The Daily Parker

With only about a week of autumn left officially, we have some great weather today. Cassie is with her pack at day care and I'm inside my downtown office looking at the sun and (relative) warmth outside, but the weather should continue through Friday.

What else is going on?

• A reader who remembers watching The Play live on TV sent a story about the statue the Bears erected to Keven Moen and unveiled last week.
• A new study ranks Asian and Scandinavian public-transit systems best in the world, with American cities doing poorly by comparison because of our automobile fetish.
• Quinta Jurecic takes offense at having her attention jerked around by super-rich adolescent men who only want the attention.
• As the percentage of major sporting events held in authoritarian countries continues to climb, does FIFA's cynicism and corruption really surprise anyone?

Finally, I hate to tell you, we will never find any real evidence to support the existence of Noah's Ark.

No matter where you find yourself today, at least you're not in Western New York:

The lake-effect snowstorm keeps pounding the Southtowns, with major highways and some roads closed.

A travel ban has been reinstituted for the City of Buffalo from William Street downtown to the Town of Cheektowaga line and everything south, according to Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz.

Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Thursday the Thruway from Rochester to the Pennsylvania border was closed to commercial traffic, although tractor trailers could be seen on the Thruway in Hamburg this morning. The governor also announced a state of emergency Thursday for the area.

The storm that dumped nearly 2 feet of snow in Hamburg and other parts of the Southtowns overnight will shift slightly north Friday morning, as the lake-effect storm continues to pound Western New York and the Buffalo metro area.

Parts of the Buffalo, N.Y., region have already gotten over 1,200 mm of snow, with another 600 mm expected over the next day or so. And yet, Niagara Falls, just 60 km northwest of the city—but crucially, downwind of Ontario, not Lake Erie—got just 25 mm of snow over the last 48 hours.

What fun.

Between my actual full-time job and the full-time job I've got this week preparing for King Roger, Cassie hasn't gotten nearly the time outdoors that she wants. The snow, rain, and 2°C we have today didn't help. (She doesn't mind the weather as much as I do.)

Words cannot describe how less disappointed I am that I will have to miss the XPOTUS announcing his third attempt to grift the American People, coming as it does just a few hours after US Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) announced his bid for Senate Minority Leader. Sad dog, sad turtle, sad party.

Now to walk the dog, pack the bag, and head to the Sitzprobe. But man, my sitz already feels probed.

Tonight's forecast calls for the S-word:

The first real snow of the season could hit as soon as Monday night — and more snowflakes could fall throughout the week.

Chicago’s set to have a snowy, chilly week, with most days seeing temperatures [below freezing], according to the National Weather Service.

Monday will be partly sunny and could warm up to 5°C, according to the National Weather Service. There’s a 50 percent chance for snow overnight, mostly after 4 a.m. Tuesday.

Snow is expected to fall throughout Tuesday morning, with it turning into a mix of snow and rain after noon, according to the National Weather Service. Ultimately, there could be less than 12 mm of snow accumulating. The day could see a high temperature of 4°C. The snow and rain could continue overnight, as well.

It happens every year, usually right around mid-November, so we knew it would come eventually. But we can still complain about it.

The Daylight Saving Time arguments that crop up twice a year encapsulate American decision-making so well. People argue for one position or another based on what works best for them; people predict doom and gloom if their view doesn't prevail; Congress makes a change that everyone hates (and, as in 1975, they have to repeal); and not a lot changes. It also has nuances that most people don't understand (or care to) and stems from a social construct completely within our control that people think is a fixed law of the universe (i.e., clock time).

Because I live just east of my time zone's standard meridian, and at a latitude that sees a six-hour daylight difference between solstices, I believe year-round standard time would be best. Katherine Wu agrees:

I gotta say, the science (pushes glasses up nose) largely backs me and my fellow standardians up. Several organizations, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, have for years wanted to do away with DST for good. “Standard time is a more natural cycle,” Pelayo told me. “In nature we fall asleep to darkness and we wake up to light.” When people spend most of their year out of sync with these rhythms, “it reduces sleep duration and quality,” says Carleara Weiss, a behavioral-sleep-medicine expert at the University at Buffalo. The onset of DST has been linked to a bump in heart attacks and strokes, and Denise Rodriguez Esquivel, a psychologist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, told me that our bodies may never fully adjust to DST. We’re just off-kilter for eight months.

