I was sitting in the Bluesmobile, looking up the slight rise from the barn to the circular drive next to the fence around the farmhouse. “I am a Michigan-trained driver,” I said. “Why did you do this to yourself?” I had been driving around the property to put tire tracks in the pristine snow to […]

(The Diamond Hotel, Manila. Photo DH). I enjoyed the snow day. For fun, I got the Bluesmobile stuck in the snow down by the barn, and got some exercise shoveling out the decks. They say there is another kick-ass storm heading this way for next week, and I am thinking a lot about the tropics, […]

(Refuge Farm triptych: porch rails, back table and trees. Images Socotra). It was Saint Patrick’s Day eve as the late winter snow began to smother the Capital of the Free World, the mysteries continued. I am choosing to view them as farce, since no one can take this stuff seriously, right? Where have the grown-ups […]

I joined Old Jim and Foggy Bottom John-with at Willow’s Amen Corner last night. I had been futzing with taxes, though my heart was not in it, and I needed to talk to people about the increasing feeling of weirdness I am getting. Chanteuse Mary got off work in The Chamber early and was ready […]

So, it is the Ides of March, the murder of a man on the Rostrum in Imperial Rome that now marks the transition from the Roman Republic to the Empire. I am suspicious of metaphors, and think they are way too pat a way to make a point. I had this nice story going that […]

(The amazing new Club House at Army-Navy Country Club that replaced the stately and crumbling old one that had its roots in the original 1924 structure. Photo ANCC.) It is not the Ides of March until tomorrow- you know, the one in which the Bard commended us to beware, due to lean and hungry look […]

(The Willow Lunch Counter Special for Wednesday: Brian’s spaghetti and meat balls with the best damn garlic bread I have tasted lately). CNN was running the Chinese satellite imagery of the three chunks of possible debris not far from the point of last contact with the missing Malaysian jet, and that was where the matter […]

(File photo of EgyptAir Flight 990 on a better day. Photo Wikipedia). I am so over this winter, and it won’t get its claws out of us. I was awake at one thirty, still wrestling with the time change. I have given up on the tossing-and-turning thing, and just pad to the kitchen, looking for […]

(The Malaysian Boeing 777-200ER that has gone missing, taking off in better times last year. Photo Malaysian Air Lines.) Goodness, there is a lot going out there in the wide world. The mystery of the missing Boeing Jet in the South China Sea- or as of this morning, perhaps the Strait of Malacca- is one […]

I got out of Arlington later than I had anticipated- hey, it was Sunday, right, and after that unpleasant Spring Forward that cost us an hour of sweet sleep? I had several good ideas that did not come to fruition, but the drive was pleasant under crisp blue skies, a little cooler than Sunday, but […]