Definitely challenged, but no record

August 28, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments

With any luck at all the unseemly heat has broken. For the moment, anyway.

Come morning we don’t have to worry that the air conditioning will click on if we throw the doors and windows open to admit a listless 80° breeze that frankly falls miles short of refreshing. But 68°? That’s more like it.

Now and then we’ve gotten a soupçon of rain overnight. Better and better.

As a consequence the cycling has been excellent. It’ll be a while before we have to start thinking about arm and knee warmers, but the other day I packed a jacket and rode a bike with fenders just to ensure that there would be no rain while I was out and about.

Your Humble Narrator, failing to distinguish himself in a time trial at Alamosa sometime in the Nineties. *Photo: Casey B. Gibson*

Despite the heat I’ve been logging 100-120 miles a week since mid-June, plus occasional short trail runs and even some light weightlifting. Exactly why remains a mystery. The only possible justification is the faint hope that all this sweaty nonsense will help me continue smiling down at the daisies instead of scowling up at the roots.

The other day I found myself afflicted with the impulse to resurrect my old Steelman time-trial bike. Must’ve been some distant, pain-wracked memory of the Record Challenge Time Trial at Moriarty trying to crawl out of its coffin.

The best ride I ever had there was in 1991, when I turned a 56:43 for 40km despite being mired in the move from Fanta Se to Bibleburg. I was logging most of my mileage in the ’83 Toyota longbed but still managed a PR that was only about 10 minutes slower than Kent Bostick’s best time on the course (he didn’t even race that year and still beat me).

Imagine my surprise when a casual check of the Innertubes found that the Paula Higgins Memorial Record Challenge Time Trial is on for the upcoming Labor Day weekend.

Hmm. Now that I’m a geezer I’d be racing the 20km. The way I’ve been training, who knows? I might even be able to break the hour.

Soup’s on

June 13, 2024June 14, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

Our shade tree would like some shade, please…

Why, yes, I am insane, and thanks for asking.

When the temps hit triple digits — 101°, another record — the first thing I think about preparing for dinner is a piping-hot pot of soup. A fragrant chicken soup with chickpeas and vegetables from Melissa Clark, to be specific.

OK, between you and me, I was thinking more along the lines of a jambalaya, or maybe some slow-cooker chipotle-honey chicken tacos.

But when I made the mistake of consulting Herself about the week’s menu, she ordered up salmon with potatoes and asparagus, and the aforementioned soup.

Well, whaddaya gonna do?

We get two dinners out of a pound and a half of salmon, a half-dozen taters, and 12 ounces of asparagus.

And that burly soup serves six to eight, which means we’ll probably be eating it through the weekend. Especially since I made a fresh loaf of whole-wheat bread to keep it company.

Maybe next week I’ll pitch a gazpacho at her. Yeah, that’d be cool. …

Socialism in the desert

June 8, 2024June 8, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Hot times in the old town, as the fella says. Yesterday’s high of 100° set a record for June 7. Normal is 89°.

But what’s normal these days?

The mule deer are slow-walking their rounds from rose bush to birdbath, lingering at feeders provided by some well-intentioned animal lovers up the road a ways. Wandering from this handout to that, the deer startle motorists in blind corners and make high-speed descents on the old two-wheeler a little more thrilling.

Seven of them were working our cul-de-sac last night, no doubt with designs on the neighbors’ new peach tree, which is enclosed in the sort of stout wire cage that should be restricting the movements of Alex Jones and Rudy the Mook, preferably in some public place so passersby can poke them with sharp sticks. Jones and the Mook, not the peach tree or deer.

Over at Desert Oracle Radio Ken Layne has his own musings on heat and wildlife as he settles in for another sweaty shift dishing up his Joshua Tree jive.

The days are long and hot and hazy. Another summer to endure. … It just eats at your nerves, this kind of weather, and what’s worse is you know that the hot weather is another month or two away. What’s bearable when you’re alone under a cottonwood in the breeze is absolute torment when you’re trying to get yourself from point A to point B and see ugliness all around. Dead eyes behind the cracked windshields of erratically piloted vehicles; the never-ending trash piles; empty strip malls of crumbling stucco and blank plastic signs. Long stretches of highway with nothing but human-built desolation. The ragweed’s coming up too. Best to stay on the property in the company of the creatures who survive this aesthetic apocalypse.

