Getting Felt up

May 19, 2015May 19, 2015 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

The Felt V100 is one of three bikes awaiting review for Adventure Cyclist. At $849, it's a cheap grocery-getter, even more so than a Honda Fit Sport. — The Felt V100 is one of three bikes awaiting review for Adventure Cyclist. At $849, it’s a cheap grocery-getter, even more so than a Honda Fit Sport.

One nice thing about having all these bloody bicycles lying about the place — besides the obvious, which is that it’s nice to have a bunch of bloody bicycles lying about the place — is that when one is down to a single motor vehicle, one has options.

I used this Felt V100, an Old Man Mountain rack and a pair of Jandd Economy Panniers to fetch about $80 worth of groceries home from the Whole Paycheck yesterday. The ride home took 40 minutes, it being all uphill and into a headwind, so everything was nicely solar-cooked by the time I got back to El Rancho Pendejo. Bonus! Mmm, E. coli in botulism sauce.

And looks like I’d better get used to it. Herself and I popped round to the Honda dealer yesterday and she wouldn’t even test-drive anything. And why should she? She has my Subaru Forester, a low-mileage creampuff previously owned by a little old man who only drove it to the Whole Paycheck.

My colleague Matt Wiebe, the tech editor at Bicycle Retailer, says he knows where I can get a deal on a second-hand Harley. But I think I’ll have the Vespa shipped down from Bibleburg instead.

Meanwhile, thanks to one and all for the auto recommendations. You are all hereby penalized two minutes for your assistance.

• Editor’s note: This is my 1,500th post on this blog. ‘Ray for me.

St. Nicked

December 26, 2014December 26, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments

Christmas has come and gone without incident, mostly.

On Christmas Eve, at the urging of Herself, we streamed “The Interview,” because freedom, and now I consider that freedom owes me about $7 and 112 minutes of my life. Herself only gets about 90 minutes back because she fell asleep before the big denouement.

Come the big day we cooked up a mess o’ U-nited States of America American® vittles, just the way Jeebus likes ’em (roast turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, stir-fried succotash with edamame, and raspberry cobbler). Later we rang up or emailed various friends and relatives, and parceled out tasty tidbits to all the critters.

The Turk rests up after an exhausting day of sleeping.

We engaged in no elaborate gift-giving. The move to Duke City and the ongoing reconstruction project that is The Six Million Dollar Boo did to our Visa card what Seth Rogen did to Kim Jong-un’s head, but our executive decisions and the consequences thereof have failed to draw the compensatory attention of the White House and the media.

Then it was early to bed — but not to sleep, not right away. Just as we drifted off, The Boo somehow tumbled out of the rack and onto the deck. I leapt from the sack to see whether his sole remaining eye was skittering around the carpet somewhere like a ping-pong ball that had escaped the table.

Nope. No harm, no foul. As Herself clicked on her bedside lamp, there sprawled The Boo, with a slight list to port, peering at me through the Cone of Shame like a dimwitted Soviet cosmonaut who’d forgotten to close the visor on his helmet before launch.

I’ll call that a Christmas gift.

Mia decides to vogue a bit as Herself and I have a bite of lunch.

The Posole Variations

December 20, 2014December 21, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

I make a lot of posole, and over the years have settled on one simple version and one slightly more elaborate (from The Santa Fe School of Cooking Cookbook).

But the other day I was searching the Innertubes for a chicken version I made once and stumbled across an entirely new recipe that looked good.

So I gave it a whirl and whaddaya know? I have a third favorite.

Thus today’s Zappadan 2014 musical selection, “The Gumbo Variations,” from “Hot Rats.”

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)

Poultry slam

February 23, 2014February 23, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

When a cold comes into the house, you've got to give it the bird. — When a cold comes into the house, you’ve got to give it the bird.

There is catarrh in the house, curse its name.

A terrorist assault on the snotlocker has laid Herself low, and with the Horse of Pestilence thus having escaped her boogered-up beezer barn I am belatedly barring the door to my own by preparing a massive tureen of chicken noodle soup.

Oh, she gets a bowl, too. Just in case you were wondering.

The recipe can be found in “Dad’s Own Cookbook,” by Bob Sloan, and it is the foundation of any number of other meals, among them chicken quesadillas, chicken chilaquiles, and chicken eaten with the fingers straight out of the pot before you make anything other than a big-ass pot of simmered chicken.

And when I say “big-ass,” I do not lie. This sucker starts with a 4.5-pound bird, plus four extra drumsticks, and adds four quarts of water, four carrots, two turnips, a large onion, a leek, a dollop of honey, salt, dill, egg noodles, peas and parsley.

As chicken soups go, this is the equivalent of Rolling Thunder, a culinary carpet-bombing, a real poultry slam. I just hope it’s not too late. Some doughty little bug in green pajamas could be out there right now, pushing his Ah Choo Minh bicycle loaded with deadly bacteria through the triple-canopy jungle of my nose hairs.