Category: climate change

Awk!tober

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Cloud cover, Duck! City style.

Ninety-three yesterday as the last day of September dragged its sweaty arse into the National Weather Service record books.

Anyone who got out early yesterday had nothing to complain about. Come to think of it, anyone who got out late, well, likewise.

The Rio wasn’t snaking its way up the drainage channels to snatch up our kinfolk, pets, and proud-ofs. We are light on natural disasters here at the moment, barring the odd pedestrian getting run over by three (!) vehicles, one woman going after another with an ax, and the city council considering guidelines for artificial intelligence, when the real thing seems to be in such short supply.

We may have a spot of wind that will set us to dashing around the foothills chasing our lawn furniture, which we have not been using because mosquitos, which will be chasing us around the foothills, and so on and so on and scooby-dooby-doo-bee.

At least it gets you out in the open air. Like crucifixion.

Meanwhile, a former colleague at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News reports that he and the fam’ are OK in Black Mountain, N.C., save for the lack of “water, internet, cell coverage or landline.” They have a propane generator that supplies electricity — as long as the propane lasts — and while driving is impossible due to downed trees and flooded roads, cycling is not. Stay high and dry, Dean.

Another former bike-industry bro in South Carolina says via text that he too is rocking a generator for power. The water is on, and he has plenty of grub, but the gas “is a bit tricky” and “cold showers suxxxx.” Word, TC.

The Shit Monsoon. They say the job isn’t over until the paperwork is done, and this one took more than the one roll.

I’ve only ever been a spectator at this sort of thing. Back in the late Seventies I got yanked off the Gazette copy desk to help cover the aftermath of a freak tornado that walloped Manitou Springs. And in Colorado we had to keep an eye peeled for fires.

One within eyesight of our shack in CrustyTucky had me scouting a back way off our one-road hillside. Another in Bibleburg had us taking in refugees.

Lucky for us, the worst we ever had to deal with was the occasional four-foot snowfall, power outages, and the fabled Shit Monsoon of song and story.

That was pretty crappy (rimshot). About like having a circus elephant with a crook gut let fly in the basement. But at least we still had power, water, and food … though our appetites were not up to snuff for a while.

I mean, c’mon. The place smelled like canned farts.

• Meanwhile, speaking of shitstorms, it’s been a while since I thumbed through the Book of Revelation, but it seems The New York Times is reprinting it in modern lingo.

For what it’s worth

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

Looks like the tree’s bringing the heat.

Some like it hot, they say.

Not me, Bubba.

There are moments when the summertime heat feels almost bearable. Say, when there are no pressing matters and a pool sits nearby. There is an iced beverage sweating in a tall glass and a broad umbrella throwing a soupçon of shade. Someone else is picking up the tabs.

But even then. …

When I was a kid on Randolph AFB the San Antonio summers were murderous. Crouch under the Fedders window unit and play board games or haunt the officers’ club pool like a toasty ghost.

Tucson? Don’t get me started. I drove a 1974 Datsun pickup with no air conditioning, and my guest-house rental (also sans a/c) was a long, slow-rolling, late-afternoon drive from The Arizona Daily Star, where I labored in dubious battle with Young Republicans and old fascists.

Mostly I passed my days at the pool there, too. Not at the Star; at the University of Arizona, where the coeds weren’t yelling at me all the time unless they caught me drooling.

Now here I am in The Duck! City, where everything I do makes life hotter and the windows of opportunity are quickly closed and curtained against the sun.

Cycling. Running. Cooking. Especially cooking. Sometimes I feel as though it’s me browning in the skillet.

Not an early riser by nature, I find myself compelled to rush through the morning’s rituals so I can get out and back in while Tōnatiuh is still warming up in the bullpen.

Coffee. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, the Albuquerque Journal. More coffee, with toast this time. The litter box. Not for me, for Miss Mia, who has already been in there a time or two while I was ethering my sputtering carburetor. Then the baño for me.

A bite of breakfast — yogurt with granola, oatmeal with nuts and dried fruit, a mandarine, or some combination of these. No tea, it’s already too hot, and we don’t want to overclock the old CPU. Dole out some water to the parched foliage.

