Good morning! Happy Friday! I’m still alive and slowly I think I’m improving from the cold I’ve had over the past few days. Talk about a bad one. Currently, partly sunny and 30 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a southwest breeze at 6 mph. Honestly a pretty nice morning, if I didn’t feel so sick from this cold. Maybe I will recover by the weekend, which actually no longer looks that nice weather-wise. Maybe I can bundle up and do a quick hike.

Today will be mostly sunny, with a high of 36 degrees at 1pm. Two degrees below normal. Southwest wind 6 to 8 mph. A year ago, we had mostly cloudy skies, clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 40 degrees. The record high of 58 was set in 1927. 4.3 inches of snow fell back in 2001.

The sun will set at 4:21 pm with dusk around 4:53 pm, which is one second earlier than yesterday. Pretty much the earliest sunset of the year. I think tomorrow it’s possibly a second or two earlier.  At sunset, look for partly clear conditions and 35 degrees. There will be a south breeze at 7 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 8 minutes of daytime, a decrease of 55 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy, with a low of 23 degrees at 5am. One degrees below normal. South wind around 6 mph becoming calm in the evening. In 2016, we had partly cloudy skies with more clouds in the early hours of the next day. It got down to 19 degrees. The record low of -11 occurred back in 1902.

I don’t have a whole lot to report, as 90% of yesterday was spent in bed, that is after making breakfast, lunch and dinner. Lots of soup, but that’s good because I had to use up some of the cans of soup I had around. I seem to end up buying a lot of soup. My landlord and his plumber was working on the unit next to my apartment yesterday, making all kinds of jackhammering and cutting noises, which really bites when your a sick little puppy.

Being sick sucks. All week I haven’t felt all that great, but sometimes Mondays are rough for reasons beside a cold. Tuesday and Wednesday I basically got home from work and collapsed, Thursday and Friday I decided I was just too sick to go to work. While I’m pretty sure it’s just a cold, it’s a nasty one. 

Reading about the outbreak of whooping cough in Oneonta made me particularly alarmed, as this cold has been on and off for like two weeks now, but honestly I think it’s just an ordinary if not a bit severe cold. Mom keep telling me I need to get my tetanus booster, the Tdap shot, which  I am starting to agree more with because it also prevents the nasty whooping cough. I actually never had that bad of a cough from this cold, just body aches, sore throat, plugged sinuses and some congestion. So is life.

My goal today is to stay out of bed as much as possible but take it easy, so I can recover quicker from the cold. My concern with laying in bed all day is that it makes my nasal drip worse and irrates my throat more. I will probably just sit at my desk, drink lots of water, and play on my computer. It’s kind of boring not having Internet or television at home when you are sick.

This weekend I plan to get the remaining bolts, nuts, and lock washers I need to mountain the solar panel on the truck cap. I also need to drill out and cut the aluminum bar, which will provide a more secure mounting platform on the panel. Then I also need to widen the hole through the gromment in floor boards to get the power in from the panel. The solar controller is already mounted, once it is hooked up it will be ready to go.

Going to be really cold by mid-week next week. I was thinking about taking off one more day before the end of year, but not if the weather is awful. I guess I could bundle up, but I don’t want to get sick again once I recover. The last two weeks of December are pretty much already taken for work, so I don’t expect to get any time off before the New Year. Then at least as far as camping goes, the next extended time I might take off from work is April break. Maybe a Finger Lakes or Mid-State trip then.

My electronics building supplies have gotten pretty good, but it seems like when you order one thing you discover you always need one more thing. I have some boxes to put away a lot of the supplies, but I keep finding I need more. I fixed another bug in my LED control module, at this point I just need to get the aluminum bar that I plan to mount everything in, along with a little more wire, a solder sucker (to work with the solder wick I have for cleaning up messes), some alligator clips for testing, and a heat sink to ensure I’m not roasting the transistors in the process of mounting them. Then I just need to get less messy with my soldering.

Looking ahead, there are 8 weeks until Ground Hog Day when the sun will be setting at 5:11 pm with dusk at 5:40 pm. On that day in 2017, we had snow, mostly cloudy skies and temperatures between 35 and 18 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 32 degrees. It’s cold in the winter in Albany. We hit a record high of 53 back in 1981.