Skied from the Slingerlands Firehouse to Voorheesville NY 155 Bridge, 3.61 miles each way.

Nine percent of NY’s GDP is health care funded by Medicaid or $132 billion out of $1,500 billion.

The high tomorrow will be 28 degrees colder then the high in 2016.

Tomorrow the sun will be setting at 4:30 PM. That is an increase of nine minutes since December 9th. Dusk isn’t until 5 PM tonight.

Upcoming Sunsets:

4:45 pm sunset – Friday, January 12
5:00 pm sunset – Wednesday, January 24
5:15 pm sunset – Sunday, February 4
5:30 pm sunset – Friday, February 16
5:45 pm sunset – Wednesday, February 28
Daylight Savings Time Begins – Sunset on Sunday, March 11 is at 6:57 pm
7:00 pm sunset – Monday, March 12
7:15 pm sunset – Sunday, March 25
7:30 pm sunset – Saturday, April 7
7:45 pm sunset – Saturday, April 21
8:00 pm sunset – Friday, May 4

Good morning! Happy Frigid Tuesday. Four weeks to National Pie Day. No, not that Pie ‘R Square Day, another one in January. Mostly sunny and 15 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a west-southwest breeze at 14 mph. The current wind chill is zero. The wind is fairly well blocked in Delmar but I’m sure in the city with the tall buildings and exposed farm fields, it has to be that cold.

Cold morning for sure. I am off from work today for the holiday, but it’s back to the daily grind tomorrow. A lot of my colleagues have off next week, but I always volunteer to cover for people and 8work during the end of December, because it’s often too snowy and cold for road trips, and my family is local. Come Independence Day Weekend, it’s a different story, although in 2018, Independence Day is a Wednesday, so I won’t be able to make it into a long weekend, especially as I expect a rather busy summer at work, with lots of late nights. At least it’s usually well air conditioned at work. Got a lot of stuff to do to prep for 2018 when I get back into the office, and I’m sure my Christmas Cactus and other office plants will be thirsty and looking for some water.

Today will have isolated snow showers after 4pm. Mostly sunny but cold, with a high of 25 degrees at 2pm. Eight degrees below normal. West wind 14 to 18 mph, with gusts as high as 31 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. A year ago, we had mostly cloudy skies. The high last year was 41 degrees. The record high of 59 was set in 1895. 13.9 inches of snow fell back in 1969. The blizzard of 1969, which fell on top of the two odd feet of snow already on the ground!

That snow yesterday was more of a nuisance then anything else, although I stayed home on Christmas, just because I didn’t want to deal with digging out my truck or the blowing snow. Sometimes when it’s really cold out, it’s just nicer to stare out the window and work on various projects.

The sun will set at 4:28 pm with dusk around 5:00 pm, which is 41 seconds later than yesterday. At sunset, look for partly sunny conditions and 23 degrees. The wind chill around sunset will be 9. Breezy, 17 mph breeze from the west with gusts up to 29mph. Today will have 9 hours and 4 minutes of daytime, a increase of 23 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy, with a low of 6 degrees at 6am. 11 degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -3 at 6am; West wind 6 to 14 mph. In 2016, we had cloudy skies. It got down to 35 degrees. The record low of -18 occurred back in 1914.

I have to admit, I really didn’t do that much yesterday but change one of the pins on the LED dimmer and continue to work on some new modes. I’ve noticed some flicker at certain light levels, making me think there is a bug in the code or something messing with the PWM output. I don’t know, this is a new issue to crop up. But I guess it’s fine.

I have found some double-wide LED track that I think I am going to order, and then put the Arduino in an Arduino case. I don’t think I will mount the Arduino shield I built into anything, just because it’s not that fragile, I don’t want to accidentially block the IR reciever, and I want to “feature” my home-made shield. Plus stuffing those MOSFETs into a box would be difficult the way I have mounted them. When it’s done, I want something that looks quite professional and well built. I also want to get some 20 guage wire, as the 16 gauge wire I have automotive wiring purposes is kind of thick, and the 26 and 30-gauge Kyner wire I bought for wiring gates and other control circuitry is dangerously thin for the source and drains that control the LEDs.

The LED strip, all 5 meters when fully lit at maximum brightness has a theoritical demand of 6 amp 12 VDC or 72 watts, although at the brightness I drive them at, it rarely exceeds 1-2 amp. Yesterday, while testing it I found at 40% brightness at 2700k I was only pulling about 180 mA or about 3 watts. My volt meter kind of has some it’s internal circuitry fried from stupid shit I did years ago, so I can’t measure about 200 mA. I have a 10 amp cheap power supply I got from eBay, although I have my doubts that it could deliver that amount without shutting down. It already shows a bit of a voltage drop (granted, a reasonable 11.8 volts) when the LEDs are at full brightess, but it may be because I’m using the 26 gauge Kyner wire right now on the gates and drains. The 5050 chips are supposed to put out 16-20 lumens per watt (which on paper is really quite efficent), but I can tell you that the 300 LEDs in strip I have certainly have not been driven to a brightness equal to 4,800 lumen or as bright as three incadescent 100 watt bulbs. While I expect to capture more light when the LEDs are all pointed in one direction mounted in the double LED tracks, I doubt that they really are all bright. It will be nice to have the LEDs mounted, rather then just taped to the wall using masking tape.

