The Daily Parker

Stuff I'll read before rehearsal today:

• Senior administration officials are re-thinking their strategy after doing almost nothing correctly in their first two weeks.
• The "bucket with no bottom" that is the West Wing continues to leak in historical proportions.
• The Republican Party has been bullshitting the American public, and now it's even more obvious.
• The Speaker of the UK House of Commons has forbidden President Trump from speaking at Westminster Palace.
• We've had almost no snow since December 19th, which is just fine by me.
• We did, however, have a meteor explode over Lake Michigan last night.

Back to the mines...

(Meteorological) Winter is less than a week old and already we've set a winter weather record. We got our first snowfall of the season yesterday, and the 163 mm we got officially in Chicago was the largest snowfall we've ever gotten for the first snow of the season.

Davenport, Iowa, got an inconvenient 259 mm. Yikes.

While I'm going through a boring cycle of NuGet updates, unit tests, and inexplicable app-publishing failures related to the above, I'm piling up a crapload of articles to read on my flight tomorrow:

• Lifehacker explains how to see everything on your home network. (It's not that hard.)
• The Chicago Tribune takes you inside Underwriters Laboratories in Northbrook, Ill., where my grandfather worked for 30 years.
• A group of physicists and mathematicians has listed the 15 most-complex subway maps in the world. (We're #12! We're #12!)
• Illinois got a metric shit-ton (i.e., a shite-tonne) of snow yesterday, but not as much as Indiana.
• The French Academy got rid of the circonflexe 20 years ago, but the French people are just now outraged that textbooks are starting to reflect the change.
• The infamous Lincoln Park Pirates (officially known as Lincoln Towing) could be shut down after decades of violating state law. They're across the street from a cemetery, so dancing on their grave will not be difficult.

Back to work. At least my build is succeeding now.

Last Friday, Chicago got up to 17°C, not a record but certainly not what we expect on February 19th. Today it's a more-seasonable 3°C.

Tomorrow afternoon we're going up to the same temperature, but with a covering of wet snow, gusty winds, and general unpleasantness.

Saturday's forecast? 10°C and sunny.

Ah, Spring.

It's sunny and just above freezing today, and all our snow melted over the weekend. So let's just remember for a moment the weather in Chicago five years ago today:

And just two years ago today, we got our 34th consecutive day with snowfall.

So I'll take a snowless, above-freezing February 1st any year.

This photo from my commute this morning shows why Chicagoans typically keep an extra pair of shoes at the office:

Sunday morning, after Saturday's snowstorm:

Last night, making mini turkey pot pies for tomorrow:

That's all from scratch. Inside a rosemary-sage crust, from the bottom we've got turkey, pinot noir-reduction gravy, stuffing with organic Italian sausage, and cranberry sauce made with cranberries, orange, honey, and a secret ingredient that makes them amazing.

I think I'm going to gain three kilos this weekend.

For the last couple of days, I've missed my 10,000-step goal by 100 to 500 steps. This is why:

Yesterday Chicago got its biggest November snowfall in 120 years; today it's well below freezing. Walking is treacherous at best for bipeds and uncomfortable for quadrupeds. So today might also be a miss.

I haven't missed three days in a row since March 5th-7th—when, not coincidentally, we had a miserable, snowy week. Winter is hard on fitness.

The good: A new study shows that drinking 3-5 cups of coffee a day has measurable health benefits.

The bad: A black resident of Santa Monica, Calif., got hauled out of her apartment at gunpoint by 19 police officers after a white neighbor reported someone trying to break in.

The ugly: Yale law student Omar Aziz writes about the soul of a Jihadist.

And the neutral, which could be ugly: forecasters predict 15-30 cm of snow in Chicago tomorrow night into Saturday morning.