(The whole campaign, Fredericksburg to Gettysburg. Lee spent the winter of 1863 in Culpeper, to the lower left, with J.E.B. Stuart occupying Fleetwood Hill at Brandy Station to screen the main force of the Army of Northern Virginia from the predations of Union cavalry). I made it through the weekend- it was an aggressive one- […]

(AT-6 Texan WWII trainers. 24 of them are launching for Washington with a real B-25 Mitchell medium bomber- the Panchito, out of Delaware- to fly in formation by the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery in honor of America’s disabled veterans. The flight was supposed to happen last Friday but washed out that day and Saturday). […]

I don’t want to beat this all to death, but I am always on the look-out for old cast iron pots and pans. You can often find them at places like the Minuteman Antiques Mall on Rt 3 just east of Culpeper. They have hundreds of stalls filled with country stuff- it is where I […]

(The five quart Lode Dutch oven. The top has no handle, so the top can be used as a skillet. This makes the DO the go-to cookware if you are on the run from Homeland Security). This is all Ann’s fault. She is a mid-western gal, a Buckeye, for goodness sake, and when she is […]

(A designer watch from Señor Dali’s Dadaist phase. I am increasingly convinced it makes literal sense). I had written a story this morning, of sorts, a surreal piece of the super real of today completely by free association. It had nothing in it like the sight at Willow last night of Barrister Jerry tucking into […]

Those barbarians are fighting their way into Kobani, a Kurdish town on the border with Turkey. Kurdish sources are telling Western media there are 50,000 Kurds, Christians, and Turkmen still in the town, and there is going to be something spectacularly ugly if- or when- it falls. The Turks has tanks and troops on the […]

It was a fabulous weekend with some long-deferred chores accomplished down at the farm. The pastures and yard were cut, the foliage around the house got trimmed and inside there was some housework accomplished- vacuuming and such to prepare for the First Fire and vacuumed inside and drank a bottle of good wine and a […]

A pal dropped a line yesterday when I was still considering the aftermath of our century of interaction with the people and government of Haiti. I think of the place with fondness: the people were nice, although their government was a curious thing. I largely felt they were better off when Smedley Butler’s Marines were […]

I have been down a few rabbit holes already this morning- sorry. The missing girl in Charlottesille and her accused abductor, the plague, the loony jihadis, all of that. Then I was trying to process the impact of the tweet that announced that Jean-Claude Duvalier, former dictator of Haiti, had died at exactly my current […]

OK, so the good news is that it wasn’t Ebola that appeared in the ER at Howard University Hospital. A patient who had recently traveled to Nigeria actually had the symptoms associated with malaria. Whew. That is one less thing to worry about for yesterday, and I checked and my head is still attached to […]