The Weber Genesis Grill is up and running at Refuge Farm, a triumph of proven American technology. Like the Zippo lighter and the Harely-Davidson motorcycle, it is a design for the ages. It is the last capital improvement for Refuge Farm. The old grill, heaved over the railing, was one of those Charmglow pieces of […]

t was late afternoon. I was puzzling through life as an unemployed person. I swam for an hour and felt good. Is this what life could be like? I was uncertain about that and both giddy and apprehensive. Jon-without-an-H texted me while I was working on a pro-bono project that had me quite animated. “You […]

  Boats and I were shooting the shit about old times and old tales, and the nature of narrative, as I told you. We had about exhausted the topics de jour, though I confess I have never seen things going on the way they are, and I have been to the County Fair. Boats has […]

I was gratified that some alert readers inquired as to my health, due to the absence of the Daily Blather the last couple days. I have to confess that all the crazy stuff going on has driven young Mr. Socotra underground, and provoked a serious off-line discussion with other tellers-of-tales. It is a challenge. Life […]

I hate the WalMart. Oh, maybe that is a little extreme for the emotions that the place provokes in my bosom. I have shopped in a couple of them, and once got a couple of money orders from one when I was in need last year with the local outlet of my bank closed on […]

The closest company- human company, that is, are the Russians next door, on the east side of the farm road. That probably accounts for my tendency to talk to the radio, or to the critters. I had been talking back to the radio about the jobs numbers for June released by the Bureau of Labor […]

My pal Jerry sings. It is not that he is a whistle-blower- that role is reserved for someone else in the Choral Arts Society, but this was his view from the riser where the choir sits of the big 4th of July celebration on the National Mall: He has been doing this for sixteen years, […]

I was talking to the mouse in the mailbox when I arrived at Refuge Farm. I had been contemplating the coup d’etat in Cairo and the Zimmerman trial in the predictably slower-than-normal pre-holiday flight of cars from the imperial city. I frankly do not know what to think about either, except that Mr. Zimmerman’s life […]

(Dreamscape. Image courtesy of Jamajurabaev. Rights reserved.) So, at one o’clock the barrage started as prelude for what has come to be known as Pickett’s Charge, 150 summers ago on the fields of Gettysburg. Day Three. It must have seemed like a dream, waiting to walk that mile into the guns and expecting to die. […]

The ghosts are legion in the fields around Culpeper, a long-suffering village that endured occupation by both armies in the first years of the war. The town hosted a couple hundred thousand troops from both sides over the winters of 1862-3 and 1863-64. Longstreet’s Corps wintered over in the vicinity of the hamlet of Winston, […]