Category: Winter

Riders on the storm

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Man, am I ever glad I bought that Giant Tempo. The temp-o outside never got above 15 today, so I was setting tempo indoors on the stationary bike between bouts of snow-brooming. Yes, brooming. We rarely get enough to shovel anymore, though today’s snowfall pushed the envelope somewhat.

I never would’ve gotten away with installing one of my bikes on a wind trainer in the living room. But since the Tempo can be adjusted to suit the much smaller frame of Herself as well as my own massive carcass, it has won approval at the highest possible level of our local chain of command.

Herself generally sets my 12-inch G4 PowerBook on the Tempo’s time-trial-style handlebars and hoots through an episode of “The Daily Show” while riding. Me, I listen to an iPod. No Allman Brothers today — this time around it was Eric Clapton (“Further On Up the Road”), Les McCann and Eddie Harris (“Compared to What?”), Miles Davis (the entirety of “Birth of the Cool”) and a couple snippets of Ornette Coleman (“Sound Grammar”) and Bill Evans (“Everybody Digs Bill Evans”) to bring the ride to a close.

Broom waggin’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Just enough snow to break a hip on.
Just enough snow to break a hip on.

Three degrees below zero and another quarter inch of snow. If this is fun, we’re having it.

Corner Mike beat me to the sidewalk-brooming this morning. I call him Corner Mike ’cause (wait for it) he lives on the corner. This helps differentiate him in casual conversation from Alley Mike, who lives — well, you get the picture.

Corner Mike and I are the only guys on this side of the street who are under 75, so we tag team  snow removal. As a part-time rumormonger I have more spare time than Corner Mike, who does something obscurely medical, but he’s an early riser and sometimes beats me to the punch.

He doesn’t do our driveway, though, and stops at the alley, so I still got a brisk upper-body workout in before breakfast. And after a mug of black tea I can almost feel my fingers and toes again.

Paging Dr. Thompson

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Oh, the weather outside is frightful. Just ask Turkenstein, who prefers a spot on my drawing board to a squat in the snow.
Oh, the weather outside is frightful. Just ask Turkenstein, who prefers a spot on my drawing board to a squat in the snow.

The Brakeman, a.k.a. Dr. Demento, Dr. Doom and Dr. Christopher T. Thompson, is up for sentencing today in the Mandeville Canyon road-rage case, if I recall correctly. VeloNews.com, which covered the trial from gavel to gavel, should have a story up tout de suite with my doppelgänger Patrick Brady on the case.

I don’t know about you, but I’m very interested to see what the judge lays on him. He has 10 years coming, and I’d like to see him serve every second of it.

Meanwhile, nobody will be mistaking Bibleburg for Southern California anytime soon. It was 8 degrees when I arose, and we are anticipating a “high” of 15. The Turk’ has asked to go outside exactly once, and after about five minutes of frigid freedom he’s parked on a sunny spot on my drawing board.

• Late update: Dr. Frankendick’s sentencing has been postponed to next year. The BikingInLA website reports that the continuance was due to — wait for it — a swine-flu-triggered lockdown at the slammer holding the good Herr Doktor. And to think they said irony was dead.

Down and all the way out

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
A Farm Service Administration photo of families camped roadside during the Great Depression, taken from the Library of Congress\' American Memory collection.
A Farm Service Administration photo of families camped roadside during the Great Depression, from the Library of Congress' American Memory collection.

Here’s a sad story for you, straight out of “The Grapes of Wrath”: A homeless bricklayer profiled in the Bibleburg Gaslight on Monday was found dead outside his tipi on Thanksgiving morning — four days before the story ran.

Ray Medina, 53, told reporter Carlyn Ray Mitchell that he came to Bibleburg three years ago from Function Junction, hunting construction work at Fort Cartoon. Four months ago he moved to the banks of Fountain Creek, living first in a tent, then in the tipi. He gave the tent to a camp mate once the tipi was finished.

“None of us really want to be here,” Medina told the G. “I’m hoping (construction) will pick back up, hopefully in the spring.”

Added officer Dan McCormack with the Bibleburg Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team: “He was convinced he was going to get a job and get off the street. Obviously his plans weren’t working out for him.”

Lots of plans are failing to reach fruition these days. Paul Krugman writes that there are six times as many of us looking for work as there are job openings, “and the average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s.”

Here in Bibleburg, the unemployment rate is hovering at 7.5 percent, a slight improvement over the first half of the year attributed not to an improving economic climate, but to discouraged job-seekers dropping out of the labor market because there is no work.

So many tipis; so little hope.

Blue bird

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 35 Comments
I really stuck the dismount this time. Even the East German judge gave me a 10.
I really stuck the dismount this time. Even the East German judge gave me a 10.

Hm. Been a little quiet around here lately, no? A couple shifts in the old VeloBarrel, some snow-shoveling, a bit of trying to learn my way around the new WordPress-based beta site, and a crash on the ’cross bike, and all of a sudden it’s five days later. How time does fly when you’re having fun.

For some reason yesterday I thought it would be smart to go for a short ride in the icy goo. Not so much, as it turns out, especially with a deadline looming. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it can be to dispense the wit and wisdom with only one functional hand. The other, as you can see, is sporting a splint to support its dislocated birdie finger, which I popped back into place as I was lying there in the puddle, the one masking the sheet of ice.

Road-raging motorists will get little in the way of obscene gestures from me over the next month, unless they park curbside to peek in through a living-room window and shout at me for riding an exercise bike.