A year ago today I posted that the previous month, July 2016, was my worst blogging month in 5 years. Well, July 2017 was my best blogging month in 3½ years. The last month I posted 47 posts was January 2014 before I slowed down to the point where this past February I only posted 20 times for a rate of 0.74/day, a number not seen since November 2010.
I have some hypotheses why this happened, and why posting has rebounded. For now, though, I'll just say I've had three consecutive months of beating both the running 12-month average (1.21/day) and the all-time average posting rate (1.31/day).
Via Eclipse2017.org, Xavier Jubier has created an interactive map showing all the data for the eclipse that takes place three weeks from today.
I'll be staying here the night before, and I'm planning to watch from here the day of.
Through a number of circumstances mostly beyond my control, I didn't fly anywhere between last December 26th and this past Saturday, a total of 208 days. I have to go all the way back to 2006, when I didn't fly for 154 days, to get even close to that interval. On average, since 1 January 2001 I've taken a flight every 10.6 days. Even last year, in which I flew the fewest miles since 2003, I flew every 25 days on average.
Well, the next five weeks will bring the 2017 average up a bit. But still, I miss traveling. I hope I can do more of it going forward.
I'm in New York for a friend's wedding this weekend, so light posting, depending on what blows up in Washington tonight. Josh Marshall is already in total freak-out mode. But President Trump tends not to do any work over the weekend, or in the evenings, or at all.
Anyway, regular posting returns Monday.
Bristol Ren Faire opening yesterday (sorry, no photos), lots of catch-up around the house today. Regular posting resumes tomorrow.
Chicago temperatures stayed below 32°C for almost nine months: September 7th all the way until last Sunday, June 4th. Then we had absolutely gorgeous weather during the last work week, which all ended on Saturday when the temperature hit 32°C for the first of (so far) three times. Our forecast calls for continued hot and shitty weather through at least Thursday.
Hey, it happens every year. And our cool weather was pretty good while it lasted.
The bad part is that the temperature killed my Fitbit numbers this weekend. I had the worst day since December 23rd, and that poor performance was because I spent 8 hours on an airplane. Fingers crossed that yesterday's 7,044 steps remains the worst of the year.
Yesterday's step count did, in fact, reach top-5 numbers:
Today's will not, if only because it looks like rain.
I took a short walk today, from Central Street in Evanston to my house. Totals: 16.37 km, 2:25:29, 8'53" per km, 18,357 steps. It's not as far as my epic 28 km walk last June, but I'll probably do another walk that distance sometime later this year. I mean, why not a 32 km walk?
Right. Because my feet hurt.
So far today I'm just shy of 30,000 steps. So I'm not quite in the top 5—but I will be if I walk another thousand steps, which seems pretty likely:
And here's the meandering route I took:
I started a new role today as a Principal Consultant at DevMynd, a startup-y software development shop in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago.
I'll have more information later this week. For now, I'm really excited to start here, especially as I'll be learning a couple of new languages. So watch this space for really bad Ruby code coming up.
Watch this space for an announcement sometime tomorrow.