An old story

September 20, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

My Nobilette takes five at the Michial Emery trailhead.

It was the Wednesday Geezer Ride and I was running on O’Grady Standard Time as per usual.

I almost always make our meeting spot on time, or within shouting distance of it, anyway. But not this Wednesday.

After a distracting morning spent accommodating Herself and a visiting sister I was horsing the Nobilette northward along Tramway, a few minutes off my usual delayed kickoff and feeling a little light in the jersey pockets for some reason.

So I gave myself a quick pat-down.

“Shit, forgot my tools. Aw, probably won’t need them.” Onward.

Then the Watch cheeped.

“Forget your water bottle?” asked Herself.

“Shit again. That I will definitely need.”

So I texted the Ride Leader to let him know I’d join up somewhere along the route, then pulled a U and big-ringed it back toward El Rancho Pendejo, which this morning seemed aptly named.

While headed south I saw our Ride Leader headed north. We both looked at each other like, “WTF?” He should’ve been at the meetup while I should’ve been a couple minutes behind him and closing in.

“Back in a minute!” I yelled and punched it.

At the casa I grabbed bottle and tools and headed north once more, advising the Ride Leader via text that I’d try to catch up around Simms at Eagle Ridge, or at the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

But when I got to Eagle Ridge, no Geezers.

So I backtracked the route a bit. Nope. Rode up to Elena Gallegos. Nix. Did a couple laps of that loop to pass the time. Nuttin’.

Shit.

So I rip a quick shortcut to the next checkpoint, in High Desert. Nada.

¡Basta ya! I text again.

“Where you gents at?”

“At top of Elena’s,” replies the Ride Leader.

Sheeeeeeyit.

Anyway, to shorten an already-overlong story, one Geezer had a crook gut and bailed pre-ride, another flatted (the Ride Leader stopped to offer aid, which explains why he was running behind), and there were a couple other no-shows. A late start thus became even later. Our carefully designed velo-structure simply fell apart like a toilet-paper tent in a heavy rain.

At least our communications devices didn’t explode in our pockets or hands. First World Problems only, please.

In any event, so we’re a little slow off the start line. So what? Rivendell’s Grant Petersen likes “pleasurable, unhurried riding,” and so do I. When I can manage it, anyway.

• Hat tip to Alex Strickland, the former boss-fella at Adventure Cyclist, for passing along the Rivendell story.

Mind the ruts

September 5, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

Is it all downhill from here? Yes and no. …

Things have been a little “Groundhog Day”-ish around here lately. On a loop, dully predictable, like customer-service hold music or the hourly news.

Thinking I might derive some mental-health benefits from taking a little road trip somewhere, I had the Subaru serviced. But then it struck me that I couldn’t think of anyplace a reasonable drive away in a 20-year-old car that would be a step up from where I already was.

Anyway, long stretches of the calendar had already been spoken for. A plumber was to diagnose and treat a leaky toilet. Herself blocked off a five-day visit to Aspen. Labor Day reared its capitalist head.

And finally, in-laws were inbound — Herself’s two sisters, the only survivors of a much larger expedition that, like Your Humble Narrator, just couldn’t seem to get buckled up and backed out of the garage.

Thus, lacking opportunity and inspiration, I’ve been trying to shake some of the dust off my local cycling routine, which over the long, hot summer took a two-wheel drift into a 20-mile rut.

It went like this: Get up early, have coffee, then some more coffee with toast, then a serious breakfast, and finally dash out for a 20-mile romp through the foothills before Tonatiuh started cooking.

This is fine, as far as it goes, which is not very; about 20 miles per sitting, according to my cyclometer(s). But after a while this sort of repetition devolves from joy into work. Exercise. Basically, gym class, which I always hated.

No wonder people get fat. Bor-ing.

So lately, with Tonatiuh having stepped away from the stove for a spell, I’ve been trying to mix it up a bit.

Last Saturday I joined a few other riders for a bit of paceline practice, zooming down Tramway to the North Valley and then drilling it out to Bernalillo and back. All told it was good for about twice my usual mileage.

On Tuesday I cranked out a solo 42-miler, likewise down in the valley, but this time south on the Paseo del Bosque trail to just past Interstate 40 and back. I hadn’t ridden the bosque since March; half a year later the trees are starting to show hints of fall color, so I need to get back down there soon.

Yesterday I grabbed a Steelman Eurocross and did a quick hour on the trails in the Elena Gallegos Open Space. Hadn’t done that since mid-August.

Grunting up a few steepish rocky pitches reminded me that I needed to replace the bike’s chainrings, chain, and cassette. Not just from wear and tear, though there’s plenty of that, but mostly due to the mileage on its 1954 engine. Down with the 48/36T chainrings, up with the 46/34T! And the cassette will get four extra teeth at the fat end. Death to the 36x28T — long live the 34x32T!

Today various crucial segments of Your Humble Narrator were complaining bitterly about working conditions and threatening to go on strike, so I decided to take a lazy jog along our shortest foothills loop as a change of pace.

I’d been neglecting my ground-pounding, and thought I’d top it off with a little light weightlifting, likewise neglected. Must preserve the muscle mass, if only for speed-scrolling past news items like “Scientists use food dye found in Doritos to make see-through mice.”

What? Hit the back button. Doritos? See-through mice? Holy hell.

Is this for real? A lactic-acid flashback? Or maybe the WaPo’s A.I. just filed the serial numbers off an abandoned Monty Python script to make the Limey boss-fella blow his breakfast gin out his snout.

Whatever. I think I just got a great idea for a Halloween costume.

Sometimes a hero is just a sandwich

July 26, 2024July 27, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments

One of those weeks, I guess.

