When the temps hit triple digits — 101°, another record — the first thing I think about preparing for dinner is a piping-hot pot of soup. A fragrant chicken soup with chickpeas and vegetables from Melissa Clark, to be specific.
OK, between you and me, I was thinking more along the lines of a jambalaya, or maybe some slow-cooker chipotle-honey chicken tacos.
But when I made the mistake of consulting Herself about the week’s menu, she ordered up salmon with potatoes and asparagus, and the aforementioned soup.
Well, whaddaya gonna do?
We get two dinners out of a pound and a half of salmon, a half-dozen taters, and 12 ounces of asparagus.
And that burly soup serves six to eight, which means we’ll probably be eating it through the weekend. Especially since I made a fresh loaf of whole-wheat bread to keep it company.
Maybe next week I’ll pitch a gazpacho at her. Yeah, that’d be cool. …
“Dude. It’s actually raining,” I told my man Hal Walter yesterday via Messages. “If it continues at this torrid pace we could have an ounce of water on the property in two, three days.”
Elena Gallegos, pre-deluge.
Ho ho, etc. That was at 2:19 p.m. Over the next four hours we got nearly an inch of rain with a side of hail that shotgunned more than a few leaves off the backyard maple.
We were under a flash-flood warning and our cul-de-sac looked like a pond tipped on one side, draining into the arroyo behind the house, one of many that funnel water from the foothills to the Rio.
We were happy to get the rain, seeing as we have a couple stupid-hot days coming up later in the week. The neighbor girls were dancing barefoot beneath umbrellas in the runoff.
And I was delighted to have logged a little trail time in and around Elena Gallegos Open Space before the mierda hit the abanico. Those trails hold up pretty well, but 0.86 inch of rain in a few hours is a big ask. We got just 0.27 inch in March, 0.33 inch in April, 0.06 inch in May, and none at all in June. Until yesterday.
In its absence it’s easy to forget the sheer power of running water. A few people got a harsh reminder yesterday; at least three were swept away in the arroyo system, and only two made it out alive.
Hot times in the old town, as the fella says. Yesterday’s high of 100° set a record for June 7. Normal is 89°.
But what’s normal these days?
The mule deer are slow-walking their rounds from rose bush to birdbath, lingering at feeders provided by some well-intentioned animal lovers up the road a ways. Wandering from this handout to that, the deer startle motorists in blind corners and make high-speed descents on the old two-wheeler a little more thrilling.
Seven of them were working our cul-de-sac last night, no doubt with designs on the neighbors’ new peach tree, which is enclosed in the sort of stout wire cage that should be restricting the movements of Alex Jones and Rudy the Mook, preferably in some public place so passersby can poke them with sharp sticks. Jones and the Mook, not the peach tree or deer.
Over at Desert Oracle Radio Ken Layne has his own musings on heat and wildlife as he settles in for another sweaty shift dishing up his Joshua Tree jive.
The days are long and hot and hazy. Another summer to endure. … It just eats at your nerves, this kind of weather, and what’s worse is you know that the hot weather is another month or two away. What’s bearable when you’re alone under a cottonwood in the breeze is absolute torment when you’re trying to get yourself from point A to point B and see ugliness all around. Dead eyes behind the cracked windshields of erratically piloted vehicles; the never-ending trash piles; empty strip malls of crumbling stucco and blank plastic signs. Long stretches of highway with nothing but human-built desolation. The ragweed’s coming up too. Best to stay on the property in the company of the creatures who survive this aesthetic apocalypse.
Layne provides a bit of heat relief for his neighbors. Young rock squirrels have taken to hanging around the water bowl he leaves out for the birds, one of them trying and failing to surf the ice cubes he includes from time to time. A cottontail dozes on the doormat. The bobcat, coyotes, and mountain lions he leaves to fend for themselves.
He has mule deer, too, hugging whatever shade they can find, under a willow or juniper. Doesn’t mention any peach trees or rose bushes.
Should we be feeding and watering these critters? Well … what we call “our” property was theirs first, after all. Is it unreasonable to ask that we contribute a little something to the common good?
