Bad Reporter

I was at the office on Friday talking to a friend when I looked outside and saw white stuff falling from the sky. Snow! That’s unusual for McKinleyville.

So I went out to my car to get my camera, but then realized I had left it at home. I drove home. I had to creep along real slow due to the small layer of snow on the roadway.

When I got home, it stopped snowing. I decided to quickly check my email before taking photos. But there were emails that required an immediate response, so I was stuck behind the computer for about 20 minutes.

The snow was melting and I had yet to take a single photo.

After I was done emailing, I jumped in the car. There was still plenty of snow on the ground, but I needed something interesting to photograph – maybe kids making a snowman or throwing snowballs.

My neighborhood was dead. Nobody was around.

I decided to drive to the park several blocks away. But when I got there, there was no snow. It didn’t snow everywhere, just in some neighborhoods.

I went further up the road until I was near a business that owed me money. So I went in and got it. And we talked about the snow. The owner told me that there was a lot of snow on a nearby hill.

I drove up the hill, but I didn’t see very much snow and there were no people.

I needed to get to a higher elevation – like the hill between McKinleyville and Fieldbrook. Up and up I went. There was little snow – nothing compared to what it was like earlier at my downtown office.

Halfway up the hill I looked down at my gas gauge and discovered that I was almost on empty and running on fumes, so I turned around, went back down the hill and bought some gas.

Still no photos.

I then returned to the area near my office, where there had been a lot of snow. Now it was melted. There was just a little here and there – nothing that would make an interesting photo.

So I went back to the house, where most of the snow had melted.

What should have been a simple mission was a total failure.

Thankfully a reader emailed me a photo this morning of his kids playing in the snow.