“Well, you have your compost!” – L. Heineman We got 5.88 inches of rain this year at the “official” Albuquerque airport weather station, which for perspective is essentially a one-in-six dry year based on over a century of records. But we got 7.05 inches at our house. Plus, as Lissa pointed out, I have my …
Continue reading ‘2020 – as dry as a tumbleweed metaphor in a bad western. But compost!’ »
I barely have anything to say, so I ride my bike. Last Thursday, I rode through my 5,000th mile of 2020, something I’ve never done before. Like much of 2020, there will need be an asterisk next to this accomplishment, but it felt good to take the morning off and ride. Cycling has become my …
Continue reading ‘On a bike, fighting through the pandemic fog, with Silver Surfer’s help’ »
Some years ago, when I first began riding bikes in Albuquerque, my office chum Jimmie took me riding south through Albuquerque’s Rio Grande valley floor along a street called Guadalupe Trail. It’s not a street I would have found by myself – following the contours of one of the early acequias, the irrigation ditches that …
Continue reading ‘Seeing Like a State: the corner of Ortega Road and Guadalupe Trail’ »
In the Time of Pandemic, the ability to refill my water bottles has become an unexpected bike riding constraint. Worst case, if I couldn’t find a drinking fountain, I used to pop into a Kwik-E-Mart and buy a bottle. So, yeah, pandemic, amiright? I hate those water pack things, and the discomfort of throwing extra …
Continue reading ‘Google Maps said there’s a uranium mine out here. Also, a Wendy’s.’ »
The pipe that carries Albuquerque’s Colorado River water is not actually all that big!
My current favorite word is “hooligan”. It’s origins are murky, but the authors of the Oxford English Dictionary say it first appeared in newspaper stories in 1898, to whit: 1898 Daily News 8 Aug. 9/3 The constable said the prisoner belonged to a gang of young roughs, calling themselves ‘Hooligans’. The story behind its emergence …
In retrospect, the red taco truck represents the moment it all changed. It was parked along Central, old Route 66, on Albuquerque’s west side. My friend Scot and I, out for our Sunday bike ride, had been debating the wisdom of our usual bike ride brunch – tacos from one of our local market food …
With a couple of days left in 2019 I’m at 4,303 miles bicycled for the year, so I made a map. My claimed mileage is almost certainly not accurate to that fourth significant digit, but since I GPS all my rides it’s probably close. There are a few hotel fitness center miles in there, and …
The first bird I formally identified, as in “sat down with the book and then wrote down the result” was a great blue heron. The entry in the old family Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds, red ball point pen: 11/86 Sat on tiny island in Colorado River all morning, picking at its feathers The …