Tag: Snow

Retracing my steps

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
This is what a juniper dusted with snow looks like at 5:14 in the ayem.

I meant to post this pic the other day and completely spaced it whilst mumbling on and on about podcasting and whatnot.

We woke on Wednesday to a measurable amount of precip’, not enough to resolve the megadrought, but just enough to keep me off a bicycle. Instead I went for a short run once the temps rose a bit.

I have no idea what made these tracks in the backyard. Fox? Coyote? La Llorona of Hobbiton?

Ten years ago I would come to The Duck! City from Bibleburg in February to get away from winter.

I’d check into the Hampton at Carlisle and I-40 and ride the bike all the doo-dah day, and in shorts and short sleeves, too.

Hit the Mexican restaurants, or fetch a sack of tasty treats from the Wholeazon Amafoods across the interstate from the motel. Binge-watch HBO in the room come evening.

I had no idea that in a year we’d be living down here. Zee-ro. If you’da told me I’da laughed in your face.

“Herself is going to get a job at Sandia National Labs that pays more money in one year than I’ve made in my entire life? We’re moving to Albuquerque? Ho, ho. Pull the other leg so I’ll be even when I go out to run in the snow. Albuquerque. Hee, and also haw.”

Well, she did, and we did, and here I am, running in February on the New Mexican snow.

Just chillin’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
Weather, outside, frightful, etc.

Sorel, God of Cold Feet, paid us a surprise visit last night.

Hard to believe the glider boyos were cruising the friendly skies just the other day.

The day before Halloween Herself and I saw three gliders working the thermals near the Menaul trailhead.

But Halloween has come and gone. We “fall back” on Sunday, and then slide at high speed into Thanksgiving, winter solstice, and Christmas. It ain’t always sandals-and-shorts weather, even in The Duck! City.

I’m not ready. I never am. I used to race in this shit? When? Was I still on drugs?

Herself is made of sterner stuff. She bundled up and sallied forth with a fellow Democrat to distribute campaign literature.

Comrade Eeyore is likewise on the hustings, telling The Guardian that Democrats “have not done a good enough job of reaching out to young people and working-class people and motivating them to come out and vote in this election.”

Hey, comrade, Herself is no passenger in this garbage scow. Ain’t her fault the officers are all rumdums.

Being of the Vanguard, I was needed here at Headquarters to propagandize over hot tea and a Taos Bakes bar. Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, and fetch me another mug of tea.

While I await the Revolution I’m also baking a loaf of bread so I don’t have to stand in line for it like the proles.

Here in a bit I’ll go for a run, if only because I never know when I might have to. It’s all this weather is good for. You can’t ski in it, or make snowballs with it, so you might as well pound ground, keep the muscle memory sharp.

The forecast for the day after Election Day is not encouraging. We may be feeling the heat, but not in a good way. I’m thinking of feet held to the fire.

Song, fire, and ice

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Sign of the times.

Tezcatlipoca, God of the Night Wind, was in something of a mood as we hit the sack last eventide.

The sonofabitch spent the night roaring and rumbling, tipping things over, and generally acting the fool. The power blipped on and off a half-dozen times before I finally toppled into a restless sleep marred by inexplicable dreams.

In one I was outside somewhere with the rest of the bums as Tom Waits sat at a nearby café, trying to compose an opera based on his song “Misery is the River of the World.”

When I moseyed on over to his table and suggested that “Ruby’s Arms” might make a better foundation, Waits snickered and replied to the effect that I must’ve fallen in love with the first girl to kiss me somewhere other than the cheek.

When I wandered back to the bums one of them was gnawing on a sandwich I had scrounged. Let your attention drift for a second and someone will be eating your lunch, swear to God.

Elsewhere other deities were on the job. Coyote took a snowy shit on Colorado, because he thought it would be funny to lay 10 inches of snow on the place right after a 90-degree day. And Xiuhtecuhtli is still torching everything flammable in New Mexico because … well, it’s anybody’s guess. Perhaps he’s croaking the tourist season to punish the pochteca merchant class for sniveling about a dearth of eager employees while refusing to pay a living wage.

The luck of the Irish

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments
A wee bit monochromatic for the wearin’ of the green.

O, ’tis a fine soft day we have here so.

The rain awakened Herself, but not me. I thought she was selling me a bill of goods when she said it rained during the night, until I glanced outside this morning.

There’s a dusting of snow just up the hill, and the cul-de-sac is dampish. This wee sprinkle will do a fine job of tamping down the sand in the arroyo I’ve been riding lately. I’ve only seen one other cyclist in there and he was riding a mountain bike; also, down, not up.

It will save me from the raking of the lawn as well. No point in busting my hump corraling all those soggy pine needles now. Wait until they dry out and lighten up.

Ditto for the trails. Never ride ’em wet. After a rain the knuckleheads in Bibleburg would slash the gooey singletrack into something that looked like Rodan the Flying Monster’s landing strip. The ruts would set up harder than times in 1929, and riding them on a cyclocross bike meant taking a hot lap on Satan’s Slot Car Track.

The ground here in The Duck! City is mighty thirsty, though. Getting it wet enough to damage with bicycle tires might require the sort of deluge that made a sailor of Noah.

The Cailleach has a long arm

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
Finally, a wee dusting of actual snow.

It was right about the time I started prepping the green chile stew that the Cailleach dropped her knitting atop Hag’s Head in County Clare and muttered, “Right, time that Ó Grádaigh gobshite in Albuquerque got the back of me hand so.”

Just a love tap, mind you. We are cousins, after all. I make it about four inches atop the wall. Still, it will require me to drag this old bag of bone splinters and bad ideas back and forth across the driveway for a spell, muttering about Gaelic deities and the length of their hairy auld arms.

It’s a refreshing 8° at the moment, a lovely temperature for a bit of upper-body work. I’ll happily take it over the -8° my man Hal is enjoying up to Weirdcliffe, where his Innertubes have quit but the woodstove remains on the job.

I remember those Crusty County temperatures, and not fondly, either. Tunnel out from under the covers at stupid-thirty, squeal like a little bitch, dash downstairs to the woodstove and feed it a few chunks, leap outside for more wood (and more squealing), then sprint back inside to melt the ice in the terlet with a good auld Guinness-and-Jameson’s wee.

It was all downhill after that, and I do mean downhill. We lived on a rocky outcropping 10 miles from town, one mile and 430 vertical feet from the county road, and once you got down to the bottom you mostly wanted to go right back up again, to where the whiskey and Guinness and woodstove were.

If I burrowed deeply enough into the covers the Cailleach couldn’t find me. That was the idea, anyway. I have lots of ideas.