I made it to the Bay Area, and I'm about to fall asleep. Tomorrow I've got plans in both San Francisco and San Jose, which, if you care to glimpse a map, are nowhere near each other. (Seriously, they're farther apart than Chicago and Milwaukee.) Fortunately they have trains here.
Right, well, I'm off then. Assuming I don't get re-routed involuntarily, I should be home mid-afternoon Sunday, and assuming meteorologists know what they're doing, I will be rewarded for schlepping a heavy coat all over the country today by not dying of hypothermia when I get back to Chicago.
Je suis épuisé, et maintenant, je dors.
A warm and dry October has given us unusually late fall colors this year. They seem close to peak intensity this week, at least in my local park. Enjoy:
It's late October, so the days are shorter. Then on Sunday, we get an extra hour of sleep at the cost of an hour of afternoon daylight.
Which is all to say I ran out of time today doing actual work and taking meetings at odd times because the UK switched their clocks yesterday.
And now I have to walk two dogs, feed two dogs, and run to rehearsal. More tomorrow.
I took the dramatic beagle and Cassie to Spiteful* yesterday afternoon. Butters got more pats than Cassie did. Perhaps it's this face?
This afternoon we took a half-hour walk through the local park because the weather is absolutely perfect. Whenever I stopped to try to photograph the two dogs, they immediately went in separate directions, so this is the best I could do:
The girls are now sunning themselves on my front porch, I'm up in my office coding away, and I've got chicken soup going in the slow cooker. It's definitely autumn.
* I really ought to update that Brews & Choos review...
We've had a fairly warm autumn so far, but this morning we got a nearly-normal temperature at O'Hare and the coldest temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ since April 27th. O'Hare saw 5°C this morning, a scoche below the normal October 20th low of 6.7°C.
We're also starting to get fall colors. I've been watching a locust tree down the block, and I'll have some photos of its progress later this week.
I thoroughly enjoyed our performance yesterday. After the No Kings demonstration, between the dress rehearsal and the concert, and well before the rain hit, Millennium Park looked pretty nice:
After the concert, I did not enjoy the rainstorm that greeted us when we walked over to the place where we had our post-concert drinks and snacks. I got home well after midnight, which fortunately Cassie didn't mind because she was at sleepaway camp.
Cassie, now home, seems to be recovering from the trauma pretty well:
I also finished Cory Doctorow's Enshittification a few minutes ago. At the very end he pointed to an essay by Cat Valente, "Stop Talking to Each Other and Buy Things," which I now recommend to you.
I will now debug some unit tests and watch vaguely-interesting videos because my body battery has dropped to 7.
So many things passed through my inbox in the last day and a half:
- The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that an assistant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was observed over the weekend discussing plans over Signal with an aide to Reichsminister Stephen Miller to send the 82nd Airborne to Portland.
- Paul Krugman breaks from his usual economics beat to lambast the OAFPOTUS and his Reichskabinett der Nationalen Rettung for the horrifying ICE raid* on a Chicago apartment building last week: "What do we learn from the Chicago apartment raid plus the growing number of incidents in which ICE agents have physically attacked people who posed no conceivable threat? To me, it says that even 'alarmists' who warned about the threat a Trump administration would pose to democracy underestimated just how evil this administration would be."
- Adam Kinzinger draws a straight line between the OAFPOTUS really, really not wanting anyone to read the Epstein files and the Republicans' not caring really one whit about "protecting kids."
- Jamelle Bouie suggests that if Hegseth and the OAFPOTUS want to see "the enemy within," they should glance at the nearest mirror. Jen Rubin concurs.
- In his latest column on the OAFPOTUS's bullshit, Glenn Kessler mocks the TACO King for "crying 'witch hunt' while stirring the cauldron."
- Josh Marshall applauds California governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois governor JB Pritzker for being willing to use the power they have to prevent the rending of our nation.
- Matt Yglesias wants to shake some sense into the "groups" who have clearly learned nothing from Kamala Harris's embarrassing loss last November.
- Pilot and journalist James Fallows once again reminds people that it's safe to fly during a government shutdown. Of course, since all the air-traffic control trainers were furloughed...
- The Times has yet another essay about craft breweries shutting down because there are just too darn many of them. (Since the Brews & Choos Project started in February 2020, 22 of the 146 breweries I've visited have closed—plus another 7 I didn't get to.)
Finally, Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford goes over the numbers: September was warm and very dry. October is shaping up to be as well, despite the forecast calling for rain tonight and cooler temperatures through Saturday.
* Seriously, doesn't anyone in ICE realize that people will talk about them 30 years from now the way we talk today about the Schutzstaffel?
I spent yesterday afternoon reading and relaxing with Cassie. As we had near-record warmth (31°C at O'Hare, 28°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ), we spent the day mostly outside. The highlight for Cassie may have been the woman who gave her a couple of fries before her partner and toddler arrived. Cassie's lowlight might have been unsuccessfully trying to psychically will the toddler to toss a couple of fries in her direction:
Back home, I've inadvertently taken in a boarder. This orb weaver has been hanging outside my kitchen window for the past week or so:
For scale, she's about 12-13 mm (½ in) fangs to spinner, and about 25 mm (1 in) all spread out as above. She looks like a neoscona crucifera, which is very common in the area. I hope she's getting all the food she needs. I'll let you know when her eggs hatch, though I haven't yet located her egg sac.
I had a long day of debugging today, and I'm about to go to Cassie's doggie daycare the way I got here: on a Divvy e-bike. They cruise at 31 km/h and cost only $2 more than the train for my commute. Plus, I get some aerobic exercise. The forecast calls for summer-like weather through the next few weeks, except for a 3-day cooldown next week, so I'll keep pedaling.
And yes, I wore a helmet.
Tomorrow: my 5th marathon walk—in 30°C weather.
The two biggest news stories of the past 24 hours are the government shutting down because Congress couldn't pass a spending bill by the end of fiscal year last night, and the pathetic attempted-fascist assembly of the United States' general and flag officers in Virginia yesterday.
We'll take the dumber one first:
And then there's failed Minnesota National Guard major (and current Defense Secretary) Pete Hegseth's demonstration of why he never got promoted to lieutenant colonel:
In other news:
Finally, the forecast for Friday has us at 29°C (85°F) by late afternoon, exactly when we would hit the treeless McRory Trail north of Lake Forest. We have altered our planned route to use the tree-lined Sheridan Road from near the Lake Forest Metra station up to Lake Bluff Brewing, but it will still be wicked hot. It got that hot the day I attempted a marathon walk in 2022, but you'll recall I only got to Evanston before throwing in the towel. In 2023, it hit 29°C, and we did all right—but we moved the walk to mid-October last year and had much better weather.
We'll see how we do. It might just come down to how much sleep I get this week.