I see Der Trumpenführer has ordered the Wehrmacht to invade Portland.
What are they gonna do? Surround this guy? Waterboard him? Does Sec’y Kegsbreath have any idea of how much it rains in Oregon?
Leaf me alone
Following the news was starting to feel like losing a shit-eating contest, so I stepped away from the Mac and treated myself to a little expedition down to the bosque.
It was something of a whim, actually. I just grabbed the Soma Pescadero and without a plan in place took the Paseo de las Montañas trail down to I-40, rolled up and over the bike-ped bridge, and then risked life and limb riding Indian School and Washington to the brief I-40 Trail at Carlisle, which leads to the North Diversion Channel Trail.
But instead of turning northward as per usual, to head back to the Mac via Osuna-Bear Canyon, I swung south. What the hell? I thought. Why not? Let someone else gnaw on that shit sandwich for a few hours.
Ridden south the NDCT has an exit onto Indian School, which becomes Odelia as it traverses I-25. It’s the sort of auto-friendly shooting gallery that bicycle advocates call a “stroad,” with a bike lane, and drops past Albuquerque High School (pay no attention to the graveyard on your right). To avoid the equally dicey Broadway at the bottom I hung a left off Odelia onto Edith, then a right onto Mountain.
This is the same route I ride to collect the Forester whenever it needs a little love from the Subaru wizards at Reincarnation. But Mountain also winds through Old Town to the Paseo del Bosque trail.
Mountain can be a little sketchy, being a narrow two-lane shared with street people and gas-guzzlers. A seemingly endless construction project that I first dodged in June added a small degree of difficulty, taking me off the street and onto a series of sidewalks from Tiguex Park to the Albuquerque Museum. After dodging a dog-walker, dropping off the sidewalk onto Mountain, and crossing to the opposite sidewalk to punch the bike-ped button at Mountain and Rio Grande, it was smooth sailing to the bosque trail, which I joined just south of I-40.
Then another whim: Check the state of the Rio Not-So-Grande. Up the Gail Ryba Memorial Bridge I rode. Yikes, etc. Back to the bosque trail.
The cottonwoods weren’t showing a lot of fall color so early in the season. Just a hint of yellow here and there. No matter; just happy to be here. I brought arm warmers but never needed them as I cruised along at a pleasant skull-flushing pace.
I shared the trail with kindred souls. E-bikes, recumbents, mountain bikes, gravel bikes, even road bikes (how quaint). One long lean type on a flared-bar, fat-tired gravel bike ahead of me was riding no hands, swaying gently to some music in his mind.
They call me the breeze / I keep blowing down the road
Was he was thinking about ways to drag hapless strangers into unmarked vans and out of the country, or into court to fight some half-baked rap, strip them of their jobs, health care, and reputations, sic’ the thugs in his cult on them, or simply shoulder his way in front of a cluster of cameras so the rest of us have to look at him and listen to his bullshit? If so, I wasn’t seeing it. Just another dude on his two-wheeler, enjoying some fresh air between shifts in the barrel.
As I turned north off the bosque onto the Paseo del Norte Trail and headed for home I thought about how the barrel is with us always. We need a broader view than the one we get through the bunghole.
UN-real
Der Trumpenführer addresses the United Nations General Assembly.
His remarks sounded better in the original German, of course.
Fall guy(s)
It’s that time of year.
Even before the autumnal equinox arrived the mornings were growing cooler. Just 60° at 9:15 today. I’ve contemplated knickers a couple of times, but haven’t gone there yet. Arm warmers are once again part of the uniform of the day, though.
Since I’m decidedly unhandy when it comes to anything useful that needs doing around here, barring cookery and comedy, with fall all up in our grills we’ve been entertaining a parade of tradesmen plugging various leaks in our fauxdobe rowboat.
The to-do list to date includes: repairs to stucco come unstuck-o; fresh weatherstripping; askew garage door set aright; haircuts for trees and shrubs; flat roof weatherproofed (flat roofs are stupid; in case you were wondering); the remains of the lawn prepped for winter; and finally an irrigation-system blowout.
How I long for a van down by the river. But the house is paid for, and so is the Subaru.
And the river … well, the river needs work too. Mos def a fixer-upper. Hard to find good help for that little project, though.
The turn of the screw
Cost of coffee? Up nearly 21 percent. Cost of screws from Taiwan, America’s No. 1 supplier?
Just ask the Taiwanese, who make screws for everything from bathroom cabinets to data-center fans.
Margins are thin and getting thinner, as is the herd of manufacturers, thanks to The Pestilence’s 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, plus competition from mainland China on product and the homegrown computer-chip industry for workers and government support.
Kent Chen of Sheh Fung Screws Company told The New York Times that his orders are down 20 percent compared to this time last year.
“Everything is in pause mode. A lot of our customers said, ‘We’ll see,’ but then we didn’t receive many orders.”
Oh, he got his orders, all right. Same as the rest of us.
“Assume the position!”
We are so screwed. Ain’t enough coffee in the world for this bullshit. Especially at these prices.
Mad Blog Media 