The roofing project continues apace, taking advantage of an exceptionally lovely bit of weather this week. So, yay us, new roof and all. But I'm trying to work at home today—my last WFH day until June 8th, in fact—and the roofers have devised new ways to make it suck.
First came the generator. I don't know whatever reason they needed to put a large generator outside my office window, but there it sat for about 90 minutes. Closing my window helped the noise but not the temperature (remember, they relocated my air conditioners to put roof under them), and a generator makes a lot of noise that can go right through a wall.
The generator finally stopped around 10:30. Finally! I opened the window again and got back to it, until just a few minutes ago when I detected they had started spreading tar right outside my window. Fortunately, this appears to be the final stage of the actual roof replacement, so I expect my home office will be perfectly serviceable again in time for me to work downtown tomorrow and Thursday.
I'm also getting a headache from the VOCs in the tar.
This may be a good time to take Cassie for her lunchtime walk.
I woke up to this at the butt crack of dawn today:
My bedroom is directly under those men. My home office is just behind them. As I write this I'm watching a guy go back and forth in front of that dormer with a large tool. Oh, and there's the power saw...
It's otherwise a beautiful day, so on that point both Cassie and I are happy I'm working from home and will be able to go for a nice walk after my 11:30 meeting. But I really would have preferred they start my roof tomorrow when I'll be in the Loop.
During the weeks around our Spring Concert, like during the first couple of weeks of December, I have almost no free time. The Beethoven performance also took away an entire day. Yesterday I had hoped to finish a bit of code linking my home weather station to Weather Now, but alas, I studied German instead.
Plus, with the aforementioned Spring Concerts on Friday and today, I felt that Cassie needed some couch time. (We both sit on the couch while I read or watch TV and she gets non-stop pats. It's good for both of us.) She'll get more couch time tonight, don't worry. But she'll also be home alone for about 7 hours today.
I don't have rehearsal tomorrow, and in fact I have no responsibilities beyond my normal day job until next Saturday, so I should finish the coding soon. (I also have a task for an old client that will take me a dozen or so hours, and I really need to start that before my trip.)
In the hour I have before Cassie's next walk and me driving out to Oak Park, I need to study more German and some Czech. In the former we're now discussing how the bear and the mouse need to an apartment („Der Bär und die Maus brauchen eine Wohnung”, for what purpose I can only imagine), and in the latter, whether I eat salt („Jíš sůl?”) and that they have good coffee („Kávu mají dobrou”). Clearly I have more work to do in Czech.
The Daily Parker began as a joke-of-the-day engine at the newly-established braverman.org on 13 May 1998. This will be my 8,907th post since 1998 and my 8,710th since 13 November 2005. And according to a quick SQL Server query I just ran, The Daily Parker contains 15,043,497 bytes of text and HTML.
A large portion of posts just curate the news and opinions that I've read during the day. But sometimes I actually employ thought and creativity, as in these favorites from the past 25 years:
- Old Man Moskowitz, sent in by an old friend in New York, 26 May 1998.
- My all-time-favorite Jewish joke, 23 June 1998. (And my second-favorite, 31 January 2003.)
- My all-time-favorite engineering joke, 11 February 2000.
- An essay on conspiracies and coincidence, 22 January 2006.
- Rant about Microsoft certification exams, 29 June 2006.
- Feeling sad about the end of Kodachrome, 31 December 2010.
- My friends and I debate the merits (such as they were) of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R), 26 March 2011.
- An examination of the Astrolabe lawsuit against the Time Zone Database, 22 October 2011, and Astrolabe's response on 14 October 2011.
- A rant about Tea Party Republicans, 14 August 2012.
- Three articles in the New York Times inspire two lengthy explanations and a rant, 18 December 2012.
- The Y2K problem and other date disasters in programming, 29 April 2018.
- The Music Theory A-Z challenge, starting on 1 April 2019.
- The entire series on logical fallacies, July-August 2019.
- My obituary for Parker, 18 November 2020.
- Star Trek: Discovery's 3rd season irked me, 3 December 2020.
