Funerals are always a sobering event. Even if they're not necessarily sad, they bring about emotions you rarely experience and make you think about things you'd sometimes rather not think about.

My great aunt Margie passed away last weekend. The funeral was yesterday. I don't remember much about her, aside from the fact that she was always nice. She'd been extremely ill in the past few years, so her passing came about no so much as a day of sorrow but more as a day of relief that she was finally free from her suffering.

It's amazing how selfish losing someone can make you. I've been lucky to have only lost one person who was close to me. You think about all the things you still had to do with that person, all the things you'll miss about them, all the things they took away from you when they left. It's hard to tell yourself that they're in a better place. It's hard to think of death as a good thing.

I'm not a particularly religious person. That's not to say that I don't believe in anything. How can you not look at everything in this world and not believe there's something out there that's bigger than you are? There's too much beauty and goodness for that not to be true.

I believe in God, but I don't believe in the church or rather the institution that is the church. I believe my relationship with God is something that's strictly between the two of us. And I'm not so quick to write off other religions, whether that religion is that of the Buddhists, Islams, or even the multiple gods of ancient times. I believe that this something bigger is in everything around us and that we would be foolish to try to limit it to just one being.

For me, spirituality is about hope. If I didn't believe in something, what would there be for me to be hopeful about? And a world without hope would be a sad one indeed.

At the funeral yesterday, one of the ministers said something that truly spoke to me. He said, "We are not a people without hope. We have the greatest hope of all." That's what religion should be about, whether you're a Catholic, Baptist, Buddhist monk, a worshiper of Allah, or someone like me who believes in the spirit of things.

Sometimes the news can be really boring, you know?

There's always somebody getting arrested for some horrible crime. The only thing that changes is the person and the crime.

So instead of focusing on something that I'm totally not interested in this morning, I've decided to do something fun and show you what my summer has looked like through pictures. This isn't an original idea, though. I'm stealing it from Jessi over at musings of a wannabe star but I don't think she'll mind!

Some crazy things happen behind-the-scenes of a newscast sometimes. Take this morning, for instance.

We're in the second block of the second hour. We normally have an average of three national stories to start the block, then wipe to a health animation to transition into health news and then we wipe to a sports opening and morning sports package.

My anchor goes through the national stories. Then she looks at her scripts. Sees that it says PAUSE in big, bold letters. Assumes we're wiping to Sports. Goes back to the desk.

Behind the scenes, the director looks up at the preset monitor. The anchor isn't there. The health animation is finished, frozen on air. There's a chorus of panicked "Where is she?!"

The cameraman is panning the studio frantically. The director is getting agitated. You can tell because he's stomping his feet under the board. In the monitor you see the anchor running diving back across the studio to get to where she's supposed to be.

In the weather monitor you can see my weathergirl dying with laughter.

The anchor stops at a completely different over-the-shoulder monitor, but we've already wasted five-to-ten seconds searching for her. That's a lot in t.v. time.

None of this made it on the air.

I love my job.

My computer decided it didn't want to cooperate with me today. In fact, it decided that it wanted to try to sabotage my producing efforts for this morning's show by moving sooo slowly that I wouldn't get finished in time. It's plan was close to succeeding, but you know what they say about things of that nature - close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades.

So, I don't have anything interesting to talk about because my head is full of computer-hate-thoughts, but I didn't want to leave you hanging so I found a pretty amusing comic. It's from my absolute favorite strip: Pearls Before Swine. Enjoy!

Your first concert is an experience you're not likely to forget. Mine was to see only the greatest band ever:

  I'm sure you guys have heard of the band Kings of Leon. They're pretty good. I really like their song 'Use Somebody', even if it is being vastly overplayed by radio stations. Anyway, this past Friday they were playing a show at an amphitheater in St. Louis, Missouri, when they were forced to end the concert after playing only three songs. It wasn't due to rain or thunder and lightening. It was because of, get this, pigeons.

There were a whole bunch of these nasty, annoying creatures roosting in the rafters of the amphitheater. I guess they weren't enjoying the show because they bombarded the band with pigeon poop. So much pigeon poop that the band literally fled.

Worst concert ever? I think so.

When I was in the sixth grade my Probe class took a field trip to the Walter F. George dam. It was, quite honestly, one of the coolest field trips I have ever been on. And I've been on quite a few.

The field trip consisted of us getting to walk across the top, look over at the gates and go all the way to the bottom. Super cool.

