Out of chances

Well, huh—Judge Amy Berman Jackson told the Babadook to STFU. She drove him through a series of obvious fabrications—no two of which were consistent—and then expanded her earlier gag order.

(This is a kind of gag to which Roger Stone is apparently not accustomed.)

Between Jackson and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the administration is starting to get schooled.

Out of the storm

We did indeed get a dump of snow yesterday. I soaked three pairs of socks during my various forays out to dig out the car (yeah, I shouldn’t have been wearing Crocs), and my feeders were quite appreciated by birds throughout the day.

The People’s Republic didn’t appear to get the freezing rain, which I hope holds. Weather’s meant to trend warmer until later in the week.

In the meantime—and apropos of pretty much nothing—here’s a shot of the veg display at Whole Foods. I just like what they did.

Storm rising

Here in the District They Call Columbia we’ve got dire predictions of a serious snow-plus-ice-plus-rain, starting in the very early hours of today. Virginia DOT trucks have already treated NoVa roads to a couple of passes of brine in preparation. Which—as I look out on my back yard under an inch and with huge flakes dropping more—turns out to have been a good idea.

My cluster parking lot has still not been plowed, though, so I'm not getting out.

Being a fourth-generation Californian, I wig out some when I hear these sorts of forecasts. So yesterday when I got in to work, I checked it out on WaPo. Why, yes indeedy—here are the visuals from around 0700:

Snow:

Then ice:

I also cast my eye over the comments and I was glad I was the only person around when I saw this:

Because welcome to the District.

Not info overload

Three years ago, as part of a company-wide “transformation initiative”, I took part in a Potemkin Village exercise involving tiger teams supposedly working toward building strategies in three new areas.

My focus was on “internal communications”, a much-needed function. (Although, tbf, most organizations are completely crap at this.) My team and I spent about 6X the amount of time we were told to commit to the project, and presented recommendations for implementing employee communications—hiring a director, comprehensive framework for multiple touch points, comms calendar, the whole megillah.

That was before executive management decided that we really didn’t need no stinkin’ transformation. There was quite the bun fight over who should control such a function; the (now-departed) HR director insisted we didn’t need to hire anyone—we could use existing resources. But in any case, HR should own the operation. Yeah, right.

Eventually they assigned the job (not at the director level) to someone in the executive office, put up a monitor with HR announcements in the lobby and reduced the amount of information shared throughout the company by an order of magnitude. Problem solved, eh?

Well, aside from various emails from HR and whatever goes on that lobby monitor that I don’t even notice, the most frequent form of communication we’ve received has been photocopied announcements of various lectures and panels taped to elevator walls.

Until a few weeks ago, when one of these appeared in each car:

I suppose that tape wasn’t good for marble walls. Or maybe someone decided that taped flyers looked tacky. Or maybe they just felt there was too much communication going on.

Gratitude Monday: raising the dough

It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had was made by my hotel in Berlin last November. So I’ve been thinking about pizza on and off ever since. The People’s Republic does not overflow with excellent pizza, and I don’t care how efficient your delivery people are, by the time it gets to your door, the bloom is off.

So I started to make my own. Turns out that you can get pizza dough in most supermarkets, and—since I like Pizza Margherita—it’s fairly easy to put one of those together. I bought the pizza stone my friend recommended (although, tbh, I’ve got very nice crust on a cookie sheet, so it’s not clear to me that this $27 was the best expenditure; also—how do you get the burnt cheese and tomato sauce off of it?), and bread flour and yeast, but I’d been dancing around the notion of making my own dough, partly because I do not have a history of success with yeast.

So yesterday I screwed my courage to the sticking point and followed the recipe my friend uses. I had a pound of dough from Trader Joe’s for backup, but it turns out that my effort was fine. I made pizza bianca (three types of cheese):

(Yes, I haven't quite mastered the round part.)

And topped it with insalata:

It was delicious, with a slurp of Pinot Gris:

And this is what I’m grateful for today—thanks to the encouragement, recipe and guidance of my friend Heather, I can make pizza dough. Also—I froze ¾ of the dough, so I can have pizza basically whenever I like.