My next Arduino project is going to be an LED message board like you see in commerical buildings in the alike, using addressable LED strips mounted on board. In some ways that will be a cheaper and simplier project, in part because I already have the hardware I need for the project like the soldering iron and the Arduino. It’s also simplier to build, as you don’t have the MOSFET transitors and many resistors to wire up. I do need to get a 10 amp 5 VDC power supply to drive that, although maybe I will see if I can steal one from an old desktop computer rather then order one online. Addressable LEDs look like a lot of fun, although they are less efficent then non-addressable ones. 

Yesterday, I did not get out for my evening walk, but soon once I finish tihs blog post and take a shower I will walk down to the library. I haven’t been doing as much walking lately, because the cold seems to bother me more, and I’ve gotten lazy. Also not having working headphones with my phone, means I’ve not had music while walking. I am hoping that my wireless headphones will arrive today, which will hopefully be less prone to failure without a jack, and not get tangled up while I am walking and skiing.

I am thinking about going to skiing along the Rail Trail out along Font Grove and to Voorheesville, but I am a bit on the fence because I’m concerned that in the cold driving to just to Slingerlands may not be enough to top off the battery and get truck fully warmed up before shutting it off. I also have to be careful driving on town roads where there may be a lot of cops, because while I cleaned off my truck the best I could the cap at 8’6″ is a bitch to get the snow off. Maybe as the day progresses with the wind some of the remaining snow up top with blow off before I head out. If not, I’m sure State Route 443 later on, possibly after dark, will do the job.

Still don’t have an ice scraper, but I don’t care. I have the windshield wipers off and the snow brushed off the windshield so hopefully the sun and the defroster will do the rest of the job. It’s a cold day but there is a lot of sun. I could go hiking or traveling somewhere, but I really am avoiding using enough gas to need a fill up, because I am trying to avoiding spending money this week. While I get paid today, I have a rent check and the payment for the next six months of cell service due this week. I also just don’t have a lot of money in my checking account, in part because I just paid for my October trip with just ordinary cash rather then take some money out of savings. I guess if I absolutely had to, I could withdraw some money to pay the bills, but I am hoping by conserving I will be okay for the next few weeks.

Money is always so tight for me, and while it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten dinged for insufficent funds, it seems like many weeks I struggle to make ends meet. Each paycheck, a lot of money goes into my various retirement accounts, investment accounts, and savings account. I actually have lost track on how much money it all is, but it helping to grow my assets.  When all the withdrawls are done, there just isn’t a lot left to spend for things like groceries, supplies, and gasoline. There is absolutely zero money left any month for luxuries like that $10 toy I see at Walmart or eating lunch out, much less fancy Internet service beyond my smartphone.

While retirement is two or three decades away, in retirement I want to be able to afford land, an off-grid cabin, nice toys like a four wheeler, guns, a nice truck, etc. A secure retirement these days doesn’t come easy, with so much of the traditional guarantees of social security and a pension fading away. I don’t need or want a fancy house, just land to live on, farm, and hunt and trap but that stuff is capital intensive up front — even living minimally on a miniscule energy budget at first — even if it’s cheaper over the long run. I look at what truck drivers Bill and Rosa are doing with their cabin in Oklahoma, starting off pretty rough at first, but building up a lot of assets now that they are free of utility bills and services that suburban homeowners have to pay each month to have access to. Their new F-350 pickup truck and big farm tractor are pretty sweet.

It seems increasingly unlikely that I will be able to head out of town for camping with the cold weather next week, so that’s one less expense. Camping over Martin Luther King Jr weekend might be nice, if it’s not to cold. I don’t mind heading up north to camp if it’s relatively snow free and the day time temperatures reach the mid-20s with limited wind, but not if the wind is howling around and it’s much colder. Too much snow would make it a bitch too dig out a parking spot, especially up north where the snow is often much deeper. Saves money, which is good with things so tight. Maybe it makes me a bad liberal, but I’m looking forward to that extra $50 or so a month that it looks like I will be getting after the Trump tax cut. Hopefully some of that can go into savings, but evidently some will have to go to address my struggling finances lately.

Looking ahead, there are 4 weeks until National Pie Day when the sun will be setting at 4:58 pm with dusk at 5:28 pm. I am still partial for pumpkin pie, although honestly I don’t eat that many sweets any more. On that day in 2017, we had rain, freezing rain, snow, sleet, mist, mostly cloudy skies and temperatures between 39 and 32 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 31 degrees. We hit a record high of 64 back in 1906.