This year’s Tour may be a little too hot to handle, for a couple of stages at least, thanks to fires in the Pyrénées-Orientales area. And anyway, I quit paying attention once the magazines quit paying me money.
Cycling is like … well, like pretty much anything, really. I’d rather do it than watch it.
So this morning, instead of watching UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Tadej Pogačar stomp all comers into a thin paste, I rolled out for a short ride on my favorite Steelman Eurocross, planning to take in the usual mix of asphalt and dirt.
About six miles in, halfway through a circuit of the Elena Gallegos Open Space, the rear tire started going soft. I stopped to add a few psi with a minipump, but what that tire really wanted was a fresh tube.
Well. Shit. What I’m doing here is cyclocross, kinda, sorta. Fuck a fresh tube, I’ll take a fresh bike. Where’s the pit?
About five miles away. In my garage.
So I swoop gingerly down from the EG, along Simms to the Tramway bike path, Comanche, and home, mindful of a rear tire whose tread is getting a little too chummy with its rim.
And I snatch up my second favorite Steelman Eurocross. Boom! Back in the race! Finished first in a field of one on my pit bike, with no further mechanicals. There was an awards banquet, featuring the remnants of Taco Thursday (h/t to stage winner Isaac del Toro) in a flour tortilla with a scattering of arugula, a spoonful of homemade salsa fresca, and a sprinkling of grated Kerrygold Blarney.
The crowd roared.
OK, so maybe that was the vacuum cleaner. Herself has her own race on Sundays, which is all about making El Rancho Pendejo look less like a race pit and more like a home. It’s a much tougher event.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla once again enjoys a full complement of servants.
We’re finally back to what passes for normal around here.
Herself has returned from Tennessee and Miss Mia Sopaipilla couldn’t be happier. I’m not the person you want to see first thing in the early morning hours, when the Voices are in full throat, roaring for coffee and news, the cacophony just a few decibels short of drowning out the clicking, popping, and squeaking of various OE bits from 1954 announcing their imminent failure. And with the factory warranty long since expired, too.
I lack a certain ruthless efficiency at stupid-thirty. Stack a few extra chores atop my tiny little pile and I am prone to mutter about Sisyphus as the rocks start rolling downhill.
I do manage to achieve some sort of spastic rhythm after a few days catching bad hops in the valley. But it’s not a pretty thing to watch.
Especially for Miss Mia. For openers, I like my coffee black, to match my aura, while Herself will share a dollop of frothy cream from her cuppa. I’ll pour Miss Mia a shot straight from the container, but it’s not the same. So off she goes, stalking from room to room, looking for Herself and that fat mug of cream with just a hint of coffee.
Never you mind that the litter box is cleaned and the water refreshed, food and meds served up, bedding shaken out. These are services, to be expected. It’s the little extras that make the difference between living and merely existing.
Eventually Miss Mia cycles through the Two Stages of Feline Grief: “I want something,” and “Fuck it, I’ll take a nap.”
We’re generally light on mothers around here come the second Sunday in May. Herself isn’t one, and neither is Miss Mia Sopaipilla.
But for this Mother’s Day we have a robin sitting on a clutch of eggs in a fine, strong nest built in the Chinese pistache outside the dining room.
Two feeders, no waiting.
We’ve had doves cobble together some half-assed homes under the front overhang that mostly turn into fly-thru eateries for the neighborhood raptors. Hummingbirds tuck their teensy little bide-a-wees into the pines out front. And a variety of little cheepers have grown up in a dead limb of the backyard maple, holed at top and bottom by a ladder-backed woodpecker. A tree dude accidentally sawed it off while pruning the maple a while back, but he reinstalled it and it’s been home to at least one more family since then, so, winning, etc.
None of these little mothers ever pays any rent, but we don’t care. We even provide free feeds at our BB&B (Bird Bed & Breakfast). From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, as the fella says.
The backyard maple is still with us, megadrought be damned.
The arborista with the tree service we use recently sent out a customer-tips newsletter about balancing responsible water use and tree care. Top of her list? “Plant better trees.”
The trend has been hotter and drier for many years. I don’t see drought conditions going away. There are plenty of shade trees that are not water-hogs and many desert trees that complement your landscapes. Cottonwood and maple are so out of fashion in drought conditions.
