The Daily Parker

I didn't have as much time to edit photos yesterday as I expected, so I only have two more for today:

And I want to give a big shout out to this little guy, named Bear, who forded the 5-meter-wide tidal pool all by himself:

I took 540 photos at Montrose Dog Beach today. I expect to post a bunch this afternoon and tomorrow evening. For now, though, here's a quick taste:

Did she have fun? Oh, my yes.

Cassie and I went to the Montrose Dog-Friendly Area (aka Montrose Dog Beach) this afternoon for the first time. I don't recall ever seeing her have more fun, which says a lot. Tomorrow I'll bring my real camera and a long lens to get some action shots.

Cassie, she of large webbed feet and recent Labrador retriever ancestry, has steadfastly refused to go into the kiddie pool at the dog park for as long as I've had her. Until today, that is:

She kind of padded in, turned around a couple of times, snapped at the water, and delicately stepped out. Then she did it again. Twice.

Well, OK, maybe this weekend when it's 33°C we'll hit Montrose Beach? (Note to self: schedule a bath for Cassie this weekend.)

I left Cassie all alone for 5½ hours yesterday, and came home to this baleful look:

And yet, 20 minutes later, all was forgiven:

(A 15-minute walk occurred between these two photos, which may have had something to do with the forgiveness.)

We have gloomy, misty weather today, keeping us mostly inside. Cassie has let me know how bored she is, so in the next few minutes we'll brave the spitting fog and see if anyone else has made it to the dog park.

Meanwhile:

• As today is May the Fourth (be with you), NPR reminded us of the time they produced a radio drama based on "A New Hope."
• It turns out, the FBI never actually got around to warning Rudy Giuliani that he was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign.
• The US Trustee, the Department of Justice official charged with enforcing bankruptcy laws, has told the court overseeing the National Rifle Administration's bankruptcy that the US Government opposes the organization's petition, instead arguing that NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre's mismanagement brought the NRA to its current state of affairs.
• Via Bruce Schneier, German security researchers successfully took over the infotainment system in a parked Tesla using a drone.
• David Frum says that "China is a paper dragon."

All right, off to the damp dog park.

Hello, CDC? I'd like to report some side-effects of my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. To wit: All I wanted to do on Friday was sleep. When I finally slept, my left arm was sore enough to wake me up a couple of times. But hey, I planned to sleep in yesterday anyway, so no biggie.

Cassie had other ideas. She poked her nose in my ear at 6:30. I shooed her away. At 6:45, she decided that the squirrel or bird or whateverthefuck outside had to die, and that was the end of my slumber for good.

According to my Garmin watch, the day I adopted Cassie I had averaged 7:48 of sleep a night for the preceding 30 days. My 7-day moving average hung out around the same value. As of today, my 30-day average has fallen to 7:17, and my 7-day moving average is 7:08 this morning. Most of this is Cassie. I have to go to bed at 10 to get a full night's sleep because the sun wakes her up at 6 and she wakes me up a few minutes later.

Now she's conked out on my office floor, and I desperately want a nap.

The United Winthrop Tower Cooperative started life in the early 1970s as a public housing development. In response to rising crime and costs on the order of $1m a year, the residents bought the building from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1993 and turned it into the affordable-housing co-op it remains today.

We had a really cool sunset Tuesday evening, so I snapped this on my walk with Cassie.

Everyone: D'awwwww!

Bit of a frustrating day, today. I spent 2½ hours trying to deploy an Azure function using the Az package in PowerShell, before giving up and going back to the AzureCLI. All of this to confirm a massive performance issue that I suspected but needed to see in a setting that eliminated network throughput as a possible factor. Yep: running everything completely within Azure sped it up by 11%, meaning an architecture choice I made a long time ago is definitely the problem. I factored the code well enough that I can replace the offending structure with a faster one in a couple of hours, but it's a springtime Sunday, so I don't really feel totally motivated right now to do so.

Lest you worry I have neglected other responsibilities, Cassie already got over an hour of walks and dog park time today, bringing her up to 10½ hours for the week. I plan to take her on another 45-minute walk in an hour or so. Last week she got almost 14 hours of walks, however. I blame the mid-week rain we got.

I also have a 30-minute task that will involve 15 minutes of setup, 10 minutes of tear-down, and 5 minutes of video recording. I will be so relieved next fall when all of our chorus work happens in person again.

Before I do that, however, I'm going to go hug my dog.