Donkey attack and train derailing

Gotcha hooked? Good, cause that's kind of my job.

The past two days at work were a litt

le crazy. I guess that makes up for the unbelievably boring Monday I had.

Everyone had taken off work for July 5th, so it was just me and about 4 other people working. I knew that it was going to be slow, but I had no choice but to work because I'm trying to leave town tomorrow! I had to get my three days in so I can drive home for my friend Lauren's wedding (which I'm super excited about in case you were wondering).

Anyway, back to the donkey.

A reporter a

nd I were trying to track down a man for an interview yesterday. In normal circumstances, we would have given up when he didn't return the reporter Jenna's call. But because a bigshot from NY is lurking around the office, everyone is walking on eggshells. Jenna's boss suggested we go drive out to this man's house and knock down his door until we give him an answer. By the way, the story was not in any way scandalous. They found tar balls on Galveston's coast and the guy we wanted to talk to is a UT professor who had hypothesized all the issues that caused the oil spill.

So we drive 40 minutes out of Austin to find this guy. He lives in the middle of nowhere and had a gate blocking the entrance. I front of the gate were two donkeys. When we figured out that we could not get through the gate, we started to turn the c

ar around, but the donkeys started approaching the car. They got right up close to the driver side window and just stared for a while. I thought it was pretty hilarious and took some pictures.

But they didn't back away from the car! It started getting a little scary when one donkey stood right in front of the car, blocking the exit. Meanwhile, the other donkey was walking alongside the car. And then we heard a thump. The donkey kicked the car!

Eventually they cleared out, but for a while there things were tense. And the car was fine too. But we never did get an interview with that man.

There's been this sudden pressure among the interns to work on our "reels." Honestly, I have only had one chance so far to put an interview I made on my reel--Most of the time we are following around other reporters and watching them, there is rarely an opportunity to take over. So anyway, even though I don't want to end up being a reporter, I feel like I need to start working on a reel because everyone else is. Thankfully, today I had a chance.

I went along with another intern to a morning live shoot today. We were supposed to be watching the anchor Tracy while she interviewed these people at an art studio about their printing press. We only get through one segment when we get a call that a train came off of its track and we needed to go cover it. So, we all left the art studio and jumped in a car to go to the site.

The train was just a freight train, so nobody was hurt but a bunch of departures were cancelled as a result of the derailing. But while we were there, Bianca (the other intern) and I were able to film each other doing short stand ups as though we were live on the scene. Of course these did not go to air, but we were able to put them on our reel! For some reason the microphone that I'm holding was not on, but I turned up the sound as much as I could when I edited it.

Check it out!

So I feel like today was an overall success. I started a reel, and I found out I'm the intern with the most cumulative hours at the station right now. I win!

Hokay, so...

It has been quite a while since I've done this. I started getting lazy with the blog, thinking that I had nothing interesting to write about. And then Rachel came into town so I've been preoccupied with that too.

Improv classes are still going well, and work is getting to be somewhat less stressful. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday of this past week sitting in on the Laura Hall trial. For those who don't know, the story is pretty complex and gruesome. I'd rather not go into it, but the summary is Hall was convicted of "tampering with evidence" after helping her boyfriend kill and dispose of a young woman. Being there when they went into gory detail was certainly not pleasant, but it is a story that a lot of people in Austin care about, and the outcome was favorable. She got sentenced to 11 years in jail.

Besides all that fun, Rachel is here! We're having a great time exploring Austin together. We've been doing a good amount of shopping and eating here. We went to see the new A-Team movie at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, which was fantastic. The movie was honestly not as appealing as the food and beer, but it wasn't bad. And all of my roommates have gone out of town for the 4th of July weekend, so we had the apartment to ourselves last night! Today we'll probably do some more shopping and then head out to Zilker Park. The weather has cleared up and we're thinking if it gets hot enough we'll go to Barton Springs, which stays around 68 degrees throughout the year.