They said it would start at 5:31PM on Saturday, but that started to creep after normal people were getting ready for Lunch. Friday had provide the Chores Day with dry streets and full grocery shelves and today it turned into boredom when they announced that Storm God Oden had put his sandal on the brake and slowed things down five hours or so. It could go further left (or right, depending on which side of he Conference Table you are standing on). We planned on sleep as the ight fell away, the ground still dry, but with the moisture in the air from Down South colliding with the frigid arctic air mass from Winnipeg we expect maybe record events with the first cup of Flat Yank coffee tomorrow morning.

We will share our surprise if there is one.

The day-long demonstrations in Minneapolis added interest. Just a quick roll call: ICE, of course, who were in the process of serving an immigration order on an unidentified individual when another individual armed with a nice new hi-capacity 9mm semi-automatic pistol and two full magazines of ammunition. The Agents who shot him said it was a matter of justified self defense and that led us to the tale of the restaurant which provided the wall on which the shooting occurred.

The Black Forest Inn is located on 24th Street in the heart of Minneapolis. It reflects the sort of down-home venue in which the food on the menu did not become “ethnic” until people stopped comparing it to what was better at home.

The Inn just celebrated 55 years on Eat Street, a nickname it helped to popularize. Proximity to the civic center meant there has always been a curious mix of artists and hungry criminals on the street due to the Art Museum nearby. There are stories to go with that. Today’s shooting brought back memories of a gun-toting Black Forest patron who pulled out a .357 magnum and shot three holes through a valuable poster next to the bar in 1986.

(Richard Avedon, 1986. Rights reserved.)

The photograph was a gift from famed photographer Richard Avedon who also used to dine there. He to enjoyed the home-made bratwurst, tender sauerbraten and spaetzle topped off with the delicious house apple strudel. The crowd outside the Inn took videos but what was plastered on messaging feeds did not capture all the lead up to a few seconds of struggling men punctuated by a shot. There was no context to show how the gun came out or who saw what in the struggle.

To show some of the street context, it was reported as the afternoon wore on that one of the ICE Agents apparently had a finger bitten off in the ensuing events, so the backdrop to all this is still primal and emotive.
By lunch, dozens of respondents were drawn to the area through social networking to stand outside in the bitter clear cold., the colors had moved on and the language no longer mattered. What remained was a measurable layer—less than the most dramatic predictions, more than the optimists hoped for—lying quietly across the lots, the medians, and the long-unused corners of Tysons.

The demonstration grew through the afternoon despite the bitter cold that hovered at ten beow zero. The ICE Agents cleared the crime scene and retreated from the intersection on 24th street. Overnight, snow arrived as promised, heavy at first, then lighter toward morning, with a crust forming where rain brushed the surface before retreating. Roads were slowed rather than stopped and traffic was mostly plows. The old NADA lot across from the Trillium entrance carried its share, but we did not get the record three feet five inches of snow Rocket had hoped for. The Trillium stayed lit. The inventory held.

In the end, it wasn’t a storm that rewrote the record books, but it was enough to remind us that forecasts are performances and outcomes are physical. By mid-morning, the sleet line crossed this corner of Fairfax County and the long wait for the melt began.

The crusted streets are going to take days to melt and the Senate will not convene tomorrow as had been planned. That and the commotion about rogue Federal Agents and their alleged atrocities began to blare from the loudspeakers on the street and on the flatscreens on the wall. There had been hope that the remaining Appropriations bills would pass the Senate Filibuster imposed on the budget allocation passed by the House last week.

The Congressional Representatives immediately left town ahead of the storm, so they are not available to adjust their version of the bill to make it more palatable to the Senior Body of Congress.

Which means we are now likely to have another Government shut-down like the 43-day version that tied everyone in knots and wasted more than a month of our time. That happens at mid-night on January 31st. The Post and legacy Media say if there is a shut down, it will be brief. But they say a lot of things, don’t they?

We can only hope the ice melts soon enough to let us ll get back to work! Section Leader Miles asked Splash to sum things up on the white board in case there is napping in the Conference Room this afternoon.
Big Storm. Enough fell from the sky to be real, not enough to be historic.
The map moved on. The snow stayed.
What fell mattered more than what was promised.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration had the only appropriate response to Big Storm. There was a press release posted on their website. To put things in perspective, they assigned the Storm a name. NOAA is officially calling it “Fern.” That may be the heaviest thing to fall out of the sky today, and of course, we support the approach!
Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com