Meet the Cyfac Vintage, a steel bike hand-built in France. It’s a wee bit short — a 54cm instead of the 56cm I usually ride — but it seems to roll along just fine nonetheless. It’s up for review in the July edition of Adventure Cyclist.
Speaking of which, cycling was something of an adventure around here today. The high reached at least 85 degrees, according to the weather wizards and confirmed by the Subaru thermometer, edging the record of 84 set in 2000. “Climate normal” is somewhere around 66, so this was something of a shock to the system, enough to make a guy buy a white Igloo helmet with a swamp cooler attached.
I couldn’t find one of those, so I bought two six-packs of beer instead: Odell’s 5 Barrel Pale Ale, which has become Herself’s favorite beer, and Victory’s Prima Pils, which is an excellent heat repellent when applied internally.
A man who sounds as though he could use a drink is Charles P. Pierce, who posits in a very grumpy blog post that Obama has left it too late to crank up the outrage machine. Writes Charles: “Personally, at this moment, I think he’s probably going to lose.”
If he’s right, then we should all start stockpiling strong drink while we still can. A nation that would elect Mitt Romney president is not one I can abide in sobriety.
“April is the cruellest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot. The quote arises unbidden as I watch the weather change from sunny to snowy to sunny again, and finally to a chilly shvitz of fog — all in less than a week.
Appropriately, April also brings the cruelest race, Paris-Roubaix. And while I no longer help cover such sport for vampire capitalists, I plan to get up way too early on Sunday and lend a paw to my friend and colleague Charles Pelkey over at Live Update Guy.
Charles will be on deck at dark-thirty, as usual, but I won’t plug in until the race is well under way. In the meantime, give us your picks for the V in comments. Tom Boonen is obviously a fave, but with filthy weather in the forecast and no Fabian Cancellara it could be anyone’s race. T.S. Eliot was right.
April showers, May flowers, yeah, right, got it. But my idea of “April showers” does not involve a gram of snow scattered across the Lesser Bibleburg Metropolitan Area by 35-mph winds. All a guy gets out of that is cold.
Could be worse, though. Apparently not satisfied with making chumps out of Rick “Governor Goodhair” Perry and Ron Paul on the national stage, God laid a dozen tornadoes on the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where they caused several million dollars worth of improvements.
Elsewhere, a three-judge panel of the 5th Judicial District is in “full wingnut mode,” according to Mother Jones; Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan chats up David Duke’s old gang, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (as I did back in the Seventies, when I spoke with The Head Hood Hisself); and the RomneyBot v2.012 wins the GOP primary in my birth state of Maryland.
But lest you think the contest over, know this: Rick Sphinctorum says it’s only “halftime.” Jesus wept.
Finally, enough snow to shovel. And shovel, and shovel, and. ...
We finally got a snowfall worthy of the name — about eight inches’ worth over a couple of days, just in time for solstice.
Lacking a gym membership and possessing the feeble upper body of the geriatric cyclist I suffered through multiple repetitions of precipitation redistribution between other chores — running VeloNews.com, cooking, serving as staff to cats, fetching the holiday vittles from Whole Paycheck, some last-minute gift-shopping and a welcome visit to the backcracker (though she probably found it less so, as I make her earn those BMW payments).
Nearly eight inches ... and just about the biggest dumper we've seen in our eight years here.
The VeloNews.com thing has been particularly irksome. I haven’t worked five days a week for 20 years — not at the same mind-numbing task, anyway — and frankly I don’t know how you poor bastards stand it. We’re still minus a web editor, and I’m minus a 2012 contract until said executive gets hired, so with eight days remaining on my 2011 deal with these people I’ve been spending more than a few of our very short daylight hours revisiting many of the late George Carlin’s fabled Seven Words.
A couple things caused me to dial down the volume a bit, though. While motoring around in the snow the other day I noticed some poor sod in a hard hat, up to his tits in a right-lane ditch, digging away as the heavy holiday traffic slalomed around him. As working for a living goes this makes pixel-pushing look like sharing a hot tub with Elle MacPherson, Scarlett Johansson and a couple flagons of Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque.
Then my friend and colleague Hal Walter reported in from Weirdcliffe, recounting a tile-and-carpet project that turned into your basic 17-day nightmare, forcing him and his family from their home as appliances and furniture were torn from their proper places and stacked in the living room while various artisans were hired and fired. At least I get to be pissed off in my own house.
And finally another friend and colleague, Charles Pelkey, who has been enduring weeks of chemotherapy for cancer, had another health scare. While taking his latest infusion he developed a dysrhythmia that sent him to the ER for a battery of heart tests; seems potentially fatal dysrhythmias are a rare side effect of the drug Taxol and his oncologist wasn’t taking any chances.
Happily, the problem disappeared when Charles got on a treadmill and elevated his heart rate. And better still, the doc decided that enough was enough already and gave Charles a get-out-of-chemo card — he had been slated to continue treatments through the holidays and most of January 2012.
Me, I take an aspirin now and then when I get a brain cramp.
So it looks like I don’t have anything to bitch about, goddamnit. But wait … I can always bitch about not having anything to bitch about! It’s the best present ever!
Here’s hoping y’all have nothing to bitch about, too. Happy holidays to you and yours.
Again with the “snow,” just enough to glaze the streets like a cop’s doughnut. I’ve seen more white powder on a proffered mirror, sighting along a rolled-up dollar bill. At least the wind is barreling down out of the north at 22 mph, with gusts to 31. So we’ve got that going for us.
Weather like this sends me straight back to the Mexican cookery for its natural-gas component. Last night it was posole and chicken-and-jalapeño quesadillas; tonight I’m simmering up a pot of beans with chipotle chile. I should whip up a batch of green chile sauce, but I think I’ll save that for tomorrow — I have a quart each of Anaheim and New Mexico chile thawing in the sink, and then we can greet the day over breakfast burritos with leftover chicken, beans and spuds smothered in green.
So, yeah. A day without beans is like a day without thunder. Just in case you thought Fort Carson was engaging in a little holiday artillery practice.
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