Good Friday? I wouldn’t know. It’s too early for a proper review.
Yesterday was a pretty good Thursday, though.
The weather shifted gears a bit, and I was able to give the trees a sip of water and get myself out for 90 minutes of sun worship on the foothills trails.
The Co-Motion Divide Rohloff is a great bike for this sort of thing if you’re not in a rush, which I never am. It goes about 32 pounds with all its bells and whistles, which include drop bars, a rigid steel frameset, and a pair of hefty 50mm Donnelly X’Plor MSO tires.
The cool spring having left me low on mileage and high on a whiter shade of pale, I wasn’t exactly skipping the light fandango in the Elena Gallegos Open Space. At times, especially on the hills, it felt like I was towing a Burley trailer containing 16 vestal virgins, a waiter, and his tray.
A mountain biker yielding trail on a climb shouted, “Hey, gravel bikes!” as I lumbered up. No, it’s a touring bike, I mumbled to myself, and there’s only one of us, shortly before a dude on an actual gravel bike passed me so fast the waiter couldn’t take his drink order.
Speaking of drinks, while railing the corners down Trail 342 bound for 203A, I abruptly found myself facing a water crossing. We’ve been in The Duck! City for nearly nine years now and I don’t think I’ve ever seen water running in this little arroyo.
So, yeah. A good Thursday, for sure. But a good Friday? Don’t ask Herself. Someone buggered something down to the Death Star and she had to go down there, on a day off, to boot a server in the slats.
I was not expecting to see 16° on the old weather widget when I stumbled into the kitchen this morning.
Six-fuggin’-teen? On April 5? Was Dante right? Hell is cold? Can we crank up the heat a smidgen, please, Beelzebub, you old devil? I know, I know, I’ve been bad, but shit, if I wanted to freeze my huevos off before coffee I’d still be doing my sinning in that hillside hacienda outside Weirdcliffe, where I had a stove, ax, and woodpile.
Still, could be worse. I spoke with Consigliere Pelkey yesterday and he said that I-80 was closed between Laramie and Cheyenne due to vile weather, th’owin’ a hitch inta his gitalong as regards a doctor’s appointment in the capital city.
My old Bicycle Retailer comrade Steve Frothingham checked in from the People’s Republic of Boul-Daire to report that it was “puking snow” in his neck of the Woke Woods.
We passed a few pleasant moments discussing jurisprudence and journalism in Manhattan and agreed that if a courtroom artist were required we wanted Ralph Steadman, since S. Clay Wilson is unavailable, being dead.
Today, meanwhile, rather than skulk around indoors and risk absorbing some news, I decided to motor around and about The Duck! City, scratch a few chores off the to-do list, wait for the desert to assert itself.
By midafternoon, the temperature finally inched into the low 40s, and I finally ventured out for a leisurely 5K on the trails, though asthma and allergies (juniper, poplar, elm, etc.) had me sounding like a secondhand accordion in the mitts of an unruly middle-schooler with a tin ear.
Tonight the wizards are calling for another hard freeze. I didn’t hear them calling yesterday, but I’ve heard them this time and unplugged the two hoses I use to water the trees.
“These temperatures are cold enough to kill most early season vegetation,” says the National Weather Service.
Good. Maybe they’ll croak the junipers, poplars, and elms. A man needs some breathing room.
The Pink Moon, not quite full, glares down through a skylight.
Things are dark enough around here on a Tuesday morning without a bloated fartsack with federal muscle jetting from Mar-a-Lago to Manhattan on Uncle Sammy’s dime to get a kid-gloves arraignment at New York taxpayers’ expense on charges of paying hush money to porn stars, cooking the books, and in general showing all the class of a Hells Angel on a rented electric scooter, or maybe Fredo Corleone in Vegas, before Mikey sent him fishing.
Does this mooch ever pick up a tab?
In a proper world, Your Numble Narrator would be allowed to stay curled up in his toasty puddle of blankets until Old Mister Sun peeps in through the gaps in the vertical blinds, murmuring, “Rise and shine like me! Time for bones creaking, weak thinking, and strong black coffee to set everything aright!”
Alas, no. Herself is a spry young thing who is still on the clock. She arises at dark-thirty most mornings to place her cute lil’ button nose squarely upon the grindstone, that we may have our bacon and beans.
Do not weep for Herself, however. She likes it. She enjoys working and earning and being known throughout The Organization as someone who does not lean on her shovel but rather buckles down and gets the job done.
And if that means getting up at an hour I once considered a reasonable bedtime, well … she’s your gal.
• • •
The air is thick enough to slice for sandwiches.
Some days there is not enough sunshine and strong black coffee in the world, and this is one of them.
I don’t want to pay attention to what’s going down in Manhattan. But I feel obliged to keep one jaundiced eye aimed in that direction, if only because not paying attention is what led us to this sordid back alley of jurisprudence ripe with decades of uncollected garbage.
It’s not fun. Not nearly as nice as sleeping late, sipping a fat mug of joe, and idly skimming the news for lively items about camera-wearing cats.
And though Charles Pelkey and I could probably make a couple thou’ apiece by cranking up the old Live Update Guy machinery to chronicle this mess, we’ll give it a miss.
While in custody, he will be fingerprinted, but special accommodations will be made for the former president: He is not expected to be placed in a holding cell and will spend only a short time in the office before his court appearance; he likely won’t be handcuffed or have a mug shot taken.
At the arraignment, Mr. Trump is expected to enter a not-guilty plea himself, rather than through his lawyers, as an act of defiance in keeping with his approach to the day, according to people with knowledge of his thinking. He is also weighing whether to address the cameras before the arraignment, another person familiar with the discussions said.
Just another rerun of “The Apprentice.” Looks like it’ll be a while before anyone gets around to taking out this old sack of trash.
Since it’s looking like a very unfunny week in the news for the next few days, you might be sniffing around for a chuckle or two or three to take the edge off.
So here’s a dude that made us laugh out loud the other night: Kyle Kinane.
We’d seen him before, in a half-hour set in season two of the Netflix series “The Standups.” But I’d forgotten about him — we watch a lot of standup — until Jason Zinoman at The New York Timesmentioned him in his regular roundup of who’s worth watching.
Kinane’s new standup can be seen on YouTube (see above), and once you pick yourself up off the floor you’re gonna want to go back to 2018 and catch his “Standups” set, and maybe listen to his 2009 interview with Marc Maron on his podcast “WTF” (Kinane comes in at about 13:30).
And if that’s not enough Kyle Kinane for you, you can pop round to his website for podcasts, videos, and more. More. More!
If that doesn’t wash all the ugly out of your week, nothing will.
Half of the ingredients for guacamole toast, plus the obligatory mug of joe.
We were down to one avocado and it didn’t look good.
I had just sliced it into halves when the dreaded brown spots made their presence known.
So I showed it to Herself, our resident avocado whisperer.
“Doesn’t look good,” I ventured. She agreed. What the hell, Miss Mia Sopaipilla is not into the morning guacamole anyway. She prefers a lick or two or three of a butter-smeared finger.
But when I went back to the kitchen with the dubious avocado I thought, “No, goddamnit, avocados cost, what, five bucks apiece? There’s gotta be enough edible flesh on this bad boy to spread on a couple pieces of toast.”
So I performed some reductive surgery on it, tossed the salvageable bits into a bowl with lime, salt, onion, and tomato, and hey presto! Guacamole for toast. No foolin’.
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