Bikes, beers and bummers

The Cyfac Vintage in a Rando configuration.

Somebody has a new toy. And no, it’s not you.

Meet the Cyfac Vintage, a steel bike hand-built in France. It’s a wee bit short — a 54cm instead of the 56cm I usually ride — but it seems to roll along just fine nonetheless. It’s up for review in the July edition of Adventure Cyclist.

Speaking of which, cycling was something of an adventure around here today. The high reached at least 85 degrees, according to the weather wizards and confirmed by the Subaru thermometer, edging the record of 84 set in 2000. “Climate normal” is somewhere around 66, so this was something of a shock to the system, enough to make a guy buy a white Igloo helmet with a swamp cooler attached.

I couldn’t find one of those, so I bought two six-packs of beer instead: Odell’s 5 Barrel Pale Ale, which has become Herself’s favorite beer, and Victory’s Prima Pils, which is an excellent heat repellent when applied internally.

A man who sounds as though he could use a drink is Charles P. Pierce, who posits in a very grumpy blog post that Obama has left it too late to crank up the outrage machine. Writes Charles: “Personally, at this moment, I think he’s probably going to lose.”

If he’s right, then we should all start stockpiling strong drink while we still can. A nation that would elect Mitt Romney president is not one I can abide in sobriety.

Foggy Friday

Things are all fogged up around here today.

“April is the cruellest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot. The quote arises unbidden as I watch the weather change from sunny to snowy to sunny again, and finally to a chilly shvitz of fog — all in less than a week.

Appropriately, April also brings the cruelest race, Paris-Roubaix. And while I no longer help cover such sport for vampire capitalists, I plan to get up way too early on Sunday and lend a paw to my friend and colleague Charles Pelkey over at Live Update Guy.

Charles will be on deck at dark-thirty, as usual, but I won’t plug in until the race is well under way. In the meantime, give us your picks for the V in comments. Tom Boonen is obviously a fave, but with filthy weather in the forecast and no Fabian Cancellara it could be anyone’s race. T.S. Eliot was right.

Light snow, big wind

Oh noes, it's the Blizzard of 2012!

April showers, May flowers, yeah, right, got it. But my idea of “April showers” does not involve a gram of snow scattered across the Lesser Bibleburg Metropolitan Area by 35-mph winds. All a guy gets out of that is cold.

Could be worse, though. Apparently not satisfied with making chumps out of Rick “Governor Goodhair” Perry and Ron Paul on the national stage, God laid a dozen tornadoes on the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where they caused several million dollars worth of improvements.

Elsewhere, a three-judge panel of the 5th Judicial District is in “full wingnut mode,” according to Mother Jones; Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan chats up David Duke’s old gang, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (as I did back in the Seventies, when I spoke with The Head Hood Hisself); and the RomneyBot v2.012 wins the GOP primary in my birth state of Maryland.

But lest you think the contest over, know this: Rick Sphinctorum says it’s only “halftime.” Jesus wept.

More daylight at the end of the tunnel

Finally, enough snow to shovel. And shovel, and shovel, and. ...

We finally got a snowfall worthy of the name — about eight inches’ worth over a couple of days, just in time for solstice.

Lacking a gym membership and possessing the feeble upper body of the geriatric cyclist I suffered through multiple repetitions of precipitation redistribution between other chores — running VeloNews.com, cooking, serving as staff to cats, fetching the holiday vittles from Whole Paycheck, some last-minute gift-shopping and a welcome visit to the backcracker (though she probably found it less so, as I make her earn those BMW payments).

Nearly eight inches ... and just about the biggest dumper we've seen in our eight years here.

The VeloNews.com thing has been particularly irksome. I haven’t worked five days a week for 20 years — not at the same mind-numbing task, anyway — and frankly I don’t know how you poor bastards stand it. We’re still minus a web editor, and I’m minus a 2012 contract until said executive gets hired, so with eight days remaining on my 2011 deal with these people I’ve been spending more than a few of our very short daylight hours revisiting many of the late George Carlin’s fabled Seven Words.

