Blow me

April 9, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Ah, balls — Turkish, who also loathes the wind, gives the hairy eyeball to one of his toys shortly before kicking its ass.

Jeebus. I say this every April, I know, but still, damn — this wind is insane. Right now it’s barreling out of the south-southwest at 29 mph with gusts to 48.

Sucker flat pile-drives the pollen up the snotlocker, let me tell you. Feels like some evil plumber is ratcheting down an extra-large hose clamp on my brainpan. I should be out logging miles on the Jamis for review purposes, but I’ve been wrestling this accursed wind all week and I’m kind of over it. For now, anyway.

Still, could be worse — Flagstaff is under about a foot of snow, I-17 is closed, and the white stuff is still coming down. This is why we keep cross-country skis and snowshoes around. April showers, don’t you know.

At play in the fields of the Lord

April 7, 2011April 7, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

We got a very welcome spring rain last night. The sound of the lawn, shrubs and trees cheering (“Yaaaaayyyy!!!) kept us up all night long.

Or perhaps that was the shit monsoon, which continues unabated in DeeCee, where the Tinfoil Beanie Party continues to hone its management philosophy, taken from the manifesto “Everything I Know About Getting My Way I Learned in Kindergarten.” What a shower of bastards we have sent to the nation’s capital.

And how God must chuckle when He looks down to see His monkeys at play, screeching and flinging dung at one another. Kind of makes You wish You hadn’t taken that seventh day off, eh, Big Fella? You could’ve used it to perform a little quality-control check on your most famous product.

A blustery day

March 22, 2011 ~ 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

May 13, 2010November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

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

April 30, 2010November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

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.