A Report in January 2024

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
The weather outside, frightful, etc. | Photo: Hal Walter

There are many reasons why I do not miss living in Crusty County and this is one of them.

My man Hal Walter has been enjoying the sort of lifestyle E.B. White wrote about in his 1958 essay “A Report in January,” in which White observed that “just to live in New England in winter is a full-time job; you don’t have to ‘do’ anything. The idle pursuit of making-a-living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.”

Sixty-six years later and several thousand feet up at his snowbound acreage in Colorado, Hal has had his good truck develop a sick headache, just as he prepared to take his son, Harrison, to the dentist in Pueblo, 50-some-odd miles east and down; borrowed his wife’s SUV for the trip only to bury that vehicle up to the axles in a snowdrift on the return trip, just 50 yards from his gate; shoveled it out in a single-digit wind chill; returned to doctoring his own rig, successfully, without having to call a tow truck (“If I were to need to have this thing towed, nobody could even get in here.”); and dug a path for it up his driveway to the county road, newly plowed.

This was in addition to the usual chores: delivering hay to the burros, grub to the family, wood to the stove, Harrison to Colorado Mountain College in Leadville (slated today, the last I heard), and so on and so forth.

If, like White, Hal wonders when he would once again “get a chance to ‘do’ something — like sit at a typewriter,” or even his MacBook Air, he has not mentioned it to me.

Risk: The Red Sea Edition

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Whew. No Rat Patrol stuff going on at the Michial Emery Trailhead. …

Man, I wish I could think of something witty, insightful or even simply funny to say about this little game of Red Sea Risk we’re playing all of a sudden.

I managed to squeeze out the nom de guerre “Houthi and the Blowemupfish,” but my head hurt afterward and I couldn’t think of anything to do with it.

Yemen, or what remains of it, was not on the map when I was into the Parker Brothers board game Risk. Lots of places weren’t.

And I don’t recall any asymmetrical warfare in the game, either. Or in real life, come to think of it.

We’d seen “The Rat Patrol” on ABC, of course, but thought that was just “Combat!” in the desert with G.I.’s in Jeeps getting big air off dunes. We had no idea that the concept was lifted, lock, stock, and smoking barrel, from British Lt. Col. David Stirling’s real-life Special Air Service hit-and-run commandos. The last surviving member of the original group, the hotshot navigator Mike Sadler, recently died at the ripe old age of 103.

Now it seems the bad guys are the ones doing all the run-and-gun. The Somalis were the O.G’s with their “technicals” (Toyota trucks tricked out with machine guns and other delights), and now the Houthis are in the game with whatever they’re driving. Not Volvos or Teslas, I assume; the Houthis’ insistence on trying to steal or sink anything that floats in the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden has disrupted those two companies’ production/shipping schedules.

A decade of dodging bombs from a Saudi-led, U.S. supported coalition has taught the Houthis to launch and leave before things get noisy on their end of the dispute. Thus we have the anonymously sourced admission from the Pentagon that despite all the boom-boom laid on them over the past few days, the Houthis retain something like 75 percent of their ability to shoot at any ducks in “their” pond. From the NYT:

But … U.S. officials cautioned on Saturday that even after hitting more than 60 missile and drone targets with more than 150 precision-guided munitions, the strikes had damaged or destroyed only about 20 to 30 percent of the Houthis’ offensive capability, much of which is mounted on mobile platforms and can be readily moved or hidden.

“Put ’er in drive, Ahmed, Uncle Sammy will be wanting a word with us directly and we don’t want to be around to hear it.”

Up the old Wazoo

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
Voodoo, child.

Anyone watch the Debate to Determine the First Loser last night?

Of course you didn’t. Because you already know that life, like the GOP pestilential campaign, is nasty, brutish, and short.

I haven’t read any of the coverage and don’t intend to because see previous graf.

In other news, Chris Christie finally conceded that he’s not enough of an asshole to out-trump You Know Who, but just enough of one to hot-mic’ his rivals for the roses in what has been a one-horse’s-ass race since the starter’s pistol fired. All the other entrants are basically carousel ponies, going up and down, and around in circles, and winding up right back where they started, a reminder that money can’t buy everything.

