Exactly 30 days ago the Inner Drive Journal (the software powering this blog) went live. I've released 7 new builds since then. One of the driving forces behind the re-write was frequent releases, so that part seems to have succeeded tremendously.

So, how's it going? I'd like to hear your thoughts. Comment below with anything that comes to mind.

• About this Blog (v5.0)  (2 weeks)
• Brews and Choos project  (1 month)
• Chicago sunrises, 2026  (1 month)
• Inner Drive Technology's computer history  (2 years)
• Logical fallacies  (6 years)
• Other people's writing  (5 years)
• Parker Braverman, 2006-2020  (5 years)
• Style sheet  (7 months)
• Where I get my corn-pone  (1 week)

Matthew Yglesias takes a look at what average Americans consider to be corrupt behavior by politicians and concludes that voters "think everyone is corrupt:"

Some people think it’s because the voters don’t care about corruption, but I think that’s probably wrong.

Searchlight Institute polling on this shows that voters just have an incredibly low estimate of the baseline level of integrity of politicians. Seventy-one percent say the “typical politician” is corrupt. Typical Republican? Sixty-eight percent. Typical Democrat? Sixty-one percent. Seventy-two percent say that “long-term elected officials” are probably corrupt.

I think it’s hard to make political hay out of Trump’s corruption because, while it looks extraordinary to me (and probably to you if you’re reading this), many voters see it as pretty normal.

It doesn't help that Americans generally don't see the nuance: the Democratic Party tends to kick out its most corrupt members, while the Republican Party lauds theirs. Nicholas Kristof sums this up in his column today:

President Trump is unrivaled in American history in one respect: None of his predecessors ever cashed in on the presidency as he has.

The fire hose of disclosures has been overwhelming. A Times editorial estimated conservatively that the Trump family has made more than $1.4 billion in documented gains by exploiting the second term of his presidency. (Others offer higher figures.)

And all that pales beside the latest bombshell: a $500 million secret deal backed by a government leader in the United Arab Emirates, just four days before Trump was inaugurated for his second term.

What does this have to do with authoritarianism? Well, corrupt politicians crack down on their opponents, particularly the press, because they don't want to go to jail. Authoritarianism is always a cover for corruption.

On the other hand, by promoting loyalty (and silence) ahead of competence (and accountability), authoritarians always fail. Sadly, failure doesn't guarantee they get kicked out of power. I just hope that the authoritarian overreach by the Republican Party will lead to electoral reckonings in November and in 2028.

Two things this morning that made me laugh, starting with the news of one more Federal grand jury refusing to indict someone that made the OAFPOTUS mad—in this case, six someones, all sitting US legislators and former US military and intelligence officers:

A Washington DC grand jury declined to indict six Democratic lawmakers who were denounced by Donald Trump after they made a video urging troops to refuse illegal orders.

Federal prosecutors had sought an indictment against the Democrats who participated in the video, including Elissa Slotkin, Mark Kelly, Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander and Chrissy Houlahan, who all have military and intelligence backgrounds.

Slotkin, a former CIA officer, organized the video in which the lawmakers said officers can resist unlawful commands. Trump was outraged by the clip, and described it as “seditious behavior by traitors” that was “punishable by death”.

Slotkin said in a statement on Tuesday that the video “simply quoted the law” and Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney, attempted to persuade a grand jury to indict Slotkin at the direction of Trump.

Let's remember that US Attorney Jeanine Pirro previously held the exalted role of Fox News presenter, where she and her colleagues lied about the 2020 election so ridiculously that Dominion Voting Systems forced Fox to settle a defamation case for $787 million.

I also laughed out loud at Paul Krugman's takedown of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik this morning:

While MAGA-world’s fantasy villains like George Soros are brilliant and subtle, MAGA’s real villains are uncouth and dim-witted. Yet they carry out their sinister schemes in broad daylight. For all they need to flourish is utter shamelessness, along with the backing of a corrupt administration and a corrupt political party.

So it’s worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s observations about the architects of Hitler’s genocide, which led her to coin the phrase “the banality of evil”. As Arendt noted, the horrors of Nazism were not inflicted by brilliant geniuses, but through the normalization of thoughtless, amoral behavior that eventually turned into evil. Thus while Lutnick appears on the surface like a dim-witted backroom grifter, he is a warning of something far more sinister and malign lurking below.

OK, I'm not quoting the funny part here, but you should read Krugman's entire post.

