Wildfire season comes to Spokane

I spent all afternoon in meetings and emerged to find Spokane Valley had erupted in flames.

With blessings from above, I slipped away for a dinner break with my dad, who was in town briefly. Afterward, I went back to work to help with the Web coverage. We had three reporters and three photographers in the field.

My boss whipped up a slicker version of our slideshow tool, which I fed with incoming images. I figured I was pretty much done after I finished linking up related content.

But the news wasn’t finished. I helped the City Desk by taking dictation from one of our reporters in the field, who fed me details about an emergency of declaration by Gov. Chris Gregoire. I threw it into a file and shipped it to the copy desk, where it had been promised as a breakout on the jump page. It was nice to interact with my former co-workers.

Friday morning I’ll be back in the newsroom at 7 a.m., filling in for our morning breaking news editor. I’m sure there will be plenty to follow up on.