Events

After the whipsaw between 2019 and 2020, I'm happy 2021 came out within a standard deviation of the mean on most measures: In 2020, I flew the fewest air miles ever. In 2021, my 11,868 miles and five segments came in 3rd lowest, ahead of only 2020 and 1999. I only visited one other country (the UK) and two other states (Wisconsin and California) during 2021. What a change from 2014. In 2020, I posted a record 609 times on The Daily Parker; 2021's 537 posts came in about average for the modern era....

All of my apps run on servers that use UTC. As it's now 00:40 UTC, that means the code I just pushed to a dev server will start running on January 1st UTC, which is in fact why I waited until after 6pm to push the code up to DevOps. It looks like Chicago will get about 150 mm of snow tomorrow during the day, giving me plenty of time to continue my four-day weekend of coding. If I can get a couple of things out of my backlog and onto my dev environment before Sunday night, I may just release the link to...

I've posted the Chicago 2022 chart. I've had some curiosity about other locations, though, so I might post a new one later today. We'll see.

Here's the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.) We don't have the latest sunrise in 47 years like we did last November. The coming year will have bog-standard sunrise and sunset times, and one hopes, bog-standard politics and health crises. But that's not the subject of this post. Here's the 2022 chart: Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 2022 3 Jan Latest sunrise until Oct 29th 07:19 16:33 9:13 27 Jan 5pm...

Welcome to stop #68 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Goldfinger Brewing, 513 Rogers St., Downers GroveTrain line: BNSF, Fairview AveTime from Chicago: 43 minutes (Zone E)Distance from station: 500 m Goldfinger Brewing opened in July 2020, which really sucked for them. But because they focused on making nothing but high-quality, traditional, Central-European lagers, they attracted an immediate following that kept them going. Fun fact: Lagers take about three times longer to brew than ales, which...

Welcome to stop #67 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Imperial Oak Brewing, 9526 Ogden Ave., BrookfieldTrain line: BNSF, Congress ParkTime from Chicago: 24 minutes (Zone C)Distance from station: 200 m The ugly stepchild of the original Imperial Oak in Willow Springs opened in March after the owners acquired a failing local bar in December 2019. The pandemic didn't hurt them since it took about 15 months to build out the new brewing facility. They have some of the same beers as the original, but...

So, 18 hours later, my third Pfizer dose made my arm sore and disrupted my sleep a little. Otherwise, no side effects. Updates as conditions warrant. Update: OK, there's quite a bit of fatigue. And a bit of headache. No fever, though; I'm at 36.9°C, which is the high end of normal for me at this time of day. CDC says it's OK to take an ibuprofen after the shot, so I will now do so.

Today is the second anniversary of the first reported Covid-19 case, a fact I had forgotten when I booked my booster shot two weeks ago. Since 2019, about 5.8 million people have died of it, 822,000 of them here in the US. And it has also befuddled peoples' senses of time. NBC has a quiz to see if you remember when things happened in the last two years. I got 28, which embarrasses me. I really did forget all about Kanye West's divorce and Alex Trebek's death. Let's hope that next year is 2,022, and not...

We almost made it to December 31st without measurable snowfall, which would have broken the record of 290 days. Alas, at day #288... I snapped that photo with the wind at my back and quarter-sized flakes melting on my coat. It was 1.7°C then, but by the time I sloshed home with the wind in my face and rain soaking through my coat, it was getting just enough warmer to really make the weather really suck dingo balls. At least I now have my Covid booster. Hurrah. And I now want to take a nap...

Redu, Belgium, has more books than people, but people don't buy many books these days: [I]n the mid-1980s, a band of booksellers moved into the empty barns and transformed the place into a literary lodestone. The village of about 400 became home to more than two dozen bookstores — more shops than cows, its boosters liked to say — and thousands of tourists thronged the winsome streets. Now, though, more than half the bookstores have closed. Some of the storekeepers died, others left when they could no...