I was going to do something significant this morning and now I cannot for the life of me determine what it was. The tension in Korea? The Cross-straits relationship between the PRC and Taiwan? The failing of our democratic institutions? Olympic Ice dancing?   I am tired of thinking about ice. There must be […]

    Drops of the late catastrophe were falling from the concrete of the balcony above at the first peek this morning. It did not freeze last night for the first time in weeks.   That is good. It is a month to go until the Vernal Equinox, when the days and night are roughly […]

Click to see larger   I managed to get out the back door thanks to the melt from the roof, which had beat back the drift on the deck into an adamant plain of knee-high white. I started a path toward the steps, throwing snow over the railing. It was then that I realized, in […]

(External Microsoft fingerprint scanner. They have been around for years.) The storms, taken together, form a great white eraser that separates this new decade from the one that went before. It may have missed the precise calendar divide by a few weeks, but was infinitely more effective as an aid to memory.   I had […]

I got scorched for not watching the opening ceremonies by more than one of you alert readers.   You know who you are, and you are correct and I was all wrong. Not for the first time, as you know. They key to the ceremony was the human scale of things, and the celebration of […]

If there actually were something like nuclear winter, I imagine it would be something like this. The temperatures have stayed near freezing during the day since the great snowfalls blanketed the city, and have plunged below it at night.   The sky has been mostly gray, and the breeze is filled with chill moisture. Ugh. […]

This was a funeral that I didn’t care about in the slightest, from the human perspective, anyway, but it did have its surreal aspect. The Congressman’s long shadow ran right across a business meeting we held with a company in Johnstown, PA, in the early afternoon.   After all the recent funerals it is a […]

(Mrs. Lot, Big Pink unit #608, surveys the salt and ice mound that covers her 2009 Prius) I am writing a cookbook, though you might not know it if you have to wade through this stuff every day. It is a real problem; the books about Rex, Naval Intelligence, Civil War Battlefields and the cookbook […]

(The Farm in Winter. The drift in front is across the driveway, waist-high and hard-pack icy from the County plows) I was going to give you a really tasty recipe for Shrimp Helene this morning, but this president’s Day I slept through the night and right past the alarm. That is sort of remarkable, considering […]

(Ruins of the Führerbunker at the Wolf’s Lair near Ketrzyn, Poland) I am sick and tired of food, and writing about it; I am weary of the house and nearly everything I can see within it; I despise the white concrete covering that cloaks the streets and sidewalks and is piled up higher than my […]