‘Yeah, but it’s a dry heat. …’

July 28, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

The Rio Gonzo, as seen last Friday by Your Humble Narrator.

What a difference a day makes. Or even a few short hours.

On Friday I rode down to the bosque because why the hell not? I was sick of all my usual foothills routes and wanted to log some respectable mileage for a change, so off I went.

The New Albion Privateer sails the Paseo del Bosque.

Also sick of its usual route was the Rio Grande, which has buggered off to parts unknown. You can tell because rivers don’t usually sport tire tracks, not even if Jeebus is driving.

I knew the Rio had run dry since I last saw it back in April. But it’s one thing to know and another to see.

Anyway. The dearth of river notwithstanding, it was a lovely day, if warmish — 81° when I got a regrettably late start, 10 degrees hotter when I finished — and then Thor woke from his nap, got his clouds in a row, and began swinging Mjölnir like he meant business. Hammer time!

Boom! Our rain gauge showed 0.90 inch in less time than it takes to type “Our rain gauge showed 0.90 inch.” The National Weather Service told the Urinal that 1.74 inches fell at Indian School and Moon in a half hour, with near-record winds that peaked at 78 mph.

Photo liberated from what remains of the National Weather Service.

I mean, that storm flat parked itself overhead and let go, like a cow pissing on a flat rock.

“Remind me to turn off the sprinkler system,” I said to Herself. And it stayed off. Y’can’t touch this.

• • •

Now, of course, Loki is back on the job. Regular heat advisories from 1 to 8 p.m., high 90s to low triple digits.

No records set, as far as I know, but 9 in the a.m. is starting to feel a little late for the twice-weekly Geezer Rides. A second bottle goes in the seat-tube cage. Attacks are few and far between.

And mowing the lawn post-ride, like I did yesterday? That’s just stupid.

Having a lawn in the desert is stupid in and of itself, but having one and mowing it noonish moves the bar up a few notches.

Still, there’s the lawn, growing, and it won’t mow itself. I’ve been watching. That shit does not happen.

Maybe what I need is a bicycle with rotary blades attached. A velo-mower. And an early start. I could create a whole new thang and a magazine to chronicle its adventurers.

Nah. That’s even dumber than having a lawn in the desert.

• • •

Speaking of greenery stuffed into the ground, it seems that we may finally be getting the fabled fiber optic here in the cul-de-sac.

The Company Formerly Known As CenturyLink, a.k.a. CenturyTel, Qwest, et al., now calling itself Lumen Technologies, has provided our internet service for ages, even before we moved here in 2014. But for some reason Duck! City DSL is twice the price for half the speed we enjoyed in Bibleburg.

Even there, the tales of comically inept customer service were endless. Once we had a modem croak on us and The Company agreed to send us a new one. In that they proved better than their word. They sent us five of them, one after another, like Red Chinese soldiers marching to B-burg from Beijing over the bodies of their comrades.

Miss Mia loved her some Qwest modems on a chilly day in Bibleburg.

I may still have one in an old-tech box around here somewhere. I’m fairly certain I brought one with us when we moved because, hey, you never know, amirite? Miss Mia Sopaipilla loved toasting her po-po on one of those Qwest-branded Motorola jobbers Back in the Day®.

But I digress. We were talking about getting some fiber in our digital diet.

The water-company boyos were out in the cul-de-sac yesterday afternoon, spraying their blue cryptograms and hieroglyphics ever’ whichaway, so I asked one what was up. Thus I learned that the diggers are coming to bring us The Future, which we had in the B-burg a dozen or so years ago before time-traveling back to the stone knives and copper wire of Albuquerque.

“Take photos of your property before they get started,” the water dude advised. And I followed his advice. At least three of the companies charged with bringing fiber optic to Duck!Burg have been slapped with temporary stop-work orders after reports that they made a shambles of various properties.

I won’t lie. It’ll be great to have a faster, cheaper on-ramp to the Infobahn. But be careful what you wish for. The news of the day — a river of sand in Duck!Burg, shit monsoons in DeeCee — is already bad enough at a piddling 13.5 Mbps.

And it comes in a whole lot faster if it’s breaking just beyond the office window, where some rando rocking a backhoe is uprooting your sewer line.

Slinging in the rain

July 23, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments

New Mexico has the *best* clouds, swear to Dog.

