If you’re looking for today’s forecast, check it out here.
Woke up, fell out of bed…dragged a comb across my head
I couldn’t get this Beatles tune out of my head this morning. I’m not complaining, in my opinion it’s their best. I figured…why not write about what happens during “a day in the life” of a morning meteorologist?
12:45am…Get up, try not to fall out of bed. Wake up while showering. With shorter hair there’s no reason to drag a comb across my head.
1:30am…Take Lola for a quick trip outside.
1:45am…Make the drive from south Nashville up Nolensville Road to News 2. You’ll see a lot of interesting folks on this route this early in the morning, especially on the weekends (late at night for them).
2:00am…Get to work, make a big bowl of oatmeal and start forecasting. That can take 30 minutes on an easy day when the long range forecast isn’t changing, but can occupy over an hour when the forecast is “tough”. Churn out the seven day forecast and various high temperature maps for the show.
3:00am…Send out the Personal Predictor e-mail. (Have you signed up?)
3:15am…Record the phone forecast (615.259.9576) and enter the forecast for wkrn.com. Work on a blog entry or two if time allows.
3:35am…Spend some quality time in the make-up room with Heather. It’s not very manly, but a fact of life with all of the bright studio lights. I try to help the situation by keeping my make-up in a little bag that used to hold my ski tools, ski wax and edge sharpeners, but who’s kidding…
3:45am…Work on the weather ticker that scrolls along the bottom of the screen during the show. Three parts to the forecast for seventeen different towns means a lot of fine-tuning to Nashville’s predicted weather.
4:00am…Tape the morning video for the Nashville Wx Channel (digital cable channel 185 and high definition channel 2.2)
4:15am…Record our radio forecast with Neil for Oldies 97.1 FM.
4:20am…Enter the today, tonight and planner forecasts into our chyron system (they’re the graphics we lay on top of the News 2 City Cams).
4:30am…Laugh while I watch Neil and Heather make a mad dash for the anchor desk, usually with seconds to spare before the start of News 2 This Morning.
7:00am…The show is finished! I used to think that our hour-long show on the weekend mornings was long. The weekday morning show is a marathon but surprisingly it flies by, especially when there’s rain or snow on Storm Tracker or big weather changes to talk about.
Through 9:00am…Done with all of the weather hits for Good Morning America and our morning news cut-ins.
Through 10:00am…Lots of e-mails and more blog entries as they come to me. Plan out school visits as the requests come in. Eat lunch while the newsroom has their morning meeting.
Going to bed at 5:30 or 6 in the afternoon isn’t that hard when you skip out on naps through the work week. Every once in a while no naps catch up with me…yesterday I conked out at 2:30 in the afternoon while watching a movie and didn’t wake up until 8:30pm! It’s always fun when you wake up, freak out wondering if it’s today or tomorrow morning, and then set your alarms before going right back to bed. On a more interesting note and back to the title of this entry…I found a site with more than I could ever hope to know about the closing track to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Beatles fans, enjoy.
