Since Fairfax County no longer accepts glass for recycling, you have to schlep jars and bottles and whatnots to designated dumpsters. Yesterday I took the accumulation of glass over to one of them and discovered that it’s apparently been a rough couple of weeks or so.
Pretty much filled to the brim.
Gonna be a tough winter.
©2026 Bas Bleu
Eight days after the Big Dump o’ Snow and Sleet, our snow removal contractor finally got around to actually clearing the cluster parking lot.
At the South exit, they piled all that snow up at the street
corner, so you have to creep out into the middle of the road to see whether
anyone’s coming from the right.
Yay.
©2026 Bas Bleu
We here in the environs of the District They Call Columbia have had sub-freezing temperatures for well over a week. We still have mountains of snow from last weekend’s storm, and—while I’m grateful this weekend’s bomb cyclone missed us—this stuff won’t go away for a while.
So on this Groundhog Day I’m grateful for these gloves that a friend knitted for
me:
She chose the open-finger pattern so I can take photos with
my mobile without having to remove my gloves. The material is wool, so it’s
really warm. They are a great blessing on my morning walks, where temperatures
have been in the low double digits for weeks.
Being from LA, I’ve never grown used to wearing gloves (or
carrying umbrellas), so I have to remember to put them on when I go out. A couple
of weeks ago, I stuck my head out the back door to toss seed to the birds and
it seemed okay. So when I left through the front door a couple of minutes later
I thought, “I probably don’t need the gloves.”
I didn’t get two houses away before I realized I needed the
gloves, so I went back and put them on.
So grateful to have them.
©2026 Bas Bleu
A couple of days ago I saw a clip of a Minneapolis community brass band riffing on “Stand by Me” at one of the memorial gatherings for Alex Pretti, the latest victim in that city of our homegrown Gestapo. I was struck by how vibrant the music was—with everyone’s breath coming out in frozen puffs, but no damper on the authenticity or the energy.
And it brought me back to the Playing for Change
organization, and their version of the Ben E. King hit, originally released in
1961. Man—different time, and yet so much the same.
I think I saw the Playing for Change video about 10 or 12 years ago; it was such an interesting notion, editing in multiple
musicians playing the same piece literally around the world. And that particular
song was the perfect one to debut the concept. They’ve since done it with lots
of songs, including my last
Friday’s earworm.
Both “Stand by Me” and this amalgam of performers perfectly
represent what we’ve been seeing for weeks in Minneapolis: people of all
backgrounds standing by their neighbors, despite the weather and despite the
very real danger of masked thugs intimidating and committing crimes against
them.
Minnesota nice will crack the ICE. And we need to stand
with them.
©2026 Bas Bleu
To my knowledge, the snow-and-sleet storm that hit the region of The District They Call Columbia on Sunday has not been given a name; no Snowpocalypse or Snowzilla. But—at least in the environs of the People’s Republic, it looks to me like we got right much of it, and—since temperatures are not to rise to even the freezing mark for days—it’s going to be with us a while.
I finally took a walk around the block and took some pix. I think some of these cars are going to be there until at least Groundhog Day. You decide.
These guys got dug out by Wednesday; they’re hopeful about
getting their spots back.
©2026 Bas Bleu
As you might be aware, there was a snow storm here. The company contracted to clear snow from our cluster left a 2ft-high margin of 5ft in front of all the parked cars, which means that anyone wanting to move their vehicle out had to shovel about 60cu ft of packed, frozen snow from in front of it. It’s not expected to get above the 20s this week, so that snowpack isn’t going to melt any time soon, either.
I emailed the cluster board, and got back a load of
nonsense from one of the members, and put in an urgent property management service
request to send the plough out and narrow the margin to about 3ft. The PM for our cluster replied, "I have already reached out to the snow management and am awaiting their anticipated schedule for the next few days."
What I would have liked would have been, "I've reached out to them and asked them to return and finish the job."
At the cluster board meeting on Monday night I brought it up again, and she gave me some bollocks about it being an unprecedented storm (on account of all of the sleet), and the contractors have to be careful about not wrecking their blade on the blocks of ice that form. Which makes no sense to me: if you can plough to a 5ft margin, why can you not safely go back and carve out 2ft on either side?
We should "give them the benefit" and let them return for further passes, either Monday night or yesterday.
But as of nightfall yesterday, they hadn't returned.
(Fortunately, I managed to dig out the Saab, and made it out for emergency Kalamata olives and cherry tomatoes.)
Walking is also curtailed—despite HOA requirements that
residents shovel the walkways in front of their property, not everyone gets
with the program. Also, no one is responsible for clearing sidewalks along the
city roads here, so pedestrians have to wait for a good melt, or else walk in
the street.
