Our house is a very very very fine house
Category: Fall
There goes the neighborhood
That’s the last of the blue skies around here for a bit. The temperature just dropped like a poisoned pigeon, Herself reports that she is driving home from Denver in a snowstorm and the forecast calls for rain and perhaps an inch or two of snow. Can’t be 70 and sunny forever, I guess.
After committing a bit of journalism in the morning I broke out a Steelman for a pleasant hour or so of low-impact cycling, then hopped on the Vespa for a quick spin downtown for lunch, just beating a light sprinkle home. Now it appears to be snowing, so I’m fortifying myself against pneumonia with a delicious glass of 2006 Ramón Bilbao Tempranillo Limited Edition.
Hey, it could be worse. I could’ve had to drive to Fruita for the VeloNews gang’s annual clusterfuck, and right now there just ain’t no good way to get there from here.
Happily, I wasn’t invited to attend this year, in part because I insist on being paid for hours logged and travel endured and in part because I refer to annual retreats as clusterfucks.
Coyote ugly
More dry, dusty cyclo-cross today, domestic and foreign alike.
At the U.S. Gran Prix of Cyclocross stop in Kentucky, Georgia Gould laid a humiliating beat-down on the women’s field, outclassing everyone for a second consecutive day, while Jeremy Powers took over from Tim Johnson in putting the ol’ Louisville slugger to Ryan Trebon.
Across the pond in the Czech Republic, Zdenek Stybar played the Roadrunner to Niels Albert’s Wile E. Coyote, going “Beep-beep” and then kapweeeng on the bell lap, leaving Albert standing there with his jaw on the ground, his Acme® ’cross bike collapsing into a pile of parts underneath him. I swear I actually saw the course rise and settle under Stybar’s wheels as he rocketed along to keep his undefeated streak intact in front of a partisan, boisterous crowd in Pilzner (mmm, beer).
I didn’t get out myself, unless you count a bout of leaf collection and removal in tandem with Herself. A neighbor uses our maple’s leaves for compost in her extensive garden, and it looks like we’ll have a record haul this season — we’ve already collected six bags’ worth and there are still a few green leaves on the tree.
Tour de meh
Oboy, oboy, oboy — the route of the 2011 Tour de France is announced today and there’s an Apple proclamation slated tomorrow. My cup runneth over.
Well, actually, not so much. I don’t give a shit about the TdF, other than as a source of income. Cav’ wins all the sprints, the Schlecks win all the climbs, the Euskaltels hit the deck, there’s no time trialing to speak of and the winner tests positive for something you never heard of. There’s your Tour.
And if Apple announces a leaner, meaner and cheaper MacBook Air, as is widely expected, well, I don’t much care about that either. The old black MacBook seems to be ticking along, and if it croaks again and I need to leave the DogHaus to do a job of work there’s always the 12-inch G4 PowerBook, the 12-inch G3 iBook, the 14.1-inch G3 PowerBook … we got more Apples than the average Washington-state orchard, is what I’m sayin’.
Meanwhile, it’s a beautiful fall morning — 30-something, with a high in the mid-60s forecast. A guy with any brains would be out riding his bike. And if he did, he might see me out there riding mine, too.
The weather is here, wish you were beautiful
Deadlines suck. Like The Turk, I’ve been indoors more than I care to be lately, in my case generating bicycle comedy for fun and profit (well, for profit, anyway, and only just barely). This is particularly irksome because we’ve been enjoying a stellar fall here in Bibleburg. It’s 76 right now — 76! — at 5:45 p.m. on Oct. 15. Imagine my amazement.
This will change, as it must. Tomorrow and Sunday look pretty damn’ nice, and wouldn’t y’know, I have to clock in for a couple of shifts in the old VeloBarrel. Come Monday, the weather should become a bit more seasonal, as in 50-something with a chance of showers. Ick.
After that, it’s the Colorado lottery, which means exactly what it sounds like — a total meteorological crapshoot, which I must say keeps life interesting, like the wining jug in John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” a punch blended by understudy barkeep Eddie using any booze left in glasses by the patrons of La Ida. A Palace Flophouse roommate, Jones, first pans, then praises the concoction:
“You take whiskey,” he said hurriedly. “You more or less know what you’ll do. A fightin’ guy fights and a cryin’ guy cries, but this —” he said magnanimously — “why, you don’t know whether it’ll run you up a pine tree or start you swimming to Santa Cruz.”
That’s the sad part. Pine trees we got. But Santa Cruz … not so much.
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