Buy the ticket, take the ride, as Hunter S. Thompson has taught us. Better yet, get someone else to buy your ticket. That way you don’t wind up a few hundred million in the red and sitting atop a suitcase on the curb in front of what used to be your home.

Elsewhere, one of You Know Who’s judges decided he didn’t want to hear “Mein Kampf” as filtered through a damp XXXL set of gold-lamé Depends in YKW’s civil-fraud trial and thus we are spared “a closing argument” that would have made the Delta House charter hearing in “Animal House” sound like “Inherit the Wind.”

Finally, here in The Duck! City the weather is fixing to take a turn for the worse, so yesterday I decided to slip out for a short ride on the Tramway bike path.

While motoring around on errands I had noticed that while the roads were still covered in red salt and sand, the bike path was clean as a whistle, so I opted for a quick spin to the County Line BBQ and back, just to keep the muscle memory from toppling over into dementia.

Today is looking more like a run type of situation, as the wizards are calling for plummeting temps, gusty winds, and plenty of the old suckee-suckee. Cycling was cold enough yesterday; no point in adding to whatever wind chill Itztlacoliuhqui has queued up. Coals to Newcastle, that is.

Happily, I’m not running for anything. Not even Christie’s people are dim enough to chuck good money down my little pasatiempo.

Impunity

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
“No paparazzi. Don’t make me call SEAL Team 6 on you.”

It’s good to know that the president can order SEAL Team 6 to swing by El Rancho Pendejo to pop a few caps in my ass and nobody can prosecute him over it, not even for littering.

I’d sort of suspected that this was the case. But it’s nice to have it confirmed.

Fuck. Me. Running. This D. John Shyster mouthpiece sounds like a real piece of work. Wikipedia says that in addition to the B.A. in theology from Oxford, the M.A. in philosophy from Notre Dame, and the J.D. from Harvard, our man has a B.S. in electrical engineering from Duke.

I guess this means that as Grand Inquisitor in the Second Coming he’ll be in charge of affixing the electrodes to everyone’s testicles. He’s getting a crash course in how to handle nuts right now.

The Benedictine monks from Saint Louis Abbey who provided his secondary-school education must be so proud. Laus Tibi Domine, y’all.

Runday

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Just another wee case of the runs.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, they say.

But when life gives you snow — what then? Make snowcones? Snowballs? Snowpersons?

Nah. Just go for a run.

I thought I was underdressed yesterday when I headed out for 5K on the trails. Lately I’ve been wearing Darn Tough wool socks, some toasty old Head tights and this long-sleeved Gore cycling jersey over an ancient Patagonia Capilene base layer because it has pockets for the phone and any bits I might feel compelled to remove or add, like the Smartwool gloves or Sugoi tuque, as conditions dictate.

But I wasn’t taking anything off yesterday. I only felt overdressed at the outset because I had the wind to my back. Once I turned around into it at the Menaul trailhead I tugged the tuque down over my ears and the Gore’s zipper up over my Adam’s apple. The wind caused my right eye to tear up behind the Rudy Project shades, making me seem to be half crying, like I wasn’t really all that worked up about whatever was bothering me.

All in all, a good day for a run, though. Not many people out and those that were seemed to feel that we were all members of some open-air private club for the genially insane.

The trails were pretty crunchy; a bit of mud where the sun had shone, icy in the shade. But I managed to not fall down and/or roll an ankle, so, winning, etc. ’Ray for me.

This morning I’m getting a loaf of bread started while I try to talk myself into a bike ride. But I think it’s gonna be another run. We’re talking 33°, feels like 25°, wind from the south at 10-15 mph, and if there’s any blue in the sky I’m having trouble making it out.

Then again, tomorrow looks worse. Maybe a short ride on a fendered bike? Thank Itztlacoliuhqui we have one more meal’s worth of green chile stew waiting patiently in the fridge. Also, there is a sack of pintos that needs cooking, and it will be a frosty day in The Bad Place when I don’t have the ingredients for some variety of south-of-the-border rice, either rojo or verde.

Now that I think of it, if I just had some shredded chicken and some corn tortillas, I could make enchiladas.

Shit, I better get outside pronto. I can feel myself dollaring up like something a fella might use in a stew.