I have gone through a lot of napkins at Willow, between wetting them under a tulip glass of Happy Hour White and writing on them, but I was not writing on them last night. I was taking a break from recording stories and just relaxing. It had been a busy and fairly productive day at […]

  They say there is no such thing as a free lunch, but I am not sure that is true. You know they used to put out a big spread of pickles and salty food “for free,” to encourage the working stiffs to come in and get really thirsty. The additional sales of adult beverages […]

Not a good start to the day. Skies are gray and smell of moisture. The first enotes in the morning queue are about family and money- the inbound ones were written at the end of someone’s day, and my querulous responses are drafted at the beginning of mine, and not caffeinated enough. I should know […]

  I dunno. Maybe there is hope. Some rumblings have emanated from the super-secret Super Committee has precisely nine days to find a $1.2 trillion bucks in budget savings or else a draconian trigger whacks discretionary funding across the Executive branch. Should that happen, the government accounts in Defense and the Intel Community on which […]

So peaceful down on the farm. Heckle is so glad to see me. The grass is neatly trimmed- thanks, Frank!- and town was bustling with pre-pre-seasonal shoppers on the main drag. This is a great circle trip- down I-95 from the Capital, off on the strip-mall chaos in Fredericksburg and west on the Germana Highway, […]

  I am going to head down to the farm on this lovely Fall day. We had a front come through with rain at mid-week and when it cleared out it left all things clean-washed and chill. It is supposed to warm up later, and I want to hang out on the deck and see […]

The moment has passed here in Arlington, the real one. You know what I mean- two minutes of silence observed at the Cenotaph in Whitehall at eleven o’clock sharp, the symbolic moment that the Great War came to an end on the Western Front. A cenotaph is an “empty tomb,” or monument erected in honor of a person, […]

I am so far behind this morning that it seems hardly worth starting. I had a request from son Eric to drive him to Dulles to catch an early flight west and I could not pass up the opportunity to share a little time with him. He won a lottery of some sort and got […]

John-with-an-H strolled into the Willow and took Old Jim’s stool at the Amen Corner. The bar area was ding a brisk business as I organized my notes, and Mac was happily picking at his pomme frites and sipping his happy Hour red. John-with took the iPod buds out of his ears. “I was hoping to […]

“It is Election Day tomorrow,” said Mac as he climbed up on the stool next to me at Willow. “So I did some electing myself.” “What do you mean, Sir?” “I went to my oncologist loaded for bear. I told him that damned medication he had me on wasn’t worth it. I want a glass […]