Good morning! Happy Tuesday. Cloudy and 34 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a north breeze at 5 mph. The skies will clear around 5 pm. Kind of a gray morning on the bus ride downtown, and cranky, because I am not going to be in the office until well after 9 AM despite getting up early and walking down to the express bus.

Got to work eventually, the bus was delayed by the traffic jam caused by the emissions and registration check on NY 32. Did they really need to pull over and check opacity for every single semi truck at rush hour slowing traffic to a crawl, especially in an area that has no air pollution problem? I guess you could make a different case for South Pearl Street or residential areas, but not on major highways in rural areas. I guess the Environmental Conservation Officers and Bethlehem Police were bored as fuck prior the opening of regular season on Saturday. I get up early to walk down to the express bus stop, and I’m still late to work because the bus gets stuck in all of this mess. I’m cranky.

Today will be mostly cloudy, with a high of 41 degrees at 1pm. Eight degrees below normal. North wind 3 to 5 mph. A year ago, we had sunny skies with more clouds in the afternoon. The high last year was 58 degrees. The record high of 70 was set in 1973. 14.4 inches of snow fell back in 1972. That was a pretty big storm by any standard, but Albany has certainly seen worse.

The sun will set at 4:33 pm with dusk around 5:03 pm, which is 55 seconds earlier than yesterday. At sunset, look for partly cloudy conditions and 39 degrees. There will be a north-northwest breeze at 5 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 46 minutes of daytime, a decrease of 2 minutes and 10 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be mostly cloudy, with a low of 26 degrees at 6am. Six degrees below normal. Light northwest wind. In 2016, we had cloudy skies. It got down to 34 degrees. The record low of 14 occurred back in 1939.

Made soup and crescent rolls for dinner last night. That was a pretty good dinner. Waffles again for breakfast. I do get a bit tired of waffles, but I figure it’s a fairly good and easy breakfast, especially when topped with peaches this morning, or other fruit like blueberries and strawberries. I had eggs with cheese and ham on Monday morning, which seems to be more filling, but I don’t like the extra dishes to clean, especially if I accidentally get the pan on and it gets burnt.

Great big bearded tom this morning, at the intersection between US 9W and NY 32. He was just standing out there staring at the passing traffic and annoyed commuters that were late to work due to the truck inspection.

I may take off Friday, depending on how much time I have left to use before the end of the year, but I don’t think I will head far out of town. I just don’t want to get caught with freezing rain up north — even if it doesn’t last all day. Waking up with everything frozen and covered with ice in the morning would not be fun — even if I’m just a few hundred feet from the winter-maintained NY 8. Plus it’s the first day of regular deer season in the Southern Zone, so while I doubt there would be Sheriff/Conservation offices patrols up north stopping by, as you would in most state forests in the Southern Zone, it’s quite possible that there would be on NY 30, once in the Southern Zone coming back home on Saturday. Not that it’s a big deal, but I still don’t like answering questions or being delayed on my trip home — although I’m sure they would admire my Molon Labe flag.

Maybe over the Thanksgiving Weekend — e.g. Black Friday through Sunday I could go for a road trip. It depends how much snow there is out there. I probably would go to the Northern Zone because deer season is mostly done up there if I wanted to go hunting or camping. That said, some of the bigger campsites on NY 8 are probably already taken by people who have deer camps set up there through December. If there isn’t any snow, I might go up and camp by Mason Lake. That is pretty with the frost and cold in the morning. I want to do some hiking too. Maybe Moxham Mountain like I’ve been talking about, although I like Mason Lake as I know I will have cell service there, and it makes the evenings more fun. I guess there is always a possibility I could go further north. But I doubt it.

Continuing to work with my Arduino IDE and developing the LED driver. I’ve been working with the IR detector which works with the TV remote that never worked with my HDTV box, the later which broke a few months back, and I’ve not been able to fix it. It was easy enough to get the code from the remote when pressing a button, and make it fire up an LED, dim it, or make it blink or do some kind of routine. That said, I will have re-write some of the code, because with the Arduino you can’t run processes in the background, so anytime you call delay(), it hangs the microprocessor until the loop runs again.

So you have to avoid calling delay, instead storing the time the program has started and check the time each time you go around the loop to see if the program needs to do further action like dimming a pin or turning it on or off. Kind of pain to write, but it works okay. There is an interrupt function you can call to break a delay(), but from what I’ve read you shouldn’t really be hanging the processor with the delay() function. Maybe there is a simpler way to do it — it would be neat if the compiler would allow you call functions in the background as a thread — but I can’t figure it out. Actually, I think messing with interrupts and breaking functions might be more complicated then just repeatedly calling the loop and checking against the time.

Looking ahead, there are 51 weeks until Election Day 2018 when the sun will be setting at 4:41 pm with dusk at 5:11 pm. Yes, it will come back around the guitar. On that day in 2017, we had mostly cloudy skies and temperatures between 51 and 35 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 52 degrees. We hit a record high of 73 back in 2015.