68° yesterday, maybe 63° today … hoo-lawd, this ain’t no way to run a climate, bruh.
It’s barely February and we already have juniper, ash, alder, elm, rumex, and willow pollen blasting us in the nose-holes like ICEholes pepper-spraying citizens.
This makes for fine cycling weather, of course, as long as you’re not drafting someone clearing his beak. The tuque and tights go back in the winter-duds drawer. Ditto the capilene base layers. Out come the short sleeves and arm/knee warmers because, hey, you never know.
But one of the days we’re gonna twist a faucet to fill a water bottle and get nothing but a fart sound, pffffbbbbbffflllhhhh, maybe a little puff of fine sand.
Boy, is Assos ever gonna make bank selling stillsuits.
“Albuquerque? You’re gonna want the Paul-Muad’Dib Signature Model. How much? Ho, ho. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. Can I interest you in a Liet-Kynes hoodie and a gallon jug of Kwisatz Haderach sunscreen, SPF 666? And maybe a Kleenex?”
The Supervisor, the M-Dogg, and Your Humble Narrator gear up for a 63-mile ride from Santa Rosa to Hopland in August 2006.
Looking back over some old training logs I was smugly congratulating myself on what I thought was a strong start to this, the Year of Our Lard 2026.
“366 miles for January,” sez I to myself, no one else being handy. “Wrapped it up with the first 100-mile week of the New Year. Not bad; not bad at all.”
And then I checked in with a couple old velo-newsie bros. No, not fellow refugees from that once-storied journal of competitive cycling — rather, fellow refugees from the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. Like Your Humble Narrator, they also ride bicycles.
The Supervisor and the M-Dogg both live in Northern California now, and it’s been nearly 20 years since the three of us last saddled up together. I’m the only one who’s fully retired, in part because I’m the only one who has a wife with a job of work, which for an old slacker keen to skip his pulls into the wind is like drafting a UPS truck on a summer day.
Anyway, there we were, chatting away via text, and the M-Dogg mentions that he just wrapped a 49.6-mile ride with 2,020 feet of vertical.
Yow.
I mentioned having done a leisurely 3-mile trail run, explaining that I got a late start and didn’t feel like kitting up for a ride.
“And here the M-Dogg is already cranking out the half-centuries,” I added.
“Mo, tell him your January mileage,” says The Supe.
“760 in January,” replies the M-Dogg, “only possible in a very dry January.”
That’s 760 miles. Not kilometers, furlongs, cubits, rods, or whatever the hell it is that Californicators use to measure the distance between organic vineyards and fair-trade java shops. And here I was, cackling over the little 366-mile egg I laid last month, which was even drier here in the Duck! City desert.
“Comparisons are odious,” they say. Ho, ho. When When John Fortescue wrote that shit he was probably on the short end of a miles-gobbling contest with Henry VI, who covered a lot of ground during the Wars of the Roses.
“Better luck next year, Forty old chum! Oh, dear, here comes Edward, with that ‘Oo’ d’ye think is the bloody king around here, mate?’ look on his face. Right, I’m off. …”
Which brings us to this poem from James Crews, “Winter Morning,” from which our headline comes. Unwrap your gift and be grateful for whatever it is you find inside.
Didn’t we just have a full moon? Is God overstocked with these things and blowing them out? Or has He finally run out of patience and put His foot to the floorboard on the road to the End of Days?
This latest celestial spotlight is the Snow Moon, which, ha ha, etc. Yesterday’s high was 61, 10 (!) degrees above normal. Today’s may be warmer still. What little remains from last week’s snow lurks in dark corners, like ICEholes waiting for women and children to push around.
But we were talking about time, not temperature, yes?
Lately it seems that the instant I’ve finished washing the breakfast dishes it’s time to make lunch. Then, with luck, a bit of exercise, and boom! Dinner and bedtime.
Not a lot of unclaimed space therein to, as Whitman put it, “loafe and invite my soul.” My soul won’t even take my calls. Straight to voicemail they go.
Now, some may say that I burn an awful lot of dawn’s early light slobbering around the Internet like an ADHD kid working out on a Tootsie Pop — the National Weather Service, The Paris Review, various and sundry purveyors of products that I don’t need and can’t afford — before finally biting into its center, the homepage of The New York Times, which almost always shares a deep brown hue with, but is very much not, chocolate.
That this drives me to lunch is only because (a) I no longer drink, and (2) I desperately need something to take the taste of the NYT homepage out of my mouth.
Having eaten my way through the fridge and pantry, I feel a pressing need for either sleep or exercise. And exercise it is, because Miss Mia Sopaipilla is in the bed, and if I try to share a corner of that king-size bed with that 8-pound cat she will get right out of it and stalk around the house, meowing at the top of her lungs. She’s deaf as a post and her voice carries.
