Turning Traitor

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
The Traitor Wander parked at the northern end of the Tramway bike path. They can still run you over on this thing, but they can't claim they never saw you.
The Traitor Wander parked at the northern end of the Tramway bike path. They can still run you over on this thing, but they can’t claim they never saw you.

The temps finally inched above 40 yesterday afternoon so I kitted up and got out for a short ride on the Traitor Wander, the next bike in line for review in Adventure Cyclist.

I’m no longer equipped for nor inclined to those long subfreezing training rides we used to enjoy Back In the Day®, when everyone dressed up like the little brother from “A Christmas Story.”

But 40-something I can handle, especially since I’m no longer afeared of fenders. The new Shimano XM7s help keep the toes toasty, too.

I briefly considered running, but I already had all that heavily loaded legwork under my belt from emptying Chez Dog, and I hadn’t been on a bike since returning to El Rancho Pendejo, so off I rolled.

I saw a few other desperadoes out there pedaling, a couple of them wearing shorts. That’s way past Manly Points and deep into Dummy Country.

Today the weatherperson is predicting a high in the low 50s, which is my idea of the perfect December day. So I’ll be out for more than an hour. So will everybody else, but as the Buddha has taught us, life is suffering. They’ll just have to suck it up and learn how to share the road with my fat ass.

Send in the clones

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
It doesn't look that cold out there, but it is. Can't you see the tree shivering?
It doesn’t look that cold out there, but it is. Can’t you see the tree shivering?

All right, which one of you wisenheimers swiped my sun-splashed Southwestern desert?

It never got over freezing today — the average for the day is supposedly in the mid-40s — and I was very much not interested in logging miles on any of the review bikes in the stable.

Instead, I made soup. That’s exercise, right? All that washing, peeling, chopping and stirring?

Sure it is.

The candidates for the GOP pestilential nomination will be making something else entirely in Vegas this evening, something not unlike a shit soufflé, but I will not be watching. Life is already far too short for that sort of cookery, even with the media trying to whip up an MMA steel-cage death match out of what amounts to a clone army of your drunk Uncle Buster carpet-bombing Christmas dinner.

Speaking of bombing, Los Angeles collectively soiled itself today over what is now believed to be a hoax involving attacks on school districts in large cities.

Thank God Al Gore hadn’t invented the Innertubez when I was a malchick. If my droogies and I had had smartphones back in the day, school would have been in session like, never, dude, sir.

“OK, hold the bong for a second and check this out. Hey, how do you spell ‘Klingon bird of prey?'”

Snow fun

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
It started like not so much of a much, but blossomed into a half-foot of the white stuff. Not bad for the Duke City.
It started like not so much of a much, but blossomed into a half-foot of the white stuff. Not bad for the Duke City.

I’ll tell you what a fella with a bad back wants after spending a week clearing and cleaning his ex-house: six and a half inches of heavy, wet snow to shovel.

Good times. Maybe not.

I won’t tell you what I used for a measuring stick. But that snow cold. Yeah, and it deep, too.

 

The road home

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
The road home, as seen through the windshield of a Chevy Express van stuffed to the ceiling with excess property.
The road home, as seen through the windshield of a Chevy Express van stuffed to the ceiling with excess property.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (MDM) — After getting the traditionally late start — O’Grady Standard Time is more than a few hours behind whatever you’re using — I rolled into Duke City at dark-thirty on Thursday with the last of our bits from Bibleburg and a killer backache.

And as of 4 p.m. yesterday, the former Chez Dog and its mortgage payment are in the hands of a 21-year-old student teacher. Now, if we can just get rid of the other two houses, I can finally achieve my dream of living in a van down by the river.

There will need to be a chiropractor’s van parked nearby, though, if I plan on lifting anything heavier than a cooler or a camp stove.