I've had a few things on my plate this week, including a wonderful event with the Choeur de la Cathedrale de Notre Dame de Paris at Old St Patrick's Church in Chicago. We had a big dinner, they sang for us, we sang for them, and then some of us hosted some of them in our homes. Tonight I'm hearing their real performance at Alice Millar Chapel in Evanston.
Sunday night I saw comedian Liz Miele at the Den Theater. I'm totally crushing on her and highly recommend you catch her on this tour:
And naturally I have a few photos of Cassie that got imported into Lightroom this morning:
Real post later today, probably around the time the cold front hits.
Not shown: she's snoring.
Cassie did not understand why she could not try my Indian food last night:
And somehow, with the rudimentary editing controls on my phone, I accidentally turned her into an Andrew Wyeth painting. Huh.
The AQI at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters has prompted me to put my air conditioning on:
Nice that the ozone has also popped out of the healthy range, too. And this is what it looks like from 25 meters up:
I'm really hoping this 1970s-style air blows away overnight. It's really unpleasant, even if the sunset was pretty.
More photos from three weeks ago. Linzer Gasse, Salzburg:
Along the train line from Freilassing to Berchtesgaden, approximately here:
Berchtesgaden, near the border of Schönau am Königsee:
And just a little ways farther up the Köningsseer Ache:
More photos. The Czech countryside, approximately here:
Hafnersteig, in Vienna's Innere Stadt:
The Schloss Belvedere, with (I am told) an Apollo capsule:
I finally got 15 minutes to start going through some of the 740 or so photos I took in Europe three weeks ago. (It turns out, when you go on an 8-day vacation, stuff piles up while you're gone.) Here are a few from Prague.
Senát Parlamentu České republiky:
Prague, from Pražský hrad:
Národní muzeum:
Staroměstská radnice:
More coming this weekend.
Between my overflowing PTO balance and getting two "floating" holidays every year, I decided I have enough free time to extend my vacation by a day to get stuff done. I'm glad I did. Cassie provided her vet with a really good sample of...things that her day care needs to know about, I've done 3 loads of laundry and queued up a 4th, I've gone through the important receipts from the trip, and I've loaded all 740 photos up into Lightroom. I've also done some Apollo-related stuff, so some of today went to other people.
I still have stuff to do, so I'm not going to get to the photos today. Probably not until Friday or Saturday, truth be told. And I've got a freelance project for a local non-profit that I'd hoped to start on the flight to London but somehow didn't find time to do.
I did finish four really good books, including The Rise of the Warrior Cop by police reporter Radley Balko; There Is No Antimemetics Division by British author and programmer Sam "qntm" Hughes based in party on some of his articles for the SCP Foundation (which you should absolutely start reading whenever you want to lose yourself in some fun and cool shit); techno-thriller Daemon by Peter Suarez; and Death of the Great Man by Peter Kramer. I recommend all of them, especially the last two.
I will now...waste some time on the Internet, and then go walk Cassie.
There's a line in The American President, when President Shephard (Michael Douglas) is trying to intimidate lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Benning). He says, "the city planners, when they sat down to design Washington, D.C., their intention was to build a city that would intimidate and humble foreign heads of state? It's true. The White House is the single greatest home-court advantage in the modern world,"
Good thing Aaron Sorkin qualified it with "modern," because this is the summer residence of the Austro-Hungarian Emperors from the 1720s until 1914:
Contrast with this mix of Soviet-era and 19th century architecture just 50 km away in Bratislava:
Near the end of my walk earlier, I climbed these stairs to the train station, and it really felt like something out of a Cold War novel:
And this cute cafè is exactly halfway between my hotel and the nearest U-Bahn station:
OK, now I really need that shower and nap.
Today they got through about half of our flat roof which doubles as an upstairs patio. Imagine how much noise all this made:
Note that all the crap on the roof off to my left was at the other end of the balcony while they laid down the material directly under me. They timed it so they had the power saw going exactly when I had a Teams meeting for work. But they did got a lot of it done, and they should reconnect my A/C units just in time for next week's heat wave.