For years, some researchers have argued that perma-DST would cut down on other societal woes: crime, traffic accidents, energy costs, even deer collisions. But research on the matter has produced mixed or contested results, showing that several of those benefits are modest or perhaps even nonexistent. And although sticking with DST might boost late-afternoon commerce, people might hate the shift more than they think. In the 1970s, the U.S. did a trial run of year-round DST … and it flopped.

We could also redraw the time zone boundaries to move more people closer to the center meridians, but that would involve even more nuance and recognition that these things are human constructs we can change.

(Also: I wonder if Michigan is so weird because so much of the state is in the wrong time zone?)

So far I've managed to avoid getting soaked running lots of errands, but the cold front descending upon us has stirred things up anyway. Right now, O'Hare reports 48 km/h winds with gusts up to 65 km/h and a peak wind just before noon of 92 km/h from the south—directly across all 6 main runways there. Whee!

I sincerely hope no one tried to land in that.

It got up to 23°C at IDTWHQ this afternoon, and even now, three hours after sunset, it's still 17°C. Not a record, but not bad for November. I still have all the windows open. (Not for long though.)

We've also had amazing foliage this year. For example, this ash tree a few blocks from my house still hasn't dropped all its leaves:

And Cassie found another sunbeam after we got home:

The forecast says we get three or four more days of this before we get back to normal autumn temperatures. I'm OK with that.

It's a quiet day at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters 6.0 as I bang away at the 60 or so boxes of books in the library. Only 10 or so of those boxes need to go all the way to my office loft on the 4th floor, so I should make do with only a few dozen Ibuprofens this afternoon.

Meanwhile, Cassie has found a sunbeam on the front deck, just as she did yesterday:

And as a bonus, here's our walk to doggie day care on Friday morning:

Our fall colors just keep going this year. The maples have reached their peak, even as the ashes and oaks are finishing up.

I believe I'm about halfway through the kitchen (the worst room to pack), and struggling not to go immediately to Empirical for my last pint there. It's sunny, breezy, and at this moment 24°C outside—perfect beer-on-a-patio weather. Alas, though, I have to pack...the dishes. And glassware.

Maybe I can do this in two hours?

I have only two rooms left to pack before my move on Monday: the master bedroom (which will take me about 30 minutes and the movers about the same), and the kitchen (which will take me most of today). I also had to reserve some time later this afternoon to grab a pint with a friend at Empirical Brewery, because (a) the weather could not look better and (b) they close permanently tomorrow night.

Let's move on from the demise of the second brewery three blocks from my new house in the period between me buying the house and moving it, because clearly I angered the Beer Gods and have yet to figure out how to make amends. Instead, what about this weather? And the leaves?

Family portrait takers, tour guides and social media influencers are running out of time to photograph the final days of the best season of fall colors in northern Illinois in years, experts say.

The Chicago area may have the best colors of the entire state, as other parts continue to struggle with dry conditions.

“The weather’s setting up really well and we’ve had some rains recently,” Johnson said. “The best color is going to come when you have bright, sunny days and cool nights and we’re getting a good amount of that now.”

Recently, Illinois has had consecutive years of subpar fall colors tied to a 2012 drought that ravaged the Midwest and continues to wreak havoc on trees.

Unfortunately, the long-range forecast looks a bit gloomier:

Regardless of when the snow starts stacking up, Chicagoans should gear up for a good number of storms this year, according to the annual winter outlook released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. While there’s no strong indication of what sort of temperatures Chicago will see this winter, the report does predict the city will see a wetter-than-average season.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean more snow, it could be more rain, more of that yucky mixed precipitation and snow,” Borchardt said. “But usually in these kinds of patterns we typically see more storms than normal.”

Even if the city gets a lot of storms this year, it would take a truly hefty amount of snow to break Chicago’s all-time snowiest winter record. The current champion is the winter of 1978-79, when 2,278 mm fell. For comparison, last winter it snowed 833 mm.

But before that happens, we have a reprieve. Here's the St Boniface Cemetery a couple of hours ago: