Author: Patrick O'Grady

After decades with his scabby little nose pressed to various grindstones of journalism, Patrick O'Grady came away with plenty of mental scar tissue, a good deal less hair to cover it, and an undiminished appreciation for three subsets of the craft: drawing cartoons, writing commentary, and composing headlines. All three are short, punchy attention-getters, the literary equivalent of yelling, "Hey, look at me!" before hanging a moon out the school-bus window, and thus own a natural appeal for an overgrown class clown with the attention span of a rat terrier raised on angel dust and bong water. And thanks to the Internet, the best thing to happen to journalism since the invention of movable type, he gets to do all three of them without having to go to work at a newspaper, where management has slowly devolved into a button-down mutant hybrid of the worst aspects of the Spanish Inquisition, the dental bits in "Marathon Man" and the DMV of your choice. He and his wife, the long-suffering Shannon, share an adobe hacienda in The Duck! City with their cat, Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

It’s June, and soon the monsoon

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
You can’t spell “monsoon” without “soon.”

It’s the summer solstice, and when I arose at stupid-thirty to make breakfast for Herself it sounded like a Tarzan movie outside.

No rain overnight, unless you count the deluge of evil tidings from far and near. Chama is out of water. “The Sedition Show” continues in DeeCee. And the less said about Texas the better. (There’s actually very little that’s new in the outrage du jour, as Texas Monthly reminds us. Molly Ivins could I.D. this crowd with her eyes closed, which they are, more’s the pity.)

But the North American Monsoon is expected to resume here directly, which, yay. It may not be ideal for cycling, but I have bikes with fenders. And the trees drink that stuff up like my people hitting a pint of the black. Even the federales have a hard time setting you on fire when you’re soaked to the core.

Gata gallivant

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
The patio gets power-washed.

What a difference a rain makes.

At 9:15 a.m. the temp was just 60 degrees. A few days back the overnight low was higher.

The official precip’ tally for the past two days is 0.58 inch, or about half again what we had received all year long before the monsoons kicked in. Our widget shows 0.71 inch.

And it was still raining when we got up. Might keep raining for a while, too, if you believe the Wizards, who have greatly improved their batting average lately.

I rode a bike with fenders yesterday, and yes, I needed them. Not often, but still, glad I had ’em. Cyclists in the desert look askance at a bike with fenders until they’re sporting the chilly Brown Stripe up the backside of their bibs. Then they’re all like, “Hm, good idee,” as they’re doing the laundry and hosing the grit off their drivetrains.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla celebrated the change in the weather with a fine gallivant this morning, launching off the furniture, rocketing around the house, and diving in and out of a paper bag in my office, before finally tunneling under our bedspread and curling up for an extended snooze.

A nap sounds like an even better idea than fenders. But I haven’t had my gallivant yet.

Aqua fina

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
We might get another water delivery from this lot.

Yesterday’s clouds moved beyond the decorative for a change.

The official tally was a quarter-inch of precip’, but out here in The Duck! City Foothills our widget recorded 0.36 inch. We’ll take it.

One of the little girls from next door came bounding over as we stood in the driveway, soaking up a welcome bit of drizzle, and announced that she had “prayed to God” to lay a little rain on us. We thanked her for her service and wondered why we hadn’t thought of that. Probably better to send the kid on that errand, I thought. Cuter, with a shorter rap sheet.

Up north, Fanta Se moved quickly to reopen some trails shuttered by fear of fire, according to The New Mexican. Down to here, the press pivoted to other concerns: the potential for flooding at burn scars and/or homeless people surfing the arroyos down to the Rio, that sort of thing. Every silver lining must have a dark cloud.

We threw open doors and windows and let the cool morning breeze wash over us. Took a few deep, cleansing breaths. We’ll be sweating things again soon enough.

Pissing and moaning

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments
This started out smelling like rain, but what did we get?
Nothing but heartache.

They promise rain, but all we get is fire.

The North American Monsoon is a couple of days late. And I expect a few long-haul truckers may be running behind schedule too, with a 30-acre brush fire closing eight miles of Interstate 40 westbound, from Zuzax to Carnuel, and the eastbound lane of NM 333 from Tramway to Tijeras.

The thing lit up 5-ish yesterday evening with a real stiff wind from the east, and here at El Rancho Pendejo we could see aircraft trying to piss it out, so as the crow and/or smoking ember flies it was a good deal closer to home than we like. Many local roadies, among them Your Humble Narrator, get their kicks on NM 333, a.k.a. Old Route 66.

We had gotten a whole bunch of not much in the way of journalism about the fire by bedtime last night — a paywall from the Journal and a couple drive-bys from the TV people — so, after checking New Mexico Fire Info a few times we decided to roll the dice and hit the rack.

Today we awakened to another warm, dry morning and very little in the way of news about our neighborhood scorcher. There’s some confusion about whether I-40 is open again, but it seems certain that 333 is a no-go this morning as a bridge and power lines get a look-see.

The good news is that the monsoon is back on the menu today. It goes without saying that we will believe this when we see the blessed water falling from the skies. Who knows? The local journos might even give it a writeup.

‘Virga’ mi verga

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Wet dream.

The NWS calls it “virga,” which means “rain that evaporates before it reaches the ground due to very dry air above the surface and below cloud base.”

But they should really call it “verga,” which means “dick,” which is what you get. And a dry hump it is, too.

Rain? Sheeyit. We got better odds of seeing a sensible gun-control measure clearing the Senate and Beelzebozo doing the perp walk.