My Brews & Choos buddy and I repeated our walk from 2023 along the North Branch Trail to Barnaby's of Northbook because they have really great pizza. This time we skipped all detours and went straight up from the trail to the restaurant, thereby saving over an hour of walking and, therefore, getting pizza sooner.
It helped that Chicago tied the record high temperature yesterday, hitting 21.7°C (71°F) between 2 and 3 pm. We started with cool and gloomy weather that got progressively better throughout the walk, contra 2023 where it started cool and sunny and turned grim as we got closer to our destination.
We also saw some wildlife. The buck stopped here:
I think the two of them just wanted some alone time and hoped the humans would continue on their ways. We didn't see any other deer on the walk, though, so clearly the others found more privacy than these two.
After dragging my tired ass to Peet's just as they opened at 6 am (8 am back home), I got the same tired ass to the BART station just down the street and discovered that the Red Line operates as a shuttle between Millbrae and SFO sometimes. This knowledge came to me after I took an unplanned round-trip to the airport, learning this bit of BART lore at the cost of 25 minutes of my life.
I did make it to Powell and Market before 8:30 am, which allowed me plenty of time to take the oldest form of public transit in the city from there up to Hyde and Beach, then walk from there to the Caltrain station on 4th street, where I caught a train to San Jose and then a VTA light rail trolley to the closest stop near my family's house.
I'll have photos when I get back to Chicago, which I hope will be tomorrow. I've already ordered a Lyft for 4:15 am, which sounds awful except that I usually get up around 6:30 am in Chicago anyway.
For now, I'm going to digest this bit of rice I picked up from a local Millbrae Mandarin spot I like, then collapse.
I just got back from a 45-minute walk with Cassie, in which we covered 4.95 km (just over 3 miles) at a pace that Butters could never in a dog's age keep up for that long. According to my doorbell camera, Butters raised four objections to this at roughly 10-minute intervals, fortunately none of which lasted longer than 40 seconds. And she appeared to forgive me when we got back.
We're now heading to Spiteful for a little while. All of us will go. It can take 20 minutes to get there if Butters so desires.
I would apologize to my immediate neighbors, except the one to the north moved out recently, and the one to the south has a 4-year-old boy. Let's compare Butters bellowing for 4 minutes against the little boy refusing to eat for an hour, shall we?
I also made some progress this morning on the replacement for this blog software. Some of the fiddly bits are behind me, but some, including how to handle images, are ahead of me. But I hope to have the minimum viable product in a public test environment before the end of the year. Here's hoping.
This was a lot of fun and a lot of work:
This was my fifth full marathon walk:
According to my watch, it was also the least draining, judging by my body battery score this morning:
For comparison, here are the previous two years:
This year, I rested a bit more, and more aggressively managed my heart rate. I also got a lot of good sleep earlier in the week. However, as this year was considerably warmer than last year, these mitigations meant it took a bit longer. Oddly, it was slightly cooler in 2023, but there were other factors that I discussed at the time (and which you can see in the charts above).
I would have preferred to do this year's walk two weeks from now. Sadly there were scheduling issues that made yesterday the only viable option. Next year, it'll be October 16th or 23rd.
I will now take another nap.
Oh, almost forgot the obligatory Baha'i Temple photo:
I had a long day of debugging today, and I'm about to go to Cassie's doggie daycare the way I got here: on a Divvy e-bike. They cruise at 31 km/h and cost only $2 more than the train for my commute. Plus, I get some aerobic exercise. The forecast calls for summer-like weather through the next few weeks, except for a 3-day cooldown next week, so I'll keep pedaling.
And yes, I wore a helmet.
Tomorrow: my 5th marathon walk—in 30°C weather.
The two biggest news stories of the past 24 hours are the government shutting down because Congress couldn't pass a spending bill by the end of fiscal year last night, and the pathetic attempted-fascist assembly of the United States' general and flag officers in Virginia yesterday.
