Posts

Streetcorner Blasphemy

Rosslyn’s most notable edifice. The Foreign Service Institute was housed in the glass-walled building at left. Trigger Warning: The following post may offend your religious sensibilities. In a little over two months, Sandra and I will be joining our son Adam and his family in the Washington, D.C., area for Thanksgiving. In beginning to think […]

Nuts and Alligators

Here’s a Foreign Service story that’s too good not to share. Back in the early 1980s when I was working in Washington, D.C., I was assigned for two or three years to USIA’s Foreign Press Center, just six blocks from the White House. It was a great job. The FPC was located in the National […]

“Burning Man”

These giant folded-paper “mushrooms” grow (and shrink) when spectators step on a switch. (All photos copyright © Sandra Kelley-Daniel 2018) This past week Sandra and I were visiting our son Adam and his family in the Washington, D.C., area. Last Sunday we all went to the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery where we enjoyed a remarkable exhibit, […]

How to Be the World’s Coolest Dad

Romanesque Grotesque It’s probably a little harder to achieve Coolest Dad status today than it was in 1983, but I found a quick and easy way to do it back then. At the time, I was a single dad, living just outside Washington, D.C., and sharing custody of my two (at that time) kids with […]

A Secret Place With a Delightful Surprise – Fort Valley

Dry Run Church, Fort Valley, Virginia, with western ridge of Massanutten Mountain in background During our recent trip east to visit with kids and grandkids and attend my 55th high school reunion, Sandra and I had a free day and drove to Fort Valley, one of my favorite places in the Appalachians, about an hour […]

Happy Easter!

Russian Easter Eggs Have you ever locked yourself out of the car? With the motor running? On a narrow street? With traffic stuck behind you? Because you’re just outside the Russian Orthodox Cathedral as the Midnight Easter Service is about to begin? Yup! It happened to me. Which is a self-exculpatory way of saying, “Yes, […]