As the reporter said, "Weather stories suck when there's no weather." Now, despite the photo (by Mike Taylor) showing plenty of weather, she made that comment a couple of hours into the search for the story. It was the first weekday after the biggest snowfall the area has seen, and the housecats thought Katie Nordeen and I could turn another two-story, two live shots for the day. It would have been the third time within two weeks. Two angles on a day of bad weather. This time they wanted one on road conditions and how the city of Greensboro was handling them, and the second one was to be on what does a homeowner do when their 80 foot trees are supporting the heft of wet snow. But it was not to be today. Why? The interstates, state roads, and primary roads in the county were dry from some outstanding work by the NCDOT and the city of Greensboro, and all that was left was some residential streets. But for the most part, they were very driveable. And the tree story? After driving around several Greensboro neighborhoods, the best we could find were a few branches that had snapped and fallen into yards, damaging nothing. It looked a lot like the photo above. We could barely find any people outside.  Fortunately we have a smart guy at the helm in Kevin Daniels, fresh off a vacation in the Carribbean. We told him how the original story ideas were melting away, and he made the right call. The decision? Cut the tree story, change the road story into a VOSOT, and the reporter package is now about the people at the Piedmont Triad International airport who have been inconvenienced by the snow.

The best part of that is that the story was already shot by colleague, Stewart Pittman, who also was just off a Christmas break, but not as fresh off his vacation as Kevin Daniels. Stewart was called in to do on-camera live shots for the morning show on three hours of sleep. Poor guy. I can only imagine the dizzying stupor he must have been in gathering that stuff. Nevertheless, we got the producers what they needed, and we felt better for not having to slam so much together, and surely Stewart felt better going home well before he expected.