And he's right. This Administration could have gotten everything they wanted had they not been stupid. (I also think the lawful-evil faction is really annoyed that their chaotic-evil leader keeps screwing things up for them.)

I've just released v1.0.9538 of the Inner Drive Journal, the software that runs The Daily Parker. This release added two big security features that I've been working toward for years.

First, the big one: users can now set up profiles using their Google IDs. Just go to the login page and click on "Sign in with Google." Google will tell you that the blog will read your name and user ID, and if that's OK with you, the Daily Parker will create a profile for you. This will enable you to set a couple of preferences and see posts with Authenticated privacy.

Despite the 30 years of professional software development behind me, I used the Anthropic Claude Opus 4.5 agent in GitHub CoPilot to do the grunt work. It got 90% the way there before it got stuck. But Claude Opus 4.6 got me over the finish line. And the code it wrote for me wasn't bad: it did what I needed and wasn't difficult to polish.

As much as CoPilot is helping me get things done faster, I'm also learning its, ah, idiosyncrasies, and thus how to get more out of it more quickly. I've struggled to find good documentation on how to get Google Authentication working in Blazor apps for about three years now, and kept giving up. Claude got it done in two hours, because it can read a lot more documentation than I can.

Now that I've got Google authentication working here, including getting the Daily Parker verified on Google and all that, I'll be adding Google sign-ins to Weather Now in the next few days.

The second major improvement today: Users who can add things to the blog can now set the privacy to "Private," the third of the five levels the app will ultimately support. Most of the 10,000+ posts are Public: anyone can see them. A few are Authenticated: only people who have an active profile can see them, as if they're paywalled. (The Daily Parker is currently free, and I have no plans to monetize the blog, but this would be the mechanism.) The new "Private" level restricts visibility to the owner (usually the creator) and people the creator affirmatively adds to the item's access list. The first use case that I'm going to build out is my reading list. I want to see a list of all the books I've read and when I read them, but I don't want you to see the whole list. I'll set some to Public and Authenticated to demonstrate the feature, but just a few.

You can see how the Journal software has evolved on the Release Notes page.

As was obvious when I left Spiteful, the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl over the New England Patriots by 29-13.

Meanwhile:

• As the OAFPOTUS becomes more unhinged and more insulated from objective reality, he's heading for a massive crash-out. Of course, that means things will get worse before they get better.
• Both Leonora Barclay and Brian Beutler take the occasion of former Vice President Kamala Harris's "cringe-worthy" outreach to remind us why she lost.
• Anne Applebaum raises the alarm about the numbers of Ukrainian civilians dying as Russia continues to destroy its own economy in hopes of destroying Ukraine. And with Steve Witkoff negotiating deals on his own, "[i]t’s also corruption on a scale we have never seen before in American history."
• Record-breaking wind surges in the Western Pacific have climatologists worried about an epic El Niño this summer.

Finally, I am happy to report that the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ poked above freezing just a few hours ago and looks like it might stay there until tomorrow night. In fact, the entire forecast as far as the National Weather Service cares to predict shows above-freezing high temperatures all week—and even above-freezing low temperatures a couple of times. So does the commercial forecast. Spring officially starts in 19 days!

17:45: Welcome to the experiment. I'm at Spiteful with Cassie watching the Big Game, but also doing a field test of the Daily Parker mobile editing experience. So far, no score on the TV but the editor is doing well. And the fact that the page auto-saves every 30 seconds is helpful. Keep refreshing: you will see me typing in near real time!

17:46: Ope. Seahawks scored a field goal (3 points). At this point I should mention that half my team and one of my dearest friends live in Seattle.

17:52: So far, the ads are not great. All the pro footballers endorsing FanDuel is a real problem. The Toyota ad with the little kids was annoying. But the patriotic opening ceremony, while masterfully executed by the producers, made me uncomfortable. More on that tomorrow.

18:08: OK, I've found an annoyance with mobile editing, but fixing it will make the underlying app less secure. If I switch apps, or if my phone locks, the editing page loses its connection to the server, requiring me to reload the page manually. That means I lose any unsaved data and, sometimes, it also disrupts the Javascript bits enough to require closing the tab and reloading it from the Edit button on the incomplete post. So, compared with what came before, it's orders of magnitude easier to write posts, but just as annoying if I want to link to outside sources.

I discovered this while gathering data about how little happens in American football.

