Local on the 8's

On my way to work, I listen to a syndicated talk show called Bob & Sheri. They are your normal morning drive talk show with listeners that call up and comment on topics of the day. They also have a one hour chat room at 8:00 am that can get pretty funny. They are a great way for me to wake up on the 40 minute drive to work.

This morning they were talking about a CD that was just released by the Weather Channel with the music from “local on the 8’s”. They couldn’t understand who would want to buy it. I really couldn’t disagree more. I couldn’t help but think about my Dad. He would have LOVED that CD. He was a guy that would sit and watch the local on the 8’s every 10 minutes to see if anything had changed. He absolutely loved the Doppler radar.

After my father died, Hurricane Katrina hit a month later, and remember Gilday and I commenting on how my father would have been glued to TV watching all the Storm Stories and Special programming based on the disaster. It’s not that he was a morbid guy; he was just fascinated by weather. I used to tell him he should go back to school and become a meteorologist. What would he have to lose? Most weather people are wrong a majority of the time anyway.

His obsession wasn’t just the last few years of his life. On every vacation we’d take growing up, it was always the first order of business to find the weather channel on the TV in our hotel room. He was on a mission to find which station carried it, and instead of looking at the hotel information guide which generally told you, he would just flip randomly through every station.

In closing, yes, there definitely is a market for it. If my Dad was still around, he would have exploded with happiness if I was to give that to him as a Christmas gift. I once made him a little booklet for Fathers Day that was titled “Thoughts from the Weather Channel” that had a bunch of pictures of me as a kid and each photo had a caption about what I learned from him. It was the sappiest thing ever and it elevated my “favorite” status to the top of the charts (yes, I have a sister). Anyway, if your Dad is as Weather Channel obsessed as mine was, I highly recommend picking it up as a stocking stuffer.