‘Thank you for this new day. …’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
The Supervisor, the M-Dogg, and Your Humble Narrator gear up for a 63-mile ride from Santa Rosa to Hopland in August 2006.

Looking back over some old training logs I was smugly congratulating myself on what I thought was a strong start to this, the Year of Our Lard 2026.

“366 miles for January,” sez I to myself, no one else being handy. “Wrapped it up with the first 100-mile week of the New Year. Not bad; not bad at all.”

And then I checked in with a couple old velo-newsie bros. No, not fellow refugees from that once-storied journal of competitive cycling — rather, fellow refugees from the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. Like Your Humble Narrator, they also ride bicycles.

The Supervisor and the M-Dogg both live in Northern California now, and it’s been nearly 20 years since the three of us last saddled up together. I’m the only one who’s fully retired, in part because I’m the only one who has a wife with a job of work, which for an old slacker keen to skip his pulls into the wind is like drafting a UPS truck on a summer day.

Anyway, there we were, chatting away via text, and the M-Dogg mentions that he just wrapped a 49.6-mile ride with 2,020 feet of vertical.

Yow.

I mentioned having done a leisurely 3-mile trail run, explaining that I got a late start and didn’t feel like kitting up for a ride.

“And here the M-Dogg is already cranking out the half-centuries,” I added.

“Mo, tell him your January mileage,” says The Supe.

“760 in January,” replies the M-Dogg, “only possible in a very dry January.”

That’s 760 miles. Not kilometers, furlongs, cubits, rods, or whatever the hell it is that Californicators use to measure the distance between organic vineyards and fair-trade java shops. And here I was, cackling over the little 366-mile egg I laid last month, which was even drier here in the Duck! City desert.

“Comparisons are odious,” they say. Ho, ho. When When John Fortescue wrote that shit he was probably on the short end of a miles-gobbling contest with Henry VI, who covered a lot of ground during the Wars of the Roses.

“Better luck next year, Forty old chum! Oh, dear, here comes Edward, with that ‘Oo’ d’ye think is the bloody king around here, mate?’ look on his face. Right, I’m off. …”

Which brings us to this poem from James Crews, “Winter Morning,” from which our headline comes. Unwrap your gift and be grateful for whatever it is you find inside.

Time and temperature

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Streetlight and moonlight in daylight.

Didn’t we just have a full moon? Is God overstocked with these things and blowing them out? Or has He finally run out of patience and put His foot to the floorboard on the road to the End of Days?

This latest celestial spotlight is the Snow Moon, which, ha ha, etc. Yesterday’s high was 61, 10 (!) degrees above normal. Today’s may be warmer still. What little remains from last week’s snow lurks in dark corners, like ICEholes waiting for women and children to push around.

But we were talking about time, not temperature, yes?

Lately it seems that the instant I’ve finished washing the breakfast dishes it’s time to make lunch. Then, with luck, a bit of exercise, and boom! Dinner and bedtime.

Not a lot of unclaimed space therein to, as Whitman put it, “loafe and invite my soul.” My soul won’t even take my calls. Straight to voicemail they go.

Now, some may say that I burn an awful lot of dawn’s early light slobbering around the Internet like an ADHD kid working out on a Tootsie Pop — the National Weather Service, The Paris Review, various and sundry purveyors of products that I don’t need and can’t afford — before finally biting into its center, the homepage of The New York Times, which almost always shares a deep brown hue with, but is very much not, chocolate.

That this drives me to lunch is only because (a) I no longer drink, and (2) I desperately need something to take the taste of the NYT homepage out of my mouth.

Having eaten my way through the fridge and pantry, I feel a pressing need for either sleep or exercise. And exercise it is, because Miss Mia Sopaipilla is in the bed, and if I try to share a corner of that king-size bed with that 8-pound cat she will get right out of it and stalk around the house, meowing at the top of her lungs. She’s deaf as a post and her voice carries.

So out the door I go. And sure, if it’s 55 or 60 out there I’m liable to stay out a while, because see “the homepage of The New York Times” and “meowing at the top of her lungs” above. Last week I got 100 miles in, plus one trail run.

When I get home I’m hungry again for some reason as Herself inspects a gas range atop which dinner is very much not cooking itself with that look on her face that says, “Some people have to go to work in the morning.” I strive mightily to swallow a cheery, “Not me!” And get out in that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans.

