Events

Stories for the last day of winter, this year on the quadrennial day when your Facebook Memories have the fewest entries and, apparently, you can't pay for gas in New Zealand: Josh Marshall calls out retiring Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for, among other things, turning the Senate "into a genuinely Calhounian body in which minority factions exercise a de facto and permanent veto over the majority." Steven Rattner calls out the XPOTUS for his destructive economic proposals. Ruth Marcus...

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ bottomed out this morning, hitting -4.8°C at 10:41 am, and it may even end the day above freezing. So this mercifully-short cold snap won't keep us out of the record books, just as predicted. It's still the warmest winter in Chicago history. (Let's hope we don't set the same record for spring or summer.) Meanwhile, the record continues to clog up with all kinds of fun stories elsewhere: Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has led his...

The cold front we expected passed over my house around 8:15 last night. I wouldn't call it subtle, either: Even that doesn't get to the truly unsubtle aspects of this frontal passage. The radar image might, though: Not shown: the 60 km/h winds, lashing rain, brilliant lightning show, 5-10 mm hailstones, tornadoes to the northwest and southeast, and a mildly alarmed dog getting pats on the couch. And it keeps getting better this morning. Right now I'm in a Loop high rise gently swaying in the 45 km/h...

It's official: with two days left, this is the warmest winter in Chicago history, with the average temperature since December 1st fully 3.5°C (6.3°F) above normal. We've had only 10 days this winter when the temperature stayed below freezing, 8 of them in one week in February. This should remain the case when spring officially begins on Friday, even though today's near-record 23°C (so far) is forecast to fall to -6°C by 6am. And that's not even to discuss the raging thunderstorms and possible tornadoes...

As fun as my trip last week was, having this last night was awesome: I've also got my windows open, because we just set a new record high temperature for February 26th of 19.4°C. Of course, it may snow tomorrow night, because it's still winter until Friday. OK, back to work...

My flight from Munich landed at Charlotte about 40 minutes early, and I got through customs and back through TSA in 34 minutes. Sweet! And now I'm watching the plane that will take me to Chicago pull into my gate. Sweet! Really, I just want to hug my dog and get 10 hours of sleep tonight. I have a feeling one of those things will happen and the other won't.

Started on AA717 MUC-CLT over Connecticut