Events

My socials today have a lot of chatter about the weather, understandably as we're now in our fourth day below -15°C. And yet I have vivid memories of 20 January 1985 when we hit the coldest temperature ever recorded in Chicago, -32°C. The fact that winters have gotten noticeably milder since the 1970s doesn't really matter during our annual Arctic blast. Sure, we had the coldest winter ever just 10 years ago, but the 3rd and 5th coldest were 1977-78 and 1978-79, respectively. I remember the snow coming...

She's in this photo, trust me: A bit closer, after we got home:

Our company has Martin Luther King, Jr. Day off, which will allow me to get a bit of rest after my lightning trip to Seattle. And to celebrate, I've broken out the Arran sweater and long-johns, because wow is it cold: The National Weather Service reported extreme cold and a wind chill of minus 40 in Aurora on Sunday morning and issued a wind chill warning through noon Monday. Weather service senior meteorologist Brett Borchardt said Chicago narrowly missed breaking the record — 1 degree — for the lowest...

I'm watching my plane arriving from Chicago to get all of us going back there on it, a little remorseful that I couldn't spend more time in Seattle. I last visited in 2013 to watch the Cubs hold their own against the Mariners for 9 whole innings, only to lose with no outs in the bottom of the 10th. On that June day Seattle had sunny 30°C weather. This morning we had sunny weather, I'll give it that: But warm? No. In the 38 hours of my trip it only got above -6°C once I got to the airport to go home....

Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Old Stove Brewing, 1901 Western Ave., SeattleTrain line: Sound Transit, University StTime from Chicago: about 4 hours by airDistance from station: 400 m Except for picking the coldest weekend in years to visit Seattle, I enjoyed the Pike Place Market a lot. At its north end I found the Old Stone Brewing Co., with a view of the Puget Sound that would have knocked my socks off if doing so wouldn't immediately have led to frostbite. Even...

My five-and-a-half-hour-delayed flight got to Seattle in the usual amount of time, but the door-to-door duration—my house to my friend's house—set a new record for domestic travel: 15 hours and 20 minutes. That's the longest travel duration for any flying trip since I had a long connection going from Chicago to London two years ago and longer than any domestic trip I can recall. But at the end of the voyage, Hazel was very glad to see me: My friend has an all-day meeting that neither of us is...

Welp. My 10:00 flight has become a 3:00 flight: But at least when I get on board the plane, I'll have a good seat: Obviously if they had predicted the delay more accurately, I'd have slept longer, left later, and probably not dropped Cassie off with my friends until this morning. She seems to be settling in just fine, though: Hooray for air travel in January. My guess is that if the original crew had flown on to Seattle, they'd have timed out. So they probably moved my plane's crew to a shorter flight...

I have enough travel experience to know that a winter storm doesn't totally shut down O'Hare. I mean, isn't it pretty? It does, however, cause some disruptions: But knowing that my flight has a 2+ hour delay means I can take a leisurely bus trip for $3.25 (including transfer), which is way better than a $60 Lyft that would take almost as long. The bus got up to 20 km/h at one point! Look at us zoom through Lincoln Square: And along the route, a little bit of good news from the airline! So only two hours...

We knew this was coming eventually: URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Chicago IL 243 PM CST Thu Jan 11 2024 ILZ006-103-104-120445- /O.CON.KLOT.WS.W.0002.240112T0900Z-240113T1800Z/ Lake IL-Northern Cook-Central Cook- Including the cities of Waukegan, Buffalo Grove, Mundelein, Gurnee, Evanston, Des Plaines, Schaumburg, Palatine, Northbrook, Chicago, Cicero, Oak Lawn, Oak Park, and La Grange 243 PM CST Thu Jan 11 2024 ...WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 3 AM FRIDAY TO NOON CST...

Julia Ioffe interviews David Scheffer, a lawyer and professor who served as Bill Clinton's ambassador-at-large for war crimes, to provide some clarity around South Africa's suit against Israel in the International Court of Justice: South Africa is alleging the entire corpus of the Genocide Convention and its application, namely that Israel has failed to prevent genocide against Gaza and that it is committing genocide against Gaza. It is a very fulsome application. South Africa is not asking the I.C.J....