And soon dinner is served, as is something less toothsome on TV, and since some people have to go to work in the morning (not me) everyone is in bed by 8 and asleep shortly thereafter.

Tomorrow, as the fella says, is another day. That Tootsie Pop ain’t gonna lick itself.

Adios, January

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
The Colorado River Basin states aren’t having much luck squeezing water from the rocks. Or each other.

January has finally wobbled off into the desert, sunburnt and mumbling to itself.

“55 degrees? Seriously?”

When last seen January was clad in short sleeves and knickers, with one half-full bidon, which will not be enough as the Colorado River Basin states squabble over how to divvy up the water that isn’t there.

I mean, shit, it’s already 46° here in Duck!Burg as February starts applying the SPF 70 and it’s all of 10:15 a.m. The Year of Our Lard 2026 looks like a long, dry ride for some of us. Maybe all of us.

In the Carolinas, meanwhile, my man Clyde DePoynter reports snow and wind and a lack of natural gas that has him feeding the wood stove like Casey Jones’ fireman shoveling coal, trying to get the mail to Mississippi. He was keeping toasty by watching the UCI cyclocross world championships in the Netherlands via VPN.

No spoilers here — but if you missed the live action and would like some recorded highlights, well, FloBikes and YouTube have ’em.

Friday ‘news’ dump

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
“Epstein files … awaaaay!

It’s Shiny Object Day again at Der Orange Haus.

Hoping to distract the media from the masked, murderous ICEholes goosestepping around Minneapolis, His Excremency’s Injustice Department has ordered a massive dump of Epstein files — “more than 3 million pages of documents … as well as more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images,” according to The Associated Press.

“I’m shocked! — shocked! — to find that perversion is going on in here!”

“Your underage victim, sir. …”

“Oh, thank you very much. …”

Thank you very much not at all, you oinking fucking swine. Here at El Rancho Pendejo we supply our own, wholesome pasatiempos.

Save for Monday, the weather has been suitable for cycling and running, which, yay. Soon as I post this mess I plan to get right back after it, too.

Between bouts of healthful outdoor exercise, “Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man” on HBO is a must-see, as is the Oscar-nominated “Train Dreams” on Netflix, though the adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella doesn’t come close to challenging Mel in the yuks department.

After abandoning a second crack at the source material for another Oscar nominee — “Vineland,” by Thomas Pynchon, the inspiration for “One Battle After Another” — I’ve been reading “The Five Wounds” by Kirstin Valdez Quade, which has taken me on a backstage tour of my old stomping grounds around Española, N.M. My favorite restaurant from those days, El Paragua, gets a shout-out, as does Saints and Sinners. I took Herself to our first date at the former, where we later had our pre-wedding dinner, and once bought her a T-shirt from the latter.

So, no. We are not buying what these fascists are selling. Mel taught us how to deal with Nazis — by mocking them, savagely and relentlessly. He’s still at it. And so are we, though at times we wish we had his stamina.

And now I’m off for a ride. It feels like springtime out there right now. Not for Hitler, though. Especially if he’s just some half-baked orange understudy who can’t sing or dance worth a shit.

Achtung, beeyotch

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
Obersturmführer Greg “Jethro” Bodino in an undated file photo.

Double-naught spy Greg “Jethro” Bodino is apparently the designated fall guy — “Sündenbock,” in the original German — for the blitzkrieg in Minneapolis whose blowback may have mussed the coiffures of Kristi “Reichstag Barbie” Noem, her chief of “staff” Corey “Simple Battery” Lewandowski, and their famously erratic patron, Orange Hitler.

Bodino, believed to have been a button man in the notorious Clampett Gang before his appointment as Obersturmführer of the ICEholen SS, reportedly has been banished to El Centro, Calif., where there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that he, his photogenic Nazi greatcoat, and the lifts in his jackboots will be in command of a meter-maid’s Cushman cart.

El Centro grannies beware — you may expect a ruthless press conference if you overstay your welcome while parked outside yarn shops, thrift stores, and doctors’ offices. Also, and too, a good pepper-spraying and perhaps a dozen or so bullet wounds. In the back, of course.