You're probably wondering where that random memory came from. Well, take a look at these pictures of a dam that broke in Iowa:

This is what was the Lake Delhi dam. On Saturday the roads on either side of it that serve as containment measures gave way. Officials say it's because of unseasonably high rainfall amounts. The 700 residents of a nearby town had less than five minutes to evacuate.

I can't direct you to my source of information [it's basically a producer's version of CNN], but HERE's a link to a story the Des Moines paper did on the story.

That's pretty crazy, huh? Almost as crazy as this:

This is supposed to be a bronze statue of a surfer in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Calif. Some pranksters decided to make it a little more interesting by building a 16-foot papier mache great white shark devouring it. This poor statue has seen its share of pranks, however nothing as elaborate as this one. In fact, it's been tampered with so many times that locals call it "The Cardiff Kook."

Yes, you read that right.

Since when do the words "stinky" and "flower" go together? And then there's that other word: corpse. That can't be good...

Well, for the Museum of Natural Science in Houston, Texas, it's extremely good. People are coming by the droves to see this little beauty flower. For the past few weeks, morbid curiosity has been getting the best of people when it comes to this flower blooming. Everyone wants to be there when it's fully in bloom and looks like this:

All so they can smell it's sweet perfume.

You read that right, too. People are lining up, cameras and noses at the ready, to catch a whiff of rotting flesh.

It's also called the carrion flower. It's scientific name is Amorphophallus titanum - from Ancient Greek amorphos, which means 'without form or misshapen', + phallos, meaning 'penis', and titan meaning 'giant'.

So basically, all these people - young and old, alike - are flocking to this museum to see and/or smell a giant misshapen penis flower with a scent akin to that of rotting flesh.

Excuse me for not jumping on that bandwagon.

My family goes "boating" all the time. Now by boating I don't mean we all put on our sailing clothes and take our yacht out to sea. As a matter of fact, our boat is nothing like a yacht.

See? Much smaller and better suited to the waves of the lake or river.

We've never had anything jump up out of the water into our boat, and we've never had a bird land on it while we were on it. We've talked about the possibilities of snakes falling out of the trees (heaven forbid) on our heads and gotten close enough to alligators that, had they wanted to, they could have climbed on board with us. And this one time the people that own the boat in the background had a wharf rat turn their old boat into a home - a fact we all discovered on an afternoon river outing. Do you have any idea how BIG those things are?!

Yesterday CNN refused to be cooperative and I was unable to use the Jeanne Moos story I wanted in my D block. My original plan was to fit the "Whoopi Stoned On Air" package into today's show, but while I was searching the CNN bitcentral site for said story I found another Moos piece that actually flowed better with a story I already had - "Whale Crashes Boat." I decided to put it after the story "Water Wars". Nice, eh?

Anyway, what would you do if this happened to you?

That's a 40-ton whale. It just jumped up out of the water off South Africa and actually landed on the boat's mast. And what, you may ask, happens when a 40-ton whale jumps on your boat's mast. Well, I've got your answer...

That looks pretty bad, right? Well, not to worry. The mast is the only thing that was broken. The two sailors on board at the time weren't injured and, aside from leaving a little blubber on the boat's deck, neither was the whale. As a matter of fact, the whale was pretty happy.

There he goes swimming off into the sunset, seemingly oblivious to the $5,000 worth of damage he caused Ralph Mothes and Paloma Werner.

To see some more pictures of the damaged boat, as well as the ones I used, go HERE.

I was going to share the Jeanne Moos story but YouTube has decided it doesn't want to cooperate. So try looking it up yourself if you really want to see it.

So yesterday's show was quite assuredly the most depressing one I've ever had to produce.

We opened the show with the story about the family from my hometown. That was followed by a story about a 4-year-old getting shot and killed by his uncle because he dropped a game piece on his foot. Then there was the story about a house fire in one of our outlying communities that ended with one woman burning to death. And to round it all out there was the story of an oysterman falling overboard on the Appalachicola River and not resurfacing.

Today it's more of the same - follow up pieces on the two weekend murders accompanied by a story about a man setting a local restaurant on fire and a former bank president embezzling more than $1 million. Awesome.

I like to watch NCIS. I know this seems like I'm changing the subject, but I do have a point in that statement. The boyfriend and I were watching it last week, and it's the episode where this convicted killer escapes and wants Gibbs and an FBI agent to reopen his case because he's innocent. He turns out to have been framed, but that isn't the point. In the course of the show they talk about Gibbs "retiring" because he just couldn't take anymore. In response to that, Agent Fornell says something along the lines of "If you don't want to quit, you're not doing the job right."