- Neon CRM also irked me, 10 February 2021. (Hmm...I wrote longer blog posts in the months when I didn't have a dog.)
- Cassie comes home from PAWS, 16 March 2021.
- My struggles to play SimCity 4, 25 years after I bought it, 8 May 2021.
- Lots of posts tagged "Photography," but particularly around the time I finished scanning all my slides (from 1983 to 2001).
Also interesting is how I can chart key events in my life just by looking at how often I posted:
Right now, I'm predicting the 10,000th post on 5 August 2025. Keep reading and find out.
I moved to my house exactly six months ago today, but only this past Saturday did I unpack the last box. I had asked two different carpenters about building in bookshelves in what I designated a library even before I moved in. Both carpenters ghosted me after taking measurements. (Great business practices, guys.)
So in January I went back to 57th Street Bookcase in Evanston, from which my mom and I had gotten bookshelves at various times going back to the mid-1990s. The bookcases arrived Friday, allowing me to transform this:
Into this:
(The coffee table came from 57th St as well.)
I spent a couple hours enjoying the finished room over the weekend. Even Cassie appears to like it better.
The new bookcases are cherry, so they'll darken over time. They should match the older ones in a couple of years.
This weekend involved about 5 hours of dog walks, including 2 with another dog, a disruption to Cassie's environments (new bookshelves, details later), an art fair, and my friend's two toddlers (ages 2 and 4). We're both pooped.
Cassie literally. I know what she ate yesterday, and I'm so glad I got to see it again today.
How my week is going so far. Wednesday evening:
Yesterday evening:
You can hear Weird Al on NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! this weekend.
Yesterday's temperature at O'Hare got up to 17°C, with a forecast of 17°C again today. Just perfect for a 4 km walk (in each direction) to Horner Park DFA, where Cassie met tons of new friends and stole dozens of their toys (she gave them back):
Today's plan calls for a Ride in the Car! (I need groceries) and another 10 km or so of walkies.
We get about 30 days a year this perfect, so we use them. Pity I have to go into my downtown office tomorrow...
Life is skittles and life is beer!
Seriously, just check out this forecast:
Today
Sunny, with a high near 7. East northeast wind 15 to 20 km/h.
Tonight
Mostly clear, with a low around 3. Northeast wind 10 to 15 km/h becoming southeast after midnight.
Saturday
Sunny, with a high near 12. South southeast wind 15 to 20 km/h becoming east northeast in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 30 km/h.
Saturday Night
Mostly clear, with a low around 4. East wind 10 to 15 km/h.
Sunday
Sunny, with a high near 13. Southeast wind 10 to 15 km/h, with gusts as high as 25 km/h.
Sunday Night
Partly cloudy, with a low around 7.
Monday
Partly sunny, with a high near 18.
Monday Night
Mostly clear, with a low around 9.
Tuesday
Sunny, with a high near 21.
Tuesday Night
Mostly clear, with a low around 12.
Wednesday
Sunny, with a high near 23.
Wednesday Night
Clear, with a low around 12.
Thursday
Sunny, with a high near 24.
That's about as perfect an April week as we can get.
Oh, and check out this girl, who lost 3.6 kg since her last vet visit. That means she only has 800 grams to go before hitting her ideal weight:
She's fitting into her harness again. Now, if I could just lose 5 kg, that would be great.
At my day job, I go into our downtown office at least once a week, which turns out to be about once a week longer than almost everyone else. I like the change of scene, and Cassie gets to spend those days at day camp, so it's a win for everyone.
The 90%-or-so remote work that people have elected also means we have tons of empty offices while our multi-year leases run their courses. So, after waiting almost a year for the furniture upgrade that never came, the office manager today said "just go take the office next door to yours." Cool. Better furniture, a (very slightly) different view, and...that's about it.
While I move my stuff 4 meters to the west, you can read these:
Finally, in keeping with me schlepping my books and laptop next door, Salesforce and Meta have put 22,000 m² of downtown Chicago office space on the secondary market, terrifying commercial real estate owners everywhere.