The cool September morn

September 27, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Does a moral handicap count when it comes to reserved parking? Asking for a friend.

I had time to sneak in a quick ride around the Elena Gallegos Open Space on Friday before motoring off to the Sunport to collect Herself, who was inbound from Tennessee after spending a week helping her sisters give bro-in-law Bill “Wild Man” White a proper sendoff to The Source.

And now things are more or less back to what passes for normal in these parts, if you overlook the rain. “Normal” precip’ for September is 1:15 inch; we’ve already gotten 3.12 inches and the month ain’t even over yet.

Mind you, I’m not complaining; just observing.

Anyway, the deluge made a pedestrian of me for three days last week and two this week. I got carried away and put fenders on the Soma Double Cross, which was both unnecessary (I had three fendered bikes already) and unsmart (the short wheelbase means some serious and unwelcome toe-fender overlap).

So that poor decision will get reversed directly and the DC will once again sport some bare-ass 42mm Soma Cazadero knobbies, which are better suited to riding trails, especially now that they’ve been guttered all to shitaree.

There’s more time for this sort of aimless wankery in the mornings these days because the sun doesn’t show its face above the Sandias until around 8:30 and it won’t be much longer before I greet it wearing pants instead of shorts.

The sliding glass doors remain closed until sunrise because our friendly neighborhood bear is back. We finally caught him on our trail cam at 3:08 a.m. on the 22nd, dropping a deuce by the butterfly bush.

This may be retribution for my bringing the bird feeders in at night and storing garbage in the garage until pickup day. If we won’t be his restaurant we will be his restroom.

The skunk is likewise back, rooting around in the yard for tasty morsels. So is the Cooper’s hawk. As for the hummingbirds, they’ve never left. It still looks like the Battle of Britain out there every time we refresh their feeders.

Miss Mia finds The Pile purr-fection itself.

And Miss Mia Sopaipilla has found herself a new sweet spot for naptime — a scattering of fluffy bits and bedding that we’re calling The Pile. Just the place to sleep off a medium-heavy breakfast, treats, and thyroid medicine.

Sure beats watching His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-fingered waddling along the red carpet alongside the Red Menace, who looked as thrilled to be there as an OYO Rooms C-suiter tallying pecker tracks on the hot sheets at a Motel 6 in Chlamydia, Nevada.

“No, I don’t care to see your ‘ballroom.’ I can smell them from here.”

Fall, in

September 23, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

That was the forecast for the first day of fall: rain, and plenty of it, starting around noon.

Perfect, I thought. I usually run on Tuesdays anyway, so I’d have plenty of time to do the morning chores, then bang out an unimpressive 5K on the trails, and be safely indoors before Thor started taking batting practice.

But as the morning unfolded the skies actually seemed to be clearing. So I thought, hmmm: First day of fall, cyclocross season with actual cyclocross weather … maybe push the run to Wednesday, when the forecast is even less velo-friendly, and take a quick spin on a Steelman today.

Bingo.

About 45 minutes in, which in cool weather is when most of the bits of me have finally reported for duty, I slalomed off a trail in the Elena Gallegos Open Space and into a parking lot to see a friend wrapping up a walk with his dogs, and we took five for a chat about Irish literature and Japanese automobiles.

Then … drip … drop. ...

“Feels like it’s starting to sprinkle,” I said.

He had a squint at the windshield of his Honda Element, which like my Subaru Forester — and, if we’re speaking frankly here, like the two of us, and many a character in Irish literature — has more than a few hard miles on it.

“So it is,” he confirmed.

Well. A fine soft day on tap and here I am, miles from home and dressed for another class of party altogether. Caught with my knickers not only down, but in a drawer, with the rest of my foul-weather kit. I said my goodbyes and took off, hoping to get home before droplets turned to deluge. Skip the lovely trails, they’re already awash in eejits with earbuds and the rain will bring out the snakes. St. Patrick I am not. Ask anyone.

But as I barreled down Simms Road toward Tramway once again the weather shifted gears on me. I caught a few fat drops in the gob on the descent and then nada. Niente. Bupkis.

Well, then. I’d been hoping for a quick hour, but if the gods were leaning on their shovels with hoses coiled I’d stay out for a while longer. The 20-mile, mixed-terrain ride is the foundation of my “training program,” such as it is, and I was halfway there as I passed Comanche headed south. Onward.

