We had our coldest morning since February 17th today, cold enough that Cassie didn't want to linger sniffing her favorite shrubberies. The temperature bottomed out at 7:45 am, hitting -8.6°C at IDTWHQ, a cold we haven't experienced since 8:25 am on February 17th. O'Hare hit -10°C at 8 am, also the first time since 8 am February 17th. Tonight, going into the first day of astronomical winter, the forecast predicts it'll get even colder before warming up a bit on Monday.
Unrelated to the weather are these two things I liked from the past week. Yesterday I went over to a friend's house to help her set up a new computer and back up her old one. It turned out she was fostering this little guy, Hayes:
She texted me last night to say thanks and also that she's going to fork over the $495 adoption fee for him. Because of course she will. He's a sweet Lab-something mix whose pregnant mom got rescued from the side of the road in Arkansas. He'll have a much better (and longer) life with my friend than he would have otherwise.
I also liked the way the sun played around with the Civic Opera Building and 110 North Wacker (the mirrored building behind the Civic Opera) on Tuesday afternoon:
My new office is farther west than my old one, but still facing north, so it won't get any direct sunlight, ever. That said, on Tuesday I discovered that the mirrored windows at 110 North Wacker will give me pretty intense reflected sunlight, which is almost as bright. I'm still only going in once a week, but it's a nice perk.
The temperature in my neighborhood fell below freezing around 4am and kept dropping, bottoming out just a few minutes ago at -1.7°C, the coldest it's been since March 18th. So despite valiantly holding onto their leaves later in the year than I can remember, the gingko and maple trees around my house finally surrendered to the inevitable:
All those leaves fell in the last couple of hours. In fact I tried to get a photo of them just pouring off the tree, but that's hard to capture in a still photo.
Cassie found all the new smells irresistable:
The little darling also pulled so often this morning that she almost completely detached her leash from her harness, and so had to walk the rest of the way to school tethered to me through her collar. Neither of us liked that very much, but at least she stopped pulling right away.
Note to self: budget for new harness every 8 months.
The weather doesn't seem that great for a planned 15-kilometer walk through Logan Square and Avondale to visit a couple of stragglers on the Brews & Choos Project. We've got 4°C under a low overcast, but only light winds and no precipitation forecast until Monday night. My Brews & Choos buddy drew up a route starting from the east end of the 606 Trail and winding up (possibly) at Jimmy's Pizza Cafe.
Also, I've joined BlueSky, because it's like Xitter without the xit. The Times explains how you, too, can join. (Cassie also has an account, of course.)
My 4-minute train to Clybourn leaves in 45 minutes, so I want to save a few things for later reading:
Finally, NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day this morning has a diptych of the Earth, one side from Saturn and the other side from Mercury. What makes it even more interesting is that both photos were taken 19 July 2013, making it the first time the Earth was photographed simultaneously from two other worlds in the solar system.
I mentioned yesterday that the gingko and maple trees in my neighborhood have held onto their leaves for much longer than usual. Yesterday's snowfall melted overnight, as predicted, but we did get below freezing for about 4 hours yesterday. And yet these two genii of trees just won't let go:
The City of Chicago has had to extend the street sweeping schedule to ensure that they'll have sweepers on task when all those leaves finally do fall off. I will, of course, keep everyone updated on this tense stand-off between Gaia and the Dept of Streets & Sanitation.
We went just over 238 days and 20 hours between freezing temperatures at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, from March 27th until the wee hours of this morning. That's quite a long time for Chicago. And in fact, our snowfall this morning was the latest first snow since 2015.
Here's my roof deck after about an hour of snow, around 9:40 am:
And just three hours later, when taking Cassie around the block, with the snow already deeper than 80 mm:
This vignette interested me because of all the maple leaves. I posted a photo of a gingko tree in the local park last weekend. Lots of the area's gingko and maple trees have held onto their leaves, in some cases without even pulling in all the chlorophyll yet. So here we are just an hour into a pretty mild snow event with the temperature hovering just around freezing, and this particular maple decided to peace out for the winter.
I think the trees were just waiting for a freeze, even one that only got down to -0.3°C and lasted less than two hours. I expect we'll see the maples and gingkoes shake the rest of their foliage off in the next day or so. And yet, the forecast has us above freezing consistently from now until Monday evening, even hitting 11°C on Sunday.
Early winter weather is always weird in Chicago. This year is no different.
After one of the mildest November days in memory, the dreaded "wintry mix" has started to approach from the west:
I had hoped it would delay until after 10pm, but we can't always get what we want.
Winter officially begins in 10 days, but it starts in Chicago tonight.
We're having a bit of odd weather in Chicago today. The temperature rose overnight, fell after sunrise, and has gone back up almost to where it was right before sunrise. The dewpoint, however, has stayed the same. That, plus the breezy winds out of the southwest, has pushed the clouds out over the lake:
This won't last. A bomb cyclone over the Pacific Northwest will push some nasty "wintry mix" towards us by Thursday. Our sunny 15°C weather will give way to this:
Wednesday Night
A chance of rain before 8pm, then a chance of rain and snow between 8pm and 10pm, then a chance of snow after 10pm. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 1. West wind 20 to 25 km/h, with gusts as high as 40 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 40%.
Thursday
Rain and snow, becoming all rain after 3pm. High near 6. Breezy, with a west northwest wind 25 to 30 km/h increasing to 30 to 35 km/h in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 60 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 80%.
November approaches. Today, though? We'll take October weather.
We're having gray, rainy weather for our few hours of daylight today. We haven't yet had a freeze this fall, and none is forecast before winter officially begins in two weeks, so all the moisture in the air just hangs around and makes more fog and rain. And yet, tomorrow we might get a high of 15°C—about 8°C above normal—before flurries and "wintry mix" Wednesday night.
Yeah, it's the end of November in Chicago.
Otherwise, I'm still mulling our electoral loss from two weeks ago, even as it looks less like a disaster and more like just three million Democrats staying home. In fact, it looks like neither candidate got a majority of the popular vote, with the OAFPOTUS increasing his total popular vote count by a little over 2½ million while our side lost about 7½ million compared with 2020.
Oh, and it's the 141st anniversary of time zones, which had a far more lasting effect than the election will have.
Happy Monday.
Winnemac Park, 3:39 pm:
Spiteful Brewing Tap Room, 7:08 pm:
The domain name wx-now.com went live on 11 November 1999, 25 years ago today. The earliest known Wayback Machine capture of the old Active Server Pages site was in September 2000; this screen shot from January 2001 looks a bit closer to what it looked like when it went live:
.png)
In 2008, Katie Zoellner gave it a facelift that lasted pretty much until March 2022, when I completely overhauled the app, writing an entirely new UI and refactoring about 50% of the internal code.
I still have all the old source code. It's trippy to look at how I wrote 25 years ago. Even trippier that I've had an application running in the wild continuously for that long.