The Daily Parker

Remember Tuesday, when we were only 13 mm away from having the wettest July in history? Thanks to a storm that dumped a squishy 259 mm of rain on nearby Dubuque, Iowa, Chicago's rainfall this month reached 248 mm, beating the old record of 243 mm set in 1889.

Today's forecast calls for even bloody more rain:

Showers and thunderstorms likely. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 32°C. Heat index values as high as 37°C. Southwest wind between 10 and 15 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 70%. New rainfall amounts between 5 and 7.5 mm possible.

At 7am, the temperature of 23°C comes with a dewpoint temperature of 22°C, which is the scientific way of saying it's warm and sticky.

Let's see...warmer summers, more extreme weather, much more moisture in the atmosphere...saw that one coming.

Chicago is still experiencing weather more suited for the jungles of Cambodia:

For a 12th consecutive day Wednesday, Chicago's lows have registered 22°C or higher—the first time that's happened in 12 years and only the fourth time such a long string of warm nighttime lows has been observed at Midway Airport since 1928.

And it's still raining: another 111 mm fell on parts of the area this morning.

A weekend in Canada starts to look very appealing...

Chicago this year has not only gotten almost enough rain to hit a new record, but it's also gotten more than enough heat:

July's 230 mm of rain at O'Hare places the month only 13 mm away from July's 122 year old record of 243 mm recorded in 1889. A more typical July would have a rainfall tally closer to 67 mm by now—just a third as much as has fallen this month. ...

July's opening 26 days are averaging 26.2°C. That makes the month the warmest at O'Hare since weather readings were first archived at the site beginning in 1959. The 26.2°C average ranks as the 4th warmest July 1-26's over the full term of Chicago weather records spanning 141 years and taken at 12 different sites in the city since 1871.

Hot and wet: my favorite. (There's a joke in there somewhere...) When is October?

I mentioned yesterday morning needing to blow some frequent-flyer miles this autumn. So far, I've whittled the list down to Scotland, Budapest, Madrid, and Tokyo. (It turns out Canada only costs 30,000 miles round-trip, so I might just go to Montréal for a weekend instead of making a big thing about it.)

Any other places people would strongly recommend for a 4- or 5-day trip in late November or early December?

(If you're wondering why I care about this in July, then obviously you haven't tried to book an international flight on partner airlines using miles before. American has sold out all of its discounted business-class and most discounted economy-class seats to Paris between Thanksgiving and New Year's, for example.)

Welcome to the semi-annual update of the Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.)

You can get sunrise information for your location at wx-now.com.

...to go somewhere else. Yesterday's final, official figure: 208 mm, a full 43 mm more than the rainfall that caused the record floods in August 1987.

And it's not over yet.

Today has set the record as the wettest day in Chicago history, and (a) it's only 11am and (b) more rain is coming:

Overnight rains that approached 178 mm over northern Cook County broke several impressive Chicago records. 176 mm of precipitation has been measured at O'Hare International Airport since Midnight making today, Chicago's wettest calandar day in modern weather history.

I'm looking for community input.

Mostly because of business travel, but also because I have signed up for almost every reward program that American Airlines offers, this year I expect to earn around 200,000 frequent-flyer miles. I need to spend them. And when best to spend them then off-season, in late November or early December, when people aren't traveling much?

But where to go? American and its partner oneworld carriers fly non-stop from Chicago to about 95 destinations, ranging in distance from Milwaukee to Delhi, India.

So here are my rules for this long weekend in November or December: the destination must be 12 hours total flying time or closer; outside the Lower 48; avoid the infamous Newark-to-Kennedy connection that American loves to inflict on people using miles; no visa requirement; and nowhere I've been before. Oh, and it has to be somewhere I actually want to go.

Here's the preliminary list, with non-stop flights from Chicago listed first:

• Amman, Jordan
• Calgary, Alb.
• Cancún, Mexico
• Madrid, Spain
• Manchester, U.K. (i.e., Scotland)
• México City
• Montréal
• Ottawa
• Tokyo
• Toronto
• Bucharest, Romania (x LHR)
• Budapest, Hungary (x JFK)
• Buenos Aires (x MIA)
• Curação (x MIA)
• Copenhagen, Denmark (x LHR)
• Honolulu (x LAX)
• Panama City (x MIA)
• Quito, Ecuador (x MIA)
• San Jose, Costa Rica (x DFW)
• San Jose Cabo, Mexico (x LAX)
• Santiago, Chile (x JFK)
• Stockholm, Sweden (x LHR)
• Tel Aviv, Israel (x LHR)
• Vienna, Austria (x LHR)
• Zurich, Switzerland (x JFK)

(I'm leaning towards the places in bold.) Thoughts?

What happens when two air conditioners together draw more than 15 amps on a 15-amp circuit? This:

(Click to see full-size.)

The graph not only shows how quickly the place warmed up when the breaker tripped Wednesday evening, but also how slowly it cooled off once I closed the breaker. The initial cliff-like dive in temperature yesterday at 5:15pm happened because after turning the AC back on, I put a box fan next to the server rack and shut down two of the servers. You can see the temperature bumped up a degree when I turned them back on around 11:15pm.

So far today the servers are staying within their safe zone, under 27.5°C. The massive thunderstorms that just pushed through, which have kept the outside temperature under 24°C so far today, has helped. Tomorrow, however, the forecast calls for 34°C again.

How long until October?

It appears the air conditioners back at IDTWHQ have failed, while I'm 1,700 km away:

The chart starts at 7pm Chicago time Tuesday. The squiggle shows the backup air conditioner cycling on and off while it's in "energy saving" mode. That stops around 2pm yesterday, when, I imagine, the backup failed. Then, at 8:30pm last night, the main seems to have stopped.

I'll be leaving San Antonio on an earlier flight. I just hope the A/C units have simply stopped, and that they'll start again when I turn them on. Chicago's forecast calls for a high of 34°C today only going down to 24°C overnight. But without cooling, Inner Drive's poor servers may not last another two hours...