Good morning! Happy Thursday. Mostly cloudy and 76 degrees in Delmar. There is a south breeze at 9 mph. The dew point is 70 degrees. Big Red is dropped off at the shop for his routine maintenance, and hopefully I’ll pick him up today or tomorrow morning.

Today will have showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly after 4pm. Some of the storms could produce gusty winds and heavy rain. Mostly cloudy, with a high of 88 degrees at 3pm. Five degrees above normal. South wind 9 to 14 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New rainfall amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible. Maximum dew point of 73 at 4pm. The record high of 99 was set in 1995. The sun will set at 8:31 pm with dusk around 9:05 pm, which is 38 seconds earlier than yesterday. Today will have 14 hours and 59 minutes of daylight, a decrease of 1 minutes and 29 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly before 7pm. Mostly cloudy, with a low of 68 degrees at 5am. Six degrees above normal. South wind 6 to 9 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New rainfall amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms. Maximum dew point of 73 at 6pm. The record low of 44 occurred back in 1950.

0.5 inch of rain expected between Thursday 8am and Friday 7am. 0.1 inch of rain expected between Monday 8am and Monday 7pm. Within the next four days, a total of 0.6 inches of rain is expected.

Muggy weather continues in our forecast through Friday afternoon and returns for Monday. Thursday 8am – Friday 1pm. Maximum temperature will be 88 degrees, a heat index reaching 96, and a maximum dew point of 73. Friday 8pm – Friday 11pm. Maximum temperature will be 83 degrees, a heat index reaching 85, and a maximum dew point of 65. Monday 4pm – Monday 8pm. Maximum temperature will be 88 degrees, a heat index reaching 90, and a maximum dew point of 67. Tuesday 1am – Tuesday 11am. Maximum temperature will be 79 degrees, a heat index reaching 79, and a maximum dew point of 67.

On this day in 1969, the $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills are officially withdrawn from circulation. After this date, if you wanted to buy a large purchase in cash, you needed a lot of hundred dollars in bills. They had last been printed in 1945, and were finally dropped from circulation in 1969, in part as an effort to reduce corruption and money scams.

There are 6 weeks until State Fair Opens when the sun will be setting at 7:39 pm with dusk at 8:09 pm. The average high temperature is 79 degrees, with a record high of 99 in 1947.

Big Red is at the shop to have the air conditioning checked and routine maintenance under the severe service schedule.  None of it had to be done today but I wanted to maximize the life of the truck and the air conditioning, and make sure I stay cold all summer long. I’ve spent enough money on the truck, it best work at peak performance. Probably waste a few hundred on this but gosh, is reasonable preventive maintenance really ever a waste?

It’s possible that the shop will tell me that the air conditioning is fine and I just have inflated expectations for how cold it should but I suspect that after five years the refrigerant has leaked a bit. The truck was manufactured five years ago and I’ve had it for five as of October. I’m fine with paying a couple hundred to prolong the life of the air conditioning system. For the 100k recharge, if necessary, I’ll just buy a Wally World kit, assuming that the climate activists don’t get R-134a limited to professional installers.

Probably in a decade I’ll view Big Red as a the folly that he is, but when you’re young, it’s fun to have fun toys. Probably in ten years we’ll be in a fuel crisis or climate crisis, and I’ll have good memories of those good old days. Life is fun but old age will certainly creep up.

A little over a week until vacation. I look forward to having nice cold air from the truck, when I travel around on vacation, assuming it’s not an unusually frigid last week of July. It will be nice spending days at the pools, exploring the gorge, and camping. I have that great campstove, a charcoal grill, and other things, so I will set up a nice campsite in the National Forest and have a lot of fun.

Nine days to be exact. Have a good one.