The Daily Parker

Welcome to stop #50 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Elmhurst Brewing Co., 171 N Addison Ave., Elmhurst
Train line: UP West, Elmhurst
Time from Chicago: 32 minutes (Zone D)
Distance from station: 300 m

Elmhurst Brewing opened in February 2018 and got through the pandemic with take-out and delivery. I can understand how: they have good beer. They brew in the back, then send the beer up to giant steel containers behind the bar, which creates a cool aesthetic in the bar area:

Marissa set out a flight of four 5-ounce pours. I started with the Go To Helles (4.7%, 23 IBU), a clean, malty lager with good length and complexity. Next, the Sabro Paradise APA (5.4%, 40 IBU) also had a clean feel with more malt than hops in an unexpectedly hazy pour. The Julius Squeezer Hazy IPA (6.7%, 21 IBU) had a great hop-malt balance with prominent Citra hops and a long, pleasant finish. Finally, the PrHopaganda West Coast IPA (7.1%, 71 IBU) had a big hop flavor without being "hop porn." All four really showed off the craft.

We have a concert in Elmhurst next March. I'll bring the crew to EBC for post-concert drinks.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? Many, unavoidable
Serves food? Full menu
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

The Chicago Transit Authority's RPM project has claimed another victim:

For comparison, here's the view from 10 days ago:

Yep. The Lawrence El station is gone. By the end of autumn, the entire east half of the embankment should be gone as well. I will post updates as interesting things happen.

Between 5pm Thursday and 6pm Friday, the dewpoint at O'Hare fell from 21°C to 9°C, to the relief of millions. At the moment O'Hare reports 24°C with a dewpoint of 13°C and only some high scattered clouds, which is about as close to perfect as Chicago can do. The light and gentle breeze coming through the windows underscores the (overdue) wisdom of moving my office into the sunroom a couple days ago:

Cassie especially likes being able to see, hear, and smell the small prey animals outside while I sit just a couple meters away:

Since I don't actually have to do any work for anyone else today, I plan to take full advantage of this weather with many kilometers of walking her and a spell at Half Acre Brewing with an old friend. But at the same time, with this new office arrangement, I don't feel like I'm wasting the weather by reading or writing at my desk. Which was exactly the point.

The environmental change I alluded to yesterday went much more smoothly than anticipated.

When I moved to my current place, I put Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters (IDTWHQ) in the room that most clearly said "office," the one off the kitchen with all the built-in bookshelves and the A/V stack the previous owners left behind. It faces south, but it has bay windows covered in ivy, providing subdued indirect light in the summer and lots of direct sunlight in the afternoon from October to March. While the bay windows provide some ventilation, the room gets a bit stuffy when they're closed, and doesn't really get much airflow when they're open. Also, the geometry of the room never quite worked with my desk. I had to squeeze around it to get into my chair, making the whole thing feel a bit constraining.

Add in 3-5 days of working from home every week, with my work laptop and secondary monitor occupying a hunk of real estate on the desk while dropping wires and power cables on the floor between the door and Cassie's bed, and the whole thing has felt really cramped for the last 18 months:

That, my friends, is bad feng shui.

Meanwhile, my easternmost room, overlooking the leafy side-street I live on, naturally became a sunroom:

I mean, light, air, and about half the time a dog on the couch? What's not to love? In fact, now in the second summer of working from home 60% or more, most days I wanted to sit on that couch with Cassie and read—especially when the weather permitted me to open all nine of those windows.

So, with a little help from Comcast to fix the cable running into my living room, yesterday I moved my office into the sunroom. Even with my work crap still occupying the same hunk of real estate, it just looks and feels so much better:

And the office? It became a sitting room:

I don't know how much I'll actually sit there, but its proximity to the kitchen means that when I entertain, people will use it for kitchen-adjacent overflow.

Cassie, naturally, freaked out a bit, and it took some coaxing for her to get back on the couch (probably because it was in the wrong place!). But as I write this, she's in the room with me, psychically commanding me to take her outside.

I don't understand why I didn't do this last year. It would have made the pandemic lockdown a ton more enjoyable. I mean, it only took me six years to configure my place in Lincoln Park correctly, but that had to do with the physical constraints imposed by having an entire server rack in one corner of the living room in an era before gigabit wi-fi. (The server rack had to go next to the POTS line jack because I used a DSL, and running a network cable through the walls to the other side of the living room was the only real option.)

This room really does feel better. And tomorrow, after Chicago's fever breaks, I'll open the windows.

Chicago's minor-league White Sox will play the New York Yankees tomorrow at a temporary 8,000-seat ballpark adjacent to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa:

The Sox and Yankees begin a three-game series in the most unusual of locations. Thursday’s game will be played at a temporary 8,000-seat ballpark on the Dyersville farm where the Academy Award-nominated 1989 movie “Field of Dreams” was filmed.

“I was raised to embrace the history of the game,” Sox manager Tony La Russa said Tuesday. “Too often we lose parts of it. We should do a better job and we should do that.

“ ‘Field of Dreams’ is a great movie, embraces all about family and (what) the game is all about. A very special opportunity. Our guys are really excited to be there. I’ve seen some of the comments already. Should be a great day for the White Sox.”

This will be the first major-league game ever played in Iowa.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his resignation this morning:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said Tuesday he would resign from office, succumbing to a ballooning sexual harassment scandal that fueled an astonishing reversal of fortune for one of the nation’s best-known leaders.