And then — hey, what’s that sound, everybody look, what’s going down? — it’s raining. Not for long, not in any quantity (0.01 inch), and it evaporates from the chip-seal in the cul-de-sac before the echo of the raindrops fades.

But still. Music to the ears. Maybe I’ll have that cup of tea after all.

Hey, cool.

Smoking pot

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Hot water at the touch of a button. Welcome to … the Future!

We bought an electric kettle to save all y’all from our gas cooktop.

You’re welcome.

Now instead of firing up the KitchenAid Death Machine to heat water for the morning pour-over, we punch a button on this OXO Brew and hey presto! Hot water. It’s magic.

Of course, we get our power from a secret plant outside Grants that generates electricity by slow-roasting the homeless. It sells the meat to Mickey D’s. We like to think of it as a win-win.

Snow joke

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

I guess we can leave the skinny skis in the garage.

Well, it must be true, if both The New York Times and The Washington Post simultaneously catch up to the sad story about Rio Verde Foothills, where dreams go to die in the dust.

It’s an old story, with the new wrinkle being Scottsdale finally putting a cork in water sales to Rio Verde, saying it had to consider its own residents first and foremost. From the WaPo:

“The city cannot be responsible for the water needs of a separate community especially given its unlimited and unregulated growth,” the city manager’s office wrote in December.

The stories share a squeaky wheel — Cody Reim, who has a wife and four kids, works for the family’s sheet-metal business, and is looking at a water bill that could surpass the tab for his mortgage, when he’s not chatting up the national press. Again, from the WaPo:

“I thought, this is the United States of America, we do so much in humanitarian aid to other countries that don’t have water, they’re not going to let taxpaying citizens of this county go without water,” he said.

“You don’t think this could happen,” he added. “You have this belief that there’s going to be help.”

I have sympathy for the Reim family. Like them, we chose to live in a sandbox — the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert — and our water gets humped uphill to El Rancho Pendejo via a series of pumping stations. If we paid what this liquid gold is actually worth, or had to fetch it here by bike or burro, you can bet your ass we’d use a lot less of it.

Either that or we’d move to where the water is. Yet here we are.

Deciding to build your base camp in the desert is magical thinking going toe to toe with mathematics. As John Fleck observes in his ongoing Dead Pool Diaries, decent runoff this year will not change the fact that Colorado River water is overallocated and always has been.

“It’s just arithmetic!” he says.

If God wanted us here, He would’ve stored more agua fria under the rocks and cacti. But clearly He wasn’t expecting quite so much company.

“Hey, you come to the desert to get wisdom, 40 days and nights, tops. And then you go back where you came from. You silly sods never went back.”

Pissing and moaning

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments

This started out smelling like rain, but what did we get?
Nothing but heartache.

They promise rain, but all we get is fire.

The North American Monsoon is a couple of days late. And I expect a few long-haul truckers may be running behind schedule too, with a 30-acre brush fire closing eight miles of Interstate 40 westbound, from Zuzax to Carnuel, and the eastbound lane of NM 333 from Tramway to Tijeras.

The thing lit up 5-ish yesterday evening with a real stiff wind from the east, and here at El Rancho Pendejo we could see aircraft trying to piss it out, so as the crow and/or smoking ember flies it was a good deal closer to home than we like. Many local roadies, among them Your Humble Narrator, get their kicks on NM 333, a.k.a. Old Route 66.

We had gotten a whole bunch of not much in the way of journalism about the fire by bedtime last night — a paywall from the Journal and a couple drive-bys from the TV people — so, after checking New Mexico Fire Info a few times we decided to roll the dice and hit the rack.

Today we awakened to another warm, dry morning and very little in the way of news about our neighborhood scorcher. There’s some confusion about whether I-40 is open again, but it seems certain that 333 is a no-go this morning as a bridge and power lines get a look-see.

The good news is that the monsoon is back on the menu today. It goes without saying that we will believe this when we see the blessed water falling from the skies. Who knows? The local journos might even give it a writeup.