Don’t blame the dogs (or the cats)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
The weather widget hits that C-note again.

Summer doesn’t officially arrive until tomorrow, but I’m already pretty much over it.

This sweaty conga line of triple-digit temps is starting to remind me of summers on Randolph AFB outside San Antonio. Your options were the swimming pool or some indoor sport, like Monopoly under the Fedders window unit. Venture outdoors for the usual boyish hijinks and you risked sinking into the asphalt like a Pleistocene mammoth stumbling into the La Brea tar pits.

Eventually we’d flee by car to Sioux City, Iowa, to visit my maternal grandmother. This was not an upgrade.

Our neighbors have been scurrying off to the high country on weekends to camp or VRBO it for a couple days, take five from the heat.

We’ve been sticking it out for a variety of perfectly unsatisfactory reasons. For instance, rather than join me in blissful sloth and torpor, Herself persists in gainful employment. Extra-credit tasks are assigned regularly by Herself the Elder, lest the devil find work for her daughter’s rarely idle hands. And finally, Miss Mia Sopaipilla is not an agreeable travel companion. The sounds she emits in a moving vehicle make a Marjorie Taylor Greene screed sound like the “Ave Maria.”

But we can’t blame this on the cat. Even the dogs are out of bounds, according to Ken Layne over at Desert Oracle Radio.

“Take the dog out at 8 o’clock and it’s still 100 degrees. The dog’s looking at me like, ‘What did you do?’ And I say, ‘Look, I did not do it.’ But of course I did; my species, anyway. The dogs just went along for the ride. It would be nice to blame them. ‘You’re the one who always wanted to get in the car and stick your head out the window when the A/C was on.’ But it’s not their fault.”

R.I.P., Harris Cyclery

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments
Sheldon Brown lives on at his eponymous website.

Harris Cyclery — yes, that Harris Cyclery, the place where the legendary Sheldon Brown served the cycling public — is no more.

I stumbled across the news while scanning Bicycle Retailer‘s Twitter feed (I hate to admit it, but occasionally Twitter actually serves a purpose). The folks at road.cc fear for Sheldon’s voluminous website as the shop closes its doors.

As a ham-handed, thumb-fingered dolt, I’ve relied on Sheldon’s how-to archives to solve many a problem that otherwise might cause actual mechanics to laugh at me for all the wrong reasons. It would be a tragedy of cosmic proportions if this treasure trove were to vanish into the dim mists of velo-history.

Road.cc is trying to reach Sheldon’s people for the deets. Here’s hoping they plan to survive yet another sad passing.

Just deserts

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Even the cacti are hunting shade.

“Just put a chair underneath the swamp cooler and deal with it all like a pro.” — “When Everything Goes Wrong,” Ken Layne, Desert Oracle Radio

Gonna be a hot one — or two, or three, or four, or more — throughout the desert Southwest.

Especially out there in Desert Oracle country, where Ken Layne chats with author Claire Nelson about the time when her day hike suddenly got too hot to handle.

Here in the Duke City I’ve finally bowed to the elements and switched the Honeywells from “heat” to “cool,” because we’ve been having too much of the one and not nearly enough of the other.

And it will only get hotter. The National Weather Service predicts high temperatures of 5 to 15 degrees above normal for about a week (!) as a strong high-pressure system blisters New Mexico like a chile on the grill.

We didn’t need no steekeeng air conditioning back in Bibleburg. Nobody made us move to the upper edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. We knew it was wrong, but we did it anyway.

And whaddaya wanna bet one or both of us goes out onto the sunbaked trails to get the ol’ heart rate up for a while? No brain, no pain. If you don’t hear from me for a couple days call the Duke City trash collectors. I’ll be that bag of bones under the prickly pear somewhere in the Sandia Foothills Open Space.

Bloody hell

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Jordan Alexander Barson. | Photo courtesy Mohave County Sheriff’s Office

Remember this fine fellow? Charged with taking out a group ride on U.S. 95 in Nevada, killing five, injuring four?

If Jordan Alexander Barson is a good boy — that means no more running over cyclists while crazed on meth, mister! — he can be paroled after serving just 10 years of the 40-year sentence he received on Wednesday.

So says defense attorney Damian Sheets, anyway. District Attorney Steven B. Wolfson claims Barson will have to do at least 16 years in the Graybar Hotel.

But Wolfson and Sheets agree that the Nevada Highway Patrol intercoursed the penguin on the blood draw; the DA described it as “less than perfect investigative work,” while the defense called it a violation of Barson’s rights.

The upshot was a deal that saw Barson cop to just two counts of DUI resulting in death.

Donna Trauger, whose husband, Tom, was among the dead, got right down to cases. She accused the stateys of “embarrassing negligence” and “victim-blaming,” and said that “justice was not served.”

The NHP had no comment. Hell, I’m nearly speechless myself. There was a retired cop on this ride — Michael Anderson, who did 22 years with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department — and you’d think that if the system worked for anyone it would work for an ex-cop and his friends.

“We got it, Mike. This guy is gonna gonna do a century over this.”

Nope. Sixteen years. Unless he runs over a trusty with a laundry cart or something.