Happy winter solstice to thee and thine. Once again I will not be attending the annual illumination of the inner chamber at Newgrange — the 5,000-year-old monument is not among the locations served by Air Subaru — but I will be there in spirit.
The weather wizards say we can expect a high in the upper 40s today here in the Duke City, but it won’t be long now before this space is devoted to bitching about the intolerable heat. To everything there is a season.
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.
You haven’t ordered your new Old Guys Who Get Fat In Winter jersey yet? Saving your pennies for “The Force Awakens,” are you?
I find your lack of faith disturbing. …
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?'”
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.
