Slinging in the rain

July 23, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments

New Mexico has the *best* clouds, swear to Dog.

Looks like I picked the right day to sleep in.

I woke up way too early — 3 a.m. — then rolled over and went back to sleep until 6. Miss Mia was not amused, and said so, loudly, otherwise I might still be asleep even now.

Except Herself would’ve thundered in eventually to kick me up the hole, because she is a working woman and has a full day ahead involving the making of money, the care and feeding of the 401(k), retention of health insurance, and like that there. Some slacker is in charge of breakfast, which clearly was not making itself.

So up, up, I got, and set about my morning chores, which do not dollar up on the hoof nearly as nicely.

As I was emptying the litter box, making coffee, toasting bread, cooking oatmeal, brewing tea, medicating Miss Mia, and so on, I was thinking in terms of where to ride today. Forecast was for a slight chance of rain after noon, so I was considering a medium-long outing to the Morning Star Grocery and back. Haven’t been out there all year.

And then it started raining.

Well. Shit. Lucky me. If I hadn’t slept in, I’d have been out in that rain, dodging swings of Thor’s hammer instead of kicks from Herself’s tiny sandals.

• • •

Speaking of hard rains a-fallin’, I don’t expect there’s much that could go wrong — cough, cough, “Armageddon,” cough, cough — with helping Saudi Arabia plunge its bloody paws into Pandora’s nuclear box.

Writes Charles P. Pierce:

To the outside observer, there’s no reason to trust either end of this deal. The American side is being run by grifters and incompetents. The Saudi side is being run by people who have settled accounts with bone saws and beheadings and who also are sharper about money than the Americans ever will be. The idea that the current Saudi regime will be able to resist the temptations of enriching uranium without using it to build weapons feels laughable. I wouldn’t trust any government on earth that far, let alone an authoritarian theocracy with murder in its heart.

Alas, Babylon, etc. The Gospel according to Frederic Brown would seem germane here, if young Harry Graham were the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and not a bit slow. I take little solace from any headline that includes the null phrase, “Trump says. …”

It never rains, but. …

July 21, 2026July 21, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Crossing over I-40 near Winrock Town Center aboard the Soma Saga (canti edition).

We’ve been enjoying the occasional sprinkle in late July, all told about a half-inch of moisture in our dusty little corner of the sandbox.

Sure helps keep the mercury on the down-low. The air conditioning gets to take five, as does the irrigation system.

Why, a fella can even wait until 9 in the a.m. to get out for a bike ride without risking spontaneous combustion. Luxury!

I’ve been logging more miles lately — 131 last week, 123 the week before, 130 the week before that — not just because the weather has been delightful, but because it gets me away from the MacBook Pro, which seems to have visited Taco Bell without me and has been shitting all over my desk.

I’ll spare you the links. You’ve seen them all anyway.

Now, I could take a claw hammer to that laptop, make it shut up. But the MacBook Pro is not the news; it’s just a delivery system. It’s not the Beast; it’s not even letting it in. It’s just making it available in case I want a peek.

Remember Parker beating the tar out of Ash in “Alien” and all the good that did him? Ash was a grinning, disembodied head in a puddle of goo — literally a talking head, still bringing the news and analysis, like some interstellar anchorman for “The Weyland-Yutani Newshour” — and before long everyone on the Nostromo was Purina Alien Chow except for Ripley, Jonesy the cat, and the alien.

And Ripley was still getting nothing but bad news. Especially when, just as she was getting ready to back the escape pod out of the garage, up pops the alien with a solid impression of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” — “Heeeere’s Johnny!” — and she had to have been thinking, “Goddamnit, all I wanted to do was take a little ride, get away from all this ‘Wet cleanup on Aisle 4’ shit for a while. …”

And Ripley didn’t even know about the next three movies in the queue. Talk about your long days in the office.

The bike is my escape pod. I check it for aliens before I hop aboard.

And while I bring a bot along, I keep that sumbitch locked down tight. If he manages to pop off somehow, well … he’s just a feeble old iPhone 13 Mini, and I’m pretty sure I can whup his ass in a fair fight.

The cat’s meow

May 29, 2026May 29, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Miss Mia Sopaipilla once again enjoys a full complement of servants.

We’re finally back to what passes for normal around here.

