The Daily Parker

At least, I don't think so. I'm about to go to a very small wedding where somehow we'll all stay two meters apart, meaning I'll be in my car or indoors all day. Outdoors, meanwhile, it's -13°C. It got down to -16°C overnight, so this qualifies as an improvement.

I was hoping to make 10k steps every day this year, but living in Chicago and having some ability to balance "would like to" against "have to" goals, I say no to today.

I will get 5,000 though. I haven't missed that number in six years.

On this day in 2011, Chicago got so much snow it shut down the city for almost 48 hours. So it's fitting we're having the biggest snowfall of the winter so far right now:

With 241 mm of snow recorded at the National Weather Service office in Romeoville and 173 mm at O’Hare International Airport as of Sunday morning, the city officially logged its second storm this week with more than 150 mm of snow — something that hasn’t happened since January 2014, officials said.

The heaviest period of snowfall was between 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 a.m. Sunday, according to meteorologists. Visibility during that time was reduced to less than 400 m during much of that time, with snow falling at a rate of an 25 mm an hour or faster, according to the weather service.

The Tribune published that around 9am; as of noon, O'Hare's snowfall reached 330 mm. They also have some photos for those of you who live in climates that have no interesting variations to gawk at. Here's my neighborhood:

And it's still coming down. Which means it's a perfect day to go to a warm (-ish, they still have to keep doors open) brewery and read for a bit. Because, dammit, I will get my 10,000 steps today.

After 312 days in a row exceeding 10,000 steps, yesterday I fell asleep after dinner with only 9,624 on my Veno. I even did a 5.7-kilometer walk around my neighborhood. Oops.

In a way, though, I'm a little relieved. Maybe I can be a bit lazy for a couple of days before starting another streak of 300+ days?

As of yesterday, I've hit my daily step goal 250 times in a row. My previous record streak, which ended 7 November 2019, was 207 days. I'm pretty sure I'll make it another 115 or more days, barring injury or impenetrable snowfall.

And because this current streak began on the last day I traveled outside of Illinois, that means it's also been 250 days since I last flew anywhere. The previous streak of 221 days ended when I flew to London on 31 August 2018.

So, every day I'm prevented from traveling by fears of an entirely predictable (and predicted) disease, the response to which dozens of governments predictably botched, I'm setting a new record.

So frustrating.

As planned—exactly as planned, if I may pat myself on the back a bit—I took a walk yesterday. To wit: the first thing I did immediately upon turning [redacted] years old was to walk an entire marathon. And I did it in the Chicago Marathon course time of 6:30*:

* Unfortunately, my course time was 7:11, which is 41 minutes too long. My goals were distance first and pace second, course time third, because I knew (a) my pace would be around 9:00/km and (b) I knew I'd need more than 10 minutes of rest along the way. If I did the actual mass event, I would aim for 8:45/km and 20 minutes' rest along the way, so I clearly need to train a bit.

It felt great, possibly because I planned food and fluids well. Along the way I drank about 3 L of Gatorade and a liter of regular water, plus a grande iced tea from a Starbucks in Evanston; ate 4 Clif bars; and changed my socks just before the 27th kilometer. I also managed to take a few photos.

At 6.8 km, 59 minutes in, Juneway Park on the Chicago/Evanston border:

Just a bit farther up, at South Boulevard Beach in Evanston, I found this gentleman in his shady practice room:

At 14.0 km, 2:05, the Bahá'i House of Worship:

Just past 20 miles, at 32.5 km and 4:51, one of the nicest parts of the Robert McClory trail if you're on foot, and one of the scariest if you're on a bike:

The last 5 km or so looked like this, with no trees and lots of sun:

I finished the walk just a block or so shy of the Lake Bluff Brewing Company, which I reviewed way back in February. Since my goal was to end up exactly at that place, it felt pretty good to plan a route that long to 99.1% accuracy.

My total stats for the day: 56,562 steps, 47.7 km.

