I arrived at the Farm without a story- or rather, the knowledge that I had chores to do, which is the very stuff of life, but unremarkable, given the dimensions of the challenges we confront overseas and here at home. So I decided to ignore them and got out of the Emerald City early and […]

(The “spellbinding mock history of the Department of Agriculture’s most secretive and vital agency.” A novel by Jim Geraghty. Photo Amazon). I was looking around for a trash book to read after I pounded down the Monster Hunter’s International series earlier this month. I have a stack of great suggestions from my reading pals- but […]

(Krispy Kreme-brand hybrid grass flip flops. They help to lower temperatures by creating organic sinks for carbon dioxide and permit the top of the wearer’s feet to tan naturally and evenly). All the needles were pegged this morning. I had to turn the news-and-weather-on-the-eights streaming off the computer. Even the news that I was not […]

There is a derecho of sorts sweeping through the world, knocking the old order aside and leaving some astonishing wreckage in its wake. As part of that, I wanted to make a couple corrections. An alert reader tried the Bloody Mary recipe from 02 January of this year. I don’t know why it took that […]

(Noted Islamist Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in a screen capture from ya Libnan.) This is about as bad as it gets. A pal with a nose for how things are going- he was a senior intelligence officer in the Emirates a while back and understands the regional alignment- is conceding what we knew as Iraq […]

I could not sleep in Arlington, a dramatic counterpoint to oversleeping yesterday at the farm. I came back up around mid-day to get a decent swim and huddle with some former co-workers about the future at Willow. Old Jim was there, enjoying a tuna slider with hot sauce and the welcome warmth of the day. […]

Ah, summer is bearing down upon us- and it will be welcome. They say it will be a week in the 90s- enough to make the coolness still resident in the pool bearable. An hour in the water left me shivering on Saturday, and a quicker swim on Sunday still left me with depressed core […]

This is sort of crazy. It is Father’s Day, of course, and I looked around for the cell phone and realized we interred Raven’s ashes almost two years ago. Still, there is that inclination to grab the phone and do something, check off that box in the phantom “to do” list. Oh well. So, with […]

I have achieved a new summit: I have written not one but three stories I can’t do anything with this morning. I will have to put them aside. At this rate, I will still be at the keyboard late this afternoon and miss crucial pool time. Anyway, the traumatic news of yesterday morning didn’t sit […]

I can’t quite grapple with this morning. I am disturbed enough about the events in Iraq that I am having flashbacks to the Ford Administration’s sad end, and then the disaster that was Jimmy Carter. Some of this current nonsense is directly attributable to a painfully incorrect view of what was happening in Iran, and […]