Dry wit

February 23, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

Our friendly neighborhood water wizard John Fleck got to make a big wake by the boat dock in The New York Times this morning, taking California to task for “trying to protect its outsized water supply at the expense of others in the region. …”

Those others, in case you were wondering, include Your Humble Narrator and his friends and neighbors in New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona.

John writes:

If we approach the challenge with a sense of fairness and shared sacrifice it will be possible to save the West that we know and love.

From your lips to God’s ears, as my people say. What was the line about learning to share in kindergarten? Maybe California needs some remedial education. That juicy Colorado River pie has become something of a dried-out shit sandwich, and we’re all going to have to take a bite.

Check out the entire essay, and follow John over at his own little adobe hacienda on the banks of the Great Digital River.

The reason for the season?

December 18, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

The War on Christmas continues apace. And leading the charge: preachers?

From The New York Times:

This year, church leaders are grappling with what may seem like an odd dilemma: Christmas Day falls on a Sunday for the first time since 2016, and that’s a problem.

“Christmas morning and Sunday morning are sort of in tension with each other,” said Timothy Beal, a professor of religious studies at Case Western Reserve University. “Most people who are churchgoers think of Christmas morning not as a religious time but as a family time: stockings and brunches and staying in your pajamas until midday or later.”

In other words, Ho ho ho, Baby Jesus. Happy birthday and all, but come Sunday morning we’ll be in our jammies, worshiping that golden plastic calf from the Church of St. Costco. Feed it four D-cells and it moos “Away in a Manger.”

• • •

If you happen to find yourself with a little change left over after your holiday shopping’s all finished, please consider kicking a bit of the extra to Charlie Cunningham’s GoFundMe, which Jacquie Phelan uses to help underwrite his care following an awful crash in 2015. She would welcome your warm wishes and cold cash.

• • •

And finally, John Fleck comes away from a Sin City water convo more hopeful that the states can reach some class of a compromise over Colorado River water use — management based on inflows rather than reservoir levels — before the feds step in.

Now that would be a useful Christmas present. Not this year — but maybe next?

This bites

August 16, 2022August 16, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

It’s bleakly amusing that The New York Times water scribe is named Henry Fountain.

And that’s about the only giggle in the “news” that we’re draining the Colorado River like a parched gaggle of Draculas tapping a hot blonde while not doing much to answer the question, “Why does the Southwest have so many vampires working out on this one skinny gal?”

It should go without saying that when you’re long on bloodsuckers and short on arteries you’re gonna start running a deficit. Is it too late to hit the Home Depot for a shitload of wooden stakes and hammers?

My fellow Burqueño John Fleck is on the case as per usual. See “How We Got Into This Mess on the Colorado River,” and a “strongly worded letter” from John Entsminger of the Southern Nevada Water Authority about the failure to reach a deal on Colorado River cutbacks.

NPR also has a piece, from The Associated Press.

And yes, I know, having spent much of my life bouncing around four of the states that draw water from the Colorado River, that I am part of the problem. What can I tell you? I am a creature of the desert, known to howl at the moon of an evening.

The children of the night! What music they make!

Just call me Bozo Lugosi.

Let’s go get stoned

July 25, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

I don’t remember Jesus mentioning all the lovely lawns he saw
during his sojourn in the desert, where the Devil does his gardening.

John Fleck tells us that the Rio is not so Grande these days in The Duck! City.

In point of actual fact, it is dry. As in no longer flowing. Just enough mud for a smallish election; p’raps a school-board contest.

Notes John in a subsequent post:

Between the levees, the river in 2022 has begun drying in the Albuquerque reach for the first time in four decades, as we grind through the summer of our third consecutive terrible spring runoff. By one measure I’ve been using, this is the worst three-year stretch here since the drought of the 1950s.*

*When Your Humble Narrator was hatched.—Editor

Now, some of that green in our lawn pictured above is courtesy of the 2022 monsoons, which are supposed to resume this week. But a lot of it came spritz-spritz-spritzing out of our sprinkler system earlier in the year, when the sun was doing its Death Star thing on our back yard.

I guess even a dumb dog can see a Milk-Bone by daylight. Because Herself and I have agreed it was long past time we engaged a landscaper, and today she picked up the phone.

We’re gonna rock out, is what. If we absolutely have to have grass we can get it from the cannabis shops like everybody else.

River of fools

March 22, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

What’s black and white and cold all over?

The Duck! City at dawn.

We got a little smooch from the gods as they thundered eastward to kick the shit out of Texas. Rained all day Monday, then started snowing overnight.

The Mad Dog Weather Widget says we got slightly less than half an inch, and we will take it, thank you very much, if only to keep the dust and pollen out of our snouts and eyeballs for a little while. Shoutout to Thor and Mjolnir for not taking the roof off en route.

Elsewhere, the water news is not as cheery. Reporting from the University of Utah’s Stegner Symposium on the Colorado River Compact, John Fleck notes, among other things, that:

Colorado River Basin water users are currently consuming 14-15 million acre feet of water from a river that for the 21st century has averaged 12.3 million acre feet.
Lake Powell is sinking toward “minimum power pool” – its lowest level since filling in the 1960s.
Summer drying is making it harder for snowpack the following winter to make it to headwaters rivers.

Hey Zeus, etc. “The crisis situation on the river made for some pointed conversations,” says Fleck, and I believe him.

“Would you like a whiskey with your wee-wee?”

“Yes, please.”

“Sorry, it takes water to make whiskey. It’s straight wee-wee for you, pal. Shall I catheterize you or would you prefer to sample our Wee-wee of the Week? This week it’s Pima Pee, and yes, we stole it.”