This seems to be Layne’s thinking. And ours, too. We maintain two bird feeders and three hummingbird feeders, and don’t holler copper on the deer ambling through the yard. Noblesse oblige? Share and share alike? From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs? Here’s the Desert Oracle again:
Now these rock squirrels are desert squirrels, squirrels of the Southwest. They don’t even need water, beyond what they get from the various seeds, grasses, fruits and bugs that they eat. But these young squirrels, they are fools for cold water. They just hang around that bowl for half the day. And now I cannot replace that bowl with a proper birdbath even if I wanted to, because what will the squirrels and the bunnies do?
The giant Chevy Tahoe rental tank that Herself drove to Function Junction to handle some library bidness back in 2012. Sumbitch was bigger than the house we lived in.
The headline is lifted from a piece in The Atlantic about Noo Yawk Gov. Kathy Hochul croaking what would have been the nation’s first first congestion-pricing plan for traffic, charging motorists a fee to shoulder (fender?) their way into the ultra-swank Manhattan central bidness district.
The idea was to reduce traffic and pollution while raising money to improve the subway system.
Author Sarah Lasgow concedes that such a scheme could work in very few places in the Land of the Free. But one of them should’ve been the Big Apple, with its wide variety of transportation possibilities, among them subways, buses, and commuter rail.
Yet even if congestion pricing were only ever implemented in New York City, it would have been a signal that U.S. politicians could shake up the nation’s rigid transportation systems in the service of cutting back emissions. That cars appear to have won out even in New York shows how little room there might be for us to try anything different.
Sigh. I’m strictly a hick from the sticks, a rube who’s never even visited Noo Yawk, but I remember being seriously impressed with the mass transit in San Francisco during my first visit, back in the Seventies. I drove to that hilly town from Colorado in a Datsun pickup, four-speed manual, and was I ever glad to park that rig for a spell and find some other way to get around, something that didn’t involve me trying not to stall out as the light turned green on some ski slope of a Gay Bay intersection.
The bus system we had in Bibleburg was a bad joke, one that told you what you already knew: You want to get around in this town, you best get you a car, son!
But in San Francisco bus travel actually seemed feasible, to say nothing of a whole lot easier on the clutch. Plus, if you were lucky and happened to be at the right stop, around 10th and Judah, you might see some giant bald woman in black leather with a little dude on a leash, like an organ grinder’s monkey. Now and then she’d pop him on the noggin and he’d bounce up and down, grinning like a jackass eating yellowjackets.
This is about the time I realized that Gilbert Shelton was not always working strictly from imagination when he penned The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
Speaking of ways to get around, especially to places where juicy artisanal tacos are sold, my man Mike Ferrentino has a delightful piece up on NSMB about achieving the flour tortilla state of mountain biking despite the braying naysaying of beautiful hippie taco vendors and broplow drivers.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams finally get off the deck on Wednesday, bound for the International Space Station. | Photo: NASA Television
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams picked a fine day to get out of town. The temps at the Cape were headed for the century mark, and before the week is out I expect a few of us here in the Great American West would be happy to join them at the International Space Station, even if we’re light on luggage and have to drink our own wee-wee.
“A hunnerd-twelve in Vegas? I don’t wanna see Carrot Top that bad. They got a casino at the ISS?”
The Duck! City is under a heat advisory tomorrow — not Vegas bad, but bad enough — and though I’m still not 100 percent sinus-wise, I got out for a short snout-flushing trail ride this morning while temps were still in the 70s. We could hit 101° tomorrow, and I’d just as soon not add heatstroke to the sinus infection.
Could be worse, though. For instance, as we speak, weather-related boogeymen have kept Herself parked on the tarmac at Baltimore Washington International for two hours and counting. Southwest’s flight-status window shows her flight as “departed” — which I guess means, “taxied away from the terminal” — with touchdown in ABQ an hour later than originally intended.
Assuming her Boeing product ever gets off the ground, that is.
Jeez, we can put a man on the moon, but … well, actually, no, we can’t. Never mind.
• Late update: Charlie Pierce has some thoughts on Wilmore, Williams, and Boeing.
Mad Blog Media 