Good morning! Monday’s come back around again. Final Monday before vacation,🏕 and coincidentally Election Day. 🗳 Next Monday, Veterans Day is Observed (Monday) 🇺🇸. Heavy rain this morning and 44 degrees in North Syracuse. 🌧 There is a southeast breeze at 14 mph. 🍃. Temperatures will drop below freezing at Saturday around 3 am. ☃️

Today will have showers likely, mainly between 10am and 1pm. Cloudy ☔, with a high of 51 degrees at 1pm. I dunno, it’s raining pretty hard now. One degrees below normal. Southeast wind 11 to 14 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New precipitation amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch possible. A year ago, we had cloudy skies. The high last year was 57 degrees. The record high of 75 was set in 1994. 3 inches of snow fell back in 1894.❄

The sun will set at 4:50 pm with dusk around 5:20 pm, which is one minute and 13 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for rain showers ☔ and 51 degrees. There will be a east-southeast breeze at 11 mph. Today will have 10 hours and 5 minutes of daytime, a decrease of 2 minutes and 30 seconds over yesterday. The days keep getting shorter, even in Trump’s America.

Tonight will have a chance of showers, mainly before midnight. Mostly cloudy , with a low of 44 degrees at 5am. 10 degrees above normal. Southeast wind 9 to 11 mph. Chance of precipitation is 40%. New precipitation amounts of less than a tenth of an inch possible. In 2017, we had light rain in the evening, remaining overcast into the early morning. It got down to 42 degrees. The record low of 15 occurred back in 1951.

I am working on putting together my packing list for the camping trip. 🏕 The forecast is generally looking drier but cold. I can deal with the cold, as long as it doesn’t look like snow and ice. I don’t want to risk sliding off a road or dealing with bad roads especially with the many steep hills and rough terrian I expect to be in over the next week and half camping. I will pack my heater, have lots of coffee and hot-coca, ☕ and will hot tent if it gets really cold. Not to mention a big fire, stew, and other good eats. 🌬 I can also build a wind-shelter to block the wind should that start to pick up in the afternoon. It’s still only early to mid-October, so an exceptionally cold night gets down into the teens, so it’s not that cold, as long as we don’t get any sow.❄ My goal is spend more nights at one camp, to save gas and miles on the truck, to get to know the land, with less driving, so I will have the time to build a fairly elaborate shelter.

There is 1 day, 12 hours and 9 minutes until the poll close on Election Day in New York. 🗳 It’s going to be a wet one today, then tomorrow is the day to vote, if you haven’t done it yet, via absentee ballots. I’m quite happy with my choice to vote for Libertarian Larry Sharpe for governor, as I didn’t think Molinaro really had a chance, despite my friends on social media saying I shouldn’t vote for a spoiler.  I am a liberal, and I believe in big-picture issues, but I have no tolerance for over-regulation of private citizen’s lives, 🚨 something that current incumbent who I’ve never voted for has made a hallmark of his eight years in the governorship.🏚 I do worry we aren’t doing enough to control government waste and spending more general, with the government finding new ways to extract more money out of ordinary people through new fees and fines. At the same time ,more needs to be done to address the climate change crisis and spiraling out of control healthcare costs.

I like to cast a protest vote, especially if my vote ain’t going to change a thing. ✊ Honestly though, I don’t really care that much, as I’m planning to move out of New York in a decade or so, and everybody knows our state is a shit-hole. 💩 I am not holding my breath on big reforms proposed by the Democrats like affordable, sensible healthcare or climate change action, despite all the nibbling around these issues and the many press releases they put out.🏦 Cuomo is basically the Donald Trump of the left, making our state more and more fascist. He’s no progressive leader, I have little hope of him fixing healthcare with a strong single-payer system or taking bold steps on climate change.

As previously noted, next Monday is Veterans Day Observed (Monday) 🇺🇸 when the sun will be setting at 4:42 pm with dusk at 5:12 pm. On that day in 2017, we had mostly sunny skies and temperatures between 44 and 22 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 49 degrees. We hit a record high of 68 back in 1909.