Mardi blahs

February 24, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 28 Comments

I should be in New Orleans, drunk as a monkey, draped in cheap beads and screaming, “Show us your tits!” But nooooo, here I am in Bibleburg, gulping non-alcoholic java and grappling with various calamities on this last day before Lent.

The Devil is very much with us going into this season of prayer, penitence, fasting and almsgiving. The basement remains in disarray two weeks after its dousing in doo, awaiting the arrival of sheetrockers, painters and carpet/vinyl flooring layers. My 2-year-old MacBook gurgled and died in the middle of editing a tech report for VeloNews.com. The dishwasher croaked after a manufacturer-mandated replacement of its wiring harness. And adding insult to these various injuries and fatalities, our sole remaining toilet has developed a hiccup that causes it to run like Niagara if the handle isn’t delicately jiggled.

The dishwasher was the most recent casualty. The tech who replaced the wiring harness returned to examine it, found a blown wash impeller, and said dolefully, “I dunno … I can call ’em and ask if they’ll cover it, but I don’t think they’re gonna.” He didn’t have a dollar figure in his head, but said he’d get back to us in a day or so once he’d settled on the bass boat he wanted to buy.

O woe. A season of almsgiving indeed, to Apple and Maytag and Christ knows who else. Our own local version of the federal bailout. Line up, boys, hold out those golden bowls, plenty of nutritious greenback soup for everyone.

And then the dishwasher dude rang us up, bright and early this morning. I hadn’t had my coffee yet and so eyeballed the whiskey as caller ID tipped me as to who was on the line. Good news, says he. The parts are ordered, he’ll pop ’round in a few days and Maytag is paying the tab.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Late update: Even more good news. A tech at the Apple Store confirmed my diagnosis regarding the MacBook: hard drive, RIP. When I mentioned the ‘Book’s longtime, low-level processor buzz (rotten HDs and buzzing ‘Books have been discussed at length on many a Mac forum for three years), he suggested shipping it to the Apple depot, where they will fix anything and everything, from a bum HD to bad RAM to a defunct logic board, for a flat fee of $288. Beats spending a G on a new ‘Book.

Floored

February 17, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I can give you both. Here’s a shot of the basement a week after a sewer crew fountained Herself’s crapper, ruining carpet, vinyl flooring, drywall and my sunny disposition. The outfit hired to handle the cleanup and restoration is on the job, and God willing (and the toilet don’t rise) we should have a functional garden-level basement once again sometime by, oh, I dunno, the 2010 Tour de France. Maybe.

This is a small house, just 1,300 square feet, and it gets a lot smaller when you don’t have full use of that basement, which housed Herself’s office, bathroom and walk-in closet, the washer-dryer combo’ and the cats’ litter box. We’re both working upstairs now — Herself on a Dell Latitude at the kitchen table, and me on a MacBook in the living room, because the dehumidifiers kept tripping breakers and crashing my office. We’re doing a load of laundry for the first time in a week. And we’re down to one toilet, which makes mornings interesting:

“I need to take a shower!”

“Well, I need to take a shit!”

And so on.

We kept the cats upstairs while things dried out downstairs, which was an exercise in sleep deprivation. After a couple too many early risings I took to waking up Turk’ and Mia whenever I caught them napping during the day, purely out of vengeance. “Big Man don’t sleep, don’t nobody sleep!” I’d growl. Everyone got cranky, even Herself, who is ordinarily the acme of sunniness. Finally we settled on locking the cats up in my office at night. What the hell, I thought, if I can’t use it as an office, it might as well serve as a feline penitentiary.

Throw in a couple extra shifts at VeloNews.com during the Amgen Tour of California, a wine rack full of bottles and a closet full of firearms and you have a recipe for headlines. Happily, so far we’ve avoided the mainstream media. But the wind is howling like a banshee now and my skull is throbbing like a Harley Fat Boy, so all bets are off.

A jihad against January and journalism

January 25, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

January should be struck from the calendar. What a waste of days. One day you’re singing the praises of global warming as you cycle along in summer kit, and the next you’re freezing your nutsack off and watching it “snow,” which in Colorado these days means greasing the streets just enough to keep the ERs and body shops busy.

