Category: Bibleburg

How long can you tread water?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

It’s been a while since I last cracked my Bible, but I seem to recall the Big Fella promising He wouldn’t destroy the Earth by water again. Got the impression it was sort of a “been there, done that” kind of deal.

Well, He may not be destroying the entire joint this time around, but He’s certainly lowering the property values hereabouts. Boulder now has a moat, and I just saw Noah go arking by the DogHaus with an AR-15 slung over one shoulder. Said he was taking two of everything except homos and Democrats, then added with a genial chuckle, “But I repeat myself.”

Herself just stepped into the deluge to walk Mister Boo, who refuses to shit indoors like everyone else around here. I declined to enable this charade, citing the potential for rust on the steel plate, cranial leakage and the shorting out of wires crucial to the composition of lame gags for fun and profit.

Then I scuttled downstairs to shit in a box. I figure that if the cats and I do it often enough, Mister Boo will eventually get the idea.

Countdown to Interbike

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
On the Road to Mandalay (Bay).
On the Road to Mandalay (Bay).

It’s rare that an upcoming trip to Sin City feels like a vacation in the making, but sheeeeeeeeyit, will I ever be glad to get the hell away from business as usual for a week.

You read the news this morning? Having shit the bed on Syria, the White House has turned to a Russian laundry to clean up the mess. An anonymous dossier makes Pat McQuaid look like Leo O’Bannion from “Miller’s Crossing.” Turnout is expected to be heavy as Bibleburg decides whether to recall Sen. John Morse for offending the penis-extension segment of the electorate, whose idea of a full magazine is decidedly not The New Yorker.

So, yeah. A nice long drive through the desert to clear the head (with the radio off); a few days of wandering about unfettered in Santa’s Workshop; eating meals I don’t have to cook — it all sounds like a little slice of heaven to me.

I’ll be providing daily updates from the show — or that’s the plan, anyway — so keep the dial tuned to WDOG for the latest and greatest from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center once the doors open a week from tomorrow.

Don’t expect me to come home with any $519 bibs, though. If that’s not an invitation to stack it on a rocky trail I never saw one.

Never wash your car

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
refugees
The Chez Dog Refugee Center, which is to say, my office.

Herself had the Subaru detailed today and the results were predictable — if there’s anything Yahweh hates, it’s a clean car. You will recall from your Bible that His people mostly walked everywhere, unless a donkey happened to be available.

Slow-moving storms briefly closed Interstate 25; Highway 24 remains closed. Hail north and east, mostly rain south and west. We hadn’t gotten much of anything at Chez Dog as of 9 p.m. Bibleburg time, though the Boo’s evening walk was more of a dog-paddle.

But those poor folks in Manitou Springs appear to be facing another beating. The flood sirens are sounding, and the Gazette says they ain’t kiddin’.

• Late note: Maybe I spoke too soon. It’s raining pretty steadily, with enough thunder to send the Boo scurrying under my drawing board. Nice night to have a new roof on the garage — if you’re a bicycle, anyway. The cars are in the driveway where they belong.

Hot time in the old town

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 33 Comments
Fountain Creek Trail
In the trees at the southern end of the Fountain Creek Trail.

We missed a temperature record today, but not by much — the official high was 89, just a few degrees short of 2003’s record of 93. I can hear Patrick chuckling (“You call that hot?”) all the way from Arizona.

Naturally, being a sluggard and a knucklehead, this mad dog was out in the noonday sun with the Englishmen, riding the Voodoo Nakisi down and back along the Fountain Creek Trail. One of these days I’ll start rolling out of the sack bright and early, like Herself, who is up and at ’em at the crack of dawn.

Yeah, right.

The recent heavy weather has done something of a number on the trail surface in spots. Ordinarily it’s no big thing to ride a cyclo-cross bike on the Fountain Creek Trail — hell, most days you could handle the 37-mile round trip on a road bike — but the recent rains have scoured it pretty good in places, stripping the trail down to hardpan gullies here and piling sand up there. Happily, I was riding 700×43 Bruce Gordon Rock N’ Roads, which could smooth out the bumps on the highway to Hell.

And the greenery! You never see Colorado this green, not this time of year. The far end of the trail, where it peters out near some dude’s hayburner hotel just west of Fountain, was strangled half to death with the same weeds that have been clogging snotlockers here at Chez Dog. The irrigation ditch at trailside by Fountain Creek Regional Park was running high, too, the water nearly level with the trail.

Up north, meanwhile, the big boys were riding the Tour of the Northern Colorado Ski Ghettos, but I wasn’t paying attention. I dislike ski towns so much I won’t even visit one to ski, much less to watch someone else ride their bikes.

It’s a shame the race won’t visit some lesser hamlets, burgs and whistle stops that could really do with a tourism bump, but then the organizers don’t put these things on out of the goodness of their hearts, eh? Them that’s got shall get, as the old song goes.

Weeds and grass roots

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments
The front yard
The House Back East™ gets a front-yard makeover.

The rain has abated for the moment and the home-improvement projects have resumed with a vengeance.

The deluge reminded us of just how badly the garage roof leaks — it had become less of a garage and more of a free car wash — and so the roof got replaced yesterday.

The back yard
The back yard looked like a scene from “Platoon” before Herself and I spent an afternoon defoliating it by hand.

Also ongoing is landscaping at The House Back East™, which had developed a bumper crop of noxious weeds during our extended monsoon season. The front yard has gotten a colorful layer of mulch, and the much larger back yard is awaiting similar treatment.

You want a reminder of how feeble you have become in your dotage, spend an afternoon doing squats while pulling a metric shit-ton of weeds. The next morning, assess the plummeting property value of your crumbling temple of the soul. Comparables from the immediate vicinity probably won’t help much, if your wife is seven years younger than you, lifts weights and does yoga.

Speaking of things getting fixed up, a group of local investors has transformed the old Ivywild School, shuttered due to declining enrollment, into a mixed-use development that houses Bristol Brewing, Old School Bakery, the Meat Locker deli and any number of other worthwhile operations.

“This is a celebration that says, hey, if people work together, this is what can happen,” partner Mike Bristol told The Gazette. “We can do this again. Not me personally, but as a community. We can do other things like this.”

Yes, please. And thank you.