Month: September 2018

Another bite of the Apple

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
The iPhone 5. Sure, it’s old. So am I.

It’s that time of year again. Another golden delicious has fallen from the tree in Cupertino. Several of them, actually.

There’s the latest iteration of the Apple Watch, of course. Apple is always Watching lately. I have a Timex Ironman that’s so old I don’t recall exactly how or when I acquired it, and we get along fine. It doesn’t inform on me to the State or the Medical-Industrial Complex, and I don’t reset it with a hammer.

The Timex Ironman takes a licking and … yeah, yeah, awright, OK, I toldja I was old.

And then there are the new iPhones. Once the size of a wallet, they’re now as big as a purse, and the rubes will empty both to buy even the cheapest of them.

That would be the iPhone Xr, which goes for the low low price of $749 for the 64GB model. I imagine the 128GB model will be more popular, so tack on another fiddy for the additional selfie storage.

OK, lessee now, what can I get for my 2012 iPhone 5?

Apple GiveBack chirps: “Based on what you’ve told us, you’ve got $25 in trade-in value. We’ll happily turn it into a refund once we verify the condition of your device.” This is mildly insulting — not just the low-ball offer, but the language, which implies I’m trying to screw Apple instead of the other way around. But as a trillion-dollar company Apple doesn’t really need me and this dry peck on the cheek is all the foreplay a mutt like me is gonna get.

Hmm. Based on what I’ve told them, I have an iPhone 5 that turns on, with an enclosure and screen in good shape, and buttons that work. So I think I’ll keep using it until a critical number of those things are no longer true. How d’ye like them apples, Apple?

Off to see the Doc

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
Sam Hillborne, meet Doc Long.

Doc Long, that is.

Dr. William Henry Long, a forest pathologist, lived and worked in New Mexico from 1910 through the 1930s, living in a cabin on the site of the Cibola National Forest picnic grounds that now bear his name. He was a Texan, a Baptist and a Democrat. Feature that, if you can.

It’s pretty much an 11-mile trip from El Rancho Pendejo to Doc Long’s if you leg it up and down Embudito Trail, Trail 365, Pino Trail, and Grand Enchantment Trail, or so says Google Maps. More like 20 if you do it on your Sam Hillborne via Old Route 66, NM 14 and NM 536. You get a couple thousand feet of vertical gain in that 40-mile round trip, too.

Also, moreover, furthermore, and too, wind. Tailwind up, headwind back, as per the rules. Unless you get a headwind both ways, which is not uncommon in New Mexico.

Back in the Day® Doc Long’s old hangout was either the parking lot, the start or the finish for the Sandia Crest Time Trial, one of the countless events at which I failed to distinguish myself.

I was no great shakes on the bike today, either, covering the out-and-back in three hours.

The worst part of this ride, for me, is always the return trip through Cedar Crest. You’d think it would be a fun plummet back to Old Route 66, but it’s not a descent in the strictest sense of the term, because it serves up a few short humps to break your rhythm, spirit and balls. Plus the wind is always in your chops, the shoulder is strewn with debris, and the traffic lanes runneth over with assholes.

If you’re lucky you don’t get runnethed over. I was lucky.

Once at Doc Long’s I was briefly tempted by delusions of grandeur to leave Cedar Crest in the rear view, where it belongs, and soldier on to NM 165 and thence to Placitas, Bernalillo and home via NM 313, Roy and Tramway, making the ride more like 62 miles. But I didn’t have enough food or water for that one.

Now that I think of it, though, I could’ve stopped to refuel at the Range Cafe in Bernalillo. Then I would’ve been full of beans and generating my own tail wind for the remainder of the trip.

Shiny side up, please

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
The Bianchi Zurigo, with its oversized alloy tubes, 30mm V-section rims and broad-bladed carbon fork, catches a little more wind than some of the other bikes in the fleet.

The bike was moving around on me in the crosswind as I swept down Tramway Road toward Interstate 25, and I was starting to think that the Bianchi Zurigo Disc, with its fat alloy tubes, broad-bladed carbon fork and skinny 700×35 adventure tires, might not have been the right tool for today’s job.

There’s nothing out there to keep the wind off you, except for the cars passing too close and too fast, and the Bianchi is both a little small and a little stretched out for Your Humble Narrator, who is too lazy to give it a stem more appropriate to his wizened, shrunken carcass.

So there I was, bowling along at speed, thinking back to the time I got into a death wobble on a long, smooth descent at the Air Force Academy, when I noticed three brother cyclists off their machines just ahead, and taking up a not insubstantial portion of the shoulder, too.

I slowed down to ask if they needed anything, and that’s when I noticed the irregular black stripe leading off the shoulder and into the terra not so firma.

“Everything OK?” I asked, coming to a stop.

“I don’t know yet,” replied rider No. 1, the one wearing the fresh road rash. “I hit my head pretty hard.” At that, No. 2 inspected No. 1’s helmet while No. 3 checked the victim’s bike. There was a divot in the lid and a big oval hole in the rear tire, as though some strong fellow had taken a Magnum potato peeler to it. There was some discussion of “shimmy.”

The gent with the dent had that look on his face, the one that says, “This has fucked up my Sunday, and it’s starting to hurt, but at least I went off into the weeds and not out into traffic, where a helmet would have been tits on a bull, or more like tits on a bumper, now that I think about it, which I’d rather not.”

I asked if he needed a phone, but he had one, and dialed up the wife for a dustoff.

“You guys seem to have this under control,” I said to the others, and off I rolled, dialing my sensor array up to maximum. “Wind from the SW, roger. Land yacht off the port stern, check. Does that rear tire feel a little soft?” That sort of thing.

I haven’t had a good high-speed getoff in a while, not even when I got into that death wobble on the AFA, and I’d like to keep it that way.

What we like and what we get are often two very different things, though. So let’s all be careful out there. The world is full of hard surfaces and sharp edges.

Takeout gets taken out

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
The monsoons persist.

Herself takes an exercise class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and sometimes she’ll slide by Il Vicino afterward to collect a couple sammiches so Your Humble Narrator doesn’t have to cook.

Last night was one of those sometimes. Until the deluge.

First came the thunder, which sounded like incoming artillery rounds fused for airburst. Skylights, which we have aplenty, gave me and the cats a pretty good look at the flash part of the flash-bang, too.

And then, the rain. Holy hell, the rain. A neighbor said we got an inch in an hour, and I have no reason to doubt her. The cul-de-sac basically turned into a giant storm drain.

In any case, the upshot is, I had to cook. It would have been an upstream swim to Il Vicino for Herself and we’d have wound up with soup sammiches after she swam back.

Executive time

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
The chair recognizes His Excellency, Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment). Oy, does it ever.

Oh, sure, you can impeach him, maybe even convict.

But you’re gonna need the Army to get him out of that chair. Maybe the Marines, too.