I'm goin' down — down, down, down, down, down.

If I had any brains and a little money to go along with them I’d be camping in McDowell Mountain Regional Park outside Fountain Hills, Arizona. Alas, I am short on both. Herself’s Subaru just got about four years’ worth of service all at once, and paydays remain uncertain as publishers try to find a pulse somewhere on the bike business.

The new owners of VeloNews have a mania for contracts that delayed my check for services rendered during January as online editor at large of the VeloNews.com website, and now we must negotiate a deal for the remaining 11 months of 2009. I’ve gotten along just fine for the past 20 years without a written deal with VeloNews, and so has VeloNews, but as the song goes, the times they are a-changin’.

Now we must set down at length in black and white what both parties already know — that for chasing typos around Al Gore’s Intertubes I will get a monthly paycheck and nothing else, and can be cut loose at any time with neither severance nor notice. Feh. When has it ever been otherwise? Cycling journalism is not a union gig, last time I checked.

And anyway, I learned a long time ago that a union card isn’t exactly a crucifix when it comes to warding off corporate vampires. The Newspaper Guild provided about as much protection as a thousand-year-old rubber when I found myself at odds with the management of The Pueblo Chieftain back in 1985. I negotiated my own buyout and got the fuck out of Dodge before they could sack my dumb ass. Before long I found an even worse job, at the Sentinel Publishing Co. in Denver, which laid me off two years later. No golden parachute that time, just six months of unemployment insurance.

My man Hal Walter is staring down that long lightless tunnel now, trying to figure out what’s next. He has a wife, child, mortgage and truck payment, in a changing world that seems to no longer need newspapers, so he can’t do what I did in January 1988 — give up the apartment, throw the dog and some essentials in the truck, and go looking for another newspaper job.

Winter of our discontent (ongoing)

January 7, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger.

Turkish and I are both irritable. The weather has been both damp and cold, and neither of us is much interested in experiencing it first-hand. At least I can dump my outer garments in the washer; a filthy Turk’ requires bathing, a process not unlike juggling caltrops. So we crouch indoors, brooding.

Our government once again appears to be living up to our increasingly lower expectations, playing keepaway with the Illinois Senate seat formerly held by the president-elect as the Gaza eye-for-an-eye insanity rolls into its 12th day and the prospect of years of deficit spending threatens to set your children and grandchildren to surfing a tsunami of red ink.

Closer to home, I just got word that VeloNews is shifting its production schedule for the March issue and suddenly I have to pull a cartoon out of my ass by close of business tomorrow. And Apple once again fails to announce either an iPhone Nano, iPod Touch with camera and Skype, a MacNetbook or an updated Mac Mini during a Steve Jobs-less keynote at the annual Macworld Expo.

The horror. The horror. Exterminate all the brutes!

Snow job

January 4, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Feh. Typical Bibleburg snow. Not enough to shovel, but too much to broom. And 13 degrees to boot, with a brisk wind out of the east. I note that it is 52 and partly sunny in Las Cruces, N.M. Yet I am here instead of there. I will never be smart.

A guy needs chile inside when it's chilly outside.

I’m putting off the ride to nowhere as long as possible. Didn’t I burn some calories shifting snow from here to there? Sure I did. Counts as exercise, I don’t care what anyone says. And anyway, we broke fast with a revoltingly healthy meal of oatmeal, toast and orange juice, largely because we are out of eggs, sausage and potatoes. Stick that in your heart-rate monitor. Pfffbbblllpphhh.

Speaking of heart-healthy food and New Mexico, if I were there, I wouldn’t have had to spend too many blisteringly cold minutes just now roasting up some green chile on the back deck. I could’ve simply bundled up and toddled on down to Tia Sophia, The Shed or La Choza to knock back a couple or six warming tequilas while waiting for someone else to do the heavy lifting, chile-wise. Instead, the neighbors are treated to the all-too-familiar sight of the block whacko, clad like Peary at the Pole, frantically flipping chiles on the gas grill in a wind chill of minus-3 so he can whip up some chicken enchiladas in green chile sauce to treat his pneumonia.