A couple things caused me to dial down the volume a bit, though. While motoring around in the snow the other day I noticed some poor sod in a hard hat, up to his tits in a right-lane ditch, digging away as the heavy holiday traffic slalomed around him. As working for a living goes this makes pixel-pushing look like sharing a hot tub with Elle MacPherson, Scarlett Johansson and a couple flagons of Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque.

Then my friend and colleague Hal Walter reported in from Weirdcliffe, recounting a tile-and-carpet project that turned into your basic 17-day nightmare, forcing him and his family from their home as appliances and furniture were torn from their proper places and stacked in the living room while various artisans were hired and fired. At least I get to be pissed off in my own house.

And finally another friend and colleague, Charles Pelkey, who has been enduring weeks of chemotherapy for cancer, had another health scare. While taking his latest infusion he developed a dysrhythmia that sent him to the ER for a battery of heart tests; seems potentially fatal dysrhythmias are a rare side effect of the drug Taxol and his oncologist wasn’t taking any chances.

Happily, the problem disappeared when Charles got on a treadmill and elevated his heart rate. And better still, the doc decided that enough was enough already and gave Charles a get-out-of-chemo card — he had been slated to continue treatments through the holidays and most of January 2012.

Me, I take an aspirin now and then when I get a brain cramp.

So it looks like I don’t have anything to bitch about, goddamnit. But wait … I can always bitch about not having anything to bitch about! It’s the best present ever!

Here’s hoping y’all have nothing to bitch about, too. Happy holidays to you and yours.

A sound of thunder

Again with the “snow,” just enough to glaze the streets like a cop’s doughnut. I’ve seen more white powder on a proffered mirror, sighting along a rolled-up dollar bill. At least the wind is barreling down out of the north at 22 mph, with gusts to 31. So we’ve got that going for us.

Weather like this sends me straight back to the Mexican cookery for its natural-gas component. Last night it was posole and chicken-and-jalapeño quesadillas; tonight I’m simmering up a pot of beans with chipotle chile. I should whip up a batch of green chile sauce, but I think I’ll save that for tomorrow — I have a quart each of Anaheim and New Mexico chile thawing in the sink, and then we can greet the day over breakfast burritos with leftover chicken, beans and spuds smothered in green.

So, yeah. A day without beans is like a day without thunder. Just in case you thought Fort Carson was engaging in a little holiday artillery practice.

Nanook rubs it

Great googly-moogly! The thermometer has been pegged at the low teens all day long. I ventured out exactly twice, the first time to broom away the light snow that fell overnight, and the second time to collect a few bottles of antifreeze from the local grog shop in order to toast my fellow Zappatistas on this, the frigid second day of Zappadan 2011.

The temps are supposed to drop to minus-7 tonight. This would feel like a relaxing soak in a hot tub to my man Charles Pelkey, who reports that last night’s low in Laramie approached minus-30. The thud of engine blocks exploding and water mains bursting must keep folks up at night.

The downside about being stuck indoors on a slow cycling-news day is that one is tempted to look at the real news, and lately that is enough to set the stoutest young Eskimo boy to beating himself upside the head with a lead-filled snowshoe. Or perhaps depriving himself of his sight through the application to the eyes (via a vigorous circular motion) of the Deadly Yellow Snow, from right there where the huskies go.

I mean, can you imagine a world in which Newt Gingrich is the front-runner for the GOP nomination for president of the United States?

Hey … I think I just cheered myself up.

There goes the neighborhood

We finally got our first real measurable snow of the season — just a few inches, but nice to see nonetheless. It'll tamp down the sand on the trails.

It can’t be 70-something and sunny all the time. Still, going from a record high of 78 to snow on the ground is something of a shock to the system.

Happily, the streets and sidewalks retained much of that heat, so I didn’t have to do any shoveling this morning — good news for the ol’ back, since I spent yesterday raking leaves from the huge maple tree that shades Chez Dog. Looks like a bumper crop, too. I’ve already filled six bags and we’re a long ways away from seeing the last leaf on the tree.

