We don’t know if this one is, but it stopped Deirdre in her tracks when she went looking for Rocket to open our weekend spread on the way he manages chili recipes across spice, color and the main protein in the pot. You knew starting with something this emotional was going to get us agitated […]

There was a reddish moon hanging over the conversation in the Conference Room this morning. It is the August Sturgeon Moon, one of those old seasonal names that survives from a time when people paid considerably more attention to what was happening in the water and sky than to what was happening on their phones. […]

The Conference Table has been getting crowded, lately. It was making the Dance-Off crowded and a little confused. This afternoon we have drifted into a severe thunderstorm alert that will last nearly through the eclipse tonight, so we may miss that part of tonight’s show, though we may have other things to watch out the […]

There will be plenty more swirling about Dolly and her legacy today. There should be. Yesterday afternoon, her passing stopped what we were doing here at Socotra House. The sausage soup show went back into the Galley, the Dance-Off changed direction, and for a little while we joined millions of other Americans remembering a woman […]

Miles thought we should run the Dance Off today with a rolling joke about Vic’s big appointment this morning down at Fair Oaks. He had cataract surgery six months ago, and this was the follow-up. The Creative Section sent a small delegation along, since they were interested in a stop at Shake Shack while Vic […]

Cutting Through Geography! This is how Vic’s PaPaw, like VP Vance’s, made a passage between seas in 1913! A century before anyone started worrying about getting Saudi oil around the Strait of Hormuz, America confronted its own inconvenient geography. Getting from one American coast to the other by sea meant going all the way around […]

There came a pause in the bustle of the mid-afternoon sorting for the Dance-off. Miles told us we would go with a Deirdre story involving an interesting sausage pasta recipe with a hearty soup. That changed with the word about the legendary Dolly Parton. She was famously self-deprecating about the extraordinary public persona she maintained, […]

There are some adventures to celebrate today, and we want to note them in roughly the order they occurred. The British burned much of Federal Washington, including the White House, on this day in 1814. Vesuvius had done something considerably more comprehensive to Pompeii in AD 79, back before anyone involved knew that someday we […]

Goodness, what a day! The medical stuff for Socotra personnel went pretty well this morning, with only a couple of mild discombobulations getting most of the gang back into the SUV for the return to The Trillium complex. Then we discovered that the Treasury Secretary had declared war on Iran. We are a little unclear […]

The passing clouds yesterday dropped a few sprinkles that made the still-bumpy DC streets shimmer as the IndyCar racers went through their practice runs. The result this morning is bright pavement, seemingly washed clean beneath sunny skies, low humidity and nearly perfect conditions for the Big Race this afternoon. There is an energy in the […]