Herself has returned from Tennessee and Miss Mia Sopaipilla couldn’t be happier. I’m not the person you want to see first thing in the early morning hours, when the Voices are in full throat, roaring for coffee and news, the cacophony just a few decibels short of drowning out the clicking, popping, and squeaking of various OE bits from 1954 announcing their imminent failure. And with the factory warranty long since expired, too.

I lack a certain ruthless efficiency at stupid-thirty. Stack a few extra chores atop my tiny little pile and I am prone to mutter about Sisyphus as the rocks start rolling downhill.

I do manage to achieve some sort of spastic rhythm after a few days catching bad hops in the valley. But it’s not a pretty thing to watch.

Especially for Miss Mia. For openers, I like my coffee black, to match my aura, while Herself will share a dollop of frothy cream from her cuppa. I’ll pour Miss Mia a shot straight from the container, but it’s not the same. So off she goes, stalking from room to room, looking for Herself and that fat mug of cream with just a hint of coffee.

Never you mind that the litter box is cleaned and the water refreshed, food and meds served up, bedding shaken out. These are services, to be expected. It’s the little extras that make the difference between living and merely existing.

Eventually Miss Mia cycles through the Two Stages of Feline Grief: “I want something,” and “Fuck it, I’ll take a nap.”

And then I can finally have my coffee. Black.

‘We are not amused’

April 24, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

“Hey, I may be a Russian Blue, but I was *born* here, so *lemme out!”*

Nothing to see here, move along, move along. The ICEholes didn’t get Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

However, she was plucked from beneath the rumpled comforter in our bed, unceremoniously stuffed into a carrier, and whisked away via Scary Noisy Rattlebox to the vet yesterday for a vaccination, a mani-pedi, and a quick looksee because — like so many of us — Miss Mia is Of a Certain Age. In this case, 19, which means she’s pushing 90 in our years.

Ninety. Holy hell. I’m neither half as spry nor a quarter as cute as she is, and I’m barely 72. She’s got more hair, too, though our whiskers are about the same shade of white.

Mia’s no longer the champion jumper she once was, but then neither am I. Since breaking that second ankle I hop onto and off of things about as well as Mr. Hilltop in “Young Frankenstein.”

But she’s only on the one medication — methimazole, for an overactive thyroid — whereas I would be on an even half-dozen if I could get any of the fun ones without risking a longish stretch in the cage myself.

As we rolled into the parking lot I noticed one vehicle with a Trump sticker, and once inside I glanced around, trying to I.D. the owner. But I didn’t see anyone with an ailing turkey buzzard, desert warthog, or vampire bat, so I couldn’t in good conscience slip the doc a double sawski and recommend a candidate for euthanasia.

“Oh, sure, you’re all about a rabies vaccination for your three-legged pit bull but the rest of us should be ‘free’ to croak of the COVID Measles,” I mumbled to no one in particular.

Miss Mia just rolled her lovely green eyes, which is her way of saying: “Can we get on with it, please? You may win the war of words in here, but you’re gonna lose the fight in the parking lot afterwards, and I want to get home to finish my nap without a side trip to the ER and/or jail.”

Earth Day

April 22, 2026April 22, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 28 Comments

The backyard maple is still with us, megadrought be damned.

The arborista with the tree service we use recently sent out a customer-tips newsletter about balancing responsible water use and tree care. Top of her list? “Plant better trees.”

The trend has been hotter and drier for many years. I don’t see drought conditions going away. There are plenty of shade trees that are not water-hogs and many desert trees that complement your landscapes. Cottonwood and maple are so out of fashion in drought conditions.

Sigh. Naturally, we’ve got this doddering old maple that endures an amputation or six every fall. And there’s a giant-ass cottonwood across the arroyo.

We had a beautiful maple in the front yard back in Bibleburg. Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Defense Regiment) loved that tree, when he was still an indoor-outdoor cat. He’d take up a position in the crotch of it and make himself look even longer than he was, like a giant furry albino alligator.

Once a killer hailstorm hit that tree like Spooky working out with its Vulcan minigun. Maple-leaf salad all over the front yard and porch. Tree bounced right back, maybe even better than ever.

But it rains and snows in the B-burg. Or it used to, anyway. A tree can get a little love up there, whether it’s Earth Day or not.