Awoke late enough to see bright sunshine on the hills and hollows instead of the feared-for dusting of snow in the upper elevations. Thermometer read 27 degrees. Inside the great room: 62. Front door was standing wide open. Dog’s walking herself this morning out that same door. Transition week for us. We head out next Tuesday for the annual trek back to South Florida. Call us snowbirds, we’ll say guilty as charged. Call us...
Read MoreThere’s a special place in the heart of Virginians for John Grisham, and for good reasons. Go to New Dominion Books on the Mall in Charlottesville … or Griffin Bookshop in classic downtown Fredericksburg. There, preserved for all visitors, are whole shelves devoted to favorite son Grisham. His roots may be in Mississippi, but his heart is in the Piedmont (downtown Charlottesville office, 204-acre farm south of town). His fame,...
Read MoreAfter all the hullabaloo over D.C. developer (and Rapp weekender) Jim Abdo’s plans for revitalizing Little Washington in recent weeks, it was good to see REAL news in the top strip of this week’s Rappahannock News. Our local board of supervisors approved a resolution opposing Spectra Energy’s proposal to run a natural gas pipeline through Rappahannock County on its befouling trek from the Marcellus Shale fields of...
Read MoreIt’s official. Mother Fracker is an award winner. For the record, I am not traveling to San Francisco tomorrow (May 17) to accept my certificate for topping the General Fiction category in the 2014 Green Book Festival. But a win is a win by any other name, to misquote Yogi Berra. Or is it? So, OK, the Green Book Festival is NOT the Pulitzer Prize or the Robert F. Kennedy Award. In fact, it’s hardly a festival. GBF is more...
Read MoreRappahannock News, Thursday, May 8, 2014 By Larry Bud Meyer For an obscure drilling technique barely on the nation’s radar two years ago, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has garnered plenty of attention so far in 2014, pro and con. As the April 30 oil train derailment and explosion in Lynchburg shows for a state seemingly beyond the controversial technique’s reach, fracking is starting to come awfully close to home. The CSX train...
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