I live in Yorktown — am I your daughter, MichaelG?! I live adjacent to those battlefields, Brian, and that’s where I bike. Twenty-one miles, especially beautiful and dangerous at dawn or dusk during rutting season when a buck will take. you. out. to chase a purdy doe. You can sometimes hear them blasting through the woods, but I usually just about fly off the bike for fear. I kayak from my backyard (actually, Wormley Creek) onto the York River, where the British caught hell from the French and Americans. My daughter and I were out about 10 days ago and saw two bald eagles, one juvenile and the other an adult. Those are birds I only saw in cigarette advertisements when I was growing up in Chicago (actually, a suburb. But you knew that, MichaelG, as my father, right?) My eldest was just running in the battlefields Thursday and saw an otter. It is wonderful, Brian. I’m glad you had such an experience here.

So. Nance, another request to share private e-mail w/MichaelG. And Brian, when you decide it’s time to move here let me know. My neighborhood is a well-kept secret and you usually have to know somebody old who’s dying/moving (same thing, I guess) to buy a 1950s ranch house built by guys who put men on the moon but couldn’t make a good decision about mechanics or construction to save their lives. Still, my homemade house is worth it.

Guess this thread proves the point we mock: Weather is talkin’ news.

You never know what you’re going to get, any more, when you book a week in Indiana. I’m totally happy it wasn’t a week of 36-degree drizzle.

So the next day i went down to Union Station again, and they’d dug some trains out of some museum somewhere (I swear) and I got to Indianapolis, way late. My sister picked me up in the sports car that her husband had traded her VW rabbit for (she never forgave him for that) and of course it had no heat. And as we rode back to her place, she said their pipes had frozen and they had no hot water, hope that wasn’t too much of a worry.

That’s when I resolved never to travel for Christmas again.

A few years back we vacationed in the Williamsburg area; visited Colonial Williamsburg (which was a lot more interesting than I thought it would be), and Busch Gardens, and Norfolk Naval Base (pre-9/11 they conducted a pretty extensive tour…I suspect things are different nowadays)

And – we drove down a parkway from Williamsburg to Yorktown, which was very, very beautiful and interesting. The National Park Service ranger who conducted the battlefield tour was an attractive young woman with a Russian accent. I’m a huge Civil War reader, but honestly I don’t know a hill of beans about the Revolutionary War – so I was paying attention to her narrative, and it was full of details and narrative sweep. She fielded lots and lots of questions and never missed a beat. It was marvelous…plus, the setting there – gentle green hills rolling down to the wide blue Chesapeake Bay – was just sublime.

If I have my druthers – retiring to Western Maryland or to the Tidewater region of Virginia would be heaven, pretty much

VA, huh Kim? My daughter lives in Yorktown.

the furthest I ever went on a non-snow chase was about 150 miles out of Nashville… but we had an old-timer photographer who decided one day to follow his orders to the letter and take off up the interstate toward the storm that was supposed to be bearing down on us, calling in every half-hour or so to report no snow yet, not here… he got within an hour of St. Louis before the desk turned him around.

The last weather story I ever filed was during a stupid snowstorm in VA. Knowing I’d be tapped to write about it, I made a preemptive suggestion: Go to the local DQ and interview people ordering Blizzards. The “brite” would have a total WTF edge to it, as the snow would be gone by morning, when folks would read the story. To my utter amazement, my usually quite literal editor bit. I almost got away with it until the next ed. up decided what the idea really needed was me to contact all sorts of businesses that wouldn’t do well in snow — like carwashes. The first five inches of the story were hilarious, and then you hit the brick. (not unlike my career)

I can’t wait to see if The Wire has a weather story. It’s gotta.

Once, here in rainy Portland, I was paged in the middle of a story shoot to immediately stop my story, drive to north Portland and shoot video of snow falling. This was about noon. We got there, saw some flakes falling but none if stuck and shot 30 seconds of flakes in the air.

The snow stopped within 30 minutes and did not resume all day long.

Was I allowed to return to my original story and pass the quick flake video to our weather guy?

Nope. I was ordered to stay there for 6 more hours. The snow that spit and stopped and did not stick and had no impact was their lead story that night, naturally LIVE!

And so gentle readers, I ask for compassion towards those reporters stuck LIVE! in the weather. They know exactly how stupid they look but it’s their managers who require it.