Got them Suburban Snowsick Blues

May 12, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 39 Comments

It was a mother of a Mothers Day at Chez Dog.

The weather has been, shall we say, unsettled.

One minute a fella’s cycling around and about wearing little more than a bit of team kit marinated in sunscreen, and the next he’s huddled over a furnace grate in a snowmobile suit, Ruger Mini Thirty locked and loaded, ready to repel a terrorist yeti raid on his bacon and beans.

I made my preparations on Saturday, whipping up two steaming tureens of Southwestern fare, the first of a pork-and-potato-laden green chile stew and the second of pinto beans with onion, garlic and chipotle chile. To say the atmosphere has grown heavy indoors since would be an understatement of epic proportions.

The weather wizards were shrieking about inches and feet of white stuff, but this latest resurrection of winter proved to be not so much of a much. What little we got was heavy and wet, to be sure, and at one point I had to venture out with a broom to flog it off the tender branches of the young Canadian red cherry in the back yard.

This morning we have gray skies, temps below freezing, a stiff wind, and flurries, which is to say it’s May in Colorado. It caused me to compose a protest song in the style of Mr. Robert Zimmerman, though it’s tough to be musical without guitar, harmonica or talent. Still, I had a whang at it in an email to a friend and colleague in the mountains.

How much snow have you got there?
They said we’d get it everywhere
But mostly, down here below
the worst was that the wind did blow

It sucked, actually
Real cold
Movin’ t’Arizony

(squee honk blaat hoot snort honk twee)

Free tea! (Bring your own bag, cup and water)

May 8, 2014May 8, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

Tea Party — `I didn’t know it was YOUR table,’ said Alice; `it’s laid for a great many more than three.’

The smart money says that the GOTea is poised to make big gains in the midterm elections, extending its pallid, liver-spotted grip on the U.S. House and perhaps retaking control of the Senate.

“What the hell?” you may think. “They’re all the same anyway, Donks and Pachyderms. Opposite sides of the same wooden nickel. How bad could it be?”

Well, we here in Bibleburg have been test-driving this brand of Gadsden-flag, live-free-or-die governance for you for as long as I can remember (my family moved here in 1967). And here’s what you get for your low-taxation, no-representation dollar:

• An unaddressed backlog of $1.3 billion in capital needs. Whether this figure includes repairing or replacing the burnt-up, 80-year-old Martin Drake Power Plant, which provides a third of Bibleburg’s power, is not clear.

• A “jobs-creation program” centered on tourist attraction that boils down to “there’ll be pie in the sky.” Not one of the visitors we’ve had at The House Back East® has expressed a desire to visit a downtown stadium, a sports medicine center, an Olympic museum, or an Air Force Academy visitors center (other than the one that already exists, on the base). They want to see the Garden of the Gods, Pikes Peak, Manitou Springs — in other words, the things that are already here which we have yet to fuck up. And be certain to check the numbers for jobs, salaries and operating deficits from our other stadium/entertainment venues, the World Arena and the Pikes Peak Center.

• Plummeting home sales, and home-sale prices. For some reason, people seem uninterested in moving to communities that lack jobs, electricity and other must-have items.

We hate that out-of-control federal government’s spending, but gyrate like a speed-freak pole dancer for every freedom-killing dollar it stuffs in our threadbare G-string. We despise taxes, but demand services. We insist on Christmas 24/7, free of charge and taxation, but if anybody wearing a red suit climbs down our chimney we’ll blow him right back up it with our AR-15.

Take a good, long look, folks. America’s future is Bibleburg’s present.

Zap comics

May 6, 2014May 6, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

We had a spot of fun around here yesterday.

The Martin Drake Power Plant, the downtown eyesore that Moses brought with him from Egypt, caught fire and had to be shut down. Not to worry — the coal-fired relic only supplies a third of Bibleburg’s power — and as you can see from the photo at top, the city has a backup in place.

Boy, I bet the City Council wishes they’d given a green light (ho ho ho) to recreational-marijuana sales now. They’d have enough sales-tax revenue to build a solar array, six wind farms and a nuclear plant.

I can already see the slogan: “Puffin’ for Power: Get Lit And Stay Lit.”

An ill wind

March 30, 2014March 30, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 35 Comments

The northwest side of the Cheyenne Trail in Palmer Park.

Ah, jaysis. One of those forecasts. The devil must be eating beans again, because the wind is up, and it stinks.

After spending the morning working on various velo-projects and watching the trees prostrate themselves like monks before the altar I decided to leave all the bikes in the garage, no matter what class of tires they were wearing, and go for a 90-minute hike in Palmer Park.

Some dipshit lit the place up the other day, briefly, and with Beelzebub’s butt-trumpet blasting hell-farts hither and yon suddenly the Asplundh folks are in there turning foliage into sawdust. It’s either a fire-mitigation effort or a thinly disguised attempt to deny cover to those horny Bibleburgers who are either too free-spirited for a hotel or too cheap to rent a room, the park’s shadier nooks long having served as havens for spirited and unsanctioned rounds of Hide the Bishop.

There was none of that going on today — not that I saw, anyway — though I did spot what could have been a few post-coital cigarette butts along the way. There was, however, a veritable parade of mountain bikers disinclined to yield trail, unleashed dogs dropping deuces, and oblivious pedestrians.

One day these three factions will come together in some blind corner as yet uncleared by Asplundh and there will be a fine old donnybrook. I will sell tickets and use the proceeds to buy a house in some place where neither the wind nor the populace blows.

Champs and chumps

February 3, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Yesterday’s world-championship duel between Zdenek Stybar and Sven Nys was one of the best I’ve ever seen. Much better than the heavily pimped, darkly comical, one-sided feetsball contest that took place later that day in East Rutherford, Noo Joisey (based on media reports; I didn’t watch the thing).

It’s a shame that Lars van der Haar had such bad luck on the big day. He and Stybar have enlivened the business-as-usual ‘cross circuit this season, and the World Cup champion deserved better than a sixth-place finish at worlds. So it goes.

My ‘cross bikes stayed in the garage yesterday as winter maintains its clutch on Dog Country and I have no excess income to redirect toward emergency rooms and physical therapists. Instead, I broke out the old mountain bike again and spent an enjoyable if difficult hour crunching through old snow.

The north-south creekside bike path is in pretty fair shape. But it must be the only one getting plowed lately, because the eastbound trail from Mark Dabling to Union was a rutted, boot-print-pocked mess. Middle-ring, big-cog, 7-mph stuff, is what. I carved untracked snow wherever I could find it, because riding that is smooth like butta. But crunching through the used stuff involves something of an ass-kicking, even with a suspension fork and seat post.

No worries. I’m sure that once City for Champions becomes a reality instead of an old white land developer’s wet dream we’ll have gold-plated hybrid snowplows working the trails the way a crack whore does South Nevada Avenue. Until then, I plan to keep a shovel handy. And not just for snow, either.