18:19: The first quarter took 46 minutes for 15 minutes of clock time. That's about right, according to a study by 538 a few years back that found only 8-11% of an NFL broadcast is even "play action." That's a lower percentage of rewards than playing blackjack in Las Vegas. So, basically, American football is a Skinner box set to variable-ratio reinforcement at a level that would make rats angry.

Some people complain that baseball has even less action, but baseball is (a) a pastime, and (b) all about possibility. Football is about Rules.

But hey: Seattle scored again! After 57 minutes, it's 6-0 Seattle. And we've now seen 10 ads per scoring event.

18:49: Slowed down live blogging because (a) not a lot is happening and (b) my phone is at 20%. When I do SOTU live-blogging later this month, I'll be home with a charger nearby. And I'll probably have more to say.

19:24: Mother forking shirt balls, Bad Bunny is amazing. Every Republican from Santa Clara to Penoboscot is having a stroke, or watching the pouty alternative. This is America. (Also, the closed captions are en español. ¡Bien hacido!)

When you're going to do something subversive, it helps to have one of the biggest entertainment companies behind you. Well done, BB.

19:32: Those are the flags of all of our possessions. And every Spanish-speaking country in the hemisphere. Every second of that was endorsed and censored by the NFL. The commercial power behind the most popular sport in the United States has just told the OAFPOTUS to suck it.

19:39: Spiteful closes at 8, and almost everyone here only came for Bad Bunny, so I'm going to wrap up. Tomorrow morning I'll add links to this post for context and history, and I'll have a slept-on-it analysis after noon Chicago time.

For readers outside the US, it might not be readily understood that most Americans watch this game "for the ads." The players on both teams will get obscene bonuses for playing, with the winning team getting double so everyone actually plays the game. But for the commercial interests, that's nothing, because they have data saying people buy more of the things they see advertized during this game than they otherwise would to such an extent that $333,000 per second of air time is worth it.

I'm OK with that, to a point. I don't believe the University of Chicago doctrine that shareholder value is paramount, but it is how we've organized the United States, and the incentive to extract every last penny (nickel, now, I guess) of consumer surplus from every transaction has led directly to a desperation for attention in corporate circles that has, in turn, produced entertainment we won't be able to surpass in many ways when we regain our humanity. And what a coup, to produce a sporting event so boring that only a few percent of the people watching care about the outcome, but so well engineered that the other 95% stay tuned for the commercials.

At least Seattle is winning...

I spent about 4½ hours today working on the blog software, and was able to implement two out of three modes of sharing posts and the "Private" level of privacy. Those are working in the dev/test environment but I don't expect to push them to production until next weekend.

"Private" just means that only the person who owns an item can view it, unless they affirmatively share it with another user. The implementation of the first part wasn't that difficult; I just had to add some code to the authorization logic and voilà, private-level privacy unlocked. Sharing with other users will require just a bit more work on the Share feature, with some straightforward changes to the IEvent interface and classes that implement it to support a list of authorized users.

The other two levels already implemented are "Public," meaning anyone can see the post, and "Authenticated," meaning only users who have set up accounts on the blog can see it. (Think of "Authenticated" as "paywalled," except The Daily Parker is free.) Later on I'll add "Encrypted" and "Secret" privacy levels, which will be much harder because of how I plan to store app-provided keys and not store user-provided passwords. More on those things much later.

The Super Bowl starts in just under two hours, however, and I owe Cassie a long walk. The temperature has risen slowly all day and just got to -2.2°C (28°F), not as warm as I'd like but warm enough for her to stay outside for an hour or so. I hope there are still seats at Spiteful.

I just finished a book that I've had on my nightstand for six full months: The Mapmakers (2nd edition), by John Noble Wilford. It took me so long to read the book that Wilford actually died while I was reading it. (Why do I have the urge to pick up Hillbilly Elegy now?)

I ploughed through the last 60 pages or so on the couch with Cassie this afternoon, who appreciated all the scritches as much as she's appreciated getting a full hour of walkies almost every day this week. In fact, we're about to head out again, despite the -5°C chill. The sun is still out, and will be for another hour, so why not get some steps?

Before we go, I just wanted to flag a story that popped up in a social feed today. Earlier this year, Queen Máxima of the Netherlands enlisted in the Dutch army "because 'our security can no longer be taken for granted,' the Royal House of the Netherlands said in a news release on Wednesday." Good on her. Her daughter, Princess Catharina-Amalia, finished her general military training last month. While the 23-year-old princess has been promoted to corporal (korporaal, OR-3), her mother will be commissioned lieutenant colonel (luitenant-kolonel, OF-4) in the reserves when she's done.

