For the two or three people who use it, I've done some cleaning up of the five million lines of code on my Near Southeast Transit Options page, and it should now be more or less functional again.

According to an article just put up at washingtonpost.com, the long-awaited Bluejacket Brewery will officially open for business at 4 pm on Tuesday, Oct. 29, with dinner service beginning at 5:30 pm.

It's an intense morning in the neighborhood as a shooter has barricaded himself inside the Washington Navy Yard. There are updates being fed all over the web and Twitter for those wanting to keep up. But I did want to pop my head in to say that I am still on hiatus, so I won't be returning to the Near Southeast news feed as of now. (I may have some other content coming in the coming weeks, though, so don't desert me completely.) And thank you to everyone for all the kind thoughts over the past weeks.

Here's the pseudo-official obituary, in its original form, before it gets mangled in various publications across the United States.

I'm not anywhere close to a point where I can wax poetic about any of this, except to say that it was a most cruel twist of fate to deprive my mother of the abilities to speak and eat, when there was never a person she didn't want to either talk to or feed (or both). Even in the very late stages of her illness, her smile and excitement when anyone arrived to see her lit up the room, in the same way she had lit up innumerable rooms over the years with her energy and enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, as her brain degenerated it lost any ability to send any signals other than GO-GO-GO, and her body finally gave out, like an engine that had run for way too long with no oil.

There is relief that she is now released from what these diseases did to her, but it is staggering to all of us who knew her that we are going to have to figure out a way to come to terms with the tremendous void she has left behind.

As for JDLand, I'm going to take some time to recover from these past months. I'll send up a flare when I decide what the next chapter will be.

In early 2012, after a few months of noticing her having problems remembering words, she was diagnosed with a form of dementia (FTD) that has left her memory intact but very quickly stole her speech completely and caused other cognitive issues. This was devastating enough, but within a few months we also found her to be suffering from a form of ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) that targeted her throat and mouth muscles, swiftly affecting her ability to chew and swallow food.

This has been such a body blow, not only to see this woman so full of life and energy be stolen away from us week by week, but to have known from the moment of diagnosis that there was absolutely not a thing we could do about it. It's like the entire family has been riding in a car with no hands on the steering wheel.

Because it's a rare combination, and because every patient with these diseases progresses differently, we've been very much on our own in terms of trying to care for her, with my father bearing the brunt of the exhausting day-to-day work while I turned my laser-like research abilities away from hyperlocal real estate and toward trying to come up with the best strategies for keeping Mom comfortable. All while nursing a desperately broken heart, alongside the shock that everyone who knows her has felt--this was not the anticipated ending of the story of this cowgirl from Wyoming who came to the big city at age 19 in 1959. (She was supposed to drop dead on a golf course at age 95, probably after a hole-in-one. And she was certainly supposed to outlive her cranky and lazy daughter.)

We are now seeing a crossroads ahead of us, as they say. So it's time for me to make sure that my focus is where it needs to be, and that I give myself permission to stop trying to keep up with other parts of my life that I just don't have the strength or interest to deal with right now. There's too much going on in the neighborhood now for me to just keep going with a hit-or-miss approach that only serves to make me feel like I'm doing less than my best.

I'll still be around on Twitter at my @jacdupree account, because I will always need an outlet for generalized snark and carping. But I really am ending the Near Southeast news service until the storm clouds clear, whenever that may be.

I'm not 100 percent sure that I'll come back to the same approach of JDLand's past 10 years, but I'll always have my camera in hand.

Thanks to all for your patience over the past few months, and for your readership for all these years. See you around....!

You may have seen the holes punched into the side of the building recently, but if you're fearing that any work is a precursor to the brown-and-white structure being salvaged and redeveloped, don't worry your pretty little heads.

Yards developer Forest City has passed along word that after the current environmental remediation is finished late this summer, the former Building 213 will then be going off to meet its maker. It will cease to be. Bereft of life, it will rest in peace. (Sorry, I'm a bit punchy tonight.)

Demolition, once started, is expected to take about six months.

As the northwestern edge of the Yards, this prime corner spot just northeast of Nats Park will eventually see new construction, most likely an office building.

But that's a good ways off--in the meantime there will continue to be parking on the site, and Forest City is also looking at maybe putting in some grassy areas both as open space and possible special events uses, though their plans aren't firm as yet.

