Category: Spring

A blustery day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
Snow on Pikes Peak
Just 'cause it's spring where you are doesn't mean it's spring at 14,110 feet.

Typical oddball Colorado weather today. Twenty degrees cooler than yesterday, a brief spell of popcorn snow from an otherwise blue sky, actual snow atop Pikes Peak, more of the winds from hell, and about umpty-ump pounds of tree pollen blasted straight up my snoot. Blaugh.

In other Bibleburg news, USA Cycling assumed the position — pardon me, assumed the UCI position — on race radios after initially deciding to allow squawk boxes in NRC events. That NastyGram® Paddy McQuaid sent must’ve really read out the old riot act, as in “IOC spank.” Don’t want to throw away your bucket while all that money is still spewing from the five-ringed faucet in downtown Bibleburg, don’t you know.

Who’da thunk race radios would end up being Dire Portents of the End Times, cycling-wise? Silly sods have been gobbling enough dope to bring Hunter S. Thompson back from the dead, mainlining each others’ blood bags and fleeing drug raids through hotel windows, and what finally does the job is Thor Hushovd’s inability to hear Jonathan Vaughters’ sideburns flapping in the breeze from an open window in the team Volvo.

Banzai! Banzai! Ba … oh, merde

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Twenty roses do tend to fill up a small living room.
Twenty roses do tend to fill up a small living room.

Yukiya Arashiro nearly pulled off a stage win today for his Bbox Bouygues Telecom squad. He started the day’s break — a break that, astoundingly, made it all the way to the line, thanks in large part to his hard work in the final kilometers — and what thanks did he get? The poor sod saw Quick Step’s Jérôme Pineau and Cofidis’ Julien Fouchard zip past him at the line. How does one say “Ce me fait chier!” in Japanese?

While we’re discussing things that suck, it snowed here briefly this morning. Naturally, the furnace went on the blink in solidarity. We’re starting to suspect our Honeywell programmable thermostat, which is about more one cold spring morning away from getting the old Han Solo treatment from me and my S&W .357 Magnum. Probably take out one of the neighbors in the process. The old hand cannon packs quite a wallop.

The chill must have been good for the roses I bought Herself yesterday, though. Just like sitting in the cooler at Platte Floral, except for the big white cat with the foliage fetish who keeps rubbing up against them.

Burnin’ the bayou

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
Tiptoeing through the tulips.
Tiptoeing through the tulips.

It really must be spring. In the past couple days I’ve seen a cottontail, a snake, a red fox the size of a coyote jogging up the sidewalk across the street and a muddy rain that required me to deploy the windshield wipers before I went grocery shopping yesterday morning. Oh, yeah, and enough yellow pollen to give King Kong the sniffles.

It’s 80 degrees one minute and 30 the next, and the dandelions are proliferating faster than dingbats in the GOP. Census workers are out and about, noting the locations of armed Christian patriots to be seized and shipped off to death camps as part of President Antichrist’s scheme to remake America as a socialist Muslim paradise.

But at least the oil slicks around these parts are mostly confined to Sprawl-Mart parking lots, under beater pickups. That sucker in the Gulf of Mexico is a whole other deal. It’s a hell of a note when cleaning up a spill means setting the ocean afire. Makes that 1969 Cuyahoga River deal look like a 5-year-old farting in the bathtub.

God certainly seems to have it in for Louisiana, afflicting it with every manner of torment, from Hurricane Katrina to Gov. Bobby Jindal. Maybe He had a bad bowl of gumbo there once.

Inherit the wind

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

Looks like the lads at La Vuelta de Bisbee enjoyed some of the same gentle spring weather that afflicted me and my fellow cyclo-tourists during the Tombstone-to-Bisbee leg of the Adventure Cycling Association’s Southern Arizona Road Adventure last month (read all about it in the July issue of Adventure Cycling, assuming management does not regain its collective mental health).

We’ve been dealing with similar weather here in Bibleburg. It’s playing hell with my sinuses, and it doesn’t take an attractive photo, so you’ll just have to settle for an old-fashioned, text-based, filth-laden, standard-issue O’Grady description, which is to say that it mostly blows, and not in a good way, either.

Happily, Saturday is one of my days in the VeloNews.com barrel, so I didn’t feel obligated to force myself out for a few hours of sandblasted cycling. Tomorrow is another — Liège-Bastogne-Liège is on deck, and so am I — but it’s only a half day of work, the weather is supposed to improve and I’m going to get out for some exercise if it harelips ever’body on Bear Creek.

April showers

~ Patrick O'Grady
A glimpse to the west, where the real weather is.
A glimpse to the west, where the real weather is.

A bit late, to be sure, but we’re getting them. The lawn likes the weather, as do the flowers, but I’d just as soon have sunny and 70, thanks all the same. Getting your vitamin D from the pharmacy just isn’t the same somehow.

I need to log some serious miles between now and May, too. I’m signed up for some extra duty at VeloNews.com, helping with coverage of the Giro d’Italia and the Amgen Tour of California. This always sounds like a good idea (more money) but rarely is (more work). If I wanted to work, I’d get a job.

However, as Herself reminds me loudly and frequently, somebody around here spent a ton of money on bike parts recently, and the piper must be paid. Maybe I could institute a “Barter for Bike Parts” program. Y’know, trade a Rhode Island Red for some SRAM Red. I hear this sort of thing is all the rage in certain circles.