Boy, the folks at Visit Albuquerque must hate seeing Simon Romero’s byline in The New York Times.
Unless they all got shanked by the Psycho on the Bike-o.
Just another weekend on the mean streets of The Duck! City.
Progress marches on, towing me along behind it like a water skier who refuses to leave shore. You can practically hear the skis dragging across the lakeside gravel.
I’ve been noticing various hitches in the gitalong of my 15-inch 2014 MacBook Pro, which is the workhorse here at El Rancho Pendejo (“Your Gateway to Giggle City!”).
And as usual, the problem lies not with me, but with everybody else.
WordPress, The Washington Post, Esquire, and other stops along my daily dawdle all have been pissing on me from their considerable technological height, proclaiming that the MacBook’s 5-year-old OS (High Sierra, 10.13.6) and equally antiquated browser (Safari 13.1.2) are so 15 minutes ago, which as sayings go is likewise about as au courant as “Twenty-three skiddoo!”
It finally became so irksome that I felt compelled to take hold. WaPo and Chazbo Pierce’s site had both gotten as creaky as a geezer’s knees in February. And WordPress wouldn’t even let me swap headers on the blog, which is pretty basic stuff.
In a support chat I could sense the Happiness Engineer’s forehead bouncing rhythmically off the keyboard.
“Safari 13 is several versions behind the latest versions so I suspect that may be what is causing the issue,” s/he typed. “I would recommend that you try to access the site through a different browser such as Chrome if you’re not ready or able to update the Macs yet for whatever reason.”
Well, sheeyit. High Sierra is as good as it gets around here, Scooter. It’s on everything newer than mid-2012. And Google is evil no matter what they claim to be.
Still, it is winter, and I am retired, and also slightly bored. So I decided to do a little tinkering.
Not on the Main Machine, mind you. My testing bench would be the 13-inch 2014 MacBook Pro, the ’Book I use for road trips if I’m sleeping indoors. The 11-inch 2012 MacBook Air gets the callup if I’m tenting it.
First I paid a visit to my old buddy Mozilla, and hey presto, Firefox 96.0.3 works like a charm. But Firefox is awful needy — “Can I be your default browser? Please? Pleasepleaseplease?” — so I thought what the hell, let’s just bump the OS up a notch, see what happens. Can’t sing, can’t dance, too fat to fly.
I’ve been hinky about this shit ever since a long jump from Snow Leopard to Mavericks gave my 2009 iMac a brain bleed. But High Sierra to Mojave is only one little hop, just a year between releases. So I gave the boot drive a once-over with Disk Utility, downloaded a fresh copy of Mojave, and let ’er buck.
And so far, so good (knocking on wood). The 13-incher is my kitchen Mac when I’m not on the road, because I don’t like sitting down first thing, and anyway I have coffee to brew, breakfast to make. And as you see, all is smooth like Irish butter on homemade bread.
Fall back. As in, fall back into bed for another hour.
Or, you can just not get up. Which is what I did.
Herself arose as per usual. Miss Mia Sopaipilla doesn’t know from time changes, and she will parade up and down the hall giving out with “Reveille” until someone — almost always Herself — gets up, marches into the kitchen, and pours some chow into her bowl.
I’m not a morning person, no matter what time it is. I like this bed. I paid for half of it, and I’m gonna get my money’s worth, thank you very much.
As long as someone feeds the cat. Jesus. Sounds like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Louie Gohmert doing the nasty out there.
The mornings are brisk around here lately. Upon arising I find myself compelled to don pants. This will not do, not at all.
This is one of the few downsides of living snuggled up to the Sandias. Come fall the sun doesn’t peek over the mountains and through the trees until 9:30 or later, which causes Miss Mia Sopaipilla to burn the early morning hours hunting a toasty napping place that does not yet exist as such.
The geezers I ride with a couple days a week likewise search for that sweet sunny spot. There has been some debate as to whether rides should continue to begin 9-ish or be delayed a tad to minimize the need for extensive layering.
It’s not unusual to experience a 30-degree temperature swing in the course of a 90-minute morning outing, which fills the jersey pockets to overflowing with wind jackets, arm and knee warmers, long-fingered gloves, skullcaps and whatnot. Jersey zippers rise and fall with the terrain.
Our location here, at the bottom of a cul-de-sac in the shadow of the foothills, often causes me to believe it’s colder outdoors than it really is. Yesterday I rode the Jones south on the foothills trails and inside 10 minutes I knew I was ridiculously overdressed. Nevertheless I persisted, because there wasn’t much I could do about the long-sleeved jersey and I didn’t stuff any short-fingered gloves into a pocket before leaving.
I found myself riding with a distinct lack of competence, confidence, style, and grace, dabbing on pretty much everything that wasn’t a nice flat sandy patch, and swearing a lot. After a series of miscues on mild obstacles I lost my mojo entirely and tried to focus on simply avoiding injury. This was nearly as irksome as wearing pants in the morning.
After an hour of embarrassing myself I called it quits and headed for home. I should probably get back out there right now and seek redemption. But I’m thinking about dialing it down to a road ride. Maybe I should wait until we fall back before I fall off.
Huh? Whuh? Rain?
Sheeeeeyit, it must be autumn for reals.
The weather widget says 64° at 2 in the peeyem, which is quite a departure from the usual around these parts at that time of day.
It makes for fine napping weather if you have the time for that sort of thing, which Miss Sopaipilla does.
What the hell? She wasn’t expecting a congratulatory phone call from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and neither was I.
Shit. I should’ve taken a nap too. No wonder I keep missing out on the genius grants.
Mad Blog Media 