And it also will be a bit different to be able to see well into the Yards when standing at 1st and M instead of looking at the remnants of a cloak and dagger operation.

(And, for the record, I'm allowed to be snarky about this place. Back in 2005 the guards there called DC cops to chase me down on 1st Street when I was taking photos in the opposite direction of the building, never having once taken any shots of 213 itself. And I did get tired over the years of seeing them reach for their guns as I walked by their fence with camera in hand.)

It's really just one photo taken at helicopter height from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive at the Library of Congress, but since it is available as a 72 MB .TIF, I was able to zoom in for some looks back into the years right before I started my own photo journey. Judging by the landscape, the best I can say is that it was taken sometime between 1992 and 1999.

Go to the page to see all of them (with explanations of what you're seeing), but see if you can figure out what you're looking at in these captionless sneak peeks:

They certainly trump the black and white overhead photos taken at about the same time that are also on my page, though at least those have some views that the trees obscure in these new ones.

At the same time, I was able to check out the progress on the filling-in of the sunken eastern portion of the Southeast Freeway to build Southeast Blvd., and dang if they haven't already piled the dirt up so that 11th Street is now level with the "land" just to its west.

Needless to say, I had to create a photo gallery of the remants and the progress, where you'll also see that work is speeding along on the new flyover to the outbound I-695 bridge.

But I wasn't just interested in the tearing down and filling in, so I continued down to O Street, where not only is the 11th Street Local Bridge inching ever closer to getting all of its lanes and pedestrian path opened, but the new asphalt Anacostia Riverwalk Trail path to the river has been laid, which also takes you to the spiffy new landing just completed by the riverside. And from that landing you can see the spiffy new overlooks that reach out onto the old bridge piers from the new local bridge. (For the record, I could have easily sidestepped the construction barrels and ventured onto the overlooks, but I am a good little citizen.)

Lots of images of the new trail, the landing, the bridge, and the surroundings are in a second new photo gallery.

If these two galleries aren't enough, you might take some time to browse my before-and-afters all the way down 11th Street, from the freeway to L to M to N to O to the river, as nearly four years of construction have altered the vistas from a maze of flyovers and embankments to, well, a completely different maze of flyovers and embankments. (But the new flyovers are a little lower on the horizon, at least.)

I also checked out the other projects that are in various stages these days, from Twelve12 to the Lumber Shed to the leafed-out and fountain-ed Canal Park to the hole in the ground that will be the Park Chelsea.

There's new pictures on each of those pages, but I also couldn't help myself and pulled together a third photo gallery, with photos from those spots and a few others that were particularly photogenic on a particularly photogenic day. (It even includes my very first visit to the footprint of one of the neighborhood's most central locations. Where might that be?)

[A postscript: I truly think Sunday was the most perfect day for taking pictures in the 10-plus years I've been wandering the neighborhood, with the achingly clear deep blue sky perfectly matched with the late-May sun strength and positions. I ended up walking more than eight miles in three separate treks, and came home with a smidge more than 1,000 photos, about 300 of which are now in my photo archive.]

First, at right (click to enlarge), a rendering of the Twelve12 development's southwest corner at 4th and Tingey SE, now updated to show in the corner ground-floor retail space that Sweetgreen will be coming to when the project is completed in mid-2014.

And below, an overhead view of what some of the DC Water acreage could look like if/when Forest City's plans to Yard-ify the site come to fruition:

Working from the far left, you see Nats Park at 1st Street and the two green-roofed residential buildings totalling 625ish units, along with the 16-screen movie theater just to their east. There's also a whole lot more grass and greenery around the two DC Water buildings that would remain on the site, the historic Main Pumping Station and also the more midcentury O Street station building by the river. And, if you know what you're looking for, you can see that Diamond Teague Park has been expanded northward, and Potomac Avenue has been extended one block east to a new street (1 1/2 Place) that would run between the theater and the residential buildings.

(There's also a couple of other interesting tidbits on this drawing, including two new buildings at far right just to the north of the Yards Park's great lawn, and two other buildings just to the north of the theater and 1st street buildings. All of these are within the footprint of the Yards, on sites currently occupied by surface parking lots. But those are probably still a good ways off. And you can also see at the very bottom right the first hint of the marina that is supposed to be coming to the Yards Park someday.)