Breaking news in my backyard.

Our evening meal of "Bang Bang Shrimp" and a veggie side consisting of summer squash, tomatoes, corn, onion and garlic had been prepped...all was ready for me to watch the final hour of The Masters when I grabbed my iPad to look at work email.

John Buckner on the assignment desk had just forwarded a tweet from the Fort Lauderdale Fire Department about a plane crash and the location was two miles south of where we live.

I yelled at John to join me and he became my driver.

Would that Periscope was already developed for Android! I have an iPad with it loaded but it was on the charger. My phone was too but it had 40% so I grabbed it and left the ability to live stream behind.

We got to the corner just east of the crash and police directed us away. The WSVN live truck arrived a minute behind me and we both wended our way through the Calvary Chapel parking lot in an effort to get a closer view.

John is a good navigator in this circumstance although I don't see a "Nightcrawler" existence in our future.

Liane Morejon, the Local 10 reporter arrived moments later and took over.

John and I went home and I made dinner.

Four people died in the crash and at the end of the day, that's what I'm thinking about tonight.

Veintiocho años!

The older we get, the faster the years go by.
It's once again time for my annual accounting of "the little things" that are really the glue that keeps John and me together.
This all started in 2009 when we lived in Baltimore and our anniversary sneaked up on me. I made the first list in lieu of a card.
So here we go:

1. I love that you keep insisting that I learn Spanish. It's probably not going to happen but you should keep nagging me. (
2. I love how you enjoy writing controversial things in the sand and then wait for a tourist to come by. And how irritated you get when nobody notices.
3. I love your silly selective memory. "Do I like this food? Have we seen that movie?"
4. Shopping with you at Kohl's can be a blast but please don't make me watch you try on seventeen pairs of jeans even though I love your butt.
5. I love our Sunday picnics at the beach and your scientific approach to planting the umbrella in the sand.
6. I love your slavish attention to our cars, every repair bill for the past decade carefully saved and filed in that ugly cabinet that I will never convince you to discard.
7. I love how much fun you have with brother-in-law Bob.
8. I love dreaming of a Murphy bed for our den so we can have even MORE COMPANY during the winter months.
9. I love that you impishly hide the United Methodist church cup that I like to drink from on Sunday mornings, as if that would stop my OCD for that particular habit.
10. I love how you actually enjoy being introduced as "the long suffering John Phillip."
11. I loved our New Year's Eve party--taping "2015" on the champagne flutes that we didn't get to use last year.
12. I love that we are both losing our hearing at the same time.
13. Subsequently, I love the hysterical laughing we do when we replay something we've missed on a TV show three times and STILL CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S BEING SAID.
14. I love that you continue to feed my addiction to Crocs sandals. My comfortable shoe fetish!
    
15. I love it when you get a wild hair, take me on a whirlwind trip to somewhere and act silly.
16. I love how you love old things.
17. I love how you understand why an occasional visit to Whole Foods is therapeutic, even if we don't need anything.
18. Consequently, I love how you stare at the cost of olives and try to find the least expensive. Which I tell you will taste bad. So we buy the good ones.
19. I love how mad you got when the printer stopped working and when I got it fixed again, the first thing it spit out was the FTD flower order for our anniversary. 
20. I love going to garden shops and looking at plants with you even though our "farm" area is pretty small.
21. I love how this year, you finally have a chance to win it all in the NCAA pool we enter every year...and how frustrating it is that you used my name on the potential winning bracket.
    
22. I love discovering new places with you on weekends.
23. I love how you look at the back of greeting cards to see how much I spent.
24. I love how much you enjoy talking to our kids on the phone.
25. I love how you have embraced my current Fitbit obsession even though it means I don't want to go on as many bike rides as I used to.
26. I love how you let me buy kitchen gadgets galore whether we need them or not. C'mon, that egg steamer is awesome!
27. I love how you compare every dog you see to Dottie and none of them compare.
28. I love falling asleep, holding hands.

Thanks for another great year, honey!

The $700 bag of candy.

It's all gone now.
This is the bag of candy that I stopped to get at the BJ's on Powerline and Commercial.
A bad person grabbed my purse from the front seat of my car while my back was turned. (Stupid me, I didn't lock it for the thirty seconds it took to return a cart to the cart corral.)

In my purse?
My beloved iPad, a cell phone that was less than six months old, prescription sunglasses and less than $5.00 in cash.

Replacing it cost $700.

I'll never be so careless again.

That Smell

Last weekend, John and I enjoyed a three-day weekend on the West Coast. Friday night on Fort Myers Beach (fabulous sunsets, groovy Key West vibe) and Saturday night with our good friend Lynda King who lives on Sanibel Island when she isn't buying and selling TV stations.

We had such a good time! We talked about how restful it is and how much we enjoyed ourselves all the way home.

Fast forward. Friday morning when I got into my car to head to work, I noticed an odor. The Ford 500 has a door drainage problem and sometimes, when it rains hard, the back doors fill up and make a noticeable slooshing sound when I turn a corner or step on the brake. If I don't drain them regularly, the car can smell a bit musty.

