July 11, 2019 Night

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Good evening! Cloudy and 79 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁ There is a south breeze at 10 mph. 🍃. The breeze and the clouds make it feel not all that warm – it comfortable in bed without hooking up the fan. I’m glad, the fan uses a lot of energy – upwards of 60 watts when it’s running. The dew point is 68 degrees. The skies will clear tomorrow around 10 am.

I went over to John Wolcott’s house 📂 and we’re down to the last box of Albany files. Still probably a few more hours worth of Albany material to sort through, I’ll be back to it next week. Tomorrow night, it’s Friday night at the library, studying tax maps and rolls for Save the Pine Bush.🌲

Tonight will have a chance of showers and thunderstorms. Cloudy 🌧, with a low of 68 degrees at 5am. Six degrees above normal. Maximum dew point of 69 at 4am. South wind 6 to 10 mph. Chance of precipitation is 40%. New rainfall amounts of less than a tenth of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms. In 2018, we had mostly clear skies. It got down to 55 degrees. The record low of 44 occurred back in 1978.

Tonight will have a Waxing Gibbous Moon 🌔 with 85% illuminated. The moon will set at 2:13 am. The 🌕 is on Monday night with a chance of t-storms. The sun will rise at 5:28 am with the first light at 4:54 am, which is 46 seconds later than yesterday. 🌄 Tonight will have 8 hours and 55 minutes of darkness, an increase of one minute and 17 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will have a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms. Partly sunny ☀, with a high of 82 degrees at 2pm. Typical for tomorrow. Maximum dew point of 68 at 6am. West wind 6 to 13 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies. The high last year was 85 degrees. The record high of 96 was set in 1935.

In four weeks on August 8 the sun will be setting at 8:06 pm,🌄 which is 26 minutes and 56 seconds earlier then tonight. In 2018 on that day, we had hot, humid, partly sunny, mist and temperatures between 87 and 71 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 82 and 61 degrees. The record high of 95 degrees was set back in 1983.

Looking ahead, August 🌻 is in 3 weeks, September 11th 🇸 is in 2 months and Last Sunset After 7 PM 🌆 is in 12 weeks.

Great Blue Heron

The US Recycling System Is Garbage | Sierra Club

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The US Recycling System Is Garbage | Sierra Club

FOR NEARLY THREE DECADES your recycling bin contained a dirty secret: Half the plastic and much of the paper you put into it did not go to your local recycling center. Instead, it was stuffed onto giant container ships and sold to China. Around 1992, US cities and trash companies started offshoring their most contaminated, least valuable "recyclables" to a China that was desperate for raw materials. There, the dirty bales of mixed paper and plastic were processed under the laxest of environmental controls. Much of it was simply dumped, washing down rivers to feed the crisis of ocean plastic pollution. Meanwhile, America's once-robust capability to sort, clean, and recycle its own waste deteriorated. Why invest in expensive technology and labor when the mess could easily be bundled off to China?

Living with little waste

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Besides generating most of my electricity on site from renewable sources, one of my goals when I own my off-grid home is to manage as much of my waste on site in an environmental sustainable fashion and make less than one trip a year to the transfer station. This would not only save upwards of $400 a year in disposal costs ($33/month), it would keep a lot of waste out of landfill, and save money by avoiding unnecessary products I later have to dispose of on or off the farm.

Full Dumpster

Buy less, avoid unnecessary products

The most important strategy in my book to avoiding waste is avoid buying unnecessary products. There is so many cheap frivolous products but they’re both a drain on finances and the environment.

Apparently The Best Grass Is On The Trail

Feed livestock with food scraps

When I own land I want to be a to produce some of my own food. Producing your own food avoids packaging and you can bury the guts on your own land, feeding the soil. Hogs make good bacon and pork, they can be partially fed from food scraps and garden vegatable waste. Chickens likewise can eat many of those wastes and produce eggs and meat.

Compost Pile

Compost

Most vegetables, leaves, manure and other organic matter can be composted and turned into rich soil. Many of the things good for compost don’t burn well as they have a lot of moisture and it seems a waste to be dumping organic matter into the air with fire or producing unnecessary carbon emissions.

