Blogging on the Powwow

As readers can see, I'm testing out a new "theme" for my blog. I love the picture of the Powwow River at the top and the dark colors, but I'm not crazy about the layout. I welcome feedback from my readers! There's a young man in my office who, as he says, is "low man on the totem pole." As the last one added to the staff, he has to be ready to do anything in order to move up. I think he'll do fine. He's bright and even-tempered and from what I can tell, a highly competent person. He's also funny as hell. But, he is sometimes the focus of jokes in our office "pod" - or our small cluster of work spaces. Last week he was working on his first bill. I think he was the first one to actually say, "baby's first bill," and then probably regretted it. He was lightly harassed about it for the rest of the afternoon. I suspect it was something akin to what goes on in junior high school locker rooms, but with a bit more soph

Well, we're going to start today's blog post with a lesson on spelling. Readers might think that I have misspelled capital  in the title of this blog post, but indeed, I have not. CapitAl,  with an "A" is used to refer to the official seat of government for a state or country. CapitOl, with an "O" is used to refer to the building occupied by a state legislature. I had to remind myself of this when I moved to Washington. You can look it up here . Okay, back to Stella. Stella , the blizzard, that is. She visited the capital. In truth, she also visited the capitol itself, but more generally speaking, she visited the capital of the United States. It was my first adventure with snow in the city and probably the only one that I will have given that it's the middle of March and the cherry blossoms are (or were?) in bloom. Yesterday there was quite a bit of hoopla about what would happen in the event of snow. Would it be all snow? Would there be rain? Would

I'm back in Washington. Despite the frigid weather, I had a wonderful trip home, with many lessons learned. Never Underestimate When Being a Runner will Come in Handy Last Friday, I was on a flight that arrived at Logan Airport in Boston at 5:03pm. It was my goal to make the 5:10 C&J bus that would bring me to the Newburyport bus station, which is just five or so miles from my house. In theory, the bus arrives  at the airport at 5:10, but then starts making the rounds to each terminal, A, B1, B2, C, etc. As long as one does not fly into terminal A, one can count on a small cushion to catch the bus. I did some trotting inside the airport, because I knew it would be close. When I neared the exits I saw that it was 5:14...not likely that I would make the bus since I was in terminal B1. I got outside and hurried in the direction toward the C&J stop. Then I saw the coming toward me. I tried to flag it down, but failed. I felt defeated. Then a man who had witnessed my eff