December 24, 2019 Morning

Good morning! A very Merry Christmas Eve 🕯️ to you! Next Tuesday is New Years Eve 🎆. Mostly cloudy and around freezing in Delmar, NY. β›… There is a north-northwest breeze at 7 mph. 🍃. There is a inch of snow on the ground. β˜ƒ ️In some outlying areas there still is enough snow left for a White Christmas 🎄.

Dipping some gingerbread into coffee β˜• this morning, looking at the clouds as they start to break up. 🥮 Going to bake some cookies in a bit for the Christmas lunch I’m going to at my parents house later on today with my niece and sister. 🍪 Heading out there around noon or so.

Later on Christmas Eve 🕯️ will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 38 degrees at 1pm. Five degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around December 10th. North wind around 7 mph. I’ll take weather like that. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 40 degrees. I don’t remember it being so warm and sunny last year but I guess it was. I stayed in town last year for Christmas which was a Tuesday last year and went out camping New Years Eve after the Save the Pine Bush Hike. The record high of 72 was set in 2015. 13 inches of snow fell back in 1966.❄

The sun will set at 4:26 pm with dusk around 4:58 pm, which is 34 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for mostly clear skies 🌃 and temperatures around 36 degrees. Nice Christmas sunset! There will be a north breeze at 6 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 3 minutes of daytime, an increase of 9 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 17 degrees at 6am. One degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around December 27th. North wind 3 to 6 mph. In 2018, we had light snow in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 24 degrees. The record low of -22 occurred back in 1969. Blizzard of the 1969!

I woke up early this morning but I got to back to asleep fairly easily. 😴 A little achy and sore today, I’ll probably take some aspirin and hopefully I’ll feel better later on. 🥴 Coffee β˜•and gingerbread 🥴 is good.

Doesn’t look too bad for starting out my road trip! β›… Saturday, partly sunny, with a high near 42. Sunday, a chance of rain or freezing rain. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 42. Chance of precipitation is 40%. Typical average high for the weekend is 32 degrees. Similar forecast for the Finger Lakes, maybe a bit warmer. Snow is largely gone at this point and will be totally gone by Saturday. I’m actually thinking about leaving on Friday mid-day and staying over in Madison County but I don’t know if I want to winter camp for just one night 🌃.

As previously noted, next Tuesday is New Years Eve 🎆 when the sun will be setting at 4:31 pm with dusk at 5:03 pm. It will be about fifteen minutes later out in the Finger Lakes. On that day in 2018, we had rain and temperatures between 41 and 29 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 32 degrees. We hit a record high of 61 back in 1895.

White Rocks Overlook

West Virginia coal wars – Wikipedia

West Virginia coal wars – Wikipedia

The West Virginia coal wars (1912–21), also known as the mine wars, arose out of a dispute between coal companies and miners.

The first workers strike, in West Virginia, was the Cabin Creek and Paint Creek strike of 1912-1913. With help from Mary "Mother Jones" Harris Jones, an important figure in unionizing the mine workers, the miners demanded better pay, better work conditions, the right to trade where they pleased (ending the practice of forcing miners to buy from company-owned stores), and recognition of the United Mine Workers (UMW).

The mining companies refused to meet the demands of the workers and instead hired Baldwin-Felts agents equipped with high-powered rifles to guard the mines and act as strikebreakers.[2][1] After the Agents arrived, the miners either moved out or were evicted from the houses they had been renting from the coal companies, and moved into coal camps that were being supported by the Union.[1] Approximately 35,000 people lived in these coal camps.

Quinn the Eskimo Eve

As I noted last night, I don’t celebrate Christmas. πŸŽ… But I think celebrating Quinn the Eskimo is a good substitute to celebrating Christmas. Quinn the Eskimo is probably a fictional character, but so is baby Jesus, and many celebrate his fictional legacy. To say nothing if the consumerist version of Jesus, the modern day Santa Claus, as they decided a cute baby born in a hay feeder in a cow stall wasn’t cool enough to sell big screen color televisions to the suburbanite consumer. I don’t know if Santa is fiction or not but North Pole is melting from all that coal and oil that is being burned in massive power plants and billions of automobiles.

But I digress. Bob Dylan supposedly created Quinn the Eskimo after Andrew Quinn, the lead actor in the Savage Innocents. Quinn plays, Inuk, an Inuit accidentially kills a Christian Missionary who is not receptive to his gifts of food and women. Inuk is pursued by the Canadian Mounties for the killing, into the great northern wilderness, getting stranded and rescued by Inuk. Ultimately, the Mounties decide to not arrest Inuk, and leave the great white north as wild as it always, deciding to respect and leave the wilderness as it is. While the film got mixed reviews in 1961, it seems even more timely today with wilderness under attack by all sides, both the preservationists and developers, who think it should be controlled in their vision of the future, ignoring the wishes of the natives who want the land just to remain as it always was.

In Modern America, 60 years into the era of the atom bomb and facing the growing climate crisis and a falling apart of society, we should celebrate the savage, and the world that is disappearing before it’s gone. We should do more to protect unique culture, to get government off of people’s backs, respect differences in how people see the world. The world of today is quickly disappearing into the past, being pushed away by the bulldozer tearing down trees and flatting out farm fields and forest, and the crush consumer goods in the landfill. Savages – whether they are Native Americans, farmers, or rural people in isolated country — may be our best hope in a society that is more about television glamour and what is new and shiny. Old ways have served our country for generations, and many ways are more consistent with our natural world and more based on reality.

I think we should celebrate Quinn the Eskimo
and the Great White North during this holiday season.

Descending the Mountain

Post No. 195212

Good morning, Merry Christmas on this Christmas Eve! πŸŽ…

Cloudy this morning but hopefully it will warm up and the will come out and be a pretty decent day.