In a sense, that's how I feel about the news regardless of whether its broadcast or print. I wish I didn't have to report on the tragedies, the crimes, the political agendas. I wish that society didn't flourish off of bad news. I wish that there were no tragedies, no crime, no political battles to have to report on a daily basis.

Do you realize how depressingly stressful this job is? Think about it. We, as journalists, are responsible for relaying information to the public, and more often that not the most important things happening in our cities, in our states, in our country or in our world are things that could only be described as horrific events.

Yesterday I reported a story that hit me harder than any other story has ever hit me before. Yes, I've felt sadness over human loss. Yes, I've felt anger over senseless acts of violence. But I've never had to present the public with information on something that affected me on a personal level. It was by far the hardest thing I've ever done.

You guys may think I'm crazy when I say this, especially all you journalistically inclined readers, but I honestly look forward to the day when newspapers, magazines, internet and newscasts are nothing more than venues for reporting upcoming events, fundraisers, and the recent deeds of the world's good Samaritans.

After a really good weekend, this week has started on a depressing note, and it's the result of much more than just a lack of sleep.

I got to work and started reading through the stories from the weekend when I saw one that said "Early Co Shooting." That's where I'm from.

A teacher that worked in the room next to my mom shot his wife and two kids, one of which my mom taught, on Friday night before he shot himself. He was pronounced dead on the scene. His wife, also a teacher, was taken to the local hospital where she died. The two kids, a 14 and 11-year-old were taken to the hospital in Dothan. The 14-year-old boy died Saturday.

I knew this family. Not personally, but well enough. The original story just said that a family of four was shot on Friday and that the parents had died. I found the updated information on the Associated Press wire about the son dying and the father being the shooter. I cried while I was writing the updated version for the air. And then again when I reformatted it for the website.

This isn't something that's normal, and all I can do is wonder what happened to turn this loving father and husband into a person who would kill his own family and then himself.

In recent years my hometown has been repeatedly struck by tragedy. Not in a huge way like when the entire nation grieved over the World Trade Center, but in a much more personal way. It's a small community where everyone knows you by name. Everyone doesn't always get along, but as a whole the community sticks up for its own.

I can remember when crime and murder weren't a part of what I like to think of as small-town USA, but now it seems as if big-city "sins" are encroaching on what used to be the goodness of America. People say we're making progress, but what good is progress if it leads to more and more destruction? Sure, the big city isn't suffering but the small towns certainly are. Pretty soon small towns won't be small in anything but their size, and that's what I believe will be the ultimate downfall of society.

For reasons I don't care to disclose, last night was a long and stressful night. Therefore I don't really feel like there's a point to this today. It took me longer than usual to write my show, I managed to put my foot in my mouth multiple times, and at one point I felt like crying. So I didn't look for something cool and/or interesting going on in the world to talk about. Instead, I stole a video that one of my friends posted on Facebook that made me laugh. Hopefully it'll make you laugh as well.

 

Back in 1965, a 15-year-old girl looked up the Beatles' London addresses and just knocked on their door. Then for the next two years she used money she earned on her paper route to take a train into London every weekend just to hang out with them. How cool is that?

If I wasn't positive the Beatles were awesome before today, I'm 100% sure of it at this moment. I mean think about it. Can you name any artist of this age that you could look up their address, knock on their door and just go hang out?

Didn't think so.

So while they were all just hanging out, this teenage girl was (of course) snapping pictures. Up until now all those pictures have been gathering dust in her attic. Next month they're all going to be auctioned off and this woman is going to have a nice little sum of cash.

Friendship pays off, huh?

Anyway, in honor of the coolness that is the Beatles, here's one of my favorites by them.

So between sifting through runoff election results, rewriting scripts from last night, finding fresh national stories and posting everything running in my show to the website (that took an hour, btw), I didn't have time to even think about what to write about for today's post. Actually, that's not true. I did think about today's post. I just didn't have time to come up with anything of substance.

However, last night I saw this commercial that made me laugh for like five minutes. It's a tampon commercial that makes fun of other tampon commercials. It may not be to your taste... heck, I might just have a twisted sense of humor... but to me at least this Kotex commercial is hilarious.

