Conveyer Belt The storm is moving slowly. We expected Ophelia to lash us with her gray claws yesterday, but all we saw were some puffy clouds and felt her oppressive humidity. The building was oppressive, too. The garage, down on the third level where you can feel the heat from the earth’s core, was particularly […]

Disaster Medicine I’m not Cassandra. I would never get you to believe that. The most obvious reason is that I am cursed with the XY chromosome, and thus share the dogged ability of all men to continue doing the same thing, over and over, expecting to get a different result. But I do share something […]

Duct Tape I do not want to go to New Jersey today. That should come as no surprise. I suspect it would be fairly low down on your list, too. I have made the train reservations, and the limo will pick me up at Newark ‘s Penn Station, and I said the name twice, so […]

Hidden Storm The good news is that street by street searches as showing fewer corpses than the hysterical mayor had predicted. Like 9/11, the worst case estimate had ranged as high a 10,000 dead. It appears it will be something less than that, thank God, or whoever giveth and taketh away in the aftermath of […]

After the Flood Tuesday was awful. They forgot how to drive here in Washington over the summer, and some idiot plowed into another idiot near the Third Street Tunnel, and the whole commute thing was a mess. It took nearly an hour to get downtown, and I can just about see the bus depot from […]

Back to School It was a sad, sunny afternoon on the pool-deck at Big Pink. Ivan the Terrible, the lithe young Czech who had ruled the pool with a hand of iron, is done with us and headed back to Mittleurope. The women of Big Pink liked him. His skin was bronzed by the sun, […]

Johnnie White’s It is morning here and the dog has dragged me around his course. He is a good boy and now sleeping quietly by the screen door, his major accomplishment of the day is history now, and he is taking a break. I’m unsettled. I want to lie by the pool and bake, and […]

I do not think the aftermath of the storm bothered the dog in the slightest. As far as he is concerned, the weather has broken, the pre-dawn sky is clear, and the temperature is exactly that: temperate. He Almost time to open the windows and let the clean fresh air inside, communicate with the outside […]

Home Grown Well, we are done with August, finally. It seemed to stand still at the end of it. Almost done with the summer, one last fling at the season coming up, two days of decent commutes downtown. Summer almost gone, but it did not leave without making it the most memorable in a century. […]

Beauvoir I got three phone calls while I was in the dentist’s chair yesterday. The hygienist was kind enough to take her hands out of my mouth so I could answer them. Two were about money, and one was about the disaster on the Gulf Coast . It did not look good for the survivors […]