After roofers took off wrong roof, business kept its word

You might remember a while back when I did a story on a roofing company who (accidently) started replacing a roof on the wrong house.

In our report, the business owner promised he would take care of the homeowner who came home to find his shingles coming off his house. (The homeowner is an employee of 9NEWS who works in our production and engineering departments.)

Well I am glad to know I am not the only person who left my family today. #Thanksgiving

It's not the best place to spend Thanksgiving, but the airport will do. Everyone is in a pretty good mood. And if you want to go far, far away... it's really your only option. The only turkey I've had so far today is the single slice of lunch meat that came on my snack plate.

I'm just relaxing and passing the time.

Apparently other people had the same idea.

Happy Thanksgiving. Despite what some tweeters say, I enjoy seeing everyone's Thanksgiving dinners.

We make it look like we got it right on the first taping, but rarely we do.

You’ll see an interesting clip of me on camera in tonight’s story. We call a taped clip of a reporter standing and taking a “standup.”

I’m in the basement of 9NEWS talking about the team of police officers who bust car thieves. What better place to do that than in our parking garage on the lower level?

I wanted the standup to look different so we moved a big HD monitor downstairs. We attached a computer to it so we could play clips of police busting bad guys as I talk.

It helped give the standup a stronger feel. Here’s a behind the scene picture.

What you won’t see on TV are the lights, cords and camera we used to make this look as good as possible.

You also won’t see that we shoot about 20 versions of this standup so we can choose the very best one.

Sometimes I stumbled over my words. Other times our photographer backed into a light jarring the shot.

Let us keep summer "time" all year!

I am not a fan if it getting dark so early. Why can’t we just have summer “time” all year?

Wouldn’t you rather have it light in the evenings? I guess that would make it tough for school bus riders.

Can not wait for it to get dark so I can check out my Xmas lights

I went simple this year and only did two trees and then up around my porch. But I'm still excited to see what it looks like what's the sun goes down.

Electronic geeks like me will understand: This year is going to be great. I'm putting all of my Christmas lights on automatic timers so I don't even have to touch them.

I also decided that I was going to put up my Christmas tree in the house. It seemed like a good time to do it. Now I won't be rushed in December.

Here a couple of pictures inside. Oh and there's a picture of my dog. As you can tell he was useless.

Possible scam alert

Luckily the viewer who called to alert us about this knows not to fall for it.

The viewer said she received a call around 7 a.m. from someone named “Mr. Benjamin" at Publisher’s Clearing House and that she won a car and some money.

They told her, she says, that she needed to get a money order for $285 and they would call her back at 9 a.m. Her caller ID picked up the number: 303-654-8791.

When taking a chance works

Hello from 70 MPH as we race back to the television station after a long day. We don't have a breaking story, we're just ready to be home.

I left this morning hoping to interview a prisoner in Trinidad. He'd said yes, but we didn't have permission from the prison. We decided to head south in hopes that we would get a yes or no answer within an hour.

No word when we reached Colorado Springs. No word when we reached Pueblo.

I hoped we weren't driving all the way there only to get no interview. We reached Walsenburg and then Trinidad. ...still nothing.

I hate wasting time and it appeared that's just what we had done. I'd tweeted and Facebooked about the dilemma all morning. Social media users told me to stay positive, but I thought they were wrong. After all, how do you get inside a prison with a camera on the spur of the moment?

One of the best days of the year: #9Cares Colorado Shares

What a day of giving, hard work and fun.

Each year we look forward to the day we make an immediateimpact on those who aren’t as fortunate as us.

What you don’t see in these pictures is how at 11:30 we discovered we had no on air people to be live during our noon to 1 p.m. broadcast.

That left Jeremy, Corey, Marty and myself with a little over time. It turned out to be a blessing because we had so much fun. It gave us time to interview the many, many volunteers who give their time unloading and sorting boxes.

They deserve so much credit too.

#Kutcher now giving us TV dinner quality tweets

Why would someone give up control of their Twitter account? Of course I know people do it, but it seems like a bad idea. Ashton Kutcher has eight million followers because it’s him behind the keyboard. I don’t particularly love him, yet I follow his tweets because I’m interested in what someone as high profile as him really thinks. 

Now it feels like I’ll be getting Tweets the quality of a TV dinner when I wanted a steak.

Read the full article.

Online schools. We made a difference and we’re proud of it.

The state Legislative Audit Committee didn’t vote to do an audit of online schools, but I’m still proud that our 9Wants to Know investigation got people talking.

We teamed with I-NEWS, a group of independent investigative journalists in Colorado. We showed some concerning stats about learning at online schools verses traditional schools.

(Read the full story here.)

We showed your elected officials what we found and they hoped an audit would dig deeper. That won't be happening after votes today that were as partisan as they get.

Journalists don’t take sides, but we do search for information.

It seems to me that doing the audit of online schools would have provided more information. If the audit turned up nothing, then no action would have needed to be taken to fix anything.

Taxpayer dollars are precious, though.

If the audit turned up problems, wouldn’t you want to know about them? Wouldn’t you want to have an opportunity to debate solutions?

You deserve it. It’s your money.

Here’s more information: