Harrison Walter, come on down!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Harrison Walter, en route to graduating from Colorado Mountain College.

Congratulations and a tip of the Mad Dog mortarboard to Harrison Walter, who yesterday collected his Associate of General Studies degree from Colorado Mountain College in Leadville.

The big day kicked off with the traditional “Ski Down” of Dutch Henry Hill. Harrison — a letterman named Most Valuable Runner of the 2023-24 CMC Eagles’ men’s team — chose to leg it down on snowshoes.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) delivered the commencement address, after which Harrison, his family and friends adjourned to the City on a Hill coffee shop for what his father, Hal, described as “a gala soiree.”

En route to his degree, Harrison also collected certificates of proficiency in basic welding and cutting and welding design and fabrication, and earned yet another certificate from the Eagles for maintaining a 3.0+ GPA as a student athlete. So it was a busy couple of years for the young fella.

Today the freshly minted graduate was reported to be resting comfortably at the family compound outside Weirdcliffe while his father examined the upshot of clearing out his dorm room.

“My truck, which looked like The Beverly Hillbillies’ … has been emptied into the living room,” he confided via Messages. “What a mess.”

Pistache! Gesundheit!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Our young pistache erupted in leaves practically overnight.

It was a gloomy morning, or maybe it just felt that way because I slept poorly.

Weird dreams and plenty of ’em, with lots of abrupt and unscheduled wake-ups. I didn’t check the clock because I didn’t want to know. What little remains of my mind was churning like a Samsung clothes washer on the brink of catastrophic failure.

My restlessness could’ve been due to seasonal allergies, which have been unusually fierce this spring. Or perhaps it was the upshot of two consecutive nights of Sarah DiGregorio’s chipotle-honey chicken tacos. I did opt for two sizable chipotles in their preparation. And I did eat two of those fat tacos both nights, topped with diced avocado, accompanied by a large green salad.

Maybe at 70 it’s time to reconsider the spicy foods?

Nah.

I’ve been eating chile since I was 8 and it hasn’t killed me yet. And if it ever does, I’ll depart this vale of tears with a smile on my face and the bedclothes floating a few aromatic inches above the rest of me. I can sleep when I’m dead.

• Editor’s note: Speaking of my mind and how it works (or doesn’t), when I went to Radio Free Dogpatch for the Samsung-washer link I was reminded that it’s been a year since I recorded a podcast. So here it is, a rerun from April 16, 2023.

Up the Wazoo

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
It’s always happy trails on the Blue Wazoo.

DeeCee being a rather long slog via Subaru, I decided I’d settle for a short mood-altering run on the neighborhood trails yesterday.

I won’t travel by air, as you know. And if I did, the airline probably wouldn’t let me take my torch and pitchfork, even as checked baggage.

Anyway, what do I know about taxidermy? Sure, I could collect a few souvenir heads in our nation’s capital with my handy-dandy Gomboy folding saw, but then what? The TSA says you can board a plane with fresh meat, but they may decide to add a cautionary note about “the severed heads of Supreme Court justices” after running your lumpy carry-on through the scanner twice because they didn’t believe what they saw on the first pass.

And if you do manage to make it home without incident, preserving and mounting your prizes for display in the den is not a chore you want to hand off to anyone who doesn’t owe you a really big favor.

Shucks, even a six-pack of ears pinned to a cork board in the garage can make for some pointed conversations you’d rather not have, even if you explain that the fuckers never used them for listening, only to keep their trifocals from falling into their black robes or onto the bench, and anyway, with the fat stacks of attaboys they get from their rich pals they can have a new pair grafted on before you can say, “Case dismissed.”

So, yeah. Herself and I went for a nice trail run in the sunshine, and afterward I decided I was still not in the mood to update myself on the latest news, so I changed costumes and took the Voodoo Wazoo for an enjoyable 90 minutes of light gnar-shredding in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

Today I see the courtroom drama has shifted back to Manhattan. Time for another run. I can’t remember where I put that saw.