Before I get to the best form of public transit available in the US, let's everyone say hello to my sister's dog, Omen:
Omen is a whippet. Good. (She's quite devo-ted to him.)
Anyway, this is how I got from the BART to the start of my 5.5 kilometer walk on Saturday:
If you take the Powell and Hyde line, the best part comes at the corner of Hyde and Lombard, at the top of Russian Hill. Just look at this view, and imagine seeing Alcatraz, Angel Island, and Tiburon directly ahead! (I have seen them from here. Trust me*.)
During my walk, I got to the end of the fog bank just before the Bay Bridge, and caught these cool lighting effects:
* OK, don't trust me. Here are two other photos I took from the same spot, the top one in April 2005, and the bottom one in May 2012:
As threatened yesterday, we got a few rounds of lake-effect snow overnight and this morning. Since not all the leaves have fallen yet, it still looks pretty:
And of course, one member of my household really, really, really likes a fresh snowfall:
Right now we've got about 100 mm on the ground. That will melt quickly as the forecast calls for above-freezing temperatures from tomorrow morning onward, reaching possibly 18°C on Saturday. I hope so, because I've got a 20 km hike planned for the day, and I'd like it not to freeze important bits of me off.
I'll have some photos from San Francisco later today. Right now I have to shovel my walkway again, then take Cassie for a 3 km walk so I get my steps in.
Butters the Engineer sometimes gets too lazy even to get her whole body onto a bed that's twice her size:
Two more days of wrangling two dogs with opposite understandings of how to behave on a leash.
Even though I have a cute beagle hanging around my office this week, and even though I've had a lot to do at work (including a very exciting deployment today), the world keeps turning:
- The OAFPOTUS pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao for the crime of running a massive money-laundering website, because of course Zhao bribed him.
- Brian Beutler thinks the OAFPOTUS's corruption has gotten too obvious for even his supporters to ignore, leading to "the things Democrats like to talk about and the things I wish they’d talked about [beginning] to converge."
- Speaking of corruption, not to mention things that are so prima facie bad that it takes a special kind of felon to even suggest it, privately funding the US military is an obviously illegal and demonstrably dangerous idea. Just ask the Roman Senate.
- Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to reconvene the House, and the Republican majority in the Senate refuse to waive the filibuster on funding SNAP, which are the two biggest things the Republican majority has chosen to do instead of making sure 40 million Americans don't go hungry next week.
- Michael Tomasky makes a point that I've made to one of my Republican trolls acquaintances: it really doesn't matter to the national Democratic Party if Zohran Mamdani wins the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday: It's NYC, not Maine.
Finally, if you're looking to pick up a little lakeside real estate, this house in Kenilworth, Ill., is on the market for the first time ever. It's a steal at $7 million.
I have mentioned how odd Butters can be. Part of her oddness seems to come from her being a little princess who craves comfort to the exclusion of propriety.
Exhibit the first, this morning, less than a minute after I stripped my bed:
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I had to pick her up to get her to move.
Exhibit the second, yesterday afternoon, rearranging the dog bed in my office for...reasons:
Exhibit the third, last night, getting quite annoyed that Cassie has trouble respecting her personal space:
The poor dear suffers so.
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...
I just got back from a 45-minute walk with Cassie, in which we covered 4.95 km (just over 3 miles) at a pace that Butters could never in a dog's age keep up for that long. According to my doorbell camera, Butters raised four objections to this at roughly 10-minute intervals, fortunately none of which lasted longer than 40 seconds. And she appeared to forgive me when we got back.
We're now heading to Spiteful for a little while. All of us will go. It can take 20 minutes to get there if Butters so desires.
I would apologize to my immediate neighbors, except the one to the north moved out recently, and the one to the south has a 4-year-old boy. Let's compare Butters bellowing for 4 minutes against the little boy refusing to eat for an hour, shall we?
I also made some progress this morning on the replacement for this blog software. Some of the fiddly bits are behind me, but some, including how to handle images, are ahead of me. But I hope to have the minimum viable product in a public test environment before the end of the year. Here's hoping.
Butters has stayed at Château Punzun many times. And yet, I swear she's getting stranger, starting with this burrowing behavior:
And her engineering:
Why the dog bed needs folding over and rearranging, I have no idea. I keep flattening it after Butters leaves, and she keeps doing this.
Of course, Cassie has opinions about me giving Butters attention:
And Butters is definitely not a morning dog. After showering and getting dressed, with Cassie checking on my progress several times, it took two hands and a gentle nudge with my foot to get Butters off the bed today:
I do appreciate how comfortable Butters seems to be at my house. The first time she stayed over, a few years ago now, she let everyone in the ZIP Code know how upset the turn of events had made her. If you have never encountered an irate beagle, enjoy your good fortune.
Updates as conditions warrant.
We've got a houseguest again. She started off as dramatic as usual, clearly put out that her humans had left her with me:
And yet, as soon as I put Cassie's harness on, Butters decided it's not so bad hanging out at Inner Drive Technology WHQ:
Of course, having met this beagle before, I've rolled up a rug and closed a couple of doors. She has decided that my office is a good place to be, which works for me because I can see her.
Regular doom posting will resume soon.