Ten hours later, at the end of the work day, the stink was noticeably stronger and even though it was dark and I was tired, I opened both back doors and lifted the little rubber flap at the bottom to let the water out. And then I drove home. The smell abated some during my 30 minute commute but now I think I just got used to it.

On Friday nights I have other things on my mind and so I forgot about it until Saturday morning as we were going out for our bike ride. John wanted to check it but I didn't bring my keys with me and generally, we take his car for errands, etc and so the Ford remained sealed up until Sunday morning.

Sunday morning, John remembered and took his set of keys to my car so that when we finished the bike ride, he could check it out.

He said he almost dropped to his knees when he opened the car door, the stench was so bad. Initially, he thought it had something to do with my slightly damp carpet (damn Ford doors) but then he followed his nose to the back of the car.

A noxious cloud of putrid headed for the heavens as soon as he opened the trunk.

The culprit? Two forgotten Publix shopping bags full of shells gathered on Sanibel. Seven days of warm, damp closed conditions combined with rotting pieces of marine mollusk inside the forgotten exoskeletons created a vile funk that permeated the area.

Another few days and our neighbors would have surely called police, confident that we had a body in the trunk.

A quart of Febreze, some fresh air and a little time cured our problem...and our forgetfulness! 

Long lost weekend

Ten years ago...from NyTimes magazine.

Loving life in South Florida.

Inappropriate? You tell me.

After the Royals took Game Two from the Orioles at Camden Yards, I heard one of the broadcasters close out the post-game by saying "We are watching something special here, folks."

It has been such a magical post-season and the statement was uttered in a poignant way so I tweeted it.

And almost immediately, a former co-worker from WMAR, tweeted me back.

Honestly, for a second I was taken aback. It's no secret that I got fired from KSHB. And it's also no secret that I'm a Twins fan. I have enjoyed the Royals winning ways -- and although I did spend a year in Baltimore and some fun evenings at Camden Yards, I'm a Midwestern girl and decidedly in favor of the Royals winning it all.

My response:

Was that wrong?
Was my former co-worker being predictably snarky?
Should I have just left it alone?

Maybe so.

Surprise Bluegrass

We spent Sunday afternoon at MacArthur State Park. And happened upon this delightful scene.

My Sunday nirvana

Exploring where we live with John.

This is MacArthur State Park in Palm Beach County.

How to tell better TV stories by watching commercials

You can't watch a post-season baseball game without seeing this commercial a gazillion times.

Storytelling lessons from Budweiser puppy commercial | Poynter.

John and I loved this sketch. Miss The Frightened Family? Me too!

End of the 6th inning.

Big game this weekend.

It's official. Writing is good for you.

Check it out:  You don't have to be a serious novelist or constantly reflecting on your life's most traumatic moments to get these great benefits. Even blogging or journaling is enough to see results. One study found that blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to the effect from running or listening to music.

Great story about competitive TV markets

Local TV’s Battle Royal | Broadcasting & Cable



I've been lucky enough to work in some of these markets.

KTVA reporter quits on-air, reveals herself as owner of Alaska Cannabis ...

My colleague and former co-worker Kevin Finch weighed in.

Dolphins game. Shenanigans.

Rainy season

Broken umbrella. Barefoot boy.

Dear NFL: Get your act together or I might have to break up with you.

This was in my newspaper this week.  Here are some of the tough questions Dave Hyde asks in his column:

"Once upon a time, the antidote for such ugliness was to escape to the games. Enjoy Sunday. Soak up the fun. But now? Is it just me who's having trouble seeing the fun and games as just fun and games anymore?

Can you enjoy football the same way when even the NFL testified in federal court one in every three players will suffer mental problems in their retirement?

What does it say that America's biggest game not only cripples players during them but increasingly leaves them with mental problems for life? Or can you set that aside to enjoy your football weekend?"

I hate the thought of Mark Cuban being right (again). Remember when he predicted the demise of the NFL in May? His rationale was not based on the bad PR of wife and child abusers, rather the gluttony of the owners who will fill every night with football.

Kind of like when ABC saturated prime time with "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" in 2000. I still remember my friend Matt Zelkind, the news director at WKRN, initially giddy at the early ratings and then moaning in anguish when the network gurus considered the show like crack or heroin and gave us three doses per week.

The Incognito saga was shameful and I hated that it involved the team I am trying to love. Then along came Ray Rice. And Adrian Peterson. And a host of other less-famous accused abusers.

Domestic violence accounts for 85 of the 713 arrests of NFL players since 2000 in a database compiled by USA Today.

On the way home from work Friday, I listened to Dan Le Betard interview Don Van Natta, the author of an unfolding story detailing how the Ravens tried to cover up the whole mess.

"The NFL's billionaire owners, who pay Goodell more than $44 million a year, are said to be supporting him as he navigates the worst crisis in NFL history and as some league sponsors, most notably Anheuser-Busch, are jittery. Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson is asking the owners to sign a petition of support for Goodell; at least three have apparently done so. For his part, Goodell has told friends he'd never resign, and he said he's confident his job is not in jeopardy."

Get this fixed, Goodell.  Or get out.