Good morning! What day is it? Hump Day, of course. 🐪 Fords don’t celebrate this day. 😆 Next Wednesday is the Save the Pine Bush Dinner 🍲 and Bake Cookies Day 🍪. After eating all that good lasagna are you really going to want to eat cookies? Hmm. Mostly cloudy and 25 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁ There is a west-northwest breeze at 5 mph. 🍃. The air is much drier, the cold doesn’t seem that cold and today or maybe I’m just dressed warmer. There are 3.5 inches of snow on the ground. ☃ You can see bare patches of ground in spots. By the end of the weekend we might have bare ground in a lot of spots. But cold the next few days. ️Things will start to thaw out at Friday around 9 am. 🌡️

Today will be partly sunny 🌞, with a high of 32 degrees at 2pm. Five degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around December 27th. West wind 5 to 7 mph becoming south in the afternoon. That sun and breeze should keep chewing away at the snow. A year ago, we had partly cloudy skies in the morning, remaining cloudy in the afternoon. The high last year was 31 degrees. The record high of 61 was set in 1952. 4.3 inches of snow fell back in 1970.❄

I guess it’s good that I went skiing last weekend. 🎿 The rail trail at this point looks pretty bare. I’m really hoping that the snow is gone for the end of the month for my Finger Lakes trip as that will mean more roads are open to explore but cold enough that the ground is frozen. That said I’m prepared for whatever except bad snow covered roads.

The sun will set at 4:22 pm with dusk around 4:53 pm, which is 3 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for partly cloudy skies 🌃 and temperatures around 31 degrees. There will be a south breeze at 7 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 6 minutes of daytime, a decrease of 48 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a slight chance of snow showers after midnight. Partly cloudy 🌧, with a low of 17 degrees at 5am. Six degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around December 27th. Maximum wind chill around 8 at 1am; West wind 7 to 13 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. In 2018, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 19 degrees. The record low of -12 occurred back in 1988.

Today in 1997, The Kyoto Protocol opens for signature. 🌎 The US would never ratify the agreement, and while some countries would participate, it was a lot of talk and not a lot of action. People like to blow a lot of green smoke but when it comes to concrete action like raising the price on fossil fuels and energy more generally ⚡they just have blank stares. They’re all for climate action if it doesn’t impact their favored groups. All we can hope for is cheap oil ⛽ to run out sooner than later. Cheap fossil energy is a lot harder to swap out than ozone depleting refrigerants and propellants.🦨

Rain and clouds for weekend. 🙁 Saturday, rain. High near 45. Chance of precipitation is 90%. Sunday, a chance of showers before 1pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 42. Chance of precipitation is 40%. Typical average high for the weekend is 36 degrees.

So be it with the rain. 🎄 There is my family 👪 Christmas decorating party 🎉 and the Save the Pine Bush benefit to fight development off of Rapp Road next to the butterfly corridor to keep me busy during the weekend. I’m hoping Sunday will be nice enough to get out for a walk, and I might work on some electronics projects.

Looking ahead, there are 3 weeks until New Years Day 2019 🎉 when the sun will be setting at 4:32 pm with dusk at 5:04 pm. On that day in 2019, we had mostly cloudy, mild, rain showers and temperatures between 53 and 27 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 31 degrees. We hit a record high of 57 back in 1966.