Good morning! Happy Arbor Day 🌳. Trees are a good thing. They provide shade and shelter and nice wood to burn in the winter. They feed the deer, provide shelter for cows and people to read under in the summer. Speaking of reading under nice trees, next Friday is 8 PM Sunset 🌇. Mostly cloudy and 45 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁ Calm wind. Rain this afternoon, 💦skies will clear tomorrow around 8 am.

Today will have showers, mainly after noon. High of 53 degrees at 4pm.☔ 10 degrees below normal. Maximum dew point of 44 at 4pm. 🏖 Maybe not so hot and humid or beach weather. South wind 3 to 6 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New precipitation amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible. A year ago, we had cloudy skies with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 73 degrees. The record high of 91 was set in 1962. There was a dusting of snow in 1946.❄

The sun will set at 7:51 pm with dusk around 8:22 pm, which is one minute and 8 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for rain ☔and 52 degrees. There will be a north-northeast breeze at 5 mph. Today will have 13 hours and 57 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 34 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a chance of showers before 2am, then a slight chance of showers after 3am. Mostly cloudy ☁, with a low of 44 degrees at 3am. Two degrees above normal. North wind around 5 mph becoming calm in the evening. Chance of precipitation is 30%. New precipitation amounts of less than a tenth of an inch possible. In 2017, we had mostly cloudy skies. It got down to 60 degrees. The record low of 25 occurred back in 1947.

Today is Arbor Day. 🌲Looking forward to getting out camping more now that summer is coming under the trees of the wilderness, burning plenty of wood and other stuff. Lol! Everyday is another buck earned and saved towards the day in another 15 years when I will own land and an off grid cabin. That’s still many years off but I’m looking forward to a better future in a state with more freedom and less laws and regulations🙋 on what I can do with my land. Land really is a sacred thing, even if you shouldn’t view it as magic but just science and rationally. Good forestry and farming can keep the land healthy for generations to come.

Tomorrow is the Save the Pine Bush hike that I am leading. 🌿Should be nice by tomorrow morning even if spring has been retarded by the cold temperatures over this past month. I struggle to accept that it’s only going to 49 degrees in the city on Sunday. That and the cold rain on Saturday evening means no camping for me this weekend.⛔

Next week I’m thinking about taking off Friday for a long weekend in the Adirondacks. Maybe try to fill my turkey tag, maybe do some trout fishing.🐸 And have a rip roaring fire, burn some junk up, do some camping have a nice breakfast in the wilderness. ⛺

Caught the express bus down to work from the Park and Ride. 🚍Nice brisk walk. While I’m not 100% recovered from the cold, I’m feeling a lot better. 🍏🍖🍛Went grocery shopping last night, then got home and went to bed early. I still like the automated check outs at Walmart but it’s a pain how they are rearranging the shelves. Still I like shopping there, as you can buy ammunition,🔫 fishing tackle,🎣 camping gear⛺ and food all in one place.

I got the USB power meter I ordered from China yesterday. Nice to be able to monitor how much power my electronics projects are consuming is important for many reasons. One is that I don’t want to overload USB power supplies,🔥 most of which are limited to about 2 amp, although computers shouldn’t really be supplying more then about a 1/2 amp to their ports.⚡ Plus I’m always interested in how much power I am consuming with my various projects for conservation purposes. So far everything I’ve metered seems to use less power then I would have expected. Could be the inexpensive meter is reading too low, but I also think it’s possible that I did not calculate the internal resistance of various components and how it’s impacting power consumption, especially on LEDs which consume power based on how much is supplied to them.💡

My next two electronics projects include building a color organ that will use some of the RGB LEDs I recently purchased from China, to make a vase or a jar full of marbles turn various colors.🕯 A nice desk thing to have, adds a lot of color on a gray day. Going to use an Arduino for sending the color signals, along with transistors and a few different RGB LEDs. I am either going to put it in a jar full of marbles or maybe a vase with fake flowers. Might use it to brighten up my desk or as a gift.💐 Then also working on my second VMS sign, with additional modules to make it longer for my bedroom. I found the broken wire, which was keeping the RT3231 timer moduel signal from working, so I just have to re-solder that back on, and then solder on the additional MAX7219 modules to make it longer, and make some minor tweaks to the code. Fun!

As previously noted, next Friday is 8 PM Sunset 🌇 with dusk at 8:30 pm. On that day in 2017, we had rain, cloudy skies and temperatures between 64 and 36 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 66 degrees. We hit a record high of 91 back in 1944.