Miles was wearing a strange costume for a retired Navy Patrol Aviation Captain. Splash was confused, since he was between romances. Rocket and Melissa clearly had plans for a lavish luncheon at 801 Chop House up the road, and the kids—who can’t afford such things—had a plan for chocolate, wine and flowers outside in the […]

Our Section Leader Miles was struggling to get back in the leader’s chair at the North End of the Conference room. Outdoors, the white snow-crete cloak remained, shining bright light into the conference room from the floor-to-ceiling walls on the east side of the building. There is mud where the sledders frolicked in front of […]

Naturally, someone brought up the big cavalry charge when we heard the Vice President was coming to Arlington on the 3rd of March to raise money for the GOP Mid Term elections. We can feel the temperatures rising to start the melt of the snow-crete that has imprisoned us for more than two weeks.. In […]

The south end of the Conference Table rests on stacked cinder blocks. Vic’s recliner failed this morning. It had been his command chair since the move. Getting it out of the apartment and the matching chair repositioned into the office nook became a major operation — one of those logistical campaigns that feels outsized when […]

Rocket was unexpectedly alert this morning, and he raised a hand at Miles to make a statement at the Morning Meeting. “The Buddhist monks are doing a Fifteen Minute County demonstration today. It took a while. They started walking northeast from Fort Worth, Texas, 108 days ago. The national media has been distracted by kidnappings, […]

Dick Nixon told us that “everything we knew about Vietnam was wrong,” except for the end of it. Our pal Jake served in Saigon in the waning days, and then as a promising young officer in the Intelligence Plot of the Chief of Naval Operations. By the spring of 1975, it was all over but […]

That was true in 1972, when a Jethro Tull album cover sat in a Chi Phi basement room and rocked hard, long before the Islamic Republic was a news item and before any of us imagined how strange the future would get. It’s still true now. There was a time when our curious carnival of […]

We tried the new header graphic the other morning. It was supposed to show what we thought might be happening on Monday, but what showed up was the bedraggled green note book with the when the air came out of the Budget and the Government shut down and the SnowCrete that still has everything frozen […]

Socotra House starts chipping the sidewalk. We were set to roll out the new header format this morning, now that we’re coming back online. That’s on hold—for the same reason most things are. Groundhog Day ceremonies kicked off at 8:30 across the river at Dupont Circle. Clear as a bell. Rocket and Melissa took an […]

We were waiting for the Bomb Cyclone to arrive yesterday afternoon with a certain apprehension. The publicity has been a little hysterical. The storm had not been given a proper name, so the talk drifted to the subject of bombs instead. It was already 1600 local. Skies went gray for an hour or two before […]