We'll take the dumber one first:
And then there's failed Minnesota National Guard major (and current Defense Secretary) Pete Hegseth's demonstration of why he never got promoted to lieutenant colonel:
In other news:
Finally, the forecast for Friday has us at 29°C (85°F) by late afternoon, exactly when we would hit the treeless McRory Trail north of Lake Forest. We have altered our planned route to use the tree-lined Sheridan Road from near the Lake Forest Metra station up to Lake Bluff Brewing, but it will still be wicked hot. It got that hot the day I attempted a marathon walk in 2022, but you'll recall I only got to Evanston before throwing in the towel. In 2023, it hit 29°C, and we did all right—but we moved the walk to mid-October last year and had much better weather.
We'll see how we do. It might just come down to how much sleep I get this week.
Tomorrow is, quite unexpectedly, October. Though the official temperature at O'Hare has not hit 32°C since August 16th, our weather has remained stubbornly summer-like. The 16-day forecast suggests the weather will continue as far as the model can predict, and may see 32°C as early as this weekend. That will make my Friday plans a bit more challenging as my Brews & Choos buddy has gotten over Covid and we're all set to walk to Lake Bluff then.
For my part, I am experiencing a very rare side effect of the Moderna MRNA vaccine: a persistent, metallic taste on the tip of my tongue. Its incidence is apparently something approaching less than 1 in 10,000, but it appears to be harmless and to clear up on its own. I have never had this side-effect from the Pfizer vaccine. I will request Pfizer again next year. Bleah. I'll let everyone know if I start growing a giant spike protein on my forehead.
Meanwhile, the OAFPOTUS has threatened to send 100 more troops to Chicago, a city which has something like 12,000 sworn police officers already. But it's kind of hard to take the regime seriously when this sort of thing happens. Or this sort of thing. Or this sort of thing.
As Joe Biden said five years ago yesterday, "Will you shut up, man?"
As planned, Cassie and I walked a lot yesterday: 13 km total, in 2¼ hours. The temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ got up to 26.9°C, and 30.6°C officially at O'Hare; i.e., a warm, July day, except for the sun setting just past 6:30 pm.
As good as yesterday was for me, and however great it was for you, I guarantee Cassie's day was better. Did you get to splash in a kiddie pool?
By the time we'd walked 11½ kilometers, and plopped ourselves at Spiteful Brewing, Cassie did what she always does after lots of exercise:
And, despite spending 7 continuous hours outside in beautiful weather, I still managed to get GitHub Copilot running the ChatGPT 4.1 card to write some pretty good integration tests for what will become The Daily Parker's replacement for BlogEngine, which replaced DasBlog almost exactly 10 years ago, which replaced my own custom code almost exactly 10 years ago. There seems to be a pattern here...
Cassie and I are about to spend the next 8 or so hours outside. The official temperature at O'Hare hit 29.4°C (85°F) a few minutes ago, and it's 25.8°C (78.4°F) at Inner Drive Technology World HQ.
Just for comparison, the normal high temperature from July 11th to July 17th is 29.3°C.
We're in no danger of setting a record high temperature today—that was 33°C set in 1971—but yes, I can tell you it feels like July, just with a lower dewpoint (12.2°C at O'Hare, compared with an average of 20.8°C this past July).
Still: I'll take it. Looking forward from the last weekend in September, I don't see too many more sit-outside-with-a-beer days in 2025. But right now, Cassie and I have a date with a dog park.
I'm doing a lot of work today, and I don't want to waste my flow. That said, it's 23°C with clear skies. Maybe I can knock off at 4 and take Cassie on another long walk?
Speaking of, my Brews & Choos buddy planned to come with me on my 42.2-km walk today, but she tested positive for Covid on Tuesday. (She does Ironman races; a marathon-length walk is practically a recovery activity for her.) So we're going next Friday. We hope it's cooler by then.