ocean. We bought a frisbee and were playing catch with it. Tyler of course was diving all over the place to catch the frisbee and told me this was the best time he'd ever had in the ocean. Right after he said that...he yelled, "Something got me!" I was confused. He started running out of the ocean and then I knew it was serious. Neither of us knew what had bit or stung him. YIKES! His foot was bleeding and he was in a lot of pain. So he tells me to run and get help. (I have to tell you it was probably a pretty hilarious sight to see a total tourist...hot pink swimsuit and NO tan whatsoever running across the beach in a panicked state.) Anyway...I ran to the snack bar out on the beach and asked an old man working it what in the world could have bit my husband. He casually replied that it was probably a stingray. I couldn't believe it. The Croc hunter died from getting stung by a stingray, but he was stung in the chest. This was not good. The old man handed us a paper with instructions on how to treat the sting.

Basically to make a long story short...the paper told us to soak his foot for an hour and a half in the hottest water he could stand. This sucks the venom out of your body. We did that and cleaned it out. Tyler was in excruciating pain, but finally felt a little better a couple of hours later. We had baseball tickets for later on that night...and Tyler insisted that we went. Of course he loves sports and a stingray wasn't going to stop him. He limped all the way to the game. By the way, he is feeling much better. His foot is pretty much healed.

Overall it was a crazy way to start the first day of our vacation. We didn't go in the water again.