The Daily Parker

A week ago Sunday, my friends picked me up in Aix-en-Provence and took me to their house in St-Martin-de-la-Brasque, about 30 km north, just south of the Luberon massif. I can see the appeal:

We then drove about 10 km to the Commune of Lourmarin, which may be even prettier than Aix:

Yes, Provence really does look like that. I really need to go back.

Let me tell you how much I suffered in Aix-en-Provence. I mean, just look at this stuff, starting with the street my hotel was on:

The Passage Agard, off Cours Mirabeau:

The Fontaine du Roi René at the east end of Cours Mirabeau:

Rue Aumône Vielle:

Finally, the Palais de Justice (the local courthouse) just past 9am on the 23rd:

Tomorrow: Lourmarin and St-Martin-de-la-Brasque.

During this last full week of summer, I haven't had a lot of time at home because we had to work in the office every day. And what a week.

I got home from work (and got Cassie home from day camp) right before some pretty impressive storms hit on Tuesday:

After discussing with a friend how a lot of the humidity we've experienced this summer comes from corn and soybean transpiration to our west, he discussed it with Bing's DALL-E 3:

(Not sure what happened with the spine of the book...or the windmill in the cover photo...or the title...but I did laugh.)

Relief is coming, though. A line of thunderstorms went through just before sunrise, and the cold front driving them will drop the dewpoint from 21°C now to 15°C by this time tomorrow:

Then Wednesday night my doorbell camera picked something up that I didn't expect:

Turns out, I have a new houseguest, who has politely set up shop by my front door to help keep mosquitoes (and one unfortunate cicada!) out:

That is a furrow or foliate spider, as far as I can tell.

Wednesday evening she even got a visitor:

Sadly, as is typical of orb weaver romances, her gentleman caller probably did not survive the evening. I don't judge; she's caught a lot of mosquitoes, she's entitled to celebrate. And I think I saw some baby spiders last night, so maybe I'll invite a couple inside?

Today, I'm taking a PTO day to catch up on everything, and to clear a path for my 4-hour walk tomorrow.

Cassie found a comfortable position on the couch while I was making lunch yesterday.

I use Adobe Lightroom to catalog and retouch my photos. Like any complex piece of software, it has a lot of features I haven't learned how to use yet. So I decided to play around this morning. Here's a new edit of Cassie's Gotcha Day photo from March:

Here's the photo as previously published:

Other than the aspect ratio change, the changes are subtle, but I think the top photo is better. And Cassie is just as adorable in both.

Cassie and I adopted each other three years ago today. And yet, she remains one of my most frustrating photographic subjects:

Regardless, I got really lucky when I found her at PAWS. I hope she feels the same way.

I went through the photos I took on my trip to Germany last week and put a couple of them through Lightroom.

Getting coffee in Viktualienmarkt:

A very practical car for city life in post-war Germany, the 1955 BMW Isetta:

The Trödelmarktinsel, Nürnberg:

A better edit of my earlier photo of the main gate at Dachau:

And finally, I had a really great view of the New York metro area on the flight home:

Finally recovered from jet lag, our hero takes a 6-kilometer walk along the Isar and through Glockenbachviertel:

As the sun set, it found a gap in the clouds which I hope means tomorrow it'll come out for a while. You can see a little bit of it here on the Paulaner Brewery:

(I didn't stop in; any Brews & Choos stops on this trip will come tomorrow, in Nuremburg.)

The Theresien-Gymnasium:

And back at Marienplatz just as twilight became night:

Now, off to find a beer.

A weather pattern has set up shop near Chicago that threatens to occlude the sun for the next week, in exchange for temperatures approaching 15°C the first weekend of February. We've already had 43 days with above-normal temperatures this winter, and just 12 below normal during the cold snap from January 13th through the 22nd. By February 2nd, 84% of our days will have had above-normal temperatures since December 1st.

Thank you, El Niño. Though I'm not sure the gloominess is a fair exchange for it.

Elsewhere:

• President Biden, whose name didn't even appear on the ballot, won the New Hampshire Democratic primary by a larger margin than the XPOTUS won the Republican primary.
• The Washington State legislature has debated scrapping Daylight Saving Time entirely, a move that does not require USDOT sign-off, as the simplest path to avoiding the cognitive challenge of moving clocks twice a year. That this would cause 4am sunrises and 8pm sunsets in Seattle in June has not gone without notice.
• Speaking of Washington, aviation reporter Bill Saporito picks up the Atlantic's theme from 2019 and blames Boeing's problems on its cultural takeover by McDonnel-Douglas in 1997.
• New research finds that companies' return-to-office ("return to the past") mandates have no effect on profits or stock price, which everyone below the executive level already knew.
• My religious group has become the largest single denomination in the US. (We already took over most of Europe in the last century.)

Finally, Minnesota-based wildlife photographer Benjamin Olson discovered that a mouse had moved into his car. So naturally, he set up a photo trap. And naturally, it's totes adorbs.

She's in this photo, trust me:

A bit closer, after we got home: