Arlington National Cemetery is running out of room.
And that’s only one of our national cemeteries. Col. Harold Joseph O’Grady is buried at Fort Logan in Denver, along with three Medal of Honor recipients, seven Buffalo Soldiers, two Navajo Code Talkers from New Mexico, and Spec. Gabriel Conde of Colorado, a kindergartner on 9/11 who was the 2,264th member of the U.S. military to die in the war in Afghanistan.
I guess we finally found out where all those flowers have gone.
Same shot, different day. I could still catch a whiff of the Buzzard Fire, now scorching 15,313 acres (h/t Pat O’B), but it seemed the winds were taking the bulk of the smoke elsewhere.
I was making my own smoke here yesterday, firing up the Char-Broil gas grill for the first time this season. Steak and taters and salad, oh my. Oh, boy, hey, hey, it’s a national holiday.
But Mad Dog and his band of jerks aren’t lighting off the fireworks. It’s enough of a thrill just to grill.
When I sallied forth for the day’s ride I saw smoke and assumed that some asshat had been careless in my vicinity.
Nope.
A local TV station says that the haze bellied up to the base of the Sandias is from the Buzzard Fire, a 12,400-acre blaze in the Gila National Forest.
This doesn’t mean that asshats have not been careless in my vicinity. After observing the smoke I started noticing the cigarette butts scattered along the shoulder of Tramway Boulevard. I thought I’d count them but it proved impossible. It seemed more important in the short term to focus on the asshats trying to kill me with their cars.
This is why I love the Innertubes: You can hear something delightfully off the wall on the local NPR affiliate, look it up with a few strokes on the keyboard, and discover an entire band of Canadian weirdos you didn’t know existed. Well done to Peggy Hessing, who was spinning the platters during Friday’s Afternoon Freeform.
I’m particularly fond of the lyric: “Life is a comedian who used to be funny but then became a born-again Christian. Now it’s all punch and no punch lines and he calls his routine his mission. And he doesn’t understand the difference between laughing at and laughing with him.”
This is why I hate the Innertubes: Your “smart” hardware can use it to rat you out.
Siri chirped some inanity at me once when I had a lot of balls in the air and I told her to shut the fuck up. “I’d never talk to you like that,” she replied. You can say that again. But she can’t. I turned her off.
More than 41.5 million of us will be traveling this weekend, most of us via suburban battlewagon, according to AAA.
What, you thought they were all taking the electric bus? Brother, have I got a bridge for you.
My man Hal Walter beat an estimated 760,000 of his fellow Coloradans to the exodus, motoring north on Thursday to help his mom celebrate her 80th birthday. But he should meet plenty of them on the way back to Weirdcliffe, especially if he’s late getting to Mile High and Bibleburg, the traditional pinch-points along Interstate 25.
“Plain and simple, people just aren’t worried about pump prices,” said AAA Colorado spokesman Skyler McKinley, who predicted “a busy summer travel season.”
Hm. Maybe so. But Herself and I will be staying put, for this weekend, anyway. Traveling on holidays is like pub-crawling on St. Patrick’s Day — strictly for amateurs.
Thus we will be riding our bikey bikes, and pulling some weeds in the back 40, and listening to the little girls next door squeal as they run through the sprinklers surrounding the nice little bit of lawn that their parents just had installed for their summertime enjoyment.
What are all y’all up to?
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