It's already a fiery new year!

It's always good to get a little time off work.

With the Christmas season comes two holidays, three if you count Christmas Eve. Because of this, we change our work schedule slightly to a skeleton crew, who volunteer well in advance.

Because we also know that individuals who would normally be around to chat during the day are also on vacation, for this two week period of time we all sign up and prepare feature and timely news stories to get us through the lull of information.

The Christmas stretch came and went without a hitch, and as I left work on Saturday, all was left in place for New Years to come and go without problem as well.

For the most part it did. I didn't receive one phone call from the office while I was out of town with Paige. Along with planning for content, Amy and I were slated to seek out the mother of the first area baby born on New Year's Day. So, as I'm driving back in from Houston, Amy calls and tells me we are going to the Medical Center of Southeast Texas at 3 p.m.

I had not even dropped Paige off at home for about a minute when I get another call from Amy telling me of a fire in downtown Port Arthur.

In our line of work, there's always room for a little breaking news. I get down to the corner of Beaumont Avenue and 6th Street, though I could see the smoke billowing over the neighborhood from well away from the scene. Police had the roads blocked, fire trucks were scattered around the building that just seemed to be pumping out smoke like despite the PAFD's best efforts to douse it with their bucket truck.

Which was the image I was after, after all. I always feel I'm better when there's something going on, so how stoked was I, going back to work with this literally handed to me.

The hard part was picking a picture. I went all over the building, behind the fire trucks, in front of the fire trucks. I could not get over the amount of smoke coming from this building, and at one point, I was taking pictures of the fire fighters coming out and around the building and into the street, where a fire truck was sitting when all of a sudden the flames grew more intense and started coming through the roof.

This led to greater, darker, and thicker plumes of smoke, which were carried through the air by the wind. The cold air in the sky kept the smoke on a low level and at one point, stamped out all visibility down on the intersection of Beaumont and 6th, with exception of the face of a fire truck. It just so happened, I was taking pictures when this happened and came up with my personal favorite of the whole ordeal.