My last summer as a college student I took a trip to San Jose, Costa Rica. It was by far one of the best experiences of my life. I learned a lot - about the Spanish language, about a different culture and even about myself. I have many, many different stories that I could share with you from my time there. Honestly, I could probably talk to you for hours on end about how much fun I had, but instead of subjecting you to that... I'm going to share one of my favorite stories to tell from that trip.

I grew up in a small town, and although we have a heck of a lot of traffic lights we don't have a professional taxi service. There are actually two private taxis that run through town, but you have to be an extremely brave individual to call one of them to take you to and from the grocery store. Suffice it to say that I'm not that brave. Call me chicken, but I've never been so desperate to get somewhere that I had to call one of Blakely's taxis - one driver was so old and shrunken all you could see of him was his hands on the wheel.

I've never been to a big American city, unless you count Atlanta or maybe New Orleans. But in Atlanta we always drive and in New Orleans we walked. So in my 23 years of living I have never experienced an American taxi ride.

In the summer of 2009, I participated in a study abroad program in Costa Rica. There were about 20 of us, all assigned to different host families in the city of San Jose which just so happens to be a majorly huge city. While there most of us just used the bus system that ran through the city. It was cheap (around 50 cents a day) and most of us lived within walking distance of a stop. In fact, my bus stop was right around the corner from my host family's home.

One afternoon, three of us decided to go to the Mall San Pedro in downtown. It was the middle of the afternoon so we walked from the Instituto de Espanol Costa Rica (IECR), but when we were ready to leave it was raining and getting dark. So we decided to be brave and hail a cab.

It wasn't truly that hard. We walked out the front entrance and there were about a million to choose from, and they all looked like this:

All certified taxis in Costa Rica are red with a yellow triangle that has their driver numbers. If you get into one that doesn't have what I just mentioned, well good luck.

So we pile in and take off in the direction of the first house. We had made it about a third of the way when the car started to sputter. The driver pushed it as far as he could up the hill we were on until finally, it just died. There was nothing for us to do, so we paid him for the distance he'd taken us and got out.

There we were, three American girls in a Spanish-speaking country, obviously lost in a not-so-nice neighborhood. We did the only thing that made sense. We continued walking in the direction we'd been traveling, hoping to see something we'd recognize, another taxi or someone who didn't look like they'd kill, rape or sell us into slavery that we could ask for directions. Luckily a taxi rounded the next corner.

We gratefully get in and dutifully hand over the first set of directions. The funny thing about Costa Rica is that the streets aren't named, just the neighborhoods, and many of the taxi drivers don't know where they're going. This was one such taxi driver. He got lost and actually had to stop and ask for directions.

We finally got the first girl home. She lived on the other side of the city from us other two, who luckily lived right down the street from each other. So we handed him our directions, crossed our fingers and waited anxiously as he proceeded to get lost again. Luckily, all the taxi drivers know the bus routes and all the stops. So we told him which bus stop we were next to - Musmani - and he took us straight there.

So my first taxi ride was actually an adventure. It tested my Spanish, my bravery and my common sense. It was an experience I'm glad to have had, an experience I'm glad to still be around to laugh about.

This weekend was awesome. The boyfriend took me to the zoo for the sole purpose of getting to feed a giraffe. And then when the giraffe refused to walk 20 feet to the feeding platform, he waited patiently with the camel in the barn while I cajoled, pleaded, shook my bag of feed and enticed Sydney into the shade and sanctity of his end of the barn, where he then ignored me to eat out of the trough that was a good 10 feet above my head. Oh, but he came around. I was patiently impatient in my waiting. I would have waited a few hours to accomplish my goal. And was it worth it?

We're totally celebrating this wacky holiday on the show today. My meteorologist is actually dressing up as a cow for the opening part of the show... in both hours. I'm talking full cow costume. It's going to be epic.

So in the spirit of cow appreciation, put on your cow suit and go to Chik-Fil-A for some free chicken!

So the whispers about the U.S.-Russian spy swap turned out to be true. All 10 suspected Russian secret agents pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as unregistered agents in a Manhattan federal court on Thursday. They were sentenced to time already served and ordered out of the country. They're being deported as I type in exchange for four people convicted of spying in Russia for the U.S.

I think we got the short end of that stick.

This is me today. Well, change the hair color and add some freckles and that's me. Major headache.

It's definitely from a screwed-up sleep schedule. You see, I went home at 7ish like I always do and laid down for an hour-and-a-half nap. I was back up at 9 to go back to work for a meeting.

