Category: Uncategorized

Clipper system hit tonight making for some very slick roads.

Hello World, Again… Yes, I’m still around, still alive, and still being me. I have not updated the site in months, and well, sorry about that. There is not much to report. The Spring was pretty much a dude for me in terms of weather, and then the summer was a huge drought.

I did get back out for the Auroras the other night.

Yes, I did get a video of this event, and it is on our Youtube channel.

What else is going on? Well, we survived getting Covid. That was not fun, but we are alive to talk about it. Unfortunately, we did lose a good friend and chase partner, Dan Fruechte, to the damn virus. https://www.millercarlin.com/daniel-dan-fruechte/

Laura is now officially a Kindergartener with attitude.

I’m pretty much just working on stuff behind the scenes for SCV and trying to keep up with the ever rapidly changing world and life.

I will be updating the site more, as I’m pretty much off Crackbook except for the 15 minutes a day I have allotted myself for work. I’m still using Twitter, but even that is limited as well. I’m not bringing the cell phone everywhere or carrying it around all the time, as I’m enjoying more freedom from being connected 24×7, with automation taking over more of my work.

It is late and don’t want to wake the family up as we all have to be up at 6am to get ready for the day.

Bye for now. I will be working on my backlog of updates and what the heck I have been doing and am currently doing.

Wow, its been so long since I updated the personal blog page that I don’t know where to begin. It is kind of like writing a letter to an old friend to say what has been happening with the family and life in general.

I limited my time on Antisocial Media. Yeah, I saw that one coming. I’ve been working on back-end stuff for SCV and taking more personal time to work on other side projects—the stuff I want to do, not the stuff I have to do.

I have also been doing a ton of reading and audiobooks. I am always trying to keep learning, and I will say I did laugh a few months ago. I had just finished a book by Survivorman Les Stroud. I was listening to his audiobook when, out of the blue at the worst timing, as I was rushing to go and pick up Neva at the courthouse since she had just got done with Jury Duty, I received a phone call from an unknown number that did not get flagged by the several spam and robo caller app’s that I use to avoid the scams. The guy on the other end asked the standard questions about rates and how to get video. Since I was driving and rushing, I cut him short and asked if I could call him back. I asked him what his name was, he said “Les Stroud”… I was like WTF and said “Survivorman?” He said “yeah that’s me” Told him to give me five minutes as I was picking the wife up from Jury Duty and I would call him right back.

Yeah, I had that Holy Shit moment where the song BU2B came to mind “The universe has a plan…” I called him back, and depending on how 2021 goes with COVID-19, lockdowns, travel restrictions, and such, we could be doing some cool new productions if the stars align. But it was still pretty cool to have someone whose work you admired for years with how they did all the camera work by themselves for their TV show, and then out of the blue, they call you. I kind of see how musicians feel when someone they have admired and listened to for years calls them up and says hey, we should do something together.

So what about the insane 2020 Hurricane season? Well, due to COVID-19 and my foot being injured with a nice deep hole from a planter wart and not wanting to walk in wastewater with open wounds, I was told to sit out most of the season. I did make it down for Hurricane Delta, where I chased with Simon Brewer, which was probably one of the funniest chases of my life. Here is the video from that chase. https://youtu.be/ZqiVJPfCKHE

Winter has been so-so for the season, but as I said, I have been working on other side projects for what I want to do and not what I must do. Hopefully, the SteamPunk computer system will be operational in the next couple of weeks. I just sorted through the life’s work and organized about 100 Terabytes of data, removed duplicated data, and then backed up everything. Once the Steam Punk setup is up and running, I’ll post some photos of it. It has several computers and editing systems in a custom-painted half rack. Trust me, it will look cool.

Otherwise, not much else is new. Laura is going to be five next month, and time does not stand still at all. I’m off to read the shortest book on my book list that just came in today: Neil Peart’s Illustrated Quotes. It’s 100 pages of quotes from the legend. This should take me about 15 minutes to read.

Today started off crazy, woke up early from the weather alarms going off and then looked at the radar and knew I had to get Laura to daycare earlier then normal. The storms where not severe but the amount of water in them was pretty decent that I knew we would get at least several inches in about an hour.

I was able to get Laura off to daycare before the roads flooded and made for a mess. I finally got a shot I have been looking to get on camera for a while of someone stalling out in the flooding and at 53 seconds, someones day just turned out pretty bad before 8:00 a.m.

Footage shows lots of flooding in the area. One of the funny things I saw was this, “Here’s Your Sign…”

Did not get a chance to get out to the Dakota’s today for the storms but just after 9:00p.m after we got Laura to bed finally… (but wait, I need this, but wait I want another hug, hey, i got out of bed, tuck me in again…) I was going to wrap up some things in the office then get to bed early. Well that did not go as planned as severe storms with some insane lightning fired up to the south of town and I got the urge to go chase.

In the video above, you can see I made it to the northwest side of the metro where the hail was large but luckily I managed to avoid the big hail while under cover. This week is starting to shape up to an active week.