Category: Fire

Burned again

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
“Ain’t you heard? Smoke gets in your eyes.”

Miss Mia Sopaipilla thinks it’s a good day to leave the bike parked and hang around indoors, where there are suddenly fewer people to distract The Help from its primary mission, which is the care, feeding, and amusement of (wait for it) Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

The sisters-in-law have departed, and an air-quality alert has arrived.

I thought I smelled smoke last evening, and sure enough, fire managers from the Santa Fe National Forest apparently have begun prescribed burns.

Not a word about it from The New Mexican or the Albuquerque Journal, of course. I had to find out by checking the New Mexico Fire Information website, which I assume is available to our local newspuppies as well.

Even the TV nitwits managed to figure it out, probably after a few of their talking heads bitched during makeup about how their eyes were all itchy and red. Is it the eyeliner? Nope.

At least the Rio hasn’t risen up on its hind legs and started chasing us around, the way the ocean has on the right side of the country.

I knew I didn’t want to live anywhere in hurricane country after seeing “Key Largo.” If the ocean isn’t trying to kill you, Edward G. Robinson is. Here’s hoping our readers in that neck of the mangrove swamps are sitting high and dry.

Wave dynamics revisited

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
Fowl weather in The Duck! City.

The fun and frolic continues apace here in the Land of Enchantment, a subsidiary of Netflix, Inc. Look for the miniseries “The Ten Plagues of Aztlan,” coming soon! “Episode 1: The Gabachos.”

Now it’s Las Vegas in the hot seat. More precisely, the wet seat, as flash floods close roads and force evacuations.

Word is Ruidoso is getting some rain, which, yay. It’s the proverbial good news/bad news scenario — helps with the fire, but not with the flooding. You gotta play the hand you’re dealt, I guess. Meanwhile, it seems full-time residents may be allowed to return Monday morning.

We woke to a light rain here at El Rancho Pendejo. By 8:30 we’d recorded 0.10 inch of rain since midnight, and we will take it, thank you. Sorta throws a spanner into the ol’ training schedule, but what the hell am I training for, anyway?

If it keeps up I don’t think I’ll have to worry about whether a fellow cyclist returns my friendly wave today. My old VeloNews colleague John Rezell broached the topic yesterday at The Cycling Independent, but I beat him to it by nearly three decades (h/t Khal S.).

In my dotage I see this churlish behavior from all manner of knuckleheads. Wave casually at a brother roadie, get The Great Stone Face. Say, “Good morning” to another hiker on a narrow stretch of trail, nuttin’ but nuttin’. Everyone has the AirPods in their ears and an iStick up their arses, I guess.

It doesn’t bother me much anymore. I keep waving and yielding trail as though it matters. Which it kinda does.

Paging Mr. DeMille

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
“Holy Moses. … this may be the worst staff infection I’ve ever seen.”

Shit is getting Biblical here in the Land of Enchantment, a division of Netflix, Inc.

We have the fires and floods in and around Ruidoso, another blaze in El Malpais National Monument, and a dust storm up by Algodones that caused a 17-vehicle pileup, closed Interstate 25 in both directions, and sent 18 people to the hospital — plus two more to the calaboose after they acted the fool in the presence of law enforcement.

Quite a kickoff to the summer solstice. I don’t think we have to worry about the Rio Grande turning to blood, though. That’s what Central Avenue is for.

Off to the races

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Image of the evacuation lifted from EarthCam.

Well, hell, here we go — we’ve had a few warm-up fires this season, but looks like the main event just kicked off at Ruidoso, where everyone has been advised to git while the gitting is good.

“We were getting ready to sit down to a meal and the alert came on: Evacuate now, don’t take anything or plan to pack anything, just evacuate,” Mary Lou Minic told KOB-TV. “And within three to five minutes, we were in the car, leaving.”

Here’s the latest from New Mexico Fire Information. Ruidoso News has a story, updated last night. The Las Cruces Sun News trotted out a backgrounder from 2019.

Ash, holes

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 30 Comments

Fire on the mountain? Nope. Smoke from Canada.

The haze around here lately is courtesy of our neighbors to the north, who continue to be on fire.

Down south, Georgia finds itself contending with an unnatural disaster, as a conga line of douchebags waltzes in and out of the Fulton County sneezer after cutting bond-and-release deals of various weights.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla supervises the landscapers.

Here at El Rancho Pendejo we have our ongoing landscaping project, which involves neither conflagration nor sedition.

As it enters an extended ditch-digging/pipe-laying phase I thank the gods that I stumbled into journalism, much of which can be done sitting down, in the shade.

Still, I’d gladly stand for hours in the Georgia sun if I got to see the Tangerine Turd get printed and mugged, especially if he came off looking half as frazzled as Rudy the Mooch. Dude looks like a drunk goat trying to shit a rusty tomato can.