Month: August 2011

Down in Denver, down in Denver, all I did was die

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
Turkish and Buddy
Associate editors Turkish and Buddy provided valuable oversight during the Vuelta a España and the USA Pro Cycling Challenge.

The (Not the) Tour of Colorado® raced to its conclusion in the Mile High City today, and I couldn’t be happier. These occasional stretches with stage races across the water and right here at home make for some long stints in the old VeloBarrel, especially since management decided there were too many necks still wearing heads.

For example, today I arose at 7 a.m., grabbed a cup of joe and sat down at the iMac. The VeloNews.com site was missing a little something — what should have been the marquee photo from Saturday’s USA Pro Cycling Challenge stage was instead a blank white box — so after a bit of frustrating flailing about in the website tool I re-edited and reloaded the pic and harmony was restored.

Next came a bit of Intertubular surfing, intended to find out what the hell was going on at the Vuelta a España. I touched base via IM with Charles Pelkey over at LiveUpdateGuy and contributed a bit of pointless snark as he interpreted the stage for his audience; then, once the streaming video from stage nine kicked in, I started writing the day’s race report.

Andrew Hood, the mainstay of European coverage for Velo and VeloNews.com, is following the Vuelta around Spain, but if someone can throw up a rudimentary stager to keep the punters occupied and buy him some time, it frees him up to do other stuff — gather quotes, write sidebars, compile his Vuelta notebook, and whatnot.

The Vuelta stage finished, I posted my report, results, a Graham Watson photo gallery, and two sidebars from Hoody — one about the toll the race has taken on worlds hopefuls, the other his notebook — plus a writethru of the stage report augmented by his quotes and on-site observations.

Next up: results from the GP Ouest France. Easy. No reporter there, no Agence France Presse report in English, so just results. Fat city.

The pièce de résistance: the Colorado race, the one drawing all the eyeballs. Short and sweet, that one. I got video about the time the break and chase were coming off Lookout Mountain, so it was the same drill —compile data and and write a stager while onsite staff ran the live updates and gathered intelligence, wait for a writethru, post a Casey B. Gibson gallery and finally swap out the marquee photo.

And suddenly it was 3 p.m. Time to dash to the grog shop for a sixer and then cool my heels (and my tonsils) while awaiting the final torrent of bits and bytes from the Colorado contingent.

It doesn’t sound like much, and frankly it isn’t. But it does take a fair amount of time, a commodity which is always in short supply.

Tomorrow I plan to swap the office chair for a Flite saddle and take a nice, long ride to somewhere. Please don’t run alongside me wearing a penis costume and beating on a giant IUD with a rubber sperm. It’s been a long week.

It’s a dog’s life

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Buddy after his bladder-stone surgery
Buddy after his bladder-stone surgery.

I signed on for a couple extra shifts in the VeloBarrel during the Vuelta and (Not) The Tour of Colorado, and also have been chiming in mornings at Charles Pelkey’s newest venture, LiveUpdateGuy.com, so I’ve been scurrying about like a roach on a griddle the past couple of days.

Being a professional slacker who hasn’t had a full-time job since the fall of 1991 it always comes as a shock to my system whenever I actually have to work anything close to a full week. How the hell did I do it all those years? How the hell does anyone do it?

Every aspect of the literary and artistic life suffers as a consequence. Grocery trips become hectic affairs instead of leisurely noshing expeditions, and mealtime the equivalent of filling the tank at a Conoco. The quality and quantity of training declines. The liquor tab takes on Pentagonesque dimensions.

But at least no one has cut me, and I’m not wearing a cone. There’s an upside to everything.

Boardroom buffoonery

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

How is it that CEOs manage to corral all the money in this country? Pulling a fatheaded stunt like this doesn’t exactly strike me as an example of top-shelf business acumen. Howard Schultz would have a tough time as a barista with an uptake this slow.

• Late update: And lest you think buffoonery is confined to the boardroom, we have this from Rep. Steve Southerland (R-Fla.), this from Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), and this from Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.). Three very small tinfoil beanies indeed.

Hot town, summer in the city

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

August is going out like a dragon that breathes fire from both ends. We just had two consecutive days of record-setting heat, as in 93 yesterday and 95 today, and may get the hat trick tomorrow, when the forecast is for 90-94.

Toss in a 5.3-magnitude earthquake near Trinidad that was felt as far north as Fort Collins and it’s already been quite a week, though it’s only Tuesday.

Tomorrow our new dog Buddy goes to the vet for the third time in a month — this time, he’s going under the knife for bladder stones — and Herself’s Wednesday I won’t even tell you about, other than to say that it starts at dark-thirty and ends at dark-thirty and involves work, study and more than a hundred miles of driving.

And Your Humble Narrator? I actually have a day free, so who knows? I might ride a bike or something, like those dudes contending (Not) The Tour of Colorado. Only slower. Much, much, slower.