Home is where the haggis

After a few posts covering our weird travels to NYC and Arizona, it's good to get the heck back home. Settle down, return to normal. Walk around downtown; forget the chilling temperatures, for cryin' out loud, it's BRISK, dagnabbit. Refreshing.

I've had reason to wonder if dagnabbit should be hyphenated.

No matter! Back to this leisurely walk through the neighborhoods that make ours such a bloody interesting city. Saunter happily down Columbia Road NW from 16th Street and wonder what all that noise is... sirens... the smell of oily smoke... the smell of dust and violated brickwork... shattered glass and the fractured bones of old buildings, releasing a century of ghosts from the blackened marrow...

It was a large fire on 18th Street just under Columbia, in the upper floors of the gorgeous old building which housed the CD/Game Exchange and Chloe. Several fire engines blocked the streets and filthy water coursed down the east-side gutter. One onlooker was weeping. Several men with expensive cameras crawled through the tangle of hoses like centipedes, battling for the perfect angle...

What happened? I asked the rather stoic looking white shephered nearby, tied by his leash to the doorway of Madam's Organ. He didn't seem to know. Or wasn't willing to talk about it.

As of 8:00pm, I could find no details online, and the evening news was much more interested in the house-fire of a certain diplomat in Bethesda. Membership has its privileges, it seems.