I generally log more mileage north of Comanche, but the south has its attractions as well. I stuck to the Tramway bike path for a while, Tramway itself seeming to have more traffic than normal, probably hoarders hellbent on cornering the chips, bean dip, and buttwipe markets before the Apocalypse struck. I needed to do some of that myself. But not until I got my 20 in.

Every time I got a dampish puck in the gob I swung north and east, toward home. If it was more of a love tap than a lashing, I turned south and west, one eye on the cyclometer. Bike paths, low-traffic foothills streets, a bit of dirt as it presented itself, and hey presto! I got my 20. 20.3 miles, to be precise, and 1,481 feet of vertical gain. Not bad for a rain day.

Which it was not, still.

The fuck? I thought. Must have the A.I. on the job down to the National Weather Service. More of a focus on mass murder than meteorology? If it fights as well as it forecasts we’ll all of us live to a ripe old age so. “Terminator” me bollocks.

So I ate the last of a pot of Pierre Franey’s turkey chili, jumped into the Subie, and rattled off to the grocery to collect a few delicacies. Herself is in Tennessee with her sisters, at a celebration of life for our late brother-in-law, William F. White Jr., so I was seizing the opportunity to minimize cooking and cleaning up afterward.

And so it was that I was sprawled comfortably on the couch, nibbling on shrimp, fresh bread with butter, and a green salad, watching a bit of standup on Netflix (Joe DeRosa, “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” not bad), when it finally started raining. At around 6 p.m.

But man — did it ever make up for lost time. It still hasn’t stopped and I just finished breakfast on Wednesday morning. A quarter inch since 4 this morning and 0.64 inch total.

Maybe I better take back some of that shit I said about A.I. Like me, it may be slow, but it gets there eventually.

Steelmen

July 5, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

Cyclocross in July? Is there no Tour de France?

Well, yes and no.

This year’s Tour may be a little too hot to handle, for a couple of stages at least, thanks to fires in the Pyrénées-Orientales area. And anyway, I quit paying attention once the magazines quit paying me money.

Cycling is like … well, like pretty much anything, really. I’d rather do it than watch it.

So this morning, instead of watching UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Tadej Pogačar stomp all comers into a thin paste, I rolled out for a short ride on my favorite Steelman Eurocross, planning to take in the usual mix of asphalt and dirt.

About six miles in, halfway through a circuit of the Elena Gallegos Open Space, the rear tire started going soft. I stopped to add a few psi with a minipump, but what that tire really wanted was a fresh tube.

Well. Shit. What I’m doing here is cyclocross, kinda, sorta. Fuck a fresh tube, I’ll take a fresh bike. Where’s the pit?

About five miles away. In my garage.

So I swoop gingerly down from the EG, along Simms to the Tramway bike path, Comanche, and home, mindful of a rear tire whose tread is getting a little too chummy with its rim.

And I snatch up my second favorite Steelman Eurocross. Boom! Back in the race! Finished first in a field of one on my pit bike, with no further mechanicals. There was an awards banquet, featuring the remnants of Taco Thursday (h/t to stage winner Isaac del Toro) in a flour tortilla with a scattering of arugula, a spoonful of homemade salsa fresca, and a sprinkling of grated Kerrygold Blarney.

The crowd roared.

OK, so maybe that was the vacuum cleaner. Herself has her own race on Sundays, which is all about making El Rancho Pendejo look less like a race pit and more like a home. It’s a much tougher event.

The grand Wazoo

June 26, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

The weatherperson’s Magic 8-Ball must’ve been on the fritz yesterday.

Every time s/he shook the sumbitch a new alert popped up. Heat warning. Thunderstorm warning. Dust-storm warning.

Herself had things to do, people to see, and places to go, so she cast a critical eye at the sky and went out for a run. Almost immediately the rain began to fall.

Lacking any pressing engagements, I waited awhile, dithering. Run? Ride? Throw in the towel and spend the morning swapping SSDs in the 2014 MacBook Pro?

Then the rain took five, so I thought I’d try to squeeze in a short trail ride, just to get outdoors and mix things up a bit. Mostly I’ve been riding the road. But I was tired of that itchy feeling between the shoulder blades one gets riding the shoulder of Tramway Boulevard, where the 50-mph speed limit is considered the minimum rather than the max.

I didn’t plan to be out long, so I pulled down a bike that would make me work for it: the Voodoo Wazoo.

When I snagged this frame with its Reynolds 853 main tubes back in 2005 I set it up pretty much in my typical cyclocross style, based on what was on hand and what I could scrounge: drop bar, XT double crank (48/36T), Shimano 600 derailleurs with bar-end shifters, 600 brake levers and some Avid cantis that had to date to 1995 or even earlier, and — just because I had ’em — a Rock Shox suspension post and Flite saddle, a True Temper Alpha Q carbon fork, and a set of Dura-Ace weirdo wheels, probably wearing Michelin Jets.

