The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Party time! Excellent!

I threw a party for a few friends last night. Cassie's friend Butters came by and ensconced herself on the couch for most of the night. Cassie, for her part, got oo-mox from one of the guests:

Cassie has spent most of today sleeping, as I would like to be doing. At some point I may even get the motivation to read. First I have to tweak a feature of Weather Now that will help re-import all the data I mentioned yesterday.

Not as much snow as we thought

I promised snow photos.

So far, it looks like we've gotten only about 25 mm of snow, though it continues to fall and will probably keep falling until the early morning. Cassie and I went out around 1pm, and I gave her a bit of off-leash time in the courtyard:

That is a happy dog. And we're about to go out again, because she insists on metabolizing food and water.

Tomorrow she gets to go to day camp and I get to go to my downtown office. One of us will have a lot more fun than the other.

Cassie did not see her shadow

We got a lot of outdoor time yesterday, and more than an average amount so far this morning.

Yesterday we took a 5.5 km walk from downtown Elmhurst to the Prairie Path, with a sojourn at a big field where Cassie and her friend Kelsey found big sticks:

Then this morning I had to get my butt down to the University of Chicago, so Cassie got to be a Big Dog on Campus for a bit:

The forecast calls for 6°C today and 9°C tomorrow, so I imagine we will get a lot more walkies before the cold front comes in Monday night. With the dreaded "wintry mix" forecast for Wednesday, we need to get all the outside time we can.

Oh to know the joy of a dog

Cassie got a Christmas present from one of my friends:

I can only imagine the kind of joy she felt as she paraded around the house showing everyone her new toy. Perhaps it helped that I gave her sardines instead of green beans with her kibble for dinner. We all had a really nice Christmas, and Cassie had a fantastic one.

Lots of walkies today

So far today, Cassie has gotten almost exactly 10 km of walks, including a swing through the Horner Park DFA. This is a happy dog:

We also passed by a controlled burn in Winnemac Park:

They burn out the natural prairie areas periodically to help them grow back stronger. My only concern is that I believe there are several families of coyotes in the park. I hope they didn't lose their homes, or worse.

Long walk on beautiful afternoon

Today may wind up being the last nice day of 2024, even though long-range forecasts suggest next week may have unseasonably warm and dry weather as well. Yesterday had nicer weather than today, with the temperature hitting 13°C under sunny skies. Yesterday was also the monthly Dog Day at Morton Arboretum in Chicago's southwest suburbs. And one of my friends has a membership.

We took the girls on the longest possible loop through the grounds, 8.7 km, in just over an hour and a half:

Sadly, we were so busy enjoying the day that we forgot to take pictures.

The next Dog Day is January 19th. Given Chicago's normal weather that time of year, we may skip it. Then again, both Kelsey and Cassie really enjoy snow.

Last day of autumn, 2024

We had our coldest morning since February 17th today, cold enough that Cassie didn't want to linger sniffing her favorite shrubberies. The temperature bottomed out at 7:45 am, hitting -8.6°C at IDTWHQ, a cold we haven't experienced since 8:25 am on February 17th. O'Hare hit -10°C at 8 am, also the first time since 8 am February 17th. Tonight, going into the first day of astronomical winter, the forecast predicts it'll get even colder before warming up a bit on Monday.

Unrelated to the weather are these two things I liked from the past week. Yesterday I went over to a friend's house to help her set up a new computer and back up her old one. It turned out she was fostering this little guy, Hayes:

She texted me last night to say thanks and also that she's going to fork over the $495 adoption fee for him. Because of course she will. He's a sweet Lab-something mix whose pregnant mom got rescued from the side of the road in Arkansas. He'll have a much better (and longer) life with my friend than he would have otherwise.

I also liked the way the sun played around with the Civic Opera Building and 110 North Wacker (the mirrored building behind the Civic Opera) on Tuesday afternoon:

My new office is farther west than my old one, but still facing north, so it won't get any direct sunlight, ever. That said, on Tuesday I discovered that the mirrored windows at 110 North Wacker will give me pretty intense reflected sunlight, which is almost as bright. I'm still only going in once a week, but it's a nice perk.

Feeling watched?

I'm dog-sitting this weekend, so this is the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes just before 7am:

Telling Butters to go away had the opposite effect of what I'd intended:

Believe it or not, this pathetic look came after I fed them both:

They're now asleep on the couch together. At some point today, they're getting an hour-long walk—which won't actually go that far, because beagles are scent hounds. Every blade of grass must be sniffed.

C'était pas absolutement horrible...

I just finished a 75-minute open-level French test as part of a QA study that Duolingo invited me to participate in. What an eye-opener. And quelle épuisement!

The test started well enough but got a lot harder as it went on, for two principal reasons. First, the order of sections went precisely in the order of my abilities: reading, writing, listening, speaking. Turns out I read French a lot better than I write it, write it better than I understand it, and speak it like a reject from a Pink Panther film. Some poor evaluator will have to listen to me going on for nearly three minutes about how hard the job of cat-herder is. What's worse, I only just now learned the word berger. "Herder des chats" is, apparently, not a thing, but berger de chats potentially is. I hope whoever scores that response at least has a sense of humor.

The second reason it got harder is that "open level" bit I mentioned. Each section got progressively more difficult, such that by the end of the listening part I could barely pick out the topic let alone individual words. Senegalese fishermen, you may be surprised to learn, are harder to understand than recorded announcements at train stations.

Still, I'm glad I did it. I don't know if they'll share the results with me, because they only want the data to calibrate their language-learning product. I hope they do, particularly before I pop out of the Chunnel just over two weeks from now.

I'm dog-sitting again, so a nervous beagle wandered up to my office during the test to see why I hadn't fed her yet. I suppose they both could use an around-the-block and some kibble. I will try to speak French to them, if only for my own practice.

Oh, and if you haven't been able to get to Weather Now this afternoon, that's because I shut it down for a bit while I root out a connection-exhaustion problem. I believe there are too many bots hitting it the last few days, but it still shouldn't crash when they do. Until I can fix the problem, or get rid of the bots, I'm only going to have it up a little bit at a time. (Its data collection continues unaffected, however.)