It is New Years! It is a day we used to celebrate with smiles on the little budget staff nestled in the bowels of the big five-sided building a shade less than fourteen miles away from the Trillium Picnic Table. We used to do a whimsical sort of party with a glass of wine […]

Morning, Gang! Holly has a nice breakfast lined up, and we have a couple words to explain why things are a little crazier than usual this morning. First, it is New Year’s Eve! Or, at least it is for those of us who spent portions of our lives wandering through the budget furrows of the […]

Wounded Pilot, Covered in Blood, Clicked Open Cockpit Door…” For the Time of Your Life! We won’t know for a while exactly how this astonishing piece of combat airmanship occurred only this morning and a half the globe away. The passenger who is said to have crashed the cockpit door is meeting the PM of […]

Yesterday morning, the Fourth Floor Conference Room at the Trillium had a day shift, a couple of breakfast munchers and what remains of our Aerospace Department watching a very large object leave Texas. The Academic Shop was wrestling with a 24-month curriculum for interns who can produce morning and afternoon stories, provided somebody tells them […]

  The Big Freaking Week is now safely retired to the annals of history. Or, actually muddled in the grinding of the massive plate tectonics on which we ride to our personal dissolution amid one much larger. And eternal. And so we start the first working week of Fall, with the Middle of the Week […]

  OK. You bought the air fryer when they told Miles the fih daily, ;\please?re in the Galley was going to lead either to shutting the place down or finding something that avoided using large Lodge skillets filled with an inch of fiery oil that otherwise well-intended people could cascade into minor localized flames. Accordingly, […]

Deirdre’s note: I am not going to clutter this page with another recipe card for Rocket’s chili. Anyone who has spent time around the Galley since the COVID nonsense knows the drill. Check the basement freezer for two-pound blocks of ground beef. Move a couple to the refrigerator to thaw. Make sure there are yellow […]

  Signaling Our Collective Virtue! That was Friday, and Saturday the Nor’Easter swept in, hitting New England and washing us in the backwash in Washington only now needed east and away. It was a Big Week, one that marked a capstone to a Big Summer in a very Big Year. Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com

Deirdre’s Dynamite Wedge We got complaints from the Crowd. After a week of pomp and drama, with heads of state gathering in New York and Washington alongside global officials and mysterious financiers, people wanted a meal they could sit down and eat. Much of what happened behind the pageantry remains out of view. What we […]