Month: May 2023
Good times, bad times
The wind woke me at midnight, a reminder that despite the warnings from the National Weather Service I had neglected to take down the wind chimes and hummingbird feeders and store the patio furniture’s cushions in their plastic footlocker.
But I’m a light sleeper, and thought drowsily, “Oh, well. How bad could it be?” And rolled over and went back to sleep.
Pretty bad, as it turns out.
About three hours later it sounded like God thought He was John Bonham and our house was His drum kit and it was time to perform “Moby Dick.” The long version.
Well. When God wants to rock out, you gotta get up and dance.
We figured that if the thundering blew us out of a sound sleep, it was probably scaring the bejaysis out of Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who overnights in the half-bath, where a goodly wind can set the fan vent a-flapping like a hi-hat cymbal.
Naturally, she couldn’t have cared less. Nothing scares Miss Mia. But she was delighted to find out that we had suddenly become lovers of the wee small hours like her and immediately set about performing her morning rituals, albeit a few hours early.
Outside, the cushions were up against a wall — we got lucky, the worst of the wind was coming from the south, or else they’d have been spotted flying in formation over the San Luis Valley — but the backyard trees lost a few limbs and our young pistache was bobbing and weaving like a stoner in the front row at Madison Square Garden in 1973.
So I stabilized it with a couple rubber bungee straps, stuffed the cushions in their footlocker, and collected the hummingbird feeders. Then Herself and I stumbled back to bed.
Well, that pissed off Miss Mia, who hates a party-pooper the way Clarence Thomas hates feeling a little light in the wallet pocket. And for the next couple of hours she shared her feelings with us at some volume, sounding like Robert Plant wearing pants three sizes too small, until we finally said to hell with it and got up for good.
It was then that I noticed the wind had peeled the outer layer off our “Save the Elena Gallegos” yard sign to reveal a campaign pitch for Khalid Emshadi, a Republican candidate for the state House of Representatives, who got blown away last year by incumbent Democrat Elizabeth Thomson.
No such thing as an ill wind, I guess.
Spring training
It was a good week on the bike.
Actually, make that “bikes.”
The red Steelman Eurocross, Jones, and Sam Hillborne all enjoyed some quality springtime during the week, and the New Albion Privateer got the nod on Sunday.
Nothing outlandish, mind you. I’m not training for anything; just trying to avoid collapsing into a smelly heap of bone splinters and bad ideas. We’re talking 90 minutes per outing, or thereabouts, with a thousand or so feet of vertical gain, and an average speed that wouldn’t impress anyone, especially me.
I’ve never been what you would call fast, but I’ve been faster.
Still, who cares? The idea is to be above ground and moving around, amirite? You know what my dad was doing when he was my age? Nothing! Because he had been dead for seven years.
So when Herself and I rolled out for our Sunday ride we were focused not on heart rate, average speed, or mileage, but on how many Gambel’s quail we might see (that would be a half-dozen, plus a couple deer).
Back at the ranch we have hummingbirds re-enacting the Battle of Midway around our three feeders, finches of various types bellied up to two tubes of birdseed while the doves prowl the ground for dropped morsels, and a northern flicker feeding babies bunkered up in a dead limb on our backyard maple.
And our young Chinese pistache tree is coming along, too.
It’s starting to get warm, so I expect we’ll start seeing buzzworms soon. But it’s OK. Every garden has its snake. Just steer clear of the fruit stand.
¡Que viva Puebla!
It’s Cinco de Mayo, which is not the Mexican Fourth of July, though Americans treat it as comparable, even adding it to their National What the Hell Let’s Drink & Drive Party Calendar.
The neighbors, the ones with the kids, have decided to throw a fiesta in the cul-de-sac this year, possibly because an uncle from Colorado was coming down to do the Turquoise Trail Burro Race at Cerrillos.
• Read “The Treasure of the Sierra Mojada,” in which I recount my own experience as a burro racer.
The uncle got here yesterday and his burros were quite the draw for our sleepy little ’hood.
My man Hal Walter will not be participating in tomorrow’s race at Cerrillos — he will drive pretty much anywhere at the drop of a sombrero, and will drop it himself if need be.
But he is busy retrieving his son Harrison from Colorado Mountain College this weekend; the kid just finished his first year of postsecondary education and will be spending the summer at the family’s Crusty County rancheroo.
This evening, Hal and Harrison will be motoring from Leadville back to Weirdcliffe, the uncle and the burros will return to the cul-de-sac, and we’ll have some quality neighbor time and medium-light refreshments to commemorate the ass-whuppin’ that General Ignacio Zaragoza and his troops laid on the French at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.
One time, one night in America.
Arise, ye pris’ners of … Hollywood?
The New York Times is a little short on May Day news, surprise, surprise.
Other than one piece about the French, who remain pissed off about having their retirement-age goalposts shifted two years (To age 64! Zut alors!), I found exactly one labor story on the website.
It concerned the struggles of — wait for it! — screenwriters.
Screenwriters?
Now, I don’t mean to make light of screenwriters’ issues. They remind me very much of the issues Your Humble Narrator faced as a free-range rumormonger. So, up the rebels, etc.
Nevertheless, it seemed appropriate to make today’s singing of “The Internationale” the version from the 1981 Warren Beatty-Diane Keaton vehicle “Reds,” which I have liberated in the name of the people from YouTube, which is owned by Google.
The writers credited for the flick are Beatty and Trevor Griffiths, according to IMDB, which is owned by Amazon.
And you’d better hope Apple TV flogged Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis and the rest of the writers room into cramming a shit-ton of “Ted Lasso” episodes into the can. According to Mother Times:
Absent an unlikely last-minute resolution with studios, more than 11,000 unionized screenwriters could head to picket lines in Los Angeles and New York as soon as Tuesday, an action that, depending on its duration, would bring Hollywood’s creative assembly lines to a gradual halt. Writers Guild of America leaders have called this an “existential” moment, contending that compensation has stagnated despite the proliferation of content in the streaming era — to the degree that even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.
“Even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.” Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
Mad Blog Media 
