January 19, 2008

The day that is…

It’s sprinkling outside at the moment and the local news says that it’s supposed to change over to snow later in the morning and we should get 1-3″ of snow by this afternoon.

Darn, I am not particularly looking forward to that.

Snow always means quite a bit of the staff calls in because they are afraid to get out on the roads and I have to pick up the other half and bring them to work as well as find them a way home.

It’s great for business if it’s during the week but it actually hurts my weekend business because that is when we are normally busy anyway. People are in less of a hurry and it takes a crowbar to get them out of the booths, particularly if it’s snowing hard.

The last time I think we really had any amount of snow at all was January 2005 or maybe even 2004. Although I drove back and forth from my house I ended up getting a hotel room across the street from the store for my employees. If the roads get ugly today I will do the same thing this year.

The bad part is that after it snows it’s supposed to get really cold which means the stuff will stick around another day and also freeze anything left on the roads.

While it’s still somewhat tenuous right now there are some similarities between the disappearance of 29-year-old Rossana Miliani in December 2005 and the deaths of Meredith Emerson and Cheryl Dunlap.

Rossana was last seen in Bryson City, North Carolina on December 7th 2005. A store clerk from Bryson City told a private investigator that Miliani came into her store with a white man in his 60s and appeared extremely nervous when they bought a backpack. She also rented a storage space there. The State Bureau of Investigation is considering the possibility of a connection but won’t comment any further.

Miliani had been vacationing in Cherokee, North Carolina at the time of her disappearance. She called her father on that day and had spoken of hiking the Appalachian Trail.

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The 2nd white van belonging to Gary Michael Hilton has also been found. It had been abandoned on a road in White County and towed to a scrap-metal yard. Apparently the van has been stripped and is in bad shape but investigators will be processing it for evidence next week.

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One bit of information I was unaware of is that Transylvania County Sheriff David Mahoney (where the Bryants disappeared/died) confirmed that the North Carolina license plate on the back of Hilton’s van when he was arrested had been stolen from a vehicle registered in Transylvania County.