Layne provides a bit of heat relief for his neighbors. Young rock squirrels have taken to hanging around the water bowl he leaves out for the birds, one of them trying and failing to surf the ice cubes he includes from time to time. A cottontail dozes on the doormat. The bobcat, coyotes, and mountain lions he leaves to fend for themselves.

He has mule deer, too, hugging whatever shade they can find, under a willow or juniper. Doesn’t mention any peach trees or rose bushes.

Should we be feeding and watering these critters? Well … what we call “our” property was theirs first, after all. Is it unreasonable to ask that we contribute a little something to the common good?

This seems to be Layne’s thinking. And ours, too. We maintain two bird feeders and three hummingbird feeders, and don’t holler copper on the deer ambling through the yard. Noblesse oblige? Share and share alike? From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs? Here’s the Desert Oracle again:

Now these rock squirrels are desert squirrels, squirrels of the Southwest. They don’t even need water, beyond what they get from the various seeds, grasses, fruits and bugs that they eat. But these young squirrels, they are fools for cold water. They just hang around that bowl for half the day. And now I cannot replace that bowl with a proper birdbath even if I wanted to, because what will the squirrels and the bunnies do?

Kick the tires and light the fires

June 5, 2024June 5, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams finally get off the deck on Wednesday, bound for the International Space Station. | Photo: NASA Television

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams picked a fine day to get out of town. The temps at the Cape were headed for the century mark, and before the week is out I expect a few of us here in the Great American West would be happy to join them at the International Space Station, even if we’re light on luggage and have to drink our own wee-wee.

“A hunnerd-twelve in Vegas? I don’t wanna see Carrot Top that bad. They got a casino at the ISS?”

The Duck! City is under a heat advisory tomorrow — not Vegas bad, but bad enough — and though I’m still not 100 percent sinus-wise, I got out for a short snout-flushing trail ride this morning while temps were still in the 70s. We could hit 101° tomorrow, and I’d just as soon not add heatstroke to the sinus infection.

Could be worse, though. For instance, as we speak, weather-related boogeymen have kept Herself parked on the tarmac at Baltimore Washington International for two hours and counting. Southwest’s flight-status window shows her flight as “departed” — which I guess means, “taxied away from the terminal” — with touchdown in ABQ an hour later than originally intended.

Assuming her Boeing product ever gets off the ground, that is.

Jeez, we can put a man on the moon, but … well, actually, no, we can’t. Never mind.

• Late update: Charlie Pierce has some thoughts on Wilmore, Williams, and Boeing.

Summer on simmer

September 10, 2023September 10, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

The Chinese pistache would like some rain, please. And thank you.

More clouds. Fewer birds. Lower temperatures. In the morning, anyway.

And come to think of it, in the evening, too. I’m not needing a wee rinse before bedtime to resolve the late-in-the-day stickiness that goes along with life in the desert and a firm hand on the thermostat.

Damp it is not. The drought not only persists, it thrives. The Rio Grande is on the edge of running dry in The Duck! City for a second consecutive year. When I stripped the bed of its sheets in the dark this morning I got a free static-electricity light show for my troubles.

But at least my rides and runs have not been the usual rolling boil for the past week. Maybe I can resume my habit of slipping out nine-ish instead of kitting up in the dark, when I need a headlight to see, not just to be seen.

It’s not summer’s end; not yet. But it’s around the bend, just flyin’.

There’s a smaller crowd queueing up at our bird feeders, and they’re getting a later start, too.

On yesterday’s looping ride through Sandia Heights I didn’t spot a single solitary quail, not a one. Didn’t even hear any. Just last Sunday Herself and I saw them by the dozens as we spun leisurely through the Heights.

This morning I made our oatmeal on the stove, instead of mixing up a müesli version to “cook” in the fridge the night before. We added diced peaches, chopped pecans, and local honey, and washed it down with a side of hot tea.

At the stove, with the windows open, I caught a whiff of bacon frying nearby. The pig is Herself’s spirit animal and she won’t tolerate it on a plate, but apparently marrying one is OK, as long as it makes a pork-free breakfast.

Then, suddenly, at 9 on the dot with the breakfast dishes washed, the birds turn up. The hummers re-enact the Battle of Britain around their feeders, and the finches perch greedily at theirs while the doves stalk the ground hunting misplaced morsels.

Is this the summertime equivalent of Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow? Do we have six more weeks of summer on tap?

I’d best kit up and get out there. Don’t forget the sunscreen. Might be another scorcher.