Looks like I picked the right day to sleep in.

I woke up way too early — 3 a.m. — then rolled over and went back to sleep until 6. Miss Mia was not amused, and said so, loudly, otherwise I might still be asleep even now.

Except Herself would’ve thundered in eventually to kick me up the hole, because she is a working woman and has a full day ahead involving the making of money, the care and feeding of the 401(k), retention of health insurance, and like that there. Some slacker is in charge of breakfast, which clearly was not making itself.

So up, up, I got, and set about my morning chores, which do not dollar up on the hoof nearly as nicely.

As I was emptying the litter box, making coffee, toasting bread, cooking oatmeal, brewing tea, medicating Miss Mia, and so on, I was thinking in terms of where to ride today. Forecast was for a slight chance of rain after noon, so I was considering a medium-long outing to the Morning Star Grocery and back. Haven’t been out there all year.

And then it started raining.

Well. Shit. Lucky me. If I hadn’t slept in, I’d have been out in that rain, dodging swings of Thor’s hammer instead of kicks from Herself’s tiny sandals.

• • •

Speaking of hard rains a-fallin’, I don’t expect there’s much that could go wrong — cough, cough, “Armageddon,” cough, cough — with helping Saudi Arabia plunge its bloody paws into Pandora’s nuclear box.

Writes Charles P. Pierce:

To the outside observer, there’s no reason to trust either end of this deal. The American side is being run by grifters and incompetents. The Saudi side is being run by people who have settled accounts with bone saws and beheadings and who also are sharper about money than the Americans ever will be. The idea that the current Saudi regime will be able to resist the temptations of enriching uranium without using it to build weapons feels laughable. I wouldn’t trust any government on earth that far, let alone an authoritarian theocracy with murder in its heart.

Alas, Babylon, etc. The Gospel according to Frederic Brown would seem germane here, if young Harry Graham were the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and not a bit slow. I take little solace from any headline that includes the null phrase, “Trump says. …”

It never rains, but. …

July 21, 2026July 21, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Crossing over I-40 near Winrock Town Center aboard the Soma Saga (canti edition).

We’ve been enjoying the occasional sprinkle in late July, all told about a half-inch of moisture in our dusty little corner of the sandbox.

Sure helps keep the mercury on the down-low. The air conditioning gets to take five, as does the irrigation system.

Why, a fella can even wait until 9 in the a.m. to get out for a bike ride without risking spontaneous combustion. Luxury!

I’ve been logging more miles lately — 131 last week, 123 the week before, 130 the week before that — not just because the weather has been delightful, but because it gets me away from the MacBook Pro, which seems to have visited Taco Bell without me and has been shitting all over my desk.

I’ll spare you the links. You’ve seen them all anyway.

Now, I could take a claw hammer to that laptop, make it shut up. But the MacBook Pro is not the news; it’s just a delivery system. It’s not the Beast; it’s not even letting it in. It’s just making it available in case I want a peek.

Remember Parker beating the tar out of Ash in “Alien” and all the good that did him? Ash was a grinning, disembodied head in a puddle of goo — literally a talking head, still bringing the news and analysis, like some interstellar anchorman for “The Weyland-Yutani Newshour” — and before long everyone on the Nostromo was Purina Alien Chow except for Ripley, Jonesy the cat, and the alien.

And Ripley was still getting nothing but bad news. Especially when, just as she was getting ready to back the escape pod out of the garage, up pops the alien with a solid impression of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” — “Heeeere’s Johnny!” — and she had to have been thinking, “Goddamnit, all I wanted to do was take a little ride, get away from all this ‘Wet cleanup on Aisle 4’ shit for a while. …”

And Ripley didn’t even know about the next three movies in the queue. Talk about your long days in the office.

The bike is my escape pod. I check it for aliens before I hop aboard.

And while I bring a bot along, I keep that sumbitch locked down tight. If he manages to pop off somehow, well … he’s just a feeble old iPhone 13 Mini, and I’m pretty sure I can whup his ass in a fair fight.

Another Saga unwritten

July 14, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

My Soma Saga touring bike (rim-brake edition).

Well, the good news is, I won’t need fenders and a rain jacket for the ride downtown to collect my Subie from the shop.

The better news is, it is raining.