So out the door I go. And sure, if it’s 55 or 60 out there I’m liable to stay out a while, because see “the homepage of The New York Times” and “meowing at the top of her lungs” above. Last week I got 100 miles in, plus one trail run.
When I get home I’m hungry again for some reason as Herself inspects a gas range atop which dinner is very much not cooking itself with that look on her face that says, “Some people have to go to work in the morning.” I strive mightily to swallow a cheery, “Not me!” And get out in that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans.
And soon dinner is served, as is something less toothsome on TV, and since some people have to go to work in the morning (not me) everyone is in bed by 8 and asleep shortly thereafter.
Tomorrow, as the fella says, is another day. That Tootsie Pop ain’t gonna lick itself.
The Colorado River Basin states aren’t having much luck squeezing water from the rocks. Or each other.
January has finally wobbled off into the desert, sunburnt and mumbling to itself.
“55 degrees? Seriously?”
When last seen January was clad in short sleeves and knickers, with one half-full bidon, which will not be enough as the Colorado River Basin states squabble over how to divvy up the water that isn’t there.
I mean, shit, it’s already 46° here in Duck!Burg as February starts applying the SPF 70 and it’s all of 10:15 a.m. The Year of Our Lard 2026 looks like a long, dry ride for some of us. Maybe all of us.
In the Carolinas, meanwhile, my man Clyde DePoynter reports snow and wind and a lack of natural gas that has him feeding the wood stove like Casey Jones’ fireman shoveling coal, trying to get the mail to Mississippi. He was keeping toasty by watching the UCI cyclocross world championships in the Netherlands via VPN.
No spoilers here — but if you missed the live action and would like some recorded highlights, well, FloBikes and YouTube have ’em.
Hell, I do this a couple times a year. Drop the Subie downtown for a little love at Reincarnation, ride a bike back to El Rancho Pendejo. Repeat in reverse to collect the old warhorse and drive ’er home. Ain’t no thang.
Except Tuesday, it kinda was.
God damn, but it was cold.
I had been expecting a temp in the low 30s, which for some reason sounds a lot warmer than high 20s, which is what it was. So I wore a jacket over a long-sleeved jersey over a long-sleeved base layer, tights over bibs, wool socks, cold-weather shoes and gloves, and tuque.
Wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. And I knew it at 9 a.m., a half-block into the 14-mile ride home.
O, lawd, I will never be smart. I had Buff neckwear, beefier tights, an old balaclava, and an even older pair of sure-’nough winter gloves … and they were all in a drawer back at the Rancho.
“Well,” I thought, “at least it’s all uphill.” And so it was, 1,200 feet of up, not including a long stretch of that fabled “invisible hill,” which is to say a damp, bitter wind out of the NNW and straight into Your Humble Narrator’s chattering choppers.
Whoever coined the phrase “What can’t be cured must be endured” was probably not thinking about stupidity. But I was as I grumbled my way up the North Diversion Channel Trail, whenever possible sitting bolt upright with hands tucked into armpits.
At Montgomery I came upon a street person’s smallish campfire underneath the bridge. I couldn’t decide whether to report him or join him. So I did neither. Onward!
By the Arroyo del Oso Golf Course, with six miles to go, I had gained some altitude, caught a soupçon of sun, and warmed up just a bit … so much so that I began contemplating some extra-credit stupidity, to wit, leaving the pavement at Juan Tabo for the trails that wind through Bear Canyon Open Space to the Embudito trailhead.
Now, in my defense, we’re talking extremely non-technical trails here, and I was on the Soma Double Cross with its 42mm knobbies. Easy breezy like a cover girl! Assuming she were properly dressed for conditions and had a pro mechanic to get her rolling again in 30 seconds after a puncture.
I, on the other hand, was dressed for conditions that existed only in my head, which was up my arse as per usual. I would be fixing my own flat with half-frozen fingers, only 80 percent of which are fully functional when warm. It would take longer than 30 seconds. Finally, there was the absolute certainty of some rapid evaporative cooling on the 1.5-mile paved descent from the trailhead to the Rancho.
So for a change I did the smart thing: took the pavement home, slammed a steaming mug of tea, and spent way too much time in a hot shower. Around 3:30 I got back on the bike and zipped down to fetch the Subie. Didn’t even need the jacket for the return trip. Ah, the desert Southwest, with its 30-degree temperature swings.
This is hardly the stuff of legend, or even unpaid bloggery. There was a time when I would drive for hours in much worse weather just to race bicycles in it, then tidy up at the car wash afterward. But that was when I was a man — a slightly better insulated man — instead of whatever it is I am now.
Plus my auto mechanic was only 14 minutes away by bike. Sometimes I’d just run home.
Mad Blog Media 