Mr. Cuomo said his resignation would take effect in 14 days. Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, will be sworn in to replace him.

“Given the circumstances, the best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to governing,” Mr. Cuomo said from his office in Manhattan. “And therefore that’s what I’ll do.”

The resignation of Mr. Cuomo, a three-term Democrat, came a week after a report from the New York State attorney general concluded that the governor sexually harassed nearly a dozen women, including current and former government workers, by engaging in unwanted touching and making inappropriate comments. The 165-page report also found that Mr. Cuomo and his aides unlawfully retaliated against at least one of the women for making her complaints public and fostered a toxic work environment.

Good. He needs to go. And yes, I am happy that my party threw the book at one of our own. We hold ourselves accountable, unlike the other guys.

But that's not all the Democratic Party did today. We also passed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill in the Senate with the support of nine Republicans:

The 69-to-30 vote follows weeks of turbulent private talks and fierce public debates that sometimes teetered on collapse, as the White House labored alongside Democrats and Republicans to achieve the sort of deal that had eluded them for years. Even though the proposal must still clear the House, where some Democrats recently have raised concerns the measure falls short of what they seek, the Senate outcome moves the bill one step closer to delivering President Biden his first major bipartisan win.

The bill proposes more than $110 billion to replace and repair roads, bridges and highways, and $66 billion to boost passenger and freight rail. That transit investment marks the most significant infusion of cash in the country’s railways since the creation of Amtrak about half a century ago, the White House said.

The infrastructure plan includes an additional $55 billion to address lingering issues in the U.S. water supply, such as an effort to replace every lead pipe in the nation. It allocates $65 billion to modernize the country’s power grid. And it devotes billions in additional sums to rehabilitating waterways, improving airports and expanding broadband Internet service, particularly after a pandemic that forced Americans to conduct much of their lives online.

If this bill becomes law, it's possible that within my lifetime the United States could have the same quality of roads, bridges, and trains that Western Europe has today. (NB: I expect to live at least another 50 years.)

Meanwhile, as if to underscore this week's IPCC report, the dewpoint outside my window right now has almost reached 26°C, giving us a delightful heat index of 38.7°C. Even Cassie didn't want to be outside for her lunchtime walk.

Update: the 2pm readings at O'Hare show even lovelier weather: temperature 33°, dewpoint 25°C, heat index 40.4°C. Bleah.

Those topics led this afternoon's news roundup:

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 6th periodic report on the state of the planet, and it's pretty grim. But as Josh Marshall points out, "Worried about life on earth? Don’t be. Life’s resilient and has a many hundreds of millions of years track record robust enough to handle and adapt to anything we throw at it. But the player at the top of the heap is the first to go."
• Charles Blow has almost run out of empathy for people who haven't gotten a Covid-19 jab. Author John Scalzi takes a more nuanced view, at least distinguishing between the people who peddle the lie and those who merely buy it.
• A research group has discovered how they can own your locked-down computer in about 30 minutes with a few tools, but at least they also tell you how to lock it down better.
• Almost half of Amtrak's $66 billion cash infusion will go to making New York City more navigable. I want my HSR to Milwaukee, dammit!
• Sometime last week, a Russian capsule accidentally fired a thruster, sending the International Space Station into a 540-degree roll.

Finally, long-time police reporter Radley Balko exposes the lie that keeps innocent people in jail.

Just a quick update: Urban Brew Labs (stop #33 on the Brews and Choos list) has opened its taproom. It's great, actually, and I still recommend it. So does Cassie.

Last August 6th I took some drone photos and video of the Black Lives Matter mural on Clifton Street in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood. Here is 6 August 2020:

And here is today:

It's had some weathering, but overall, it looks OK.

My primary goal of today's flights was to document the CTA RPM Project. Crews have removed the two east-side tracks between Lawrence and Bryn Mawr, and have started removing the embankment as well. As the project goes on, I'll document more of it, and assemble a video. This is what the Lawrence El station looked like today:

As of June 11th, the Cubs were tied for first place. That turned out to have been the high point of 2021. The nadir arrived over the weekend when the organization perpetrated the "biggest 24-hour roster dump in franchise history," according to the Chicago Tribune:

The Cubs entered the Brewers series hitting .186 in June, the fourth-lowest average of any team in any calendar month.

After beating the Cubs 13-2 in the opening game of the homestand, again with Sogard pitching in relief, the Philadelphia Phillies knocked out Arrieta in the second inning of Game 2, taking a 7-0 lead in a 15-10 win.

The Cubs lost 11 straight, their longest skid since a 12-game streak in 2012, the first year of the rebuild. They finally ended the streak on July 7, and one day later Hoyer announced his plans had changed in the previous 11 days.

Joc Pederson was dealt to the Atlanta Braves before the opening game of the second half, igniting the sell-off. Tepera was traded to the Chicago White Sox on July 29, and Rizzo was sent to the New York Yankees after that day’s game with the Reds. 

Bryant, Báez and Kimbrel were all gone in the final hours before the July 30 trade deadline — and the last hurrah was over. TV cameras caught Bryant in the dugout of Nationals Park in an emotional embrace with hitting coach Anthony Iapoce.

It took only 11 days for the Cubs to destroy a season that seemed to have so much promise and less than 24 hours for Hoyer to dismantle the core.

I remember the San Diego Padres having a similar purge in the 1990s. It took them a very long time to recover.

Oh well. It's just business, right?