Sigh. Naturally, we’ve got this doddering old maple that endures an amputation or six every fall. And there’s a giant-ass cottonwood across the arroyo.
The Turk standing watch in 2008.
We had a beautiful maple in the front yard back in Bibleburg. Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Defense Regiment) loved that tree, when he was still an indoor-outdoor cat. He’d take up a position in the crotch of it and make himself look even longer than he was, like a giant furry albino alligator.
Once a killer hailstorm hit that tree like Spooky working out with its Vulcan minigun. Maple-leaf salad all over the front yard and porch. Tree bounced right back, maybe even better than ever.
But it rains and snows in the B-burg. Or it used to, anyway. A tree can get a little love up there, whether it’s Earth Day or not.
The early bird can have the damn’ worm. Especially if it’s a brain worm.
Who needs a cranial parasite before coffee? Not me, Skeezix. What I need before coffee is sleep, and plenty of it.
And I really don’t need a brain worm at midnight, which is about when some noise of unknown origin finished the job of dragging me out of a sound sleep the other night.
Herself had just gotten up for a drink of water and tiptoed back to bed. After three decades of holy macaroni I barely notice this nightly ritual. I drift lazily up toward consciousness, wondering idly: Ghost cat? “Play Misty for Me?” Night fart powerful enough to levitate a sheet, blanket, and comforter? And on the other side of the bed, too. …
But it’s always Herself, having a wee or a drink or a wee and a drink. If it were a gust of the southern wind strong enough to unmake the bed I’d be sporting a fresh bruise or two somewhere.
This time, however, just as she settled back into the sack, came the Mystery Noise.
Ordinarily my practice is to ignore all things that go bump in the night, as hauntings, Clint Eastwood movies, and night farts often end badly. There will be some cleanup involved.
Alas, unable to forgo a bit of vengeance for three decades of midnight wees, I rolled over and asked, “You hear that?”
“Yep,” she replied, burrowing deeper into the bedclothes.
Well. Shit. Check and mate. Outsmarted yourself again, ould fella.
So up I got to prowl around the house in my skivvies looking for … well, your guess is as good as mine. Herself has added NextDoor to her list of online pasatiempos and recently showed me a wildlife-cam video of a mountain lion slinking up a nearby driveway with a raccoon in its jaws. For sure we have had bobcats, raccoons, foxes, skunks, hawks, coyotes, and deer in our yard.
But a peek through various windows and sliding glass doors revealed bupkis.
Maybe it was our in-house varmint, Miss Mia Sopaipilla? I checked her bedroom (a half-bath off the kitchen) but saw no evidence of midnight mischief. She was briefly delighted to have company, then outraged that breakfast was not forthcoming.
And I abandoned all hope of zeroing in on the mystery noise because the hills were alive with the sound of Mia.
Back to bed. Sleep, like wisdom, would not come. The imagination, no longer gainfully employed, was working overtime on threat analysis.
Water heater finally gasp its last? No rusty puddles by its door. Roof failure? Didn’t stumble into the package unit or any ductwork while wandering around below. Owl hit the pigeons nesting by the wisteria? No feathers. Bicycle thieves? Jesus, this isn’t some postwar Italian neorealist film — it’s your basic Yankee jump-scare, meat-in-the-seats, spill-your-popcorn slasher flick. Happily, the only Jason in the vicinity lives next door with his lovely wife, two saucy daughters and several bikes of his own.
Sunrise surprise.
Finally I drifted off to a restless sleep … and then, bam, Herself arose again, this time to go to work and get a start on earning the preposterous amount of money required to remedy whatever hideous tragedy had befallen us during the night. Early birds. Worms. It felt as though they were locked in mortal combat between my ears.
I padded into the kitchen to make coffee, briefly contemplated going back to bed instead, and then glanced out the window.
Wow. Now that’s worth getting up for. It’s almost better than coffee.
Oh, yeah. And the noise? Turns out it was the uppermost cardboard box on a tall stack of same toppling onto an exercise ball that then bounded about in Herself’s home-office-slash-eBay warehouse.
Guess I broke out the ladder and clambered onto the roof for no particular purpose. I will never be smart. Or well-rested.
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