Tag: Heat Dome

Kick the tires and light the fires

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams finally get off the deck on Wednesday, bound for the International Space Station. | Photo: NASA Television

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams picked a fine day to get out of town. The temps at the Cape were headed for the century mark, and before the week is out I expect a few of us here in the Great American West would be happy to join them at the International Space Station, even if we’re light on luggage and have to drink our own wee-wee.

“A hunnerd-twelve in Vegas? I don’t wanna see Carrot Top that bad. They got a casino at the ISS?”

The Duck! City is under a heat advisory tomorrow — not Vegas bad, but bad enough — and though I’m still not 100 percent sinus-wise, I got out for a short snout-flushing trail ride this morning while temps were still in the 70s. We could hit 101° tomorrow, and I’d just as soon not add heatstroke to the sinus infection.

Could be worse, though. For instance, as we speak, weather-related boogeymen have kept Herself parked on the tarmac at Baltimore Washington International for two hours and counting. Southwest’s flight-status window shows her flight as “departed” — which I guess means, “taxied away from the terminal” — with touchdown in ABQ an hour later than originally intended.

Assuming her Boeing product ever gets off the ground, that is.

Jeez, we can put a man on the moon, but … well, actually, no, we can’t. Never mind.

• Late update: Charlie Pierce has some thoughts on Wilmore, Williams, and Boeing.

Landscraping

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

Just take a little off the top, please.

July has been a scorcher, with 12 triple-digit days and one record high (104° on the 17th).

It was 103° yesterday. Not a record, but still, damn. Today, at 3 p.m., it’s 97°.

And I’m gonna try real hard not to bitch about it because I’m not one of the landscapers trying to make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that is our back yard.

I didn’t even go out to sweat for fun yesterday.

But the landscapers were out there bright and early under Tōnatiuh’s broiler, with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, excising scorched swaths of grass, excavating edging stones gone all wobbly like a meth-head’s dentition, and wheelbarrowing railroad ties off to … who knows? A railroad, maybe?

All the livelong day, too. As an expression of solidarity while motoring to the grocery for some grub that would not require cooking I refused to turn on the a/c in the Subaru.

Burning daylight

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments

We’re just waiting on the priests to rip out a few hearts here.

Well, somebody’s getting away from it all, and they’re taking it with them as they go.

I don’t get around much anymore, so I had never seen this before until just recently: A Mercedes Sprinter RV … with a rooftop tent. Another Sprinter … towing one of those Igloo-looking trailers, a Scamp or Casita.

Sheeyit. And here I’d been thinking $250 a night was a little spendy for a motel room someplace that isn’t enjoying triple-digit temperatures or an End of Days deluge.

Instead of loading up the old Highway Hilton I don’t have for an extended voyage I’m not taking, I’ve been getting my exercise a little earlier in the morning, before Tōnatiuh starts taking orders for gabacho asada.

Yesterday it was a leisurely couple of hours on the bike with some like-minded gents of a certain age and two 21-ounce bottles in my cages. Today it was a 6-mile solo hike on the rolling foothills trails, with a 2-liter bladder in the backpack and a stout staff for disputations with serpents (none rose to the challenges of my staff or the thermometer).

The idea is to get back under cover before the heat advisory kicks in noonish. Which I did. Even so, a bit of grub, some cold water, a warm shower, and a short nap by the fan all seemed like excellent ideas, better even than a large RV towing a smaller one.

But then what? There’s the whole rest of the day to deal with. However does one fill the hours?

Well, we can always follow the misadventures of that guy, whose shysters are arguing that it’s cruel and unusual to bring his fat ass to trial while he campaigns to reclaim his old job, after which he can drop all the charges against himself.

Or we could root for an MMA cage match, a weenie-measuring contest, or perhaps death rays at 10 paces between Zuck and Schmuck, who are quarreling over which of them is the One True King of the social-media hellscape.

Can’t one of them just pull a phone from a stone and settle it that way? My calls to Merlin keep going to voicemail.

Dome sweet dome

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

Headed down, down, down to the bosque.

The more I read of the news, the more I want to ride my bicycle.

That said, holy hell, it’s getting hot again. The Heat Dome must be coming back for round two.

Another day, another century.

I was out for about three hours yesterday, down to the bosque and back again, and by noon I was starting to feel like a parched lizard in need of a shady rock.

My insulated Camelbak Podium bottles will keep water cold — OK, so, cool — for about two hours. But three hours in, what remains tastes like warm flu.

Today Herself and I got out early for our weekly leg-stretcher, about 90 minutes of pooting around in the foothills, and that was fine. Afterward we finished off the last of the tasty egg salad I made yesterday, in sandwiches of homemade bread, and I am not ashamed to say that we added some hipster potato chips to the mix.

Strictly to replace lost sodium, you understand.

Elsewhere, doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s hot, cold, up, or down, Mark Cavendish just keeps winning stages at the Tour. Dude is better at finding the hole than Ben Crenshaw.