It lasted an hour, and as most meetings go it was mostly pointless. One major point drawn out entirely too long. You know how I hate posting stories to the web? Well that's what the meeting was about - the website. They want me to, aside from producing a two-hour long show, post every story in it to the website all without going into overtime. Want to know the best part? The video I need generally isn't available until about two hours after I'm scheduled to get off.

I would tell you what I think about that but it would lower the integrity of my blog. Suffice it to say that they're not going to get everything they want. I'll post the stories but I'm not going to worry myself over trying to get video posted. Screw that.

Anyway, let's move onto something interesting. Ten people have been arrested as Russian secret agents. I wasn't aware The Cold War was still going on. Apparently Russia wasn't aware it had ended. And there are whispers that the U.S. and Russia will be swapping spies, although no official has officially confirmed it.

In the spirit of spying I've been doing a little research, but the sheer amount of information out there about The Cold War honestly overwhelmed me. I just wanted to know about spying and stuff, you know. I haven't actually sifted through all the stuff I found, but when I finish you'll get to see the result. Maybe. If I don't get sidetracked by weekend activities again, which is highly likely seeing as how I'm going to the zoo to feed a giraffe.

And one more thing... tomorrow is Cow Appreciation Day. Betcha didn't know that. So if you're not too chicken, put on that cow suit you've got stored in the back of your closet and go to Chick-Fil-A to get a free sandwich.

The Obama Administration is suing the state of Arizona over its newly passed immigration law.

Here's a link to Arizona Senate Bill 1070 if you'd like to take a look at it for yourself.

Basically, the new law would allow the police to question the citizenship of anyone they stop legally but suspect might be in the country illegally. It also would require legal immigrants to carry their official documents.

There's been a lot of hooplah over this law in recent weeks, mostly from the Latin community. At least 18 localities around the nation are boycotting the state while 22 other states are considering similar legislation.

National media has been broadcasting massive protests and rallies in connection with Arizona's new policy, but has anyone stopped to notice that the majority of the people there are Latino? I'm not being racist in any way, shape or form with that comment. I'm simply stating a fact. And with an estimated 10.8 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. as of 2009 according to the Center for Immigration Studies, I'm guessing that a lot of those protesters aren't exactly legal citizens.

Civil rights groups are calling it racial profiling, and I can see where they're coming from. Corrupt cops could use the new law to target certain races. I get it. But there's an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona. Maybe, just maybe, this new law will help cut back on the myriad of crimes that come with it, namely drug trafficking.

And is it just me or are other law-abiding, legal U.S. citizens wondering how 10.8 million people who don't have any power over the political system whatsoever are managing to enforce any modicum of control over the presiding administration?

Welcome to summer in the South. That's what it looks feels like on a daily basis. And there is no beating it. I don't care what all the so-called experts tell you. You just learn to deal with it.

 

So why do people from the north want to retire here? (More specifically in Florida.) Don't they know what they're getting themselves into? Humidity that's so high you break into a sweat at 8:00 a.m.; crazy, unpredictable afternoon thunderstorms; life-threatening sunburns; heat stroke.

 

 So in the spirit of the record heat wave currently sizzling on the East Coast, here are some unusual ways to keep cool.

No, I don't mean a vacation, although that would be nice. I was talking about your clothing. Keep things loose and light-weight.

Remember when you were sick and your mom would lay a wet washcloth on your forehead to ease the fever? This is the same principle. Run cold water or put ice cubes on your wrists every hour or so for about a minute. Splashing cold water on your face/temples also helps, although it could smear your makeup (but if you're living in the South you know the folly of trying to wear full makeup and avoid it).

Okay, so I don't mean to not eat at all. But have you ever noticed how you feel hot after a big meal? Well, that's because big meals kick-start your metabolism. So break your meals up into smaller ones. It's healthy for you, too. (And now I'm hungry!)

Sounds gross, doesn't it? But get this - spicy foods make you sweat without actually raising your body temperature. And when the sweat is evaporating off your skin, you feel cooler.

I don't know about you but it's hard to fall asleep when you're hot, so here are some tricks to help you cool down at bedtime: a) fill a hot water bottle with ice water and use it to cool your ankles and backs of your knees; b) toss your sheets in the freezer for an hour or two before bed; and c) use a cool, absorbent cotton pillow to keep your head cool which will in turn keep the rest of your body cool.

Note to self: Sunblock, even if it's 50-proof, can only do its job if you remember to put it on.