Country life can be complicated when attempting to juggle local and national affairs. The Chairman has been off the property, attempting to juggle the perceived value of the property against the inexorable inflation and threat of dramatic interest rate increases from the Federal Reserve. He sent a note to DeMille and the other department heads to advise them of some of what he saw while supervising the closure of the satellite Socotra Office in Arlington. It was a little emotional, since that is where the company was founded, and now we are letting it slid into the wake.

That transaction was good, as he depicted it, though he stressed that everything happening needs to be portrayed against a backdrop in which money is essentially akin to what swirls around in the sink before plummeting into the drain. “It is all about the Moment!” he said in the note’s conclusion. The Writer’s Section has already been warned about commentary on the collective lunacy, and in order to keep our warm spots in the Staff Bunk Room, will reserve judgement on this for a future historian who can write honestly about the amazing condition of the world.

It will be someone like Gibbon, whose history of the collapse of Rome’s great empire helped to shape the way some of us who learned the old history have kept in mind. But broadcast history, like so much else, has been altered to reflect New Truth. DeMille is an engineer, a nuclear qualified one, and thus at odds with some of the changes. In his world, truth is defined by observation. Science is always open to new evidence and progress is defined by refinement of those things that can be measured.

Splash is a person whose life outlook is partially defined by the failure of a large machine capable of independent flight, and the success of a rocket attached to the bottom of the seat to which he was attached by straps and blasted him upward to a safety guaranteed by more straps attached to silken shrouds that allowed his safe entry into the ocean waves. Rocket’s perspective is to move the throttle to zone four or five and simply blow through the fight. Buck is the only one who understands why money has only symbolic value determined by other things, and that some of the symbols are incorrect. Loma’s criteria is to hae the proper payload on his aircraft, to avoid other sensors where possible, and safely return after delivering them to targets defined by someone else.

The only one who actually understands the full complexity of these disparate things is Melissa, since she has had to operate across the domains of commerce, national security and producing a family. She at least has had a measure of success in both.

There were reports of a raid in the middle east this morning. An ISIS leader was encouraged to detonate an explosive device that killed him and his family. That was the bigger news from Washington, bigger than the conference between China and Russia and the swirl of the Olympics occurring with hundreds of thousands of troops in the field in eastern Europe, living in the snow, apparently poised for action. There is palpable change in the air, as real as the chill rain that forms The View from The Farm.

Our Attorney said we can talk about the weather, so long as we do not venture into speculation about Climate. We agreed with that, since we have all witnessed the latest explanations about warming causing cooling, and vice versa when the weather changes.

The Lady In Red on the flatscreen makes the weather entertaining. A swath of brightly colored bands move across the green screen on which her graphics are presented, invisible to her on the set but dramatic to those of us huddled by the roaring fire in the cast-iron stove. She claims, looking at the reality of her brightly-lit set and a blank green screen, that a powerful storm is about to sweep over The Farm. The collision of arctic air with the moisture of the Gulf breeze could cause the rain to turn to glare ice smooth as a hockey rink shortly.

DeMille said we should have a meeting about that. There was some generalized agreement about that, and Splash mentioned he had left a pack of Marlboros out by the fire pit. We all knew the consequences of that, at least.

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