Category: water

The Rolling Blunder Revue

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
“Roll him back to makeup, someone screwed up the spray tan. Also, more lipstick. Maybe that’ll help.”

Here it is Feb. 1 in the Year of Our Lard 2025. The last 11 days of January were chock-full of chuckles, and I anticipate even more of same going forward.

Yesterday I got out for a leisurely 90-minute ride in pleasant weather, which helped. The 45-minute run is fine, as far as it goes, which is not very. But I need at least twice that to slap some of the rabies out of the Voices in my head, get them all singing more or less on key and in harmony rather than screeching at random like banshees with the piles. They resist gentle persuasion, and believe me, you don’t want to get bitten.

Meanwhile, the Dingaling Bros-Barnum & Beelzebozo Circus Rolling Blunder Revue thunders along. The Junior Stalinists are erasing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data because DEI, whipping tariffs on all and sundry (adios, avocados), and releasing water from storage in California because … who the fuck knows why? Not the water wizards, that’s for sure. (A tip of the ol’ swim cap to Kevin Drum for the intel).

I could go on — and on, and on, and on — but won’t. Remember, it”s a marathon, not a sprint. Maybe an ultramarathon. Barefoot, uphill, into the wind, on a rocky trail bordered by cacti and speckled with bear scat and broken glass. Let’s pace ourselves.

(Not) for the birds

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
The April showers are a little late this year.

Hm. The weather seems less than ideal for the old bikey ridey this morning. The weather widget says we’ve gotten 0.15 inch since I oozed out of bed two hours ago, it’s still bucketing down, and I am no Laura Killingbeck. I prefer my velo-adventures sunny-side up with some toasty 65°-degree-plus temps if I can get ’em. Just ’cause I have mudguards doesn’t mean I wanna use ’em.

We Duck! Citizens enjoyed a high of 81° yesterday, well short of the record — 92° in 2022 — with zero precip’. In fact, the National Weather Service reports that we have had but a trace of moisture so far in May, and just 0.33 inch in April, a mere dribble compared to the usual half-inch.

Up to 0.24 inch since I started typing this post. Woof. We could corral those missing April showers today.

Anyone who has forgotten/is unaware how important water is to us here in the upper reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert, where the yappy purse dogs roam free, can become wise following the online musings of water wizard John Fleck. Buy him a coffee if you can spare the funds; I attended one water-board meeting in the Seventies, as a cub reporter fueled by vile percolator joe, and I can assure you John needs all the proper java he can get.

In other news, our man Charles Pelkey is working the early shift in Laramie as local host of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” and anyone who misses the glory days of Live Update Guy can catch his act on the Innertubes at Wyoming Public Media. That other fella he used to work with at LUG remains unemployable in print, broadcast, and online.

I do serve at least one small purpose, however. After my own cup of coffee I scattered some bird seed around under the patio cover so the tweeties could enjoy a snack out of the wet. Queuing up at the feeders today must feel like being a hobo outside a Seattle soup kitchen.

Dry wit

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

My bucket list includes water.

Our friendly neighborhood water wizard John Fleck got to make a big wake by the boat dock in The New York Times this morning, taking California to task for “trying to protect its outsized water supply at the expense of others in the region. …”

Those others, in case you were wondering, include Your Humble Narrator and his friends and neighbors in New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona.

John writes:

If we approach the challenge with a sense of fairness and shared sacrifice it will be possible to save the West that we know and love.

From your lips to God’s ears, as my people say. What was the line about learning to share in kindergarten? Maybe California needs some remedial education. That juicy Colorado River pie has become something of a dried-out shit sandwich, and we’re all going to have to take a bite.

Check out the entire essay, and follow John over at his own little adobe hacienda on the banks of the Great Digital River.

Snow joke

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

I guess we can leave the skinny skis in the garage.

Well, it must be true, if both The New York Times and The Washington Post simultaneously catch up to the sad story about Rio Verde Foothills, where dreams go to die in the dust.

It’s an old story, with the new wrinkle being Scottsdale finally putting a cork in water sales to Rio Verde, saying it had to consider its own residents first and foremost. From the WaPo:

“The city cannot be responsible for the water needs of a separate community especially given its unlimited and unregulated growth,” the city manager’s office wrote in December.

The stories share a squeaky wheel — Cody Reim, who has a wife and four kids, works for the family’s sheet-metal business, and is looking at a water bill that could surpass the tab for his mortgage, when he’s not chatting up the national press. Again, from the WaPo:

“I thought, this is the United States of America, we do so much in humanitarian aid to other countries that don’t have water, they’re not going to let taxpaying citizens of this county go without water,” he said.

“You don’t think this could happen,” he added. “You have this belief that there’s going to be help.”

I have sympathy for the Reim family. Like them, we chose to live in a sandbox — the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert — and our water gets humped uphill to El Rancho Pendejo via a series of pumping stations. If we paid what this liquid gold is actually worth, or had to fetch it here by bike or burro, you can bet your ass we’d use a lot less of it.

Either that or we’d move to where the water is. Yet here we are.

Deciding to build your base camp in the desert is magical thinking going toe to toe with mathematics. As John Fleck observes in his ongoing Dead Pool Diaries, decent runoff this year will not change the fact that Colorado River water is overallocated and always has been.

“It’s just arithmetic!” he says.

If God wanted us here, He would’ve stored more agua fria under the rocks and cacti. But clearly He wasn’t expecting quite so much company.

“Hey, you come to the desert to get wisdom, 40 days and nights, tops. And then you go back where you came from. You silly sods never went back.”

This bites

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

Glass don’t be even half full, yo.

It’s bleakly amusing that The New York Times water scribe is named Henry Fountain.

And that’s about the only giggle in the “news” that we’re draining the Colorado River like a parched gaggle of Draculas tapping a hot blonde while not doing much to answer the question, “Why does the Southwest have so many vampires working out on this one skinny gal?”

It should go without saying that when you’re long on bloodsuckers and short on arteries you’re gonna start running a deficit. Is it too late to hit the Home Depot for a shitload of wooden stakes and hammers?

My fellow Burqueño John Fleck is on the case as per usual. See “How We Got Into This Mess on the Colorado River,” and a “strongly worded letter” from John Entsminger of the Southern Nevada Water Authority about the failure to reach a deal on Colorado River cutbacks.

NPR also has a piece, from The Associated Press.

And yes, I know, having spent much of my life bouncing around four of the states that draw water from the Colorado River, that I am part of the problem. What can I tell you? I am a creature of the desert, known to howl at the moon of an evening.

The children of the night! What music they make!

Just call me Bozo Lugosi.