So, the holiday is over, gone with a faint blue flash that reminded me of something I couldn’t quite remember. To keep my mind off the other memories, I was working on a small project with a dual purpose. I have (somewhere) a pile of things that go back to days spent on what is […]

A Merry Christmas! This is a view from downslope of the barn at Refuge Farm. The snow- no kidding- is falling lightly on this Christmas morning. It is enough to gently accumulate just a bit and bring back memories of the kids and their wild excitement, and the parallel wild excitement we shared all those […]

Screen Shot 2020-12-24 at 11.06.57 AM.png It is raining here, just south of the Rappahannock River. Cold rain, but filled with a certain mirth at the warmth of the fire inside, good company, and the promise of a new year less filled with strife and uncertainty. I ran across an old clip of what a […]

20 December 2020 Editor’s Note: This popped up as I was trying to organize a compendium of official travel to some odd places- Delhi, Zagreb, Rangoon, Pyongyang among others. It was weird and fun. But I found some other stuff that stopped me in my tracks. This is one of them.We talked about th end […]

19 December 2020 When One War Ended…. Editor’s Note: Here in Virginia’s Piedmont, most of the snow is aligned in orderly clumps this morning. Those may depart before the endless series of Hallmark movies has been put to bed for what hopefully may be a bright new year. I can summarize: “cute lady returns to […]

They have been hysterical on the flat screen for the last couple days, predicting a wild variety of snow accumulation on the Eastern Seaboard. We had nothing last season, so this combines a potential novelty and systemic collapse as a news story. Of course, there is so much going on in the background it is […]

It was an odd Thanksgiving this strange year, and odder still to feel the spirit of “thanks” that rises on mornings like this. OK, I get it. You cannot feel the ice that coats the old Navy bell on the back deck. It has spent it’s long life in the open, on the ocean, decorating […]

(This young American is on the only side of this little bridge you would want to visit. The other side of it is in North Korea. Taken at he Joint Security Area (JSA) in 1980 by some kid named ‘Socotra.’) I am sure you want to talk about the Electoral College this morning, and the […]

The big epidemic and the big emergency continue to rule our lives. Not so much down here on the farm, since satellite coverage enabled us to see video of an obviously stressed United Cabin Crew throw a young family off a flight because the family’s two-year-old had trouble conforming with CDC guidelines. The rest of […]

Editor’s Note: So, SCOTUS refused to accept the legal challenge from Texas yesterday, and set the stage for the Electoral College vote on Monday. From what we can see from the Piedmont here in Virginia, that strongly suggests we will have a Biden Administration next month. I anticipated grand theater in this amazing year, but […]