Good morning, round two! That snow is remarkably slick, as experience shows walking down to the bus stop. Nearly slip and fell a couple times on the walk down there. Then again the soles are getting warn down on my boots. I waterproofed the boots, hopefully they won’t smell like persistent organic compounds all day. So far the bus stop hasn’t been shoveled out but I assume it will melt by mid day. I ended up standing in the gas station parking lot and somebody with serious boots stayed right at the stop and flagged the bus down, and I walked in the road.

The snow has stopped and we are now above freezing with temperatures around 34 degrees in Delmar. There is a south breeze at 9 mph. Cloudy now and while we might get a few rain showers, eventually the skies will clear around sunset. The snow will be quickly gone.

The sun will set at 4:22 pm with dusk around 4:54 pm, which is 10 seconds later than yesterday. Today will have 9 hours and 5 minutes of daylight, a decrease of 37 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy, with a low of 27 degrees at 6am. A fairly mild evening after the snow, which I expect will be mostly gone by then. Five degrees above normal. West wind 8 to 15 mph. With that wind it might be a bit cold, but I don’t expect to miss my evening walk. In 2015, it got down to 43 degrees with periods of rain. The record low of -6 occurred back in 1988.

That January holiday is rapid approaching, with only five weeks until Martin Luther King Day when the sun will be setting at 4:49 pm with dusk at 5:20 pm. On that day in 2016, we had rain, snow and temperatures between 40 and 29 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 30 degrees. We hit a record high of 62 back in 1995. I might go camping during that long weekend. Depends on the weather.

Today in 1991, the Russian federation breaks off from the USSR, essentially meaning the end of the Soviet Union. The era of communism was no longer to be.

I will be posting the interactive Google Map of the 160 communities in New York State that have Local Area Unemployment Statistics generated for them on a monthly basis, later on today. This map is pretty neat as you can click on any municipality (town, city, or village) population and find out the unadjusted monthly unemployment rate going back a year, along with the change over the past year and last year’s average.