As I wrote back then:

Haven’t had it on a scale yet, but I suspect it’s the lightest bike in the bunch. The top tube is a centimeter shorter than my (Steelman) Eurocrosses, and the stem sits a tad higher, so I’ve a nice upright position on this rascal, which is nice when you’re riding something that says “Voodoo” in a town full of Bible-thumpers. You want to be able to see ’em coming.

Four years later what I didn’t see coming was a patch of ice hiding under a puddle on a Bibleburg bike path. Down I went, dislocating my left communications digit, leaving me wearing a splint and unable to handle a road bar and its various levers, STI or otherwise, with a multiday bike tour of southern Arizona coming up, my first gig for Mike Deme and Adventure Cyclist magazine.

Well. Shit.

I had to train, and I didn’t want to do it on a 26-inch-wheeled mountain bike, so I got the gang at Old Town Bike Shop to redo my Voodoo as a flat-bar, single-ring, thumb-shifting, seven-speed. The weirdo wheels went away, replaced by a mismatched set of Mavic hoops laced to Hügi Compact hubs cannibalized from an old set of MTB wheels. The cantis went unchanged, but got a pair of Real levers operable by two of the fingers that still functioned on that left hand.

Bingo.

And 17 years down the road that’s pretty much how the bike remains, with a few changes to accommodate failure and/or necessity.

The rear Avid brake finally croaked, so I swapped in a Dia-Compe 986. The Flite got moved to another bike and after a few candidates auditioned only to be found wanting the Wazoo now sports an Ergon SMC4-M atop an old Control Tech post. The tires are Continental CrossRides in 700×42. A Tange Infinity fork replaced the carbon model. When the Shimano 600 rear derailleur was needed elsewhere I plugged in a 105, with a tab extender that lets me run an 11-34T cassette with that 38T chainring.

I hadn’t ridden it since February. And that “short” ride I had planned turned into two hours of giggles on the trails, from El Rancho Pendejo south past Copper and then back north to the Elena Gallegos.

When it really started getting good to me I thought, “Maybe I should turn this back into a drop-bar cyclocross bike. I’ve got the parts. Who knows? I might spend more time riding it if it were a ’cross bike again.”

And then I thought again. The Wazoo is perfect just the way it is.

For now, anyway. …

Gimme Soma dat

June 16, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

Going up in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

Some days you just have to avert your eyes and fuck off somewhere. The Abyss will still be there when you get back.

Yesterday I distracted myself with our regularly scheduled Geezer Ride. Afterward I put some new tires (Hutchinson Caracals) on an old bike (Soma Double Cross), and this morning I slipped out for a couple hours of “me time” on chip-seal and singletrack before the thermometer could come to a rolling boil, fanned by the wind.

Being a huge fan of the venerable Hutchinson Python I bought the Caracals from Rivendell the instant they started carrying the brand. And ever since I had been dithering about which bike to put ’em on.

When I flatted the DC’s rear Soma Cazadero, I suddenly had a candidate.

The 700×42 Cazadero (510g) is a great tire for the trails around here, but it can feel like overkill for the road, even our roads, especially with sealant-filled inner tubes. And one of the things I like most about the Double Cross — a 54cm frameset with a longish top tube — is that with the right tire it can be as frisky as a young pup.

The plump 700×35 Caracal (487g) felt both lively and cushy on pavement at 30/35psi, and it wasn’t too shabby on the Elena Gallegos trails, either — just knobby enough for the most part, hooking up nicely in everything save for deep sand, where it tended to swim a bit.

The Cazadero just floats over the soft stuff like a magic carpet. I can ride that tire uphill through a sandy wash, though it can overwhelm the front end in the twisty bits if you’re not paying close attention, which frequently I am not.

“I wanna go there!”

“AIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!”

Etc.

I might relocate the Caracals from the Double Cross to the New Albion Privateer, because I’ve been wanting to see how that rig fares on an occasional off-road adventure. It has a pair of Soma’s The Everwear in 700c38, a fine setup for the road (their Shikoro is even better) but slicker ’n’ snot on a doorknob, not exactly the ticket for when the going gets dirty and sharpish.

Then again, maybe I’ll buy a set of Caracals in 700×40 for the Privateer, see how the old pirate dances with French shoes.