We watched Joe Biden’s presser and I felt as though I should weigh in, but Charlie Pierce beat me to it with his remembrance of how Laughin’ Joe knuckle-chuckled Lyin’ Paul Ryan right off the stage during their 2012 veep debate, in which “he effectively demolished Ryan as a political figure simply through good old Irish barroom bonhomie.”

Like Charlie, I always had a soft spot in my heart for José after he gave that empty suit the old one-two, the hee and the haw.

Next, my APC Back-UPS NS 1080 went loudly sideways, presenting various error messages overlaid by a soundtrack from the Nostromo on self-destruct in “Alien.” This caused me to spend the better part of quite some time online with tech support, trying to diagnose what I suspected — and the tech eventually confirmed — was a terminal case of old age, the unit being 7 years old, the short end of this battery backup’s lifespan.

Speaking of old age, in the course of unplugging and inplugging laptop, monitor, dock, speakers, backup drives, backup battery, and what have you during the diagnostic process I was reminded that the fans in my 2014 MacBook Pro 15-incher seemed to be running all the time, no matter how light the workload. Also, its trackpad was largely inoperable again.

The first time the trackpad issue cropped up, the cause was a swelling battery. I had Apple replace that and give the innards a wash and brushup. But this time I didn’t see any telltale bulge in the case, and some casual nosing around the Innertubes led to the usual potential suspects — old, dried-up thermal paste, other failing critical bits, filth and clutter, demonic possession, Cthulhu awakening, and why not just buy a nice new MacBook and shitcan that 10-year-old relic, you penny-pinching eejit, etc.

Well, we’re not quite there yet. I unplugged all my gear again, set the 15-incher aside, and swapped in its little brother, the 2014 13-incher, which has gone mostly unused since I sidelined my Radio Free Dogpatch podcast and seems as quiet as a mouse.

Naturally, there’s a downside to that maneuver. When I bought the 13-incher I went for 8GB of memory and the 128GB SSD for reasons that elude me now (possibly penury; more likely stupidity). And that drive is pretty close to full. Happily, I had a 480GB OWC Mercury Elite Pro Mini external drive lying around doing not much, so, yay, problem solved. Or at least avoided. For now.

I know, I know. I should sack up, crack the Big Mac’s clamshell, get in there with my little toolkit and root around like I know what the hell I’m doing.

But I’m gonna take my cue from Joe here. Pass the torch to the Vice-MacBook Pro. It’s not so much the big fella’s age; it’s the hours it’s been on and running hot.

There may be a better candidate out there somewhere, but so what? I got shit to do, man.

Sallying Fourth

July 4, 2024July 4, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Five-thirty in the morning. Doors and windows open to a cooling breeze. Birds and crickets singing up the sun.

An old analog clock ticks off the seconds. The clock is the front wheel of a bicycle. I don’t think of this as time rolling away from me, because this tiny bicycle’s wheels do not move. But the hands of its clock do — tick, tock; tick, tock — so maybe I’m mistaken. I’m a scribbler, not a theoretical physicist.

As dawn unfolds the lawn looks good from my perch on the couch. After yesterday’s ride on an actual bicycle I watered, mowed, raked, and just sort of generally tidied up back there. This morning I’ve set aside my traditional practice of washing down the news of the day — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexican, et al. — with the first cup of coffee. I’ve had enough of their squawking for the moment — call it a declaration of independence — so this limited reconnaissance from the couch will have to serve as my newsgathering as the sun comes up on this Fourth of July.

My first post this morning, like the ticking bicycle clock, was analog. I stepped outside and stuck our two cheapo plastic flags into the dirt at either side of the front walkway. Right side up, too.

I was thinking of our old Bibleburg friend and neighbor, Marv Berkman, who when asked why a freethinking old saloon picker like himself would fly the Stars and Stripes every morning replied, “I don’t want those people to think they’re the only ones who can do it.”

Tick, tock

March 27, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

“You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.”
—Taisen Deshimaru

When I awakened on the morning of my 70th birthday, March 27, 2024, my heart was still beating. Tick, tock; tick, tock. Fifty-two beats per minute, just like clockwork.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t in Hell. I don’t know if we take heartbeats with us to Hell, but if we do, I expect they’re slightly more elevated, what with the pitchforks and roasting and screaming and all.

Also, it was almost six o’clock, and it seemed I had been allowed to sleep in. I’m almost certain that’s not part of the drill in Hell. If there’s any extra sack time in Hell it’s probably spent in an actual sack, being dipped like a teabag into a giant iron mug of boiling shit that you have to drink instead of coffee in the mornings that look just like midnight, only more so, while a grinning D.I. who looks like a cross between R. Lee Ermey and Hellboy screams at you: “You gotta be shittin’ me, Joker! You think you’re Mickey Spillane? You think you’re some kind of a fuckin’ writer? Now get on your face and give me infinity!”

When I finally crawled out of the sack I was 99 percent convinced I was not in Hell.

For one thing, instead of Gunnery Sergeant Beelzebub demanding an eternity of pushups I found a sweet little kitty-cat purring happy birthday to me. Like Herself, who had slipped silently off to work, Miss Mia Sopaipilla had granted me a little extra catnap instead of yowling me up at stupid-thirty to fill her bowl and/or empty her litter box.

And for another, it was 29° outside, with a dusting of snow on the green grass.

Huh. Not Hell. Albuquerque. Some people think it’s Hell, but everyplace is Hell to someone. Especially in March.

So I enjoyed two cups of coffee instead of a bottomless mug of Lipton Shitfire Hellbroth, attended to Miss Mia, and got back to the bloggery. Tempus fugit. Tick, tock; tick, tock.

Thanks to one and all for the birthday wishes. And apologies to anyone who had 69 in the office pool. I had 30; imagine my surprise.