It's interesting how European leaders just do things because it's the right thing to do while American ones get their doctors to find bone spurs to avoid the same things.

That's right: at 7:49 am, the temperature at my house went above freezing for the first time in 20 days, 11 hours, and 10 minutes. O'Hare reported 0.6°C (33°F) at 7:05, so we're officially out of our 3-week freeze!

Though the forecast has us going up to 2°C by noon but then plunging to -12°C overnight. Tomorrow will once again freeze our bits off, but then back up to 0°C Sunday and mostly above freezing for the rest of the week.

Spring seems possible, just.

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ has crept all the way up to -0.4°C (31.3°F), close enough to freezing that it would take hours to get frostbite. But you'd still get frostbite, so it's not quite where we want it. Officially at O'Hare it's -0.6°C (31.0°F), the warmest since 9pm on Friday January 16th.

Sadly for Cassie, I'm in my downtown office and have a work event tonight, so we can't take advantage of this warmth. Tomorrow, though, the forecast calls for above-freezing temperatures most of the day. I hope so; Cassie and I both need a long walk. We'll get one Sunday if tomorrow doesn't work out, at least.

Update: It got all the way up to -0.3°C before starting to cool off again. So close!

Well, it looks like Jeff Bezos has decided to light the Washington Post on fire as he just can't seem to figure out how newspapers work. Josh Marshall, a 25-year veteran of online journalism, congratulates Bezos on getting to the "F this" part of the billionaire ownership lifecycle (also known as "Dunning-Krueger strikes again"):

Our guy comes in as a White Knight. He solves every problem because money is no issue. The readers and the staff are happy and, because of that, the billionaire is happy. The press watchers at the universities are happy. Everybody’s happy. It’s a for-profit operation and the buyer doesn’t want to lose money but it’s not a money-making purchase. The operation is purchased as a kind of public trust. He’s signed up as the protector and custodian of a public asset.

But billionaires turn out not to like losing money. That shouldn’t surprise us. You don’t get to be a billionaire by having much tolerance for losing money. Having limitless amounts of money doesn’t really matter. It’s more integral to their personhood. It eats at them.

What’s the solution? Innovation, efficiency, scale … The salient point is that now the operation has been turned over to the consultants and billionaire-speakers with their talk of innovation and multi-media, multi-platform scale and the seeds have been planted for a curdled and resentful attitude toward the people who write the stories. And why do they have a union? Seriously, fuck that. The billionaire starts to get maybe a bit of a different idea of what the “problem” is with this operation.

It’s dead and there’s no point is the thinking. It’s the billionaire white knight publishing arc. At a smaller scale, see Chris Hughes at TNR going on a generation ago now. It almost always runs this cycle.

Glenn Kessler, a 28-year veteran of the Post, agrees:

Under orders from the Post’s mega-billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, one-third of the staff was laid off. Some entire newsroom departments — sports, books, audio — were eliminated. The metro staff, already decimated by reductions around the time of publisher Will Lewis’ arrival in 2024, was slashed even further. The foreign staff was also cut dramatically, with every correspondent based in the Middle East (Jerusalem, Cairo and Istanbul) laid off. The Post’s Ukraine correspondent was ditched in a war zone.

Not so long ago, during President Donald Trump’s first term, The New York Times and The Washington Post had about the same number of digital subscribers. But, wisely, the Times invested in expanding its offerings with acquisitions; readers could consume top-tier reporting or a range of other fare such as Wordle and The Athletic. Meanwhile, the Post cut back and shrank.

Now, the Post has roughly two million digital subscribers — maybe fewer — and the Times has 12 million. The Post’s travails were exacerbated by some Bezos decisions in recent years, such as canceling the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris just 11 days before the 2024 election — a move that led more than 250,000 subscribers to cancel. A few months later, Bezos announced the opinion section would focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” a turn to the right also intended to curry favor with Trump.

The number of substantial news outlets in this country has already dwindled to a handful, and Bezos has eliminated the attributes that made the Post so influential. The net result is that American journalism will be diminished — and too many revelatory stories and exposés now will never be written.

Let's not forget that it's in the interest of rich people that their fortunes not be scrutinized too closely, too.

This isn't confined to newspapers, of course. Look at Eddie Lampert's destruction of Sears, which I chronicled for years. Or just read Enshttification. The American economic system as popularized by the University of Chicago guarantees these outcomes.

Still, I'll miss the Post. But hey, at least I can still support some journalism directly.

