Shiny side up, please

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
The Bianchi Zurigo, with its oversized alloy tubes, 30mm V-section rims and broad-bladed carbon fork, catches a little more wind than some of the other bikes in the fleet.

The bike was moving around on me in the crosswind as I swept down Tramway Road toward Interstate 25, and I was starting to think that the Bianchi Zurigo Disc, with its fat alloy tubes, broad-bladed carbon fork and skinny 700×35 adventure tires, might not have been the right tool for today’s job.

There’s nothing out there to keep the wind off you, except for the cars passing too close and too fast, and the Bianchi is both a little small and a little stretched out for Your Humble Narrator, who is too lazy to give it a stem more appropriate to his wizened, shrunken carcass.

So there I was, bowling along at speed, thinking back to the time I got into a death wobble on a long, smooth descent at the Air Force Academy, when I noticed three brother cyclists off their machines just ahead, and taking up a not insubstantial portion of the shoulder, too.

I slowed down to ask if they needed anything, and that’s when I noticed the irregular black stripe leading off the shoulder and into the terra not so firma.

“Everything OK?” I asked, coming to a stop.

“I don’t know yet,” replied rider No. 1, the one wearing the fresh road rash. “I hit my head pretty hard.” At that, No. 2 inspected No. 1’s helmet while No. 3 checked the victim’s bike. There was a divot in the lid and a big oval hole in the rear tire, as though some strong fellow had taken a Magnum potato peeler to it. There was some discussion of “shimmy.”

The gent with the dent had that look on his face, the one that says, “This has fucked up my Sunday, and it’s starting to hurt, but at least I went off into the weeds and not out into traffic, where a helmet would have been tits on a bull, or more like tits on a bumper, now that I think about it, which I’d rather not.”

I asked if he needed a phone, but he had one, and dialed up the wife for a dustoff.

“You guys seem to have this under control,” I said to the others, and off I rolled, dialing my sensor array up to maximum. “Wind from the SW, roger. Land yacht off the port stern, check. Does that rear tire feel a little soft?” That sort of thing.

I haven’t had a good high-speed getoff in a while, not even when I got into that death wobble on the AFA, and I’d like to keep it that way.

What we like and what we get are often two very different things, though. So let’s all be careful out there. The world is full of hard surfaces and sharp edges.

Takeout gets taken out

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
The monsoons persist.

Herself takes an exercise class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and sometimes she’ll slide by Il Vicino afterward to collect a couple sammiches so Your Humble Narrator doesn’t have to cook.

Last night was one of those sometimes. Until the deluge.

First came the thunder, which sounded like incoming artillery rounds fused for airburst. Skylights, which we have aplenty, gave me and the cats a pretty good look at the flash part of the flash-bang, too.

And then, the rain. Holy hell, the rain. A neighbor said we got an inch in an hour, and I have no reason to doubt her. The cul-de-sac basically turned into a giant storm drain.

In any case, the upshot is, I had to cook. It would have been an upstream swim to Il Vicino for Herself and we’d have wound up with soup sammiches after she swam back.

Executive time

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
The chair recognizes His Excellency, Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment). Oy, does it ever.

Oh, sure, you can impeach him, maybe even convict.

But you’re gonna need the Army to get him out of that chair. Maybe the Marines, too.

Adios, summer

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
The backyard maple catches a bit of late-day light.

Ordinarily we don’t expect much when flipping to the next page in the calendar, any more than we do when crossing a state line, unless we’re driving a hot car wearing the wrong plates with an old enemy bound and gagged in the trunk next to a suitcase full of cash, cocaine, and at least one unregistered firearm while the underage runaway in the passenger seat passes us a fat spliff soaked in hash oil, pulls off her tube top, and asks if she can pretty please have a pull on our fifth of Jameson.

Float like a hummingbird, sting like a bee.

But it rained a good deal of the first day of September, and we opened most of the windows at El Rancho Pendejo to let the cool breeze blow through, and that sort of felt like the end of summer to me.

I rearranged my office for no good reason, playing a selection of weather-appropriate Irish tunes on the stereo, while Herself vacuumed the house.

Today I vacuumed the lawn, which is more fun, because you can do it outside in the fresh air and there is no stopping to empty the bag, because our lawn is a cannibal and enjoys eating its own clippings.

The two-tailed swallowtail is the state butterfly of Arizona and the largest swallowtail in western North America.

After chores we poured ourselves a couple of cold beverages and sprawled on the patio for a spell, listening to some Miles Davis, enjoying some more of that cool breeze, and watching a pair of hummingbirds battle each other and the bees for a short snort from the feeder as a pacifist two-tailed swallowtail stealthily worked a bush along the back wall.

Tomorrow is Labor Day, and labor we shall not. Something in a bike ride, I think, clad in red.