Category: Illness

Hi-def’, where is thy sting?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
I had a little fun shooting the video of the Jones bike. There's plenty of room for gadgetry on that 66cm H-bar; I was going to add a flower vase, but ran out of hose clamps.
I had a little fun shooting the video of the Jones bike. There’s plenty of room for gadgetry on that 66cm H-bar; I was going to add a flower vase, but ran out of hose clamps.

In comments, Patrick O’B. asks whether I’m having trouble deciding which bike to ride since adding a nifty Jones rigid-specific 29er to the Mad Dog fleet.

Nope.

I haven’t been on a bike of any type for a week — a terrorist wasp nailed me in my left ankle during a hike last Wednesday, the sonofabitch swelled up to the size and shade of a ruby-red Texas grapefruit (the ankle, not the terrorist wasp), and I have whiled away the hours since full of Benadryl and bad ideas, trying to get a metric shit-ton of work done with my shoeless left leg propped up on a box.

And the weather has been picture-postcard, Chamber of Commerce, fall-in-Colorado perfect, too.

Gah.

The Co-Motion Divide Rohloff got its closeup today.
The Co-Motion Divide Rohloff got its closeup today.

I did get out for a short while today. The ankle looks more or less like an ankle again, rather than a botulistic bratwurst, and I needed to shoot a bit of HD video for an online review of the Co-Motion Divide Rohloff, having just wrapped production on a Jones video. So I spazzed around in Palmer Park for an hour, playing Quentin Ferrentino with a couple of dusty old Hero 3 Black Editions.

The Adventure Cyclist gang and I met with the GoPro people at Interbike, but only editor Mike Deme walked away with one of the new Hero 3+ dinguses, though I thought I batted my eyelashes most fetchingly at the product guy. Bitch.

So I had to make do with obsolete technology in my latest projects, and as usual it is the little people — you, the viewing public — who must suffer.

Still, that makes two videos in two days. Stick that in your hobbit-pipe and smoke it, Peter Jackson.

In like a lion

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 32 Comments
Novara Verita
The Novara Verita from REI.

March, is it? Whose idea was it to make February so short and start Daylight Saving Time on Sunday? Jesus, I take some time away from the blog to do a spot of work from my deathbed and the whole place goes to hell.

I brought some heavyweight class of an upper-respiratory bug home from the North American Handmade Bicycle Show and mostly have been sleeping at The House Back East® to keep from catapulting Herself out of bed and into the madhouse with my coughs, which sound remarkably like an M777 howitzer in action, if M777 howitzers fired 155mm olive-drab snot rockets.

Between booger barrages I have had to crank out the word count for Adventure Cyclist and Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, the latter now back to twice-a-month publication. Doubling up on the funny is heavy lifting when your brain is braising in bacterial tapioca.

The past couple of days have brought some mild improvement, happily, and I’ve even been out and about on the latest review bike, a Novara Verita, one of the steeds in REI’s velo-stable. I’ve tried not to dribble on it, because the green would clash horribly with the nifty blue-and-white color scheme and might even dissolve the tubeset.

I shan’t have access to that refreshing little pasatiempo this weekend, however. The wizards predict rain, snow and wind — to wit, March weather.

Just as well. Another round of deadlines is upon me like some fresh plague, and I might as well stick to embarrassing myself in print instead of upon the bicycle until the sun comes back sometime next week.

Ten days that shook the ribs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Baby, it's cold outside.
Baby, it’s cold outside.

Ten days after the flu sank its meathooks into my respiratory system I’m finally starting to feel like a primate instead of a paramecium.

And there’s no danger of being tempted to imperil my fragile recovery by throwing myself headlong into a futile attempt to recover all those miles unridden because it’s 8 degrees and snowing.

It would be just like me to rocket out the door in search of a nasty case of bronchitis and perhaps a broken bone or two, so I think I’ll surprise the universe and stay indoors, maybe ride the trainer gently for a half hour or so.

Speaking of disease, beyond my little cocoon the speculation as regards impending revelations by the One Ball To Rule Them All has reached a fever pitch, and don’t I wish I could give a shit. Watching him summon the Reverend Mutha Gaius Helen Winfrey and her rubber gom jabbar to Pelotaville for a televised confessional in hopes of getting his personal gravy train back on the rails looks very little like a penitente journeying to the Sanctuario de Chimayó on his knees.

I can’t decide which cultural reference to deploy here. Is it an unrepentant Alex insisting that the Int Inf Min spoon-feed him in his hospital bed? Or is it Lucy at the chocolate factory, only with the chocolate being money and Lucy a great white shark and the assembly line running not too fast, but rather not fast enough?

“What’s it going to be then, eh?” I’m going to go with Alex here, because no matter what we may hear on Thursday, I suspect that a “cure” forced is no cure at all, and we will have our malevolent little droogie on our hands for quite a while yet.

One flu over the cuckoo’s nest

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments

Tomorrow I will have had this friggin’ bug for a week and I can tell you the sonofabitch has most definitely overstayed its welcome.

I have launched two tureens of chicken noodle soup against the invader (“From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”) and yet it remains encamped upon my ribcage, brazenly flying its yellow-and-green Kleenex banners. Ptui.

Tomorrow I’m escalating to Scotch broth with kale. And after that, the B-52s.

A sure cure for Big Tex fever

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments

I’ll tell you what will take your mind off TCWSNBN real fast — the flu that’s going around.

Lordy sweet Jeebus, I recommend in the strongest possible terms that you do not contract this bad boy. It got me on Friday and ever since I have felt like I got et by a coyote and shit off a cliff. Not even green chile helps. Hell, I don’t even want a drink, so you know it’s bad. That said, some of my symptoms might belong to the DTs rather than the flu, so your mileage may vary.

Needless to say, I did not get up at dark-thirty this morning to hustle up some pirate video of Katie Compton clinching the World Cup title in Rome. No, instead I curled fetus-like under a heap of sweaty bedclothes, emitting feeble mewling sounds interspersed with mighty honks into tissues and the occasional hacking jag one might expect from a Vegas bluehair working three slot machines at once with a Chesterfield glued to her lower lip.

Later, in the shower, after a few moments of abominable racket reminiscent of a pack of werewolves with kennel cough trying to kick-start their Harleys I passed a lung biscuit the approximate size, shape and color of an apricot. I thought it bore the likeness of Our Lord, but that was probably just the flu. Or the DTs.