April 8, 2020 Night

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Good evening! Partly cloudy and 53 degrees in Delmar, NY. 🌃 There is a west-northwest breeze at 7 mph. 🍃. Enjoy the nice evening, not expected to last. More rain tomorrow. Temperatures will drop below freezing at Saturday around 4 am. ☃️

Today wasn’t a half bad day, 😊busy at work but unfortunately not a real nice day for working outside so I stayed home and worked on my work computer. 💻 As I only do work on that machine I’m much more productive, not checking my personal email 📧 or social media. After work, I walked down to the town park 🚶 and got some podcasts. 🎧 I am watching some videos I downloaded the other day. It did clear out for a while today and I thought about driving out to Five Rivers 🐸 to work on the wifi. But it was probably much more productive working from home. Hot Meatball sandwich for lunch, hot dogs and beans with cheese for dinner. 🍱Not really adventurous cooking today. 🍲 Yesterday’s tuna fish melt was really good though. 🐠

While it was a pretty nice evening I decided after my walk 🚶 to lay in bed and catch up on some of the YouTube videos I downloaded yesterday while I was working at Five Rivers. 🎥 Farmers are busy with prepping fields this time of year, 🚜 they’ve moved beyond counting the hundreds of loads of manure 💩 they’ve hauled over the winter that’s come and gone. 🌾Things are starting to green up in the valley now, the average low is about 35 at this point and nights below freezing are becoming rare. Even in the upland, spring is coming.

Tonight will be mostly cloudy 🌥, with a low of 40 degrees at 4am. Five degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around April 22nd. Northwest wind 5 to 7 mph becoming south after midnight. In 2019, we had mostly clear skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 41 degrees. The record low of 16 occurred back in 1977.

Been working on growing out my side burns during the quarantine. 🙊 While my hairy face isn’t quite a secret with all the zoom meetings I’ve been participating in 📹, truth be told everybody is getting long and shaggy so I might as well join in the fun and try something different. 💈 I haven’t gotten rid of the goatee I have but I might. Good to try something new and fool all the facial recognition cameras on the street. ☺🎥 It’s creepy enough that the politicians are monitoring people’s cellphone pings and using it to pronounce if people are doing enough social distancing. Honestly if I plan to travel I’ll just pull my cellphone 📱 battery. Stop those creeps in government from judging my pings. 📍

Tonight will have a Waining Gibbous 🌖 Moon with 98% illuminated. The moon is quite bright 🔆 tonight. The Pink 🌸 Moon is on Friday, April 24. The darkest hour is at 12:58 am, followed by dawn at 5:57 am, and sun starting to rise at 6:26 am in the east (79°) and last for 2 minutes and 57 seconds. Sunrise is one minute and 42 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌄 The golden hour ends at 7:03 am with sun in the east (86°). Tonight will have 10 hours and 52 minutes of darkness, a decrease of 2 minutes and 49 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will have showers and possibly a thunderstorm before 3pm, then showers likely. 🌦 High of 52 degrees at 1pm. Three degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around April 2nd. Maximum dew point of 44 at 11am. 🏖️ Breezy, with a south wind 14 to 21 mph becoming west in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 34 mph. Going to be wet and windy but not too cold. But definitely a work from home day I think. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New rainfall amounts between a half and three quarters of an inch possible. I know some other models say it will be colder. A year ago, we had cloudy skies in the morning with more sun in the afternoon. The high last year was 65 degrees. The record high of 77 was set in 1991. 13.3 inches of snow fell back in 2000.❄

So one model says the upper elevations may get several inches of snow ❄ tomorrow into Good Friday, while others call for cold and cloudy weather for the weekend. Yet others call for all rain ☔ event with more sun ☀ and not as cold this weekend. I don’t know about this weekend. I may or may not have plans, I don’t know. I actually have three different scenarios, maybe four – it depends a lot. ⛺ 🔥 🚶 🎣 🔫 ❓❔❓❔I have to remember that Sunday is Easter 🐰 so I can’t plan on going shopping on Sunday. 🍏 Regardless, I plan on practicing social distancing, 👤although if I stay in town I might join my neighbors six feet away next to their fire pit. 🔥 I’ll have to buy some beer 🍻.

In four weeks on May 6 the sun will be setting in the west-northwest (294°) at 8:01 pm,🌄 which is 31 minutes and 42 seconds later then tonight. Seems both oddly close and far away at same time. Hopefully by then things will be return back to normal. In 2019 on that day, we had partly sunny, patches of fog and temperatures between 74 and 53 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 67 and 44 degrees. The record high of 89 degrees was set back in 1930.

Looking ahead, Earth Day 🌎 is in 2 weeks, Latest Sunset 🌆 is in 11 weeks and Inauguration Day 2021 👴🏻 is in 41 weeks.

🇺🇸🦅Only 43 days remain until the start of Memorial Day Weekend!🦅🇺🇸

North

1968 Illinois earthquake – Wikipedia

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1968 Illinois earthquake – Wikipedia

The 1968 Illinois earthquake (a "New Madrid event") was the largest recorded earthquake in the U.S. Midwestern state of Illinois. Striking at 11:02 a.m. on November 9, it measured 5.4 on the Richter scale.

Although there were no fatalities, the event caused considerable structural damage to buildings, including the toppling of chimneys and shaking in Chicago, the region's largest city. The earthquake was one of the most widely felt in U.S. history, largely affecting 23 states over an area of 580,000 square miles (1,500,000 km2). In studying its cause, scientists discovered the Cottage Grove Fault in the Southern Illinois Basin.

Within the region, millions felt the rupture. Reactions to the earthquake varied: some people near the epicenter did not react to the shaking, while others panicked. A future earthquake in the region is extremely likely; in 2005, seismologists and geologists estimated a 90% chance of a magnitude 6–7 tremor before 2055, likely originating in the Wabash Valley seismic zone on the Illinois–Indiana border or the New Madrid fault zone.

2020… The year of the geriatrics!

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2020… The year of the geriatrics!👴 👵

I don’t want to hate on old people too much but it’s telling when both of the major candidates for president are well in their 70s and the Coronavirus disease that has ground the economy and our lives to a halt primarily attacks the elderly. As cold as it might seem, the virus might be nature’s way of taking out the trash, even if it’s a rather indiscriminate on who gets culled.

American society has gotten long in the tooth, we need more young people with fresh new ideas, and for elderly to move out of center stage. It’s absurd that the next leader of the free world is likely to have grown up in the 1950s and 1960s. Old people should retire and enjoy their final years, and let young people have a chance at building a good life and realize that maybe their time has come to move on.

For too long human lifespans have been increasing to arguably excessive numbers of years, going forward we should settle on better quality but shorter lives with fewer work years and earlier retirements and more dynamicism in our country and our economy. If people could be content with fewer but better years than we all could be a lot more happy.

Finally been a busy day at work.

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Finally been a busy day at work. 📝

I’m glad to be busy and productive again, as much as I hate working from home, I do like being productive and getting important things done and catching up on things. The first few weeks of the Coronavirus crisis was a shock but I feel like slowly but surely things are moving forward.

Why Isn’t Anyone From Agriculture on the White House Coronavirus Task Force? – Modern Farmer

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Why Isn’t Anyone From Agriculture on the White House Coronavirus Task Force? – Modern Farmer

The White House Coronavirus Task Force is the Trump administration’s central collating force for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

It includes members from various parts of the federal government, spanning several different departments and organizations. But Congressman Josh Harder recently penned a letter asking why one major element of American society was not included: agriculture.