Good morning! What day is it? Hump Day, of course. Three weeks to Halloween 🎃. Trick or treat? Mostly sunny and 76 degrees in North Syracuse. There is a south breeze at 6 mph. 🍃. The dew point is 66 degrees. A beautiful morning, although a bit sticky! The muggy weather ends tomorrow around 6 pm. 😓

I started out this morning with a nice walk at Long Branch County Park in Baldwinsville, although maybe it’s better to call it Liverpool as the village is closer, and I think i was in the town of Salina. Nice to see a different part of the Onondoga Lake Park, beautiful day walking along the canal up there.🚶 Next week or maybe the week after, I’ll have to explore some of the trails on the west side of the lake. There is a bit of noise pollution 🔇 from the Thruway 🚛🚚🚓🚗🏎🚌🚐 but it looks like a great park to explore. 🍁

Today will be mostly sunny 🌞 , with a high of 84 degrees at 3pm. 22 degrees above normal. Maximum dew point of 67 at 10am. Not half bad weather for being at the swimming pool in mid-July. 🏊 Southwest wind 6 to 9 mph. Don’t worry, it will be much colder on Thursday and Friday. 😰 A year ago, we had partly cloudy skies. The high last year was 76 degrees. The record high of 89 was set in 1939. 0.8 inches of snow fell back in 1925.❄

The sun will set at 6:29 pm with dusk around 6:57 pm, which is one minute and 42 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for partly cloudy skies ⛅ and 81 degrees. The dew point will be 65 degrees. A bit sticky. There will be a south breeze at 8 mph. Today will have 11 hours and 16 minutes of daytime, an decrease of 2 minutes and 52 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a chance of showers before 2am, then a chance of rain and thunderstorms between 2am and 3am, then rain likely and possibly a thunderstorm after 3am. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a low of 67 degrees at 6am. 26 degrees above normal. Maximum dew point of 65 at 6pm. South wind 7 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. In 2017, we had mostly clear skies with more clouds in the early hours of the next day. It got down to 47 degrees. The record low of 22 occurred back in 1943.

There are 27 days, 11 hours and 26 minutes until the poll close on Election Day in New York. 🗳 Each day we get one day closer. I will be glad once it’s over, because I get tired of spending all of this time in the office, and I am very much so looking forward to my November Road Trip. 🏕 I don’t know why but I still am really looking forward to Allegany County. I mean I guess it’s not that fantastic — it’s just more state forest, but it’s lands I’ve only spent a limited time exploring. Plus all those delicious camp meals.

Lately, I’ve been watching more videos about bushcrafting,🌲 hunting, and trapping 🏹 on my phone in the evening before bed. 📱I kind of like learning more about how people are using the woods and the back country. So many ideas to learn. It’s kind of nice having Internet where I’m staying, because it gives me a lot more opportunities to watch video on the Youtube. 📽 When I return back to Albany in late November, I’ll have to start downloading more videos at the library to bring back home and watch. ⤵️ There is so much more I could be doing on my adventures in the wilderness and back country. It just seems summer is so short — but then I like winter camping, especially when there isn’t too much snow to park my truck in the back-country.

Before going out camping this autumn, I want to buy a resist flag, to add to my collection.  I really don’t like much of the Trump agenda, and it will look nice next to my Gadsen Flag and Molon Labe flag. Even if I only a few of my flags, it adds a lot of light and color to my campsite, especially when they are lit up on the long winter nights.

After my November Road trip, I will probably do one or two more trips to the Adirondacks before the snow sets in. It might be nice to do a North Country trip I’ve been talking about for a while, 🌨 but I doubt I will have time to do it before the snow comes in. There is a lot of great things to see up North, but it’s such a long drive, and I don’t really like those really long drives. Maybe in the spring. 🌿 I’ll have to think about it some more. Maybe it will be a quite mild winter so I can get out most of the winter.

On the toy front, I continue to study M.2 SSD drives for upgrading my laptop. I am going to wait until the Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales, then order something online. 💾 I guess I will go with a 1 TB drive, as that will double my space, and give me plenty of fast space for doing video and my disk-intensive GIS work that I do. I am hoping to get something for under $150, which on sale seems reasonable as I’ve started to see a lot of deals in that range, and they typically are even better before the holiday season. I also need to figure out the process of getting my laptop apart, 🖥 but i don’t think that’s too big of a deal. But it’s best done mid-winter when it’s too icky to spend traveling. I don’t have a lot of fancy electronic toys besides my year and a half old $50 smartphone and my laptop which I use for making all my maps.

Still thinking about what kind of meter to measure the output of the solar panel. I do like the GT Power meter I mention yesterday, but I do worry about the 20 mA they consume 24/7 plus loses in the wire from being too thin.  📟 This is more of a concern at night when the solar panel isn’t feeding any power into the line, especially on the long winter lines. 🔌 And sometimes the quality of China equipment is less then you would hope. But I guess at $10 a piece they won’t break the bank. I will also need more crimp connector ends to tie them, especially for the meter I mount between the battery and the load. I wonder what the meter will read when I back feed current from the panel into the battery? Will it show zero or the amount of back fed current (with no negative sign?) My guess is the later, as I assume it reads current via a hall-effect sensor. 🔋 As things take a long while to arrive from China — and I would like to have a meter at least for the panel installed before my November road trip — I probably should do it soon.

Last year, because I got Big Red inspected on November 1st, I don’t have to get another state inspection until the end of November this year. 🔍 That’s good because I don’t like to have to get the truck inspected at some random shop that I am unfamiliar with. I will probably do it sometimes around the Thanksgiving Holiday, once camping season is all but over — unless for some reason I have some other pressing maintenance need, but I doubt it.

As previously noted, there are 3 weeks until Halloween 🎃 when the sun will be setting at 5:57 pm with dusk at 6:26 pm. On that day in 2017, we had mostly cloudy skies and temperatures between 54 and 40 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 54 degrees. We hit a record high of 73 back in 1946. 😲