Day 209

Today was an absolute shambles. Late this morning I got a call from East Lake Pet Orphanage asking if I could drive down to Hutchins, Texas and film the goat being released. Evidently the owner of the goat and the Great Dane had been located and he wanted to surrender the pair for adoption. The owner had only one stipulation. He wanted the orphanage to take a third animal that was also friendly with the goat. The third animal happened to be a dog with three legs, just in case you thought this story couldn't get any stranger. I was supposed to photograph the reunion of these three animals.

I took a quick shower, threw the cameras in the car and headed out. Then I remembered that they had said to film the event, not photograph it, so I turned around and headed over to the storage warehouse where the much heavier video equipment was stored. I was a little late at this point, but still thought I could make it on time. When I was driving down Central Expressway, I noticed that the oil light on my car had come on. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw gray smoke pouring out of the tailpipe. I quickly pulled off the freeway at the first exit and discovered that all the oil had leaked out of the engine. The car wasn't going anywhere.
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Luckily, a friend was able to meet me and we transfered all the equipment to his car and continued toward Hutchins. I thought I'd probably missed the entire event at this point, but when we finally arrived, nothing had happened. The rest of the media had gotten the wrong directions to the sheriff's goat jail and hadn't even arrived yet. I thought nothing further could go wrong at this point, but I was sadly mistaken. The day was so humid that moisture was forming in the tape transport mechanism of my camera. I kept getting a "Slack" error, which if you know anything about Sony Beta-SP cameras, isn't good. I ruined two $40 tape cassettes before the moisture evaporated enough for everything to work properly again.

As the afternoon dragged on, I was afraid my car was going to get towed to an impound lot for being improperly parked before I could get back to it and have it transported to the Land Rover dealer. I had to go back to the pet orphanage and film the second half of the reunion too, so I didn't actually get my my car to the dealer until almost 6 PM.  I made it about five minutes before the dealership closed. Luckily, they had a loaner car waiting for me, because I didn't know how I was going to get home at that point.

By the time I got the dogs out for their evening walk, it was dangerously close to the coyote cutoff hour. Worries about coyotes were nothing compared to all the horror stories the tow truck driver told me on the way to the dealership though. Every time I spent any time with tow truck drivers, I realize that Dallas is a lot more dangerous than I like to think it is. There are evidently a lot of things happening out on the roads at 2 and 3 in the morning that you just don't want to know about.

Just whan I thought the day's excitement was over, I saw a lizard scurrying across the living room floor. Lord knows how a lizard got in the house. I managed to catch the beast before the dogs ate it. I hope tomorrow is a boring day and nothing happens at all.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day