I'm TIRED!

I'm writing from my hotel room in San Diego, CA on a Saturday night. I've been suffering from a sleep deficit since last Wednesday.

On that day, I was up at 1:30am to have breakfast, shower, and be at ABC Radio Networks by 3am. Actually, I get there about twenty before three. I'm training to sub-host on the Open Road Cafe on the Trucking Channel, Sirius Stream 131. I'm working for Mark Willis. On this morning, Mark was having me do the two-hour prep before the show (3a to 5a) and then host the whole show. That's five hours! The first hour is me doing news and sports. The next two hours is me chatting with Elizabeth Walsh in New York (we sound like we're in the same studio), and then the last two hours is me interviewing phone guests.

We were in the last hour when NBC called to send me to San Diego for the California fires. Dale Hancock was to be my sound tech.

Dale and I flew out here and left early the next morning with Larry Weidman to drive 130 miles to Lake Arrowhead. Larry is a great guy. A solid producer who is not of the nervous type. He's clear-headed and he knows what he wants. Larry is also an on-camera correspondent that mostly does live-shots for MSNBC. This was our mission out here, live shots with Larry, for this whole trip.

Lake Arrowhead and Lake Arrowhead Village are more than five thousand feet up the San Bernadino mountains about 60- miles East of Los Angeles. Why they have us staying in San Diego I don't know. Possibly because the thousands of people displaced by the fires take up all the hotel rooms near the fire-damaged area.

Well, I could see why they call Lake Arrowhead the Beverly Hills of the mountains! Absolutely stunning! I found out that many celebretites keep homes up there.

We went to Cedar Glen, on the East side of Lake Arrowhead Village. It was devestated. The fire in this region approached Lake Arrowhead and burned Cedar Glen to the ground. But then the winds changed and Lake Arrowhead Village was spared. Still, more than 300 homes were nothing more than chimney stacks when the fire retreated. We did live-shots all day that day and every day standing in the soot and dodging falling branches. One large branch hit and damaged a car about four feet to my right! THAT will get your heart started!

Today, Saturday, was the hardest. Because of the long drive, I was up at 12:30 a.m. after four hours of sleep and we were wheels-up by 1:30 a.m. It was COLD and RAINY up the mountain! Plus, sliding mud had closed the main road. The highway patrol lead us up an alternate route, but we arrived with minutes to put up a tent in the cold rain and get on the air. The good news on this day is that we were finished by 9:30 a.m. and we made the trip back to San Diego. That made the sixth time we drove that 130 mile trip. As I said in the beginning of this piece, I'm TIRED! We fly back to Dallas tomorrow.