I spent the day assembling the Murphy Bed. I think I am probably only a month away from completion, and have resigned myself to sleeping on the floor amid the parts. But there is room for optimism. I have heat and light and the whole of a Sunday to fritter away. I took the elevator […]

I ordered Chinese after Sam the Shutter guy finally got done with the job last night. Sam has a sandy chort beard and intense blue eyes. He is a perfectionist. I wondered about offering him beer while he was trying to complete the installation of the Plantation shutters on the big glass windows. But he […]

There is a winter storm warning declared for today, a mix of sleet and snow predicted to fall atop the icy residue of last week. We had recovered sufficiently that I washed the car of the crusty layer of salt and chemicals. So the return of winter is technically my fault, and I apologize. I […]

The center of gravity at Big Pink shifted abruptly yesterday 5:15PM. The happy equilibrium of gravity and altitude came crashing down, the lode-star shifting in the heavens and plunging toward the frozen drifts around the forlorn swimming pool under its taut green cover and crusted snow. The cable company came and shut down my service. […]

Ranger 6 crashed into the moon forty years ago, one of the survey craft to help get us ready to land on the moon. My Uncle Jim designed the camera systems that sent the images back to earth digitally, prior to its lunar demise. It was quite a development, but he was very cagey about […]

“Your e-mails will be passed on to those who can make decisions.” That is what the host said on the BBC World Update. I was up early because the morning show was all about spooks and journalists and policymakers. Once a junkie, always a junkie. There is an uneasy balance amongst these tribes on both […]

It is winter and I wondered what the hell I was doing, out on the road. My motto in Washington is “If it’s snowing, I ain’t going.” Yet here I was, snow crunching beneath my wheels, the front end of the Sebring seeking its own way through the packed snow. I had thought about this […]

My friend was interesting in seeing the re-release of a classic film. Washington has been bereft of a legitimate Art House for cinema since the Biograph in Georgetown went out of business a few years ago. The Biograph had been a little one-screen neighborhood theater that couldn’t make it in the multiplex world of mega-thearters […]

It is the heart of January here, cold as Hell, a small city in Michigan I used to pass through on occasion. I thought about that little town on Friday when the goose-bumps began to freeze on my skin. I was looking at the semi-trailer that came to Big Pink with the Murphy Bed. But […]

So I wasted the day yesterday waiting for my bed to get here. It was very Thurber-esque. I thought about the memorable opening line: “I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father.” We had to read the Thurber story as part of […]