For those who are curious, I've updated my media consumption list, and as a result, I need to review my Substack subscriptions. Maybe I should rotate them? I would love to see a new feature on Substack where you can just pay Substack and get credits to distribute to everyone you want to follow, or buy à la carte articles. If you know anyone who works there, please mention this.

In other news:

• Anne Applebaum has a shocking list of the companies that stand to gain billions of dollars from ICE contracts, most of which are controlled by the OAFPOTUS's donors and right-wing billionaires. Remember: authoritarianism is always about the grift.
• Brian Beutler asks, was the OAFPOTUS's 2024 campaign just a huge Epstein files cover-up? And why didn't the Biden Administration release the files? "They cared more about seeming nonpartisan than about maximizing their political standing against fascist opponents."
• Jeff Maurer really wishes celebrities would sit down and shut up because "rich, vapid celebrities spouting insane activist aphorisms is just fuel for the MAGA fire, as proved by the fact that right-wing media is covering [Billie] Eilish’s speech [at the Grammy's last weekend] like it’s Pearl fucking Harbor."
• Penny, a 4-year-old Doberman pinscher, won Best in Show at yesterday's Westminster Dog Show. Who's the bestest girl? Well, Cassie, obviously, but Penny is also a good girl!

Finally, I've just re-read Umberto Eco's essay "Ur-Fascism," which reminds us that resistance doesn't happen on its own, and no one is coming to save us from the neo-Fascists. I worried a lot more about that a year ago, but seeing how Minnesota has responded to the intrusion of the armed, unaccountable secret police the Republican Party created, I'm worrying less now.

I just released v1.0.9531 which corrected the caching issue that prevented anonymous visitors from commenting.

Simply put: the cache operates at the Factory layer, which moves objects in and out of the database. But security happens at the Service layer, which coordinates the factories and other services to generate the objects that the user interface layer displays to you.

The basic sequence for displaying a post is for the EventService to ask the EventFactory for a post. The EventFactory caches posts for about 3 minutes, which means there's a huge probability that the post is already in the cache. It then passes that post along with the current user's profile (or null in the case of anonymous users) to the AuthorizationService to see if the user can (a) see the post and (b) see unapproved and deleted comments. If the user can see the post but not unapproved comments, the EventService strips the comments off the post before giving it to the UI.

I forgot C# objects are passed by reference. Despite that being one of the most basic principles of the language, it slipped my mind. (Always have someone else read your code, folks!) So when the EventService stripped the comments from the object it was about to pass to the UI, it was stripping them from the exact same object that was in the cache. So for anonymous comments, the anonymous commenter's comments got removed from the blog post as the EventService was checking to see if the commenter had permission to leave a comment.

Anyway, that's fixed now. And I'm actually pleased with myself that I at least got the security correct: better to display no data at all than to display data the user isn't authorized to see.

Not 10 seconds after deploying that fix, I discovered that a rude search bot was able to generate a ton of error messages just by trying to get a list of posts with the same tag on them. I've patched that temporarily while I refactor how tagged posts are displayed.

The fun never stops.

I figured out why comments broke for anonymous users: caching is hard. I spent some time yesterday after work digging into the caching code and realized that I was an idiot. I also found where my bad decision about what to cache caused unrelated things to work, which they wouldn't have done had I done caching correctly. I'll fix that tonight.

Also, if you haven't read any reviews of the $75 million bribe Amazon paid to the OAFPOTUS in the form of a documentary about his third wife, here's Jeff Maurer, John Semley, and Alexandra Petri. Enjoy.

I haven't had a chance to work on the comments problem, because, you see, I have another job. I've also had a plumber and a carpet cleaner here today, traumatizing poor Cassie who couldn't show them her blanket because she got shoved into a different room. She's now on her bed in my office rather than on one of the couches downstairs. I expect she'll get over the soul-crushing exile she experienced for nearly an hour today.

If only she knew what the rest of the world was like:

• Ezra Klein says the OAFPOTUS "has overwhelmed himself," blowing way past the limits of the administration's miniscule competence: "That is why most White Houses pay such close attention to policy processes and chain of command: These are all ways of filtering the torrent of information and decisions in order to conserve the focus and attention of the president and his top aides." Ruth Ben-Ghiat told you so.
• In case you need it, Paul Krugman has a refresher on the Federal Reserve.
• Matt Yglesias doesn't see a lot of difference between California Governor Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris. (Personally, I think Newsom will be a great vice president to JB Pritzker.)
• James Fallows explains what we know and still don't know about the helicopter-jet collision over Washington last year.
• The City of Chicago has released 25 finalists for the "You Name a Snowplow" contest, with "Abolish ICE" taking the lead with 80% of the nominations. (My favorite is "Daniel Brrrnham.")

