Horseshit and gunfire

November 28, 2025November 28, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

Black Friday? Not entirely. As long as you avert your eyes from the news, that is.

And from your email in-box, too. Jaysis H., etc. Everybody and his bookkeeper is trying to sell me something. Take a break, f’chrissakes. I’m still digesting last night’s feast.

Well … truth be told, as feasts go it was fairly light dining. Green chile stew, salad, freshly baked cornbread, and raspberry cobbler with whipped cream. Fake beer for me, real beer for Herself.

While feasting we watched a couple episodes of the old HBO series “Deadwood,” a tale of unfettered capitalism ascendant in which much of the dialogue sounds like Pestilence Piggy addressing the press.

In one episode a gambler and whoremonger growing fat on fear of and hatred for the government ordered the newspaper office ransacked, its machinery vandalized and shat upon.

So, yeah, ripped straight from today’s headlines. Art imitating life; horseshit and gunfire.

Before we sat down to eat I slipped out for a bracing 90 minutes on the Soma Double Cross, tooling around the Elena Gallegos Open Space and a few of its neighboring trails. Lots of folks out, hoofers and rollers, either working up an appetite for Thanksgiving dinner or sweating out the gravy. And no wonder, with temps in the low 50s, though there was still a bit of mud in the shady spots after last Thursday’s rain.

The DC is a good choice for EG: 42mm Soma Cazadero tires at 30/35 psi, a low end of 24x34T, and grippy IRD Cafam cantis for when shit gets real. Eight-speed bar-cons and XT/Ultegra derailleurs. The 54cm frame is small for me, but has a longish top tube, so I don’t look like a frog trying to hump a helmet when I’m in the saddle. The little sucker is really frisky in the swoopy, twisty bits.

I enjoyed myself so much that I went right back out and did it again today. One more thing to be thankful for. Like leftovers.

One big pile, no arrests

November 27, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

Plenty of room on the Group W bench. Slide over, litterbug.

The dump is closed, all the wrong people are in cuffs, and there ain’t enough SNAP in the EBT for turkey but there’s a big ol’ ham living large in the White House.

Oh, well. We can still sing. Sing loud. You know the words.

After the deluge

November 23, 2025November 23, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

I’m glad to have logged a couple leisurely hours on the bike yesterday, because today is looking decidedly less velo-friendly.

Something blew me out of a sound sleep around 3 a.m., and surprise, surprise, it was a powerful wind bearing water in quantity. Stripped a metric shit-ton of needles off the pines, slapped one wind chime off its hook, pitched a plastic bucket across the yard, and dumped about 0.30 inch of agua fria in under three hours.

That would be 0.12 inch short of normal … for the month.

We’ll take it. Since we shut down the irrigation system I’ve been watering by hand, and that burns a lot of daylight that I could use for other pasatiempos. Like, say, cycling.

The bike I was riding yesterday, a Soma Saga, sported fenders that I did not need. Long sleeves, knee warmers, yes; mudguards, no. The only evidence of Thursday’s 0.44 inch of precip’ was a little more sand scattered across the foothills streets.

Today might be a very different story, if I were sucker enough to give it a go. Oh, sure, at the moment the sun is shining brightly, and the cul-de-sac is slowly drying out.

But there’s still a 50 percent chance of rain resuming around 10:30. And while I welcome it on the trees’ behalf, I can do without it on my person, thanks all the same. I like my showers hot.

A bouquet for November

November 22, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Gloomy. Chilly. And yet the roses persist.

Is this some class of literary device? Might there be some deeper significance here?

Who knows? Not me, chief. I just work here.

It’s true that we finally caved and turned on the furnaces, and even so the uniform of the day now includes pants, long sleeves, and occasionally a fleece vest.

Too, Thursday brought a chilly rain, and plenty of it, so much so that I never considered going out for a ride or even a run (I ran on Tuesday, and again on Friday, and twice a week is my limit on that nonsense).

Happily, gloom and chill tend to be shortlived in the desert. Hell, these days the sun doesn’t even peek round the Sandias until shortly after 8 a.m. And boom! There the sonofabitch is, right on time. I’m no gardener, but I’m trying to cultivate patience.

Is that some class of literary device, with some deeper significance?

Beats me. I’ll leave that to others. I just like sunshine and flowers.