Month: July 2023

Burning daylight

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
We’re just waiting on the priests to rip out a few hearts here.

Well, somebody’s getting away from it all, and they’re taking it with them as they go.

I don’t get around much anymore, so I had never seen this before until just recently: A Mercedes Sprinter RV … with a rooftop tent. Another Sprinter … towing one of those Igloo-looking trailers, a Scamp or Casita.

Sheeyit. And here I’d been thinking $250 a night was a little spendy for a motel room someplace that isn’t enjoying triple-digit temperatures or an End of Days deluge.

Instead of loading up the old Highway Hilton I don’t have for an extended voyage I’m not taking, I’ve been getting my exercise a little earlier in the morning, before Tōnatiuh starts taking orders for gabacho asada.

Yesterday it was a leisurely couple of hours on the bike with some like-minded gents of a certain age and two 21-ounce bottles in my cages. Today it was a 6-mile solo hike on the rolling foothills trails, with a 2-liter bladder in the backpack and a stout staff for disputations with serpents (none rose to the challenges of my staff or the thermometer).

The idea is to get back under cover before the heat advisory kicks in noonish. Which I did. Even so, a bit of grub, some cold water, a warm shower, and a short nap by the fan all seemed like excellent ideas, better even than a large RV towing a smaller one.

But then what? There’s the whole rest of the day to deal with. However does one fill the hours?

Well, we can always follow the misadventures of that guy, whose shysters are arguing that it’s cruel and unusual to bring his fat ass to trial while he campaigns to reclaim his old job, after which he can drop all the charges against himself.

Or we could root for an MMA cage match, a weenie-measuring contest, or perhaps death rays at 10 paces between Zuck and Schmuck, who are quarreling over which of them is the One True King of the social-media hellscape.

Can’t one of them just pull a phone from a stone and settle it that way? My calls to Merlin keep going to voicemail.

For what it’s worth

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
Looks like the tree’s bringing the heat.

Some like it hot, they say.

Not me, Bubba.

There are moments when the summertime heat feels almost bearable. Say, when there are no pressing matters and a pool sits nearby. There is an iced beverage sweating in a tall glass and a broad umbrella throwing a soupçon of shade. Someone else is picking up the tabs.

But even then. …

When I was a kid on Randolph AFB the San Antonio summers were murderous. Crouch under the Fedders window unit and play board games or haunt the officers’ club pool like a toasty ghost.

Tucson? Don’t get me started. I drove a 1974 Datsun pickup with no air conditioning, and my guest-house rental (also sans a/c) was a long, slow-rolling, late-afternoon drive from The Arizona Daily Star, where I labored in dubious battle with Young Republicans and old fascists.

Mostly I passed my days at the pool there, too. Not at the Star; at the University of Arizona, where the coeds weren’t yelling at me all the time unless they caught me drooling.

Now here I am in The Duck! City, where everything I do makes life hotter and the windows of opportunity are quickly closed and curtained against the sun.

Cycling. Running. Cooking. Especially cooking. Sometimes I feel as though it’s me browning in the skillet.

Not an early riser by nature, I find myself compelled to rush through the morning’s rituals so I can get out and back in while Tōnatiuh is still warming up in the bullpen.

Coffee. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, the Albuquerque Journal. More coffee, with toast this time. The litter box. Not for me, for Miss Mia, who has already been in there a time or two while I was ethering my sputtering carburetor. Then the baño for me.

A bite of breakfast — yogurt with granola, oatmeal with nuts and dried fruit, a mandarine, or some combination of these. No tea, it’s already too hot, and we don’t want to overclock the old CPU. Dole out some water to the parched foliage.

And then — hey, what’s that sound, everybody look, what’s going down? — it’s raining. Not for long, not in any quantity (0.01 inch), and it evaporates from the chip-seal in the cul-de-sac before the echo of the raindrops fades.

But still. Music to the ears. Maybe I’ll have that cup of tea after all.

Hey, cool.

Going Fourth

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Incoming! No, that’s outgoing. And not very far, either. Them’s the rules.

The cul-de-sac was rockin’ last night.

Grandpa Doug was in charge of the boom-boom. We got a courtesy call from the fire marshals. And the crowd — well, you could actually call it a crowd. Lots of folks, not all of them residents of the cul-de-sac. Young and old, men and women, right and left, brown, black, white. Your basic melting pot.

Old Glory, catching some rays.

We stayed up a little later than is our practice, and I slept a little later than is practical for a Fourth of July with a heat advisory in effect.

So by the time we’d broken fast, handled our morning chores, and just kinda-sorta gotten our poop more or less in a group, the menu of exercise options had shrunk like a spider on a hotplate.

We settled on a short road ride, which inexplicably saw me roll off without a water bottle. Duh. So we had to circle back after a couple miles to collect that, after which I decided we might as well keep on heading south since that was where the wind was coming from.

For old times’ sake we noodled on over to have a look at Herself the Elder’s first residence here in The Duck! City, now a private home rather than an assisted-living residence.

Then we got a little random, hopping onto and off of a couple bike paths linking various suburban streets, before agreeing that it was just about as hot as we cared to have it and rolling back to the rancheroo for some light refreshment.

By noon the temperature was 93° if you believe our little weather widget, and 88° if you don’t. And the weather wizards say we ain’t seen nothing yet.

When the high temp matches my average heart rate on a road ride I sometimes think about getting back in the pool, churning out the laps in the cool, chlorinated fluids, where the distracted drivers and earbudded pedestrians mostly aren’t.

But I don’t know that I want to be the 69-year-old dude in the banana hammock trying to relive his glory years (Mitchell High School swim team, 1969 South Central League champs). Aren’t the bib shorts and Lycra jersey bad enough?

Muchas gracias, El Niño

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
Hot plate, señor. No, not the one on the table; the one in your head.

Hotter, drier, and windier — that’s the prediction as regards monsoon season from the National Weather Service Forecast Office here in The Duck! City.

A heat advisory is in our immediate future, as in tomorrow, the actual Fourth of July, which this year seemed to start sometime around last Thursday and will end … well, who knows? Not me, Skeezix.

There are a few fires going, prescribed and otherwise, the largest being the Pass Fire in the Gila National Forest. Nothing like what’s been going on in Canada; not yet, anyway.

Yesterday I rolled out for a little 30-miler with 1,200 feet of vertical gain — the lion’s share of it coming in the final grind from I-25 to The County Line barbecue joint — and it got a little toasty there toward the end. The brain was not quite at a rolling boil but even a brisk simmer gets your attention a couple hours into what should be a two-bottle ride.

Today it seemed wise to skip the Monday spin with the ould fellahs and instead go for a half-hour trail jog with Herself. Early. Before Tōnatiuh fired up His comal.

Tonight brings the cul-de-sac’s Fourth fiesta, featuring non-explosive, ground-based “fireworks” of the type that would have caused my younger self to use descriptive language that would get the 69-year-old me canceled in a heartbeat if anyone paid any attention at all to what I thought, said, or wrote. Which mostly they don’t, lucky for me.

Neighbors to the east have two kids, neighbors to the west have three grandkids, and the couple on the northeast corner have a toddler, so there will be sprouts of various sizes gamboling around and about, shrieking at the pips, pops, and poots as the Buck supermoon rises.

If we’re lucky the skeeters will take the night off. It’s too bloody hot to don the Levi’s body armor, and I don’t have a sword small enough to behead the little bastards.