Spring training

May 8, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

It was a good week on the bike.

Actually, make that “bikes.”

The red Steelman Eurocross, Jones, and Sam Hillborne all enjoyed some quality springtime during the week, and the New Albion Privateer got the nod on Sunday.

Nothing outlandish, mind you. I’m not training for anything; just trying to avoid collapsing into a smelly heap of bone splinters and bad ideas. We’re talking 90 minutes per outing, or thereabouts, with a thousand or so feet of vertical gain, and an average speed that wouldn’t impress anyone, especially me.

I’ve never been what you would call fast, but I’ve been faster.

“Listen up, you kids, don’t make me stop this tree and come back there.”

Still, who cares? The idea is to be above ground and moving around, amirite? You know what my dad was doing when he was my age? Nothing! Because he had been dead for seven years.

So when Herself and I rolled out for our Sunday ride we were focused not on heart rate, average speed, or mileage, but on how many Gambel’s quail we might see (that would be a half-dozen, plus a couple deer).

Back at the ranch we have hummingbirds re-enacting the Battle of Midway around our three feeders, finches of various types bellied up to two tubes of birdseed while the doves prowl the ground for dropped morsels, and a northern flicker feeding babies bunkered up in a dead limb on our backyard maple.

And our young Chinese pistache tree is coming along, too.

It’s starting to get warm, so I expect we’ll start seeing buzzworms soon. But it’s OK. Every garden has its snake. Just steer clear of the fruit stand.

Humming along

April 23, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Yesterday we finally saw the first hummingbirds of spring 2023.

We’d heard the little buzzbombs elsewhere in the ’hood — Zzzzz! Whizzzz! — but until yesterday none had appeared at our backyard feeders. We’d actually hung up the feeders once and then taken them down again due to a lack of customers.

I’ve been hearing and seeing quail for a couple weeks now but the hummers have proven elusive. And who can blame them? With weather advisories ping-ponging between fire alerts and freeze warnings this springtime has been screwier than GOP pestilential theater.

Double dumbstruck

September 11, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

“This heat’s not good for the brain. Turns out nothing much is good for the brain in the 2020s. TV rots it, the Internet turns it to jelly, the miserable climate bakes it, 90 percent of what we call ‘work’ is deliberately designed to actually erase the human brain; this has been proven. Podcasts: Now there’s a guaranteed way to reverse years of book-learning and social skills. There’s online gambling, TikTok … and then Queen Elizabeth II passed away and it was like a Bat-Signal in the sky to make everybody go extra double-dumb. … Only in Ireland did they seem to sort of be enjoying it all.” — Ken Layne, “Like a Hurricane,” Desert Oracle Radio

You said a mouthful, brother.

The news has been so relentlessly grotesque that I found myself double-dumbstruck, which is to say rendered speechless by astonishment while simultaneously catching a puck in the gob from a wildly flailing eejit.

The prospect of commenting on any of our ongoing Dumpster fires felt like pissing into the drinking water in Jackson, Mississippi — an enhancement, to be sure, but not a solution any sane person would swallow.

So I kept it zipped. Averted my eyes. Instead I watched the hummingbirds mobbing our feeders; the little buzzbombs will be leaving us shortly. Played with Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who remains extraordinarily kittenish for a 15-year-old cat. Rode the bike(s) — 130 miles last week, 140 this week.

With “Better Call Saul” in the rear view we branched out a bit in our evening TV-watching. I can recommend “Letterkenny,” (absurdly funny Canadians); “This Fool” (snarky South Central working-class vatos); “Belfast” (The Troubles through a child’s eyes); and “The Sandman,” derived, like “Watchmen,” from a high-gloss DC comic of which I had been ignorant.

• Honorable mention: “Funny Pages,” a bent coming-of-age story about a teenage cartoonist who gets an up-close-and-personal look at the subterranean bits of “underground comics.” Could be straight out of “Zap,” “Bijou,” or pretty much any other comic you read back when weed was still illegal. And yes, Your Humble Narrator recognized more than a few unsavory aspects of himself in this film.

What about literature, you ask? Check out a couple road-trippers on the ragged edge: the cabbie Lou in Lee Durkee’s “The Last Taxi Driver,” and the shaggy mercenary Will Bear in Dan Chaon’s “Sleepwalk.”

• Honorable mentions: “Night of the Living Rez” by Morgan Talty (his first book; dark tales of a Native community in Maine) and “Homesickness” by Colin Barrett (his second; darkly funny tales of the Irish at home and abroad).

If none of these diversions from the daily disaster does the trick for you, find a hummingbird to watch or a cat to play with.

Strictly for the birds

April 29, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

The hummers and quail are lightening the mood around here.

The hummingbirds are back. And this looks just like an Audubon photo of one, the same way I look just like Jason Statham if you see me backlit at sunset, from the other side of a four-lane street with a sizable median. It’s possible that you left your specs in the pub after a half-dozen boilermakers, a vicious beating, and perhaps a stroke.

The grasses in Elena Gallegos Open Space are an ominous shade of tan.

It’s been a quiet week around El Rancho Pendejo. Herself just got her second Plague-B-Gon booster and is recovering nicely after enduring a sore arm and some drowsiness.

As for Your Humble Narrator, despite relentless seasonal allergies exacerbated by smoke-laden afternoon breezes I found the weather stellar for cycling. Actual tan lines are in evidence. I managed 105 miles last week and would be on track to repeat that this week if I hadn’t veered off road three times, twice on the bike and once on foot.

When riding trail I strive mightily to avoid nicking any trailside rocks with a pedal. One good spark in these dry, windy conditions and we’ll be grabbing the go-bags and cat carrier and hightailing it for … for … for where? Is there anyplace that isn’t on fire and/or out of water?

Nesting

April 6, 2021April 6, 2021 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

Through my office window I’ve seen this dove refurbing an old nest.
Now she’s in residence.

I knew I heard a hummingbird. We saw the little buzzbomb yesterday having a long drink at the feeder out back as we sat down to dinner.

Well, sir. Now it’s spring.

Out front, a dove has refurbished a wind-battered nest atop the wisteria. Same dove as last year? Beats me. I asked, she didn’t answer.

The rest of the world’s ills notwithstanding, I am very much enjoying getting up, making coffee, and checking the news to find out that nobody I know has bothered to collect and distribute the wit and wisdom of the previous occupant of the Oval Office.

That’s one bird whose song we can do without. Until the judge says, “Will the defendant please rise?”