I heard the young smart folks on NPR last night dissecting the health bill, something I was forced to confront for the first time after the big open summit held by the Commander-in-Chief and televised on C-SPAN.   That was the promise when all this started long ago, when the world was warm. I […]

We got no snow last night.   The smart people on the media had been telling us to brace for rain transitioning to something solid over night. Maybe four inches was what they said, though the temperatures made that prediction a bit of a crap-shoot.   Of course, that amount of snow would have been […]

(Red Army detachment sings on road  march, 1920. Image copyright Billie Love) I feel the former and bleed the latter, though not at the moment. I live in a State that leans Red, though, my neighborhood is resolutely Blue.   I have been uncomfortable with the whole Red-Blue thing. We were all so militantly anti-Red […]

  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 […]