Steel

Scrap metal

Metals don’t burn and they are good to recycle. Separating out aluminum cans and tin cans for a yearly trip to the scrap metal yard or recycling center is an environmentally responsible activity and might even few a bucks. Likewise broken down machinery can be sold for scrap. If I can’t use it, I might as well get a few bucks for it and return it to the vast material industry for scrapping.

Burn Baby Burn

Burn

Almost everything you buy in the store today is packaged in paper, cardboard or plastic. These materials – often linked with plastics – can take a long time to break down in nature unless they are burned. Fortunately as witnessed by the large number of rural households and farms with burn barrels in states without regulations prohibiting them, most ordinary household trash burns. Add some scrap wood, maybe some increased ventilation and you got a hot fire that isn’t particularly noxious. I would keep my burn barrels down wind of my cabin in a place where I can monitor them and have garbage cans to store waste until the weather is safe for burning.

Landfill Fence, Methane Pump

Transfer station

As a last resort there is always a trip to the transfer station for wastes that can’t be reused or disposed on site. My goal would be at my off-grid property to do this less than once a year and really try to use the landfill option as last resort, mostly using it for recycling of glass, e-waste or other materials that lack an environmentally responsible way to dispose of on-site, which can’t be avoided by careful choices when shopping.

Next Time – Thursday July 11

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Today’s sunrise was at 5:28 am. The next time the sun will rise earlier then today 🌄 is in 313 days on Tuesday, May 19, 2020.

The average high for today is 82 degrees. 🌡 The next time it will be on average cooler then today is in 30 days on Saturday, August 10 when the average temperature will be 81 degrees.

Today’s sunset will be at 8:33 pm. The next time the sun will set later then today 🌆 is in 337 days on Friday, June 12, 2020.

The average low for today is 61 degrees. 🌡 The next night it will be on average cooler then tonight is in 34 days on Wednesday, August 14 when the average temperature will be 60 degrees.

Island

Parachuting beavers featured in ‘Fur For the Future,’ 1950s-era film

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In 1948, game warden and pilot Elmo Heter executed a plan years in the making to reintroduce beavers into the mountainous wilds of Idaho. His plan sounded simple, Idaho Fish & Wildlife professionals would work with skilled trappers to catch nuisance beavers from abundant areas adjacent to mankind, pack them into wooden crates, load them onto an airplane and, whilst tethered to a parachute, drop the sub-aquatic rodents into portions of the wilderness for reintroduction efforts. The crates would burst open on impact, freeing the furry engineers encased inside to roam the wilds of their new abode. "

In all, 76 beavers would complete the trip, with only one documented beaver fatality from the drop, which was due to a lashing failure allowing the beaver to exit the box in mid-air.

https://furbearerconservation.com/blog/2019/7/9/idahos-air-dropped-beavers-cage-trapped-muskrats-and-ear-tagged-marten

Adirondacks

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Kettle, Harrington, Garnet Lake, and many mountains can be seen into the horizon from Crain Mountain.

Taken on Sunday July 5, 2009 at Crane Mountain.

Moose River Plains Upgrades

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A decade ago Moose River Plains was a lot more diapolated than it is now it seems. While the state had invested in some of the accessible features like the new improved accessible trails to Helldiver, Icehouse, and Mitchells Pond, and the accessible campsites most of the other campsites had fallen into disrepair with outhouses and picnic tables falling apart if they existed at all.

Campsite on Moose River Plains road

In more recent years the situation has improved enormously. Most of the drive in campsites have new outhouses, fire places have largely been replaced as have picnic tables. While the original infrastructure of the Plains held up well for fifty years – much of it from the late 1960s and early 1970s, use and abuse meant it needed to be upgraded.

Untitled [Expires August 4 2024]

I’ve heard that many of the upgrades were in part done by volunteers and not the Division of Operations. But regardless, they still make for a nice area to visit and enjoy. Having a picnic table and outhouse at nearly every site is a good improvement for sure.