The Bloo Voodoo Wazoo on Friday, before Old Man Winter laid his icy breath on the ’hood.Break out the sled, hon’, the dog’s rarin’ to go.
One minute you’re tooling around in the Duke City dust, peeling off layers under sunny skies, and the next it’s 10-percenting all over the lawn.
Snowpocalypse it isn’t, but we’ll take every milliliter of moisture we can get.
In a few days we’ll be back at the New Normal — 50s and sunny — and the chains will return to singing “How Dry I Am.”
I may go for a run in this winter wonderland, and then again I may not. I feel like Herself is trying to share her cold with me, the trails may be treacherous, and you know how it is with the elderly, pneumonia and broken hips.
“It’s totally snowing,” said Herself at dark-thirty as she was leaving for work.
“No sir,” said I.
As usual, she was right.
It wasn’t much in the way of a storm. Just a piddling little wind-driven dusting. Happily, it didn’t nuke the tulips, which have been popping up with more enthusiasm than the daffodils, which had a very short and sparse run indeed.
Forty-four steps later. …
It being slightly sucky outdoors, I decided to take care of a bit of business indoors, where it was warm.
Herself’s old iPad 2 had been awaiting recycling, along with my old 800 MHz G3 iBook. The iPad had already been wiped and reset, but the iBook had not; alas, when I tried to wipe it via Target Disk Mode the sonofabitch croaked on me. And after only 14 years, too. They sure don’t make ’em the way they used to.
So I had to take it apart to get to the hard drive — don’t want the terrorists to lay hands on all my classified data from 2003 — and lemme tell you, I am mighty glad I didn’t have to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Pulling the HDD required 44 steps and like Tim “Men Are Pigs” Allen I just knew I’d be left with a real small bag of important-looking shit left over.
Headed east toward the Sandias and El Rancho Pendejo via the Bear Canyon Arroyo bike trail.
Another BRAIN deadline beaten, if only barely.
And thus yesterday afternoon I was able to get out on the bike for a couple of hours. What a beautiful day it was, too — warm and sunny with a slight wind from the south, and a temp of 63 by the time I rolled home.
Today is supposed to be even nicer, perhaps with a record high — 71? In February? You shittin’ me? — and I will be at it again, having awarded myself a day off without pay. Hey, when you’re a freelancer, every day you take off is a day without pay.
But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. We’re fixin’ to switch from chart-bustin’ warmth to snow on the deck by Sunday. So it goes in the upper reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert.
In the eastern reaches of the Ay Chihuahua Desert, meanwhile, the usual shock-‘n’-awe continues largely unabated. Nobody seems to be able to pry the phone out of Beelzebozo’s stubby lil’ fingers; the national security adviser is said to have had an illegal back-door chat with the Rooskies; and America’s newest senator is so swampy the Swamp-Thing looks at him and goes all like, “Dude, you make me look like Justin Timberlake.”
So far the only bright spot has been the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals punking Tweety Bird, and it’s anybody’s guess whether he continues to have that burning, itching sensation once The Supremes have weighed in. If they get the case before the Repugs can install their ‘bot on the Court, I’d put my money on a 4-4 split; afterward, all bets are off.
I don’t think I need to break out the shovel for this one.
It probably doesn’t qualify as the first snow of the year, but we finally got a dusting at El Rancho Pendejo.
The temp remains below freezing as of 9 a.m., and I’m having a very hard time getting excited about going grocery shopping. But we’re inching our way downward through the pantry toward the basics — beans, rice, chile, etc. — and something, as they say, must be done.
I could slap together a pretty interesting vegetarian combo platter with what I have on hand — bean burritos smothered in green and sprinkled with cheddar, sides of Mexican rice and posole — but that would just kick the ol’ can down the road.
Speaking of roads and cans that need kicking along same, some of us have been having an invigorating discussion in comments about the big bad feddle gummint and what to do about it. I don’t want the blog to devolve entirely into a civics course, but just for shits and giggles, let’s take it on faith that the government is too big and intrusive and our tax burden too onerous.
So how do we shrink the federal government to a manageable size? What would you cut? Whose ox gets gored?
And keep in mind that we are not just cutting functions here. We’re shitcanning people. Our fellow Americans. They enjoy their combo platters, too, as do the folks that sell and serve them, so spare them a thought in your calculations.
As of 2014 the U.S. government employed some 2.7 million people. Walmart only has 1.5 million or so on payroll in the United States; Amazon’s headcount is about 240,000 folks, or about twice as many as Apple.
So I don’t see all these sidelined federales landing cushy gigs moving boxes around an Amazon warehouse, greeting the penny-pinchers at Sam’s Club, or failing to fix my 2009 iMac at the Albuquerque Apple Store.
Mad Blog Media 