Watch this

May 14, 2021 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments

I’m losing most of my bets with the watch on my nightstand.

Lately I’ve been posing myself a little challenge when I return to earth from dreamland: Pop open an eye, peer around the bedroom, and try to guess what time it is based on ambient light leaking through the vertical blinds.

I was doing pretty well there for a while. Nailed it once or twice. But lately I’m minutes off the mark.

I’m not sure who’s to blame for the decline in my batting average. Possibly the “Harvard elite with perfect hair” who’s apparently behind all the psychos shooting the mortal shit out of each other around town. He’s certainly broken into at least one head down at Peterson Properties, which has more eyes than Avalokiteshvara and knows more about what you’ve been up to than Santa Claus.

We remain unventilated by pistoleros here at El Rancho Pendejo, though we have endured a busy week. Last Friday we moved Herself the Elder from the Dark Tower to the Bermuda Triangle, an assisted-living house a little closer to us. It’s where Herself had wanted to park the old gal when she first came to town, but there weren’t any vacancies. Suddenly there were. So it goes.

Wednesday was our 31st anniversary, and as we were both thoroughly shot up vaccine-wise, we went out to eat at an actual restaurant, El Patio on Rio Grande. It was my first sitdown restaurant meal in more than a year, and it was spectacular. Great food, excellent service, and we didn’t get plugged or burgled or tagged or nothin’, Harvard elites with perfect hair notwithstanding.

Today we’re baking bread and pulling weeds. Probably still working off some of those tasty El Patio calories. Gotta keep in fighting trim for the next 31 years.

Bench press

April 9, 2021 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

The rocky wash leading to the bench between Comanche and Candelaria.

The old red flag was flying again today, so instead of cycling Herself and I scrambled into the neighboring Sandia foothills, working our way along bits and pieces of the Candelaria Bench Loop.

Herself bouldering upward. There’s a bit of singletrack off to her left but it’s a slippery sonofabitch.

It’s only a four-mile hike, but there’s a fair amount of vertical at the beginning and the end, much of it on crumbly gravel switchbacks lined with sharp rocks and cacti.

After the first steep, loose climb east of Comanche we stuck to a stair-stepped, boulder-studded wash that was a whole lot more fun than the narrow singletrack I took a digger on last year, slamming my left thigh into a big round rock.

Oddly, the winding descent to Trail 365 near Candelaria seemed less challenging than I remembered.

Once I met another hiker on that stretch who said she simply sat and slid down some of the steeper sections (glissading, for the aficionados among you). I’ve done this a time or two myself, but never on purpose, or without consequences.

Didn’t happen today, to either of us, so yay, etc.

And we didn’t see another single solitary soul, either. Unless you count the three circling crows who seemed to be tracking our cautious movements downward and providing an appropriate soundtrack. Haw … haw … haw.

Herself inspects the Greater Duke City Metropolitan Area
from the Candelaria bench.

Nothing but blue skies

March 26, 2021 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Puffy clouds to the north, above the garage.

Wednesday’s snow tamped down the pollen for a while, which is a pleasant respite for the snotlocker.

It’s still not warm — 39° at the moment, which would be 10 in the a.m. on a Friday morning — but as we’ve noted before, nobody who lives in the desert should complain when it’s cool and damp. Because it never lasts.

Sleepy Joe held his first presser yesterday, but I had to bail on it after just a few minutes because I kept hearing Dana Carvey’s spot-on impression of him in my head and couldn’t focus on what the real Joe was saying. I know, I know, bad citizen, bad bad citizen!

But from what little I saw, and read afterward, I feel confident when I say that Sleepy José is unlikely to challenge his predecessor’s score on the Loon-O-Meter® anytime soon.

Meanwhile, Herself is slated to get her first jab today. She and a colleague will each get a dose of Moderna, and then if the weather permits they might find some nearby bistro for a socially distant bite of something and perhaps a celebratory shot that doesn’t go in the arm.

And I am scheduled for round two in late April, at the same place that stuck me on Wednesday. Round one left me with an achy arm and a touch of fatigue, though the latter could have been weather- or allergy-induced. As far as I know my DNA remains unchanged, I am not shedding mutant viruses, and I have not croaked. Yet.

Or is that just what “they” would have you believe?

Happy birthday to Herself

March 12, 2021March 12, 2021 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments

The gods served up a cotton-ball sky for Herself’s mumble-mumble-th birthday this morning.

I immediately felt a kinship with this piece because she’s still cute
and he looks like shit.

They won’t be there for long — the forecast calls for gusty winds out of the SSW as Thor breaks out the old hammer for a little light touch-up work on Colorado.

As The Bug® still holds sway over the land, and we have not yet had our shots, the birthday festivities will be muted, as they were last year.

Herself and a colleague did manage to enjoy a socially distant cocktail and appetizers on some uptown bistro’s patio yesterday afternoon while I stayed home and cooked dinner (turkey tacos and arroz verde).

The other day we went shopping for a birdbath to keep the juncos hydrated and stumbled across the Dia de los Muertos talavera pictured above, a bride and groom sitting on a bench looking slightly stupified, probably from strong drink and/or unbridled lust.

As we both have March birthdays, it was a no-brainer — boom, two birthdays, one present, no waiting.

The couple matches the cyclist we have by the front door, so, bonus. You may remember El Señor from our Interbike coverage in days gone by.

Meanwhile, the phone rings off the hook it no longer has with calls from well-wishers. Later we will nosh on some delicious snacks and watch something silly on TV.

Par-tee, baybee. Not even The Bug® can stop us.

Scratch race

March 8, 2021 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Calendar, schmalendar: Herself got out yesterday for her first bike ride of 2021, so it must be spring.

It wasn’t definitively springlike here in the Duke City — but still, arm warmers and knickers beat long sleeves and tights for the first week of March.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla did not join us. She prefers her indoor exercise apparatus.