So here’s a picture of a candle for you. I was interested by its burning pattern.
©2026 Bas Bleu
Eighty-one years ago today, the Red Army—no strangers to nightmares—came upon a hollowed-out shell of a compound that became the one-word representation of the worst that humans could do to one another. And so today, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was a conglomeration of factories—both
for manufacturing and for death, as distinguished from other camps like
Majdanek or Sobibor or Treblinka, which were devoted to extermination pure and
simple. Great German industrial powerhouses, like the chemical monolith I.G.
Farben and arms giant Krupp, consumed hundreds of thousands of prisoners as
slave labor in their factories. Those who could no longer work went to the gas
chambers, where one of Farben’s most famous products, Zyklon B (developed for
pest control), snuffed out their lives.
Oh, well—you know all that, don’t you?
And yet, you don’t, or you forget, or you become impatient
with remembering, because it’s uncomfortable and inconvenient and even
unpleasant to think about it. And there’s always someone ready to shout about
how one atrocity is offset by another because it preceded it, or went on
longer, or involved one ethnic or religious group or another.
But the events of recent weeks (and years and decades) have
made it all too clear that those who do not learn from history’s mistakes are
doomed to repeat them. Anti-Semitism, intolerance, racism, fascism and
dogmatism are on the rise—and all of them right here in the US. And now that
pretty much anyone has access to assault rifles, RPG launchers, bio-weapons and
worse, we do well to haul ourselves out of our daily stroll through the trees
and take a good, hard look at the bloody forest.
We have been provided with irrefutable proof on an
unimaginably massive scale, within living memory, that those who begin by
burning books have no qualms whatsoever about burning people. If we can’t learn
that lesson, I just despair.
©2026 Bas Bleu
We had a big snow storm yesterday. Prolly about 5” in The People’s Republic, as measured by the top of the table carved out by the heated bird bath.
Sleet started dropping around 0900; by 1300 it was coming
down like steady rain.
Forecast is for days of never-above (or even approaching) the
freeze point, so I reckon I’m not getting out of here in my car for a while.
The weather also restricts my cardio workout, because no
one’s responsible for clearing the sidewalks on public streets around here, so
morning walks would be more danger than benefit. I have to wait until it
unfreezes long enough to melt and dry away all the snow.
Still—I have provisions, heat and power; at time of writing
I have detected no frozen pipes, so I’m doing really quite well.
I also have a bin of safflower seed, handfuls of which I
toss out on the patio about every hour. And the birds who’ve congregated to
tank up at the Bas Bleu Snack Bar—the juncos, blue jays, sparrows, finches,
chickadees, downies, cardinals, wrens, nuthatches, titmice and even the doves—are my
gratitude today. Because I spent hours, snuggled under an afghan crocheted by
my sister’s late mother-in-law and sipping my way through a pot of tea, just
watching them dancing in the unexpected largesse of food. (And also the
unfrozen source of water.) The sparrows, especially, made me smile, because
they were all fluffed-up little balls against the cold.
After the horror that was Saturday in Minneapolis, those birds
saved my soul.
©2026 Bas Bleu
After the unhinged performance in Davos Wednesday, I was thinking today’s earworm had to be “Yakety Sax”. Or maybe “Horst-Wessel-Lied”, for ICE kidnapping four children—one as young as 5 years old—to literally use as bait to draw out families who otherwise wouldn’t open their doors for fear.
(The children have all been sent to concentration camps in
other states.)
But I decided that all of them can get fucked, and I’ve
been surrounding myself with music that envisions the world we could make, if we
really wanted to.
Viz: Playing for Change’s cover of Bob Marley’s “Get Up,
Stand Up”.
I mean—think about the world we want to leave for Keith
Richards.
©2026 Bas Bleu
Since I have no words (well, I do; but they’re very uncouth and I’d just run them on a loop for 72 paragraphs) for yesterday’s unhinged performance at Davos—by which I mean everything every member of this unhinged administration said and did—here’s a photo of some Canada geese:
(Apologies for the quality of the shot: it was 17°F, my
glasses fogged up and I had the light behind me reflecting on the mobile
screen.)
TBH, I’m not a fan of them; they’re the rudest thing to
come out of our neighbors to the North, they act like gangsters and they poop everywhere. (I reference the line from Patton, where the general
promises that his Third Army will “go through Europe like crap through a goose.”)
But compared to Republicans up and down the line currently in office, they’re
organized, focused and would not follow anyone attempting to invade Greenland.
(Or Iceland, as the case may be.)
These guys were on the golf course I sometimes walk
through. I gave them a wide berth.
©2026 Bas Bleu