Reincarnation (the shop, not my hope for higher rebirth) just texted to say the old bucket of bolts is still deep into its semiannual wellness check and won’t be ready to come home until tomorrow.

It should go without saying that I had just pulled a fendered Soma Saga off its hook, aired up the tires, and lubed the chain.

But no matter. That needed doing anyway. And I got a couple hours of saddle time in this morning when it was still windless, cool, and dry, noodling home from the shop on the fenderless Soma Double Cross.

Besides, I may need the Saga tomorrow. The weather wizards are calling for a 70 percent chance of rain.

FIngers crossed.

The grand Wazoo

June 26, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

The weatherperson’s Magic 8-Ball must’ve been on the fritz yesterday.

Every time s/he shook the sumbitch a new alert popped up. Heat warning. Thunderstorm warning. Dust-storm warning.

Herself had things to do, people to see, and places to go, so she cast a critical eye at the sky and went out for a run. Almost immediately the rain began to fall.

Lacking any pressing engagements, I waited awhile, dithering. Run? Ride? Throw in the towel and spend the morning swapping SSDs in the 2014 MacBook Pro?

Then the rain took five, so I thought I’d try to squeeze in a short trail ride, just to get outdoors and mix things up a bit. Mostly I’ve been riding the road. But I was tired of that itchy feeling between the shoulder blades one gets riding the shoulder of Tramway Boulevard, where the 50-mph speed limit is considered the minimum rather than the max.

I didn’t plan to be out long, so I pulled down a bike that would make me work for it: the Voodoo Wazoo.

When I snagged this frame with its Reynolds 853 main tubes back in 2005 I set it up pretty much in my typical cyclocross style, based on what was on hand and what I could scrounge: drop bar, XT double crank (48/36T), Shimano 600 derailleurs with bar-end shifters, 600 brake levers and some Avid cantis that had to date to 1995 or even earlier, and — just because I had ’em — a Rock Shox suspension post and Flite saddle, a True Temper Alpha Q carbon fork, and a set of Dura-Ace weirdo wheels, probably wearing Michelin Jets.

As I wrote back then:

Haven’t had it on a scale yet, but I suspect it’s the lightest bike in the bunch. The top tube is a centimeter shorter than my (Steelman) Eurocrosses, and the stem sits a tad higher, so I’ve a nice upright position on this rascal, which is nice when you’re riding something that says “Voodoo” in a town full of Bible-thumpers. You want to be able to see ’em coming.

Four years later what I didn’t see coming was a patch of ice hiding under a puddle on a Bibleburg bike path. Down I went, dislocating my left communications digit, leaving me wearing a splint and unable to handle a road bar and its various levers, STI or otherwise, with a multiday bike tour of southern Arizona coming up, my first gig for Mike Deme and Adventure Cyclist magazine.

Well. Shit.

I had to train, and I didn’t want to do it on a 26-inch-wheeled mountain bike, so I got the gang at Old Town Bike Shop to redo my Voodoo as a flat-bar, single-ring, thumb-shifting, seven-speed. The weirdo wheels went away, replaced by a mismatched set of Mavic hoops laced to Hügi Compact hubs cannibalized from an old set of MTB wheels. The cantis went unchanged, but got a pair of Real levers operable by two of the fingers that still functioned on that left hand.

Bingo.

And 17 years down the road that’s pretty much how the bike remains, with a few changes to accommodate failure and/or necessity.

The rear Avid brake finally croaked, so I swapped in a Dia-Compe 986. The Flite got moved to another bike and after a few candidates auditioned only to be found wanting the Wazoo now sports an Ergon SMC4-M atop an old Control Tech post. The tires are Continental CrossRides in 700×42. A Tange Infinity fork replaced the carbon model. When the Shimano 600 rear derailleur was needed elsewhere I plugged in a 105, with a tab extender that lets me run an 11-34T cassette with that 38T chainring.

I hadn’t ridden it since February. And that “short” ride I had planned turned into two hours of giggles on the trails, from El Rancho Pendejo south past Copper and then back north to the Elena Gallegos.

When it really started getting good to me I thought, “Maybe I should turn this back into a drop-bar cyclocross bike. I’ve got the parts. Who knows? I might spend more time riding it if it were a ’cross bike again.”

And then I thought again. The Wazoo is perfect just the way it is.

For now, anyway. …