The Daily Parker

Tonight's forecast calls for the S-word:

The first real snow of the season could hit as soon as Monday night — and more snowflakes could fall throughout the week.

Chicago’s set to have a snowy, chilly week, with most days seeing temperatures [below freezing], according to the National Weather Service.

Monday will be partly sunny and could warm up to 5°C, according to the National Weather Service. There’s a 50 percent chance for snow overnight, mostly after 4 a.m. Tuesday.

Snow is expected to fall throughout Tuesday morning, with it turning into a mix of snow and rain after noon, according to the National Weather Service. Ultimately, there could be less than 12 mm of snow accumulating. The day could see a high temperature of 4°C. The snow and rain could continue overnight, as well.

It happens every year, usually right around mid-November, so we knew it would come eventually. But we can still complain about it.

Even with Chicago's 1,642 judges on the ballot ("Shall NERDLY McSNOOD be retained as a circuit court judge in Cook County?"), I still got in and out of my polling place in about 15 minutes. It helped that the various bar associations only gave "not recommended" marks to two of them, which still left 1,640 little "yes" ovals to fill in.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world...

• Republican pollster Rick Wilson, one of the co-founders of the Lincoln Project, has a head-shaking Twitter thread warning everyone that You Know Who will probably announce his 2024 run before polls close tonight just to keep his narcissistic needs met.
• Author Stacy Schiff argues that the arguments John Hancock and Samuel Adams had in the 1770s define our politics today. (Would that make them the Isaac and Ishmael of American politics?)
• College Football and politics really, really shouldn't mix.
• Josh Marshall looks back wistfully on the stories TPM ran about alleged voter fraud in 2002 and finds nothing has changed except how much Republicans are lying about it. (Hint: they're lying more now.)
• National Geographic describes some archaeological finds that elucidate why the Western Roman Empire fell.
• The historic Belden-Stratford in Lincoln Park, which Parker and I passed every morning on his dawn relief trip to the park, is getting a multi-million-dollar rehab so the new landlord can offer $3,000-a-month studios and $8,000 three-bedrooms.
• Cranky Flier analyzes all 9,999 flight numbers for four major airlines to figure out some things about how their business models differ.
• Why is Maine building a $106 million highway that nobody wants? (The omnibus explanation seems on point.)
• John Scalzi lays out how Twitter's policy change around the "blue check" will make the notation worse than useless going forward.

Finally, Chicago gets a new brewery taproom on Thursday when Hop Butcher to the World opens in Half Acre's former Lincoln Avenue space, just over 2 km from my house. Cassie and I might find out on Saturday whether they let dogs in, assuming the forecast holds. (And there it is: a post that literally checks all the boxes for Daily Parker categories!)

I'm running all 538 unit tests in my real job's application right now after updating all the NuGet packages. This is why I like automated testing: if one of the updated packages broke anything, tests will fail, and I can fix the affected code. (So far they've all passed.)

This comes after a major demo this morning, and a new feature that will consume the rest of the sprint, which ends next Monday. Oh, and I have two opera rehearsals this week. Plus I have to vote tomorrow, which could take 15 minutes or two hours.

So it's not likely I'll have time to read all of these:

• Josh Marshall looks at the late polls for tomorrow's biggest races and decides...no one knows nothin'. (Not to mention, we won't have some results for up to two weeks, so...)
• Wait, Republican US Senate candidate Herschel Walker has dissociative identity disorder? Not that he's got severe brain damage from getting concussed in football games so many times? Shouldn't either condition be disqualifying for the Senate?
• Chicago gas bills could go up 60% this winter, to an average of $240-260 per month per household. Guess I'll keep the thermostats at 17°C...
• Free-speech crusader and irony-proof billionaire Elon Musk has banned everyone who changed their Twitter names to "Elon Musk" last week.
• Attorney Kellen Dwyer digs into the implications of Uber's former Chief Security Officer getting convicted of two Federal crimes on October 5th for covering up a security breach at the company.
• Strong Towns will launch a National Crash Analysis Studio in January to more accurately figure out why car accidents happen.
• With less than a day before they all go up for re-election, Chicago's city council passed Mayor Lightfoot's $16 billion budget for 2023. The mayoral election will take place February 28th. Goody.
• And the New York Times asked this morning, does the US have too many elections? (Yes. Yes we do.)

Regardless, I'm setting an alarm for just past 4am to see the total lunar eclipse tonight. NOAA predicts 17% sky cover, so I should get a good view of it. Unless I go back to sleep.

So far I've managed to avoid getting soaked running lots of errands, but the cold front descending upon us has stirred things up anyway. Right now, O'Hare reports 48 km/h winds with gusts up to 65 km/h and a peak wind just before noon of 92 km/h from the south—directly across all 6 main runways there. Whee!

I sincerely hope no one tried to land in that.

It got up to 23°C at IDTWHQ this afternoon, and even now, three hours after sunset, it's still 17°C. Not a record, but not bad for November. I still have all the windows open. (Not for long though.)

We've also had amazing foliage this year. For example, this ash tree a few blocks from my house still hasn't dropped all its leaves:

And Cassie found another sunbeam after we got home:

The forecast says we get three or four more days of this before we get back to normal autumn temperatures. I'm OK with that.