Sounds like the cops in Oakland were engaged in a little clean-up operation of their own last night. They went after the Occupy Oakland folks with everything from tear gas to flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, “City officials said they had been forced to clear the encampments because of sanitary and public safety concerns.” Uh huh. Right out of Steinbeck that is, as in “The Grapes of Wrath” and the less-well-known “In Dubious Battle.”

All the stories I’ve read make references to a schism in the Occupy crowd, with some insisting on a non-violent approach and others intent on challenging the cops to a fight. I’d love to know how much of the latter is legit and how much is the work of agents provocateurs. It’s an old trick, and one that keeps working, especially on the media. The Oakland Tribune‘s account of the evening’s festivities could have been written by the PD’s PR flack.

If you’re interested in following the Occupy movement online, bookmark Greg Mitchell’s OccupyUSA blog at The Nation. It’s one of my first stops every morning.

High and dry

When my family moved from Texas to Colorado Springs in August 1967 we saw a thick white blanket of snow on Pikes Peak as we drove into town.

“Holy shit,” I thought. “It snows here in August.”

The big fella wears his white hat on the first day of summer.

We knew something about snow, having lived three years in Ottawa, Canada. But Randolph AFB, Texas, was “a whole other country,” as the slogan has it. It snowed just twice in our five years there — about a zillionth of an inch each time — and the whole place went batshit. Schools closed, non-essential personnel stayed home, and we scratched our heads, wondering what all the fuss was about.

That glimpse of Pikes Peak was a reminder that in some places, it actually does snow enough to cause a fuss. By arriving in summertime we had been spared a massive winter dumper that had set folks in our new suburban neighborhood to heating with ornamental fireplaces and cooking over camp stoves in the absence of utility service.

I’ve seen plenty of the white stuff since, including a four-footer that had us snowshoeing up and down our road in Westcliffe and a couple lesser storms that let us ski the roads and parks here in Bibleburg.

But it’s been a while, and lately even rain is scarce. So I’m always happy to look up and see a little snow on the big hill. We may catch fire down here, but at least we’ll have water to drink, and something to scare Texans with on the first day of summer.

It’s quiet out there … too quiet

“Tweet of the day,” notes a colleague, forwarding this:

lancearmstrong Happy hour w/ the whole @LIVESTRONG team here at the house. For those who think we’ll be distracted, think again. We’re here to serve.

The old Million Pound Yellow Shithammer of Denial just ain’t what it used to be, hey? Not as long as Big George Hincapie may be one of the moles in need of a stout whacking. This shot will require some finesse, muses Big Tex, consulting his caddy: “What club do I use here, do y’think?” All the anticipation makes one’s putter flutter.

I get a feeling we’re on a rest day here on the Tour de Lance. But sometime soon it’s gonna be game on and Big Tex will have to start taking some very long pulls indeed, with the Devil running alongside him. And I ain’t talking Didi Senft here.

Meanwhile, I awakened to the sound of rain, thunder and hail at Chez Dog. I think I’ll sell all the bikes and buy a submarine. A yellow one. I bet I know where I can get one cheap, and all the rats should be out of there momentarily, if they haven’t all leaped overboard already.

May showers bring what, exactly?

All hands on deck? Not today: Today I need an office with a lid on it.

Jeebus. More water on the deck this morning. Just because I have fenders and neoprene doesn’t mean I enjoy using them.

Oh, well. I’m signed up for an extra-credit day in the VeloBarrel today, helping cover stage five of the Amgen Tour as our boots on the ground rotate in and out. It’s supposed to start at 10:15 a.m. Bibleburg time, but since we don’t do live updates anymore (just a Twitter feed, which is like passing out bullhorns to the voices in Sarah Palin’s head) the heavy lifting won’t start until much later in the day, when the streaming video kicks in.

One thing’s for sure: I won’t be using the open-air office this afternoon. It’s plenty soggy already, and there’s more rain in the forecast. No point in getting electrocuted in advance of Saturday’s Rapture. I want to stick around long enough to see who the real Christians are. I have a feeling the Tower will not approve some of the self-righteous flight plans on His desk.