Category: Albuquerque

Horsing around

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
A horse bypass leads to a saddle. Irony scratches her mosquito bites.

The day after a national holiday weekend is generally top notch for riding trail, if the weather permits. Everyone who hasn’t tripped the Bug-O-Meter® or gotten arrested for fleeing the fuzz is back to work, or school, and a fella has a little elbow room out there among the cacti and buzzworms.

But for some inexplicable reason I decided to take a hike instead. Go figure.

I got the traditional late start (O’Grady Standard Time), so with the sun up, the wind at my back, and a steady uphill trudge for most of the first hour or so, I was sweating like a sausage in a skillet, doffing my hat at intervals to mop the brain-case with a bandana.

Slouching up Trail 365 I turned for no good reason onto the Embudo Trail Horse Bypass, mainly because I’d never used it and was idly curious. Generally I loop around on 365A and head back down to El Rancho Pendejo.

The bypass wound upward to a ridge that overlooks Embudo Trail 193, and so did I. Thought briefly about following it down to where the two trails merge, but I didn’t know exactly where that was, or what the footing might be like after the monsoons. Plus I’d been out for 90 minutes already, probably sweated off all the sunscreen, and was down to about a half liter of water and a half tube of Clif Blox.

Hey, it was a trail for horses, not a horse’s ass. I turned around, whinnied, and hoofed it home.

For a minute there I was all aTwitter

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
This is not a buzzworm. It is, however, his office.

Touting this week’s installment of Desert Oracle Radio, Ken Layne notes:

Portents and signs, everywhere we look. But signs of what? Oh, the usual: plague, disaster, but at least we have social media to make it all worse.

On my hike this morning I saw two snakes, a buzzworm at the beginning and a bull at the turnaround point.

Surely this must have been a sign of something? Probably that I had seen two snakes in the actual grass instead of on Twitter.

The cool September morn

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
I guess I can skip the rubdown with SPF 70 this morning.

Huh. Must be a national-holiday weekend on the horizon. ’Cause there’s plenty grim-looking clouds up there to keep it company.

Looks like a page-one meeting at The Washington Post:

“Gloom, yep. Despair, check. Agony, roger. How about a light feature? ‘How the delta variant stole Christmas?’ We need art, maybe a Barbie on a ventilator.”

Gaia must have the DTs. She’s boiling Lake Tahoe like a teapot and power-washing Tucson like a redneck sheriff blasting hippies and coloreds off his streets. A brother-in-law had to drive from Maryland to Louisiana and back to rescue a daughter whose Nawlins vacation went all Waterworld on her.

And unvaccinated Americans are advised to avoid Labor Day travel. Ho, ho, etc. Unless they’re traveling to a vaccination clinic to terrorize health-care workers.

Me, I’m just glad I got a nice ride in yesterday, ’cause it looks like the surf’s up today. And when it comes to surfing, you can call me Charlie.

Mission accomplished

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
The backyard maple is shedding leaves, and it’s not even Labor Day yet.

’Twas a glorious day to ride the bike in ’Burque.

Nobody told me I had waited too long, or left too soon, or was just plain doing it wrong. That I had left my wife and cat behind raised nary an eyebrow among the chattering classes.

This may be because El Rancho Pendejo remained firmly under the control of said wife and cat; their autocratic ways are not exactly breaking news. Herself has been in the driver’s seat since 1990, and Miss Mia Sopaipilla has been a key member of the ruling class for nearly half that time.

In my absence they do exactly as they please, which is pretty much what they do when I’m around, the United Nations and Geneva Conventions be damned.

The only uproar arose when I returned after 90 minutes of pooting around in the foothills on the Co-Motion Divide Rohloff.

“What’s to eat around here?” they yowled. The knives were out, along with the forks. Can a call for comment from The New York Times be far behind?

Tramway to the moon

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments
I got mooned on Thursday’s ride.

The Sandia Peak Tramway actually goes the other way, to (wait for it) the peak of the Sandias.

I usually go that way myself, from Tramway Boulevard to Tramway Road and up toward the tram’s lower terminal, before veering off on Juniper Hill Road for a bit of up and down along the foothills.

By Thursday I was sick of the same-ol’, same-ol’, so I continued down Tramway and under Interstate 25 onto Roy, 4th, Guadalupe Trail, and eventually Alameda, then spun onto the Paseo del Bosque Trail.

But I got sick of that, too, and fast.

A massive allergy attack reminded me of the bad old days on Randolph AFB outside San Antone, where there were plenty of allergens to clog the pipes. Here, too, it seems, thanks to a hot, moist summer. I was firing snot rockets right and left, from both nostrils, and trying to breathe through my ears.

So instead of enjoying a nice flat spin along the bosque, dogged by whatever it was that had me by the snotlocker with a downhill pull, I hung a left on the Paseo del Norte Trail and struggled home via the North Diversion Channel Trail, Osuna-Bear Canyon, and like that there. Felt like hammered shit all the way, too.

You can always feel worse, though. Depend on it. Some days there isn’t enough Kleenex in the world.