It's a quiet day at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters 6.0 as I bang away at the 60 or so boxes of books in the library. Only 10 or so of those boxes need to go all the way to my office loft on the 4th floor, so I should make do with only a few dozen Ibuprofens this afternoon.

Meanwhile, Cassie has found a sunbeam on the front deck, just as she did yesterday:

And as a bonus, here's our walk to doggie day care on Friday morning:

Our fall colors just keep going this year. The maples have reached their peak, even as the ashes and oaks are finishing up.

I believe I'm about halfway through the kitchen (the worst room to pack), and struggling not to go immediately to Empirical for my last pint there. It's sunny, breezy, and at this moment 24°C outside—perfect beer-on-a-patio weather. Alas, though, I have to pack...the dishes. And glassware.

Maybe I can do this in two hours?

I have only two rooms left to pack before my move on Monday: the master bedroom (which will take me about 30 minutes and the movers about the same), and the kitchen (which will take me most of today). I also had to reserve some time later this afternoon to grab a pint with a friend at Empirical Brewery, because (a) the weather could not look better and (b) they close permanently tomorrow night.

Let's move on from the demise of the second brewery three blocks from my new house in the period between me buying the house and moving it, because clearly I angered the Beer Gods and have yet to figure out how to make amends. Instead, what about this weather? And the leaves?

Family portrait takers, tour guides and social media influencers are running out of time to photograph the final days of the best season of fall colors in northern Illinois in years, experts say.

The Chicago area may have the best colors of the entire state, as other parts continue to struggle with dry conditions.

“The weather’s setting up really well and we’ve had some rains recently,” Johnson said. “The best color is going to come when you have bright, sunny days and cool nights and we’re getting a good amount of that now.”

Recently, Illinois has had consecutive years of subpar fall colors tied to a 2012 drought that ravaged the Midwest and continues to wreak havoc on trees.

Unfortunately, the long-range forecast looks a bit gloomier:

Regardless of when the snow starts stacking up, Chicagoans should gear up for a good number of storms this year, according to the annual winter outlook released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. While there’s no strong indication of what sort of temperatures Chicago will see this winter, the report does predict the city will see a wetter-than-average season.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean more snow, it could be more rain, more of that yucky mixed precipitation and snow,” Borchardt said. “But usually in these kinds of patterns we typically see more storms than normal.”

Even if the city gets a lot of storms this year, it would take a truly hefty amount of snow to break Chicago’s all-time snowiest winter record. The current champion is the winter of 1978-79, when 2,278 mm fell. For comparison, last winter it snowed 833 mm.

But before that happens, we have a reprieve. Here's the St Boniface Cemetery a couple of hours ago:

Busy day today, but I finished a major task at work just now. As I'm waiting for the CI system to finish compiling and pushing out a test build, I'm going to read these:

• Jonathan Chait shares his chilling observations from the National Socialist Conservatism Conference in Miami.
• Gen-Xers like me have started contending with...middle age.
• The Chicago City Council doesn't like working with the CTA, even as everyone in the city complains about CTA frequency and reliability. Maybe if we stopped thinking of the CTA as a business and started thinking of it as a public service...hmm...
• Daniel Herriges admonishes just about everyone for the muddled thinking in statements like "they should put a Trader Joe's there."

Finally, we got our first official (trace) snow of the season this morning, even as forecasters predict temperatures over 21°C this weekend. While I'm packing. All day.

I've had a busy day. I finally solved the token-authentication problem I've been working on all week for my day job (only to discover another flavor of it after deploying to Azure), while dealing with a plumber ($1600 repair!), an HVAC inspector ($170 inspection!) and my buyer's mortgage appraiser (not my problem!). That left some reading to do tonight:

• Support for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has waned somewhat as Ukraine continues to kick Russian ass.
• Michael Dobbs warns that Putin has taken all the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis and done exactly the opposite.
• Julia Ioffe interviewed a Chechen journalist who explained how bad things have gotten in the areas from where Russia has drawn most of its troops.
• Josh Marshall believes Saudi Arabia aligning so visibly with Russian interests may have finally put paid the lie that they were ever our allies.
• Republicans in Georgia are sticking with their scandal-plagued candidate Herschel Walker because they have to.
• Molly Jong-Fast calls bullshit on the far right's "fake feminist gambit."
• A WWI German U-boat scuttled in 1922 to keep its secrets out of enemy hands was found last month.
• California has legalized jaywalking, a crime put on the books in the 1930s by the car industry.
• James Fallows sees the end of gas-powered leaf blowers soon. (I hope he's right.)
• A Divvy Bike (Chicago's bike-share program) wound up in Santa Ana Maya, Mexico, and no one knows why.
• Chicago has moved most of its in-person polling places, so not only will I have to vote at my old precinct on the 8th, I'll have to find it, too. (Oh, wait, it's even closer to both my old and new places!)
• Three board members of Chicago-based Green Thumb Industries resigned right before the news hit that President Biden will pardon thousands of low-level marijuana crimes.

Finally, despite the crashing temperatures outside my window right now (down 5.5°C in the past 2 hours), Illinois had a pretty dry and mild start to autumn.