The Daily Parker

Thursday evening, at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance:

That's Bill Kurtis, Peter Sagal, Karen Chee, Alonzo Bodden, and Helen Hong at this week's "Wait Wait" taping. The "Not My Job" guest was actor Matt Walsh:

Then yesterday, Cassie and I trundled up to Spiteful Brewing in the sun:

Not a bad few days, in all.

Cassie has spent the last two weeks creating found art out of one of my area rugs. Yesterday the "found" part got too much for me and I let the rug go. Pity, too; I won it at a silent auction for $300 only in 2016, and neither Parker nor Cassie tried to destroy it until this spring.

Here's Cassie's final expression of the piece. Note not only the center section, which Cassie exfiltrated from the house a small bit at a time, but also the left edge, where she expressed a more compelling feeling of the interplay between organic lines and straight edges:

Now that I've got a few weeks without travel, performances*, or work conferences, I can go back to not having enough time to read all the news that interests me. Like these stories:

• The Economist examines how Putin might be punished for war crimes in Ukraine.
• Max Boot wonders why Tucker Carlson still loves his old Uncle Vlad.
• The IPCC says we have eight years to cut greenhouse emissions by 50% or the planet will pass the 1.5°C warming threshold no matter what else we do. Welp.
• Via Bruce Schneier, criminals have started phishing data providers for sensitive information by pretending to be law enforcement.
• Michelle Goldberg wonders why Republican politicians are suddenly afraid of...furries?
• Tom Scott explains how Britain knows what time it is, and a British comedy show takes Denmark to task for not pinning their clocks to UTC.
• As part of his promotional tour for his new novel Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi has given us the short story "Grizzly Bear Conflict Manager."

Finally, Michelin has handed out its 2022 stars for Chicago. Nothing surprising on the list, but I now have four more restaurants to try.

* Except that I volunteered to help a church choir do five Messiah choruses on Easter Sunday, so I've got two extra rehearsals and a service in the next 12 days.

Bonus update: the fog this morning made St Boniface Cemetery especially spooky-looking when Cassie and I went out for her morning walk:

I took Cassie for a 40-minute walk around Lexington's historic district on the way back from Berea:

The light really wasn't great, so I didn't take a lot of photos. Plus Cassie has a way of adding motion blur to every photo I shoot.

Two weeks ago I attended a conference by the Chicago River, which had dye left over from St Patrick's Day. Add a passing fire boat and it's Christmas in March:

Editing photos on my phone doesn't always produce the best results. Faster, cheaper, better, pick two, right? Fortunately I have Adobe Lightroom at home, and deploying software yesterday took a long time.

Here are my re-edits. Better? Worse? At the very least, they're all correctly-proportioned (2x3) instead of whatever I guessed on my little phone screen.

Thursday's sunrise at Nicura Ranch:

Berea College:

One of the ranch's permanent residents:

Down the road from the ranch:

Cinnamon, who rather preferred that I keep Cassie outside the pasture, thank you very much:

I've got a couple more from the past two weeks I'll post after lunch.

We're about to get back on the road for our 700 km drive back to Chicago. Before leaving, I just wanted to highlight Ravinia Festival's upcoming 2022 season. In particular, note who they're partnering with for these performances of La Clemenza di Tito and Don Giovanni.

Oh, yes, I will be there.

The day started like this:

Then it became this:

And returned to this:

But because of this:

It is now this:

As for the horses and goats on the ranch, I had some challenges introducing Cassie to them. The principal challenge was Cassie barking her head off at all of them, which two of the horses and both of the goats wanted nothing to do with, but one of the horses looked ready to teach Cassie the formula F=ma in a direct and possibly painful way.

Now that I've downloaded 12 hours of email and figured out where to have dinner later, I'm going to head back and hope that Cassie hasn't figured out how to open doors.

(Also, I'll edit the photos properly when I get home and possibly re-post them.)

Cassie and I are at a lovely ranch in Kentucky where tomorrow she'll meet goats and tonight I've met a 1990s-era Internet connection. Well, I didn't come here to surf the Web, so I'll just deal.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting outside listening to frogs. Lots of frogs. And a hound somewhere down the road.

I'm about 18 hours from taking Cassie on a long road trip, and I have two problems that may cause headaches (one of them literally). First, trees and grasses all over Chicago have started having lots of sex, causing really uncomfortable stuffiness and sinus congestion for me. Second, one of the tires of my car has a slow leak.

The first one will work itself out naturally, with the help of several boxes of tissues. The second one requires a trip to the local tire center, which I'm glad to report is about 200 meters from my house.

Updates as conditions warrant.

I just finished upgrading an old, old, old Windows service to .NET 6 and a completely different back end. It took 6.4 hours, soup to nuts, and now the .NET 6 service is happily communicating with Azure and the old .NET Framework 4.6 service is off.

Meanwhile, the Post published a map (using a pretty lazy algorithm) describing county-by-county what sunrise times will look like in January 2024 if daylight saving time becomes permanent. I'd have actually used a curve tool but, hey, the jagged edges look much more "data-driven." (They used the center point of each county.)

Now it's 22:45 (daylight saving time), and I need to empty Cassie and go to bed. But I'm pretty jazzed by how I spent a rainy afternoon on PTO. It was definitely more rewarding than tramping out in the rain to a couple of breweries for the Brews & Choos project, which had been Plan A.