Finally, be careful which LLMs you use to help with your coding. KOI has discovered that MaliciousCorgi extensions send everything you type (and then some) back to unknown endpoints China. I'll stick with Claude and ChatGPT on Copilot for now.

I've just discovered comments aren't working for anonymous users. They appear to work, and the logs say they worked, but they're not saving to the comment index.

I'll get this fixed by tomorrow. Apologies if you've tried to leave a comment recently. If you log in with a Microsoft account, however, you will have no problem commenting.

Happy February!

Yesterday got up to -3.2°C, the warmest we've had since 1am a week ago Thursday. Officially at O'Hare the temperature hit -3.9°C. Reading the forecast is excruciating: -3°C today, -2°C tomorrow, the same Tuesday and Wednesday, with the possibility of just touching freezing on Thursday afternoon.

Cassie got an hour and 20 minutes of walks yesterday, though, so at least she and I are no longer climbing the walls. We're about to go out again as the sun will make the -3.6°C feel almost tropical. First, though: groceries. Nothing can slow this swinger down today!

Cassie and I just finished a 41-minute walk through the neighborhood, bringing her total walkies over an hour for the first time in a week and a half. As I mentioned yesterday, we've both gone a bit stir-crazy without the exercise.

While it is a tiny bit warmer today, it's still below freezing. But now it's close enough to freezing that the tons of salt have started working again so tonight someone will get an overdue bath.

At least I'm now over 310,000 steps for January, which means I still have gotten at least 10,000 steps per day on average every calendar month since I started keeping track in October 2014. It's a small victory.

The sun just came out, reminding me that gray skies don't last forever. Neither will all this crap:

• The OAFPOTUS swapping out the head of the Lollipop Guild¹ for the guy who took $50,000 from an FBI agent in a bribery sting doesn't change anything in Minnesota.
• Molly White asks, where are all the freedom-loving crypto bosses now? Right: they're bankrolling the administration and the Congress who are causing all this shit. Because right-wing governments are always, always about the grift.
• Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman explains exactly how the OAFPOTUS's pick for Federal Reserve Chair will likely be "the least influential...ever."
• Jeff Maurer reminds the sane among us that it doesn't matter whether victims are "good" or "bad".
• Julia Ioffe introduces us to "the 'MAGA Barbie' redecorating the State Department."
• Josh Marshall draws a straight line between billionaires demanding privacy for things that everyone else has to declare publicly and ICE doing the same thing. Hint: neither group wants accountability for their actions.

Well, I guess that's it. And the skies are cloudy again.

Cassie and I took a 2.88 km walk at lunchtime today, which turned out to be the longest walk we've taken since January 11th (6.28 km). Why? Because for the first time in over a week, the temperature got above -6°C. No kidding: it hasn't been this warm since 2:16 am last Thursday.

In fairness, we took the same route as a walk on January 13th, which was 60 meters and 4 seconds shorter only because of where I started the workout on my Garmin. Of course, that walk was 14 degrees warmer than today's.

After two weeks of below-freezing weather, I'm done. The National Weather Service doesn't have above-freezing temperatures in the 5-day forecast, but Weather Underground has us above freezing a week from today.

Cassie has a full double coat, which has thickened considerably in the last few weeks (woe to my vacuum cleaner in February). So my rule of thumb is that above -8°C (18°F) we can stay outside for 30-35 minutes, and above -5°C (23°F) until one of us gets cold. Above freezing there's no limit; her fur is that thick. Which is why I really, really want a thaw. It's supposed to be -4°C tomorrow, which is warm enough to walk to the dog park, as long as we pop into Burning Bush Brewing to warm up after.

Also, because we haven't been able to walk very much, I just had seven days in a row without making my 10,000 step goal. I got only 58,132 steps last Friday through yesterday. Today I'm already over 8,000, so I am pretty sure I'll get there, just as I'm pretty sure I'll be over 310,000 for January as I have 300,847 so far. But this will be my worst month for steps ever. (I got 305,385 steps in February 2021, but that's still 10,906 per day.)

Lack of exercise has made me irritable and made Cassie barky. (She may be irritable too, but she's such a sweet dog it's hard to tell.) The mild warm-up over the next week will, I hope, help.