Today, on my official birthday, the weather is once again absolutely perfect, but given the growing blister on my right foot, I will probably not walk another 40 kilometers. That said, I may walk the Chicago Marathon virtual half-marathon in a couple of weeks, because why not?

I woke up this morning to a beautiful early-autumn morning: 16°C, low humidity, clear skies, and a gentle breeze. Parker celebrated by eating a live cicada, which made the mistake of buzzing when he sniffed it.

My plan today? Starting as close to 9:09 am as practical, I'm going to walk up to Lake Bluff, about 42 km. Full report when I recover.

I'm glad I took a long walk yesterday and not today, because of this:

In other news:

• State health officials warn that suburban Cook County (the immediate suburbs surrounding Chicago) has experienced a resurgence in Covid-19 cases, and placed it and 29 other counties on warning that social restrictions could resume next week.
• Moreover, Covid-19 leads in a massive wave of excess deaths reported by the Cook County Medical Examiner this week. Suicides, homicides, and overdoses are also at near-record levels.
• Jonathan Russo, writing in TPM Cafe, lays out the case that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin got what he wanted with his meddling in the 2016 US elections, and stands to gain even more if the president wins (or somehow achieves) re-election.
• The nationalist, right-wing disease has started to infect Canada as well, as their new Conservative Party leader Erin O'Toole has adopted a "Canada First" platform.
• Graceland Cemetery, which doubles as an arboretum, will be closed for the longest period in its 160-year history because of damage from the August 10th derecho.
• Mother Jones obtained video from a 10 December 2015 deposition showing Donald Trump boasting about his lack of ethics and ignorance of the law.

Finally, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine has called for an end to Daylight Saving Time—not just the twice-annual time changes associated with the practice.

Today is not only a Saturday, it's also the first day all week under 32°C. So I took a little 26 km walk around the neighborhood. It felt good, and I maintained a Chicago Marathon-qualifying pace throughout. I also underestimated my water needs by half, so I've drunk about two liters since I got home.

And now, I must go to the store. Yay.

I kind of got into the flow today, so things to read later just piled up:

• Illinois found 1,532 new known Covid-19 cases as of today, with four downstate, bright-red counties now getting warned that their numbers are rising quickly.
• The GOP failures on containing this disease keep mounting.
• Greg Sargent points out that "Trump's authoritarian crackdown is so bad that even some in the GOP are blasting it."
• Maeve Higgins finds that her American passport just doesn't work anymore.
• Garmin's entire production app suite remains offline, but someone found time to rearrange their status page.
• QANTAS has retired its last Boeing 747, and gave it a lovely sign-off.

And wait—you can make risotto in an Instant Pot? I might have to try that.

Four days after I switched from Fitbit to Garmin, all of Garmin's online services have gone offline:

The problems with those services also mean that a range of features can't be used on Garmin's own devices: it is not possible to create new routes to go running or cycling, for instance, or to share those activities on services like Strava once they are completed.

The devices themselves continue to work as normal with the data they do have, however, meaning that any data collected during the outage will be safe.

Garmin wrote on its official Twitter pages that the problems were also affecting its call centres, leaving users unable to get in touch through calls or online messages.

"We are currently experiencing an outage that affects Garmin Connect, and as a result, the Garmin Connect website and mobile app are down at this time," it wrote.

"This outage also affects our call centres, and we are currently unable to receive any calls, emails or online chats. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and apologise for this inconvenience."

This is not what Garmin customers want to see:

The error message on the Garmin Connect website suggests the problem is with their Cloudflare equipment:

Update: Based on Garmin employee's social-media posts, ZDNet now reports that the company experienced a catastrophic ransomware attack, most likely a new strain of WastedLocker. Fortunately, my Venu can hold 200 hours of data. So as long as they get it back up within a week or so, I shouldn't lose anything—unless the ransomware attack already destroyed my data from this past week.