There is some nonsense happening back up inside the Beltway- I am listening to the traffic-and-weather-on-the-eights with a sense of schadenfruede this morning as the light spreads over Refuge Farm, deep in the heart of Culpeper. Not that I am going to escape the capital entirely this week- there is a ceremony in Maryland this […]

  Gentle Readers, The trees are on the verge of changing at Refuge Farm. We were huddled around the First Fire of Fall last night, terrified. The temperature on the deck had dropped, and the last salmon and chicken and steak morsel was being mopped up with good red wine. We were almost paralyzed by […]

(Hillbilly rockers Jumpin’ Jupiter belt it out in the courtyard next to Willow) I have been trying to get back to the fascinating article by a design engineer named Dennis Feucht. It seemed important at the time, and it is worth an examination to see what our pipsqueak impending nuclear-armed rivals are up to. The […]

(End of Summer, 2013, promo flyer for this evening’s festivities. Be there, or be square!) I was going to talk with you about what those whacky North Koreans are up to with their weapons of mass destruction this morning, but that is in the realm of speculative geo-politics. The whole Carrington Event thing is illustrative […]

I had a list of things that are making us run in circles this morning and was puzzling over which strand I might pull on. I got to critical point “H” and had not even drudged up “Benghazi,” when I decided that I was full enough of it, and decided to finish the repairs to […]

I was pecking away at something much safer- real life and death in human scale- but I saw a column the other day on the vast amount of out-of-state cash pouring into Virginia that made me sensitive to those insert ads that I saw on several sites as I scanned the morning rants. Here is […]

I may have made another mistake yesterday, but if I did it was in a worthy cause. The last time you were looking for a tractor, I imagine you went through the same thing I did. So tiresome. John Deere? Kubota? Buy new or used? Did you get the sticker shock I did, comparing even […]

It will be Fall this afternoon, officially, though driving through the Virginia countryside you can see that it has already arrived here. The hay-bales are stacked, some of them painted bright seasonal orange, and the advertising for the haunted hay-rides are sprinkled along Route 33 and the Zachary Taylor Highway that brought me, eventually, to […]

No, it is not like the Zimmerman Telegram. Dad used to get the Kiplinger Letter, a weekly business and economic forecasting periodical for people in management. It was started in 1920 by a former AP economics reporter and is still around today as a closely held company managed for more than eight decades by three […]

My associates have been beating the frontier drums all morning, and it is making me more than a little nuts. Sorry. Not your fault. The issues at hand include the drive-by shootings in Chicago, notably the one that produced 13 victims, including a three year old, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood where Mrs. […]