Good morning! Happy Sunday. ⛪ Third Sunday of advent, last day of autumn 2020. Winter 2021 starts tomorrow. That said it’s going to warm up a lot this week with possibly heavy rain on Christmas Eve. 🎄 ☔ Two weeks to Latest Sunrise of the Winter 🌄️. Mostly cloudy and 21 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁ There is a south breeze at 6 mph. 🍃. The current wind chill is 10. There are 21 inches of snow on the ground. ☃ ️Things will start to thaw out at tomorrow around 10 am. 🌡️

Yesterday was nice cross country skiing 🎿 at Schodack Island. That said I really enjoyed the Christmas 🤶🏻 Spice Cookies 🍪 they have at Aldi’s. Cheap too and so good. I really need to get over to Rennselear more often. Well with winter I probably will ski more at Schodack Island as there isn’t the hills there to fall on as my skiis are fairly aggressive, designed for groomed trails. I saw a fair number of bright red robins and Blue Jays out there and lots of eastern sparrows. 🐦 Kind of a pretty sunset 🌇 and I ran into one of Albany’s most chatty insiders there 🗣️ and we chatted for a while until right before the park was locked 🔒 for the evening. Fun though, and I got to learn all the gossips about Albany.

I tell you when I own my own land, 🛒 I hope to live near enough a town that has an Aldi’s – they’re cheap, fun and so convenient. While they don’t have the selection of a Wally World or the bulk goods, 🍱 I like their product selection. True, sometimes the lower their prices by smaller packages 📦 but as they say, the burn barrel gotta eat too. 🔥 Plus a good library to download podcasts, 🎧 and a laundromat. 👚 I wouldn’t mind living out in the sticks 🐮 in a town that smells like silage and manure some of the year but it’s nice to have access to the basics. Good gun shop 🔫 too.

You can forget what an agricultural county Rennselear is but while I was shopping 🛒 at Aldi, I spotted a Toyota Tundra with a big metal flask in the backseat. It caught my eye 👁‍🗨 and it turned out to be a bucket milker. 🐮 Dairy farmer, maybe a small scale operation or maybe they’re using it to milk a cow that is on the withdrawal period from antibiotics or for feeding calves. Big unit though, must be heavy when it’s full of milk but then again Holstein do produce a lot of milk 🥛. Upstate NY may have fewer farms but there are still a lot of people who homestead and live off the land – and Aldi’s is such an affordable option.

At any rate, yesterday was nice ☀ and pretty sunny although a bit cold but nice when I was moving. Getting off the trails though was a bit of slog with the skiis though. 🎿 I thought about going up to Partridge Run but it’s still black powder season 🦌 and I’d be drowned out probably by the noise of snow machines.

Today will snow showers likely, mainly after 3pm. Cloudy 🌦, with a high of 32 degrees at 5pm. Two degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around December 27th. South wind 6 to 9 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. Total daytime snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 21 degrees. The record high of 61 was set in 1957. 8.4 inches of snow fell back in 1975.❄

Not a super nice day out today 🌨️ just very gray. I told mom and dad I’d be out for Sunday dinner assuming that it doesn’t snow too much. 🍲 It will be nice to see them. I’m really not out and about in the community lately and we’ll stay socially distant. I do go to the supermarket 🛒 from time but I wear a mask 😷 and any COVID positive person I might be near its very passing at that.

Dash cam hasn’t been working right for some time now. 📹 It looked like it was crashing. I am going to try reformatting the memory cards 🎴 and installing the latest firmware update and clean the lens off. I really like capturing some scenes from my trips on the dash cam but it hasn’t been working reliaby all autumn. It is about four years old and though is exposed to all the heat and cold in the windshield so maybe a capictor or the alike is failing.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 11:54 am with sun having an altitude of 24° from the due south horizon (-46.9° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 13.5 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 3:40 pm with the sun in the southwest (230°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-southwest (238°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 4:25 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 25 seconds with dusk around 4:56 pm, which is 27 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see the First Quarter 🌓 Moon in the south (174°) at an altitude of 37° from the horizon, 246,764 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 5:33 pm. At sunset, look for snow 🌨 and temperatures around 31 degrees. There will be a south-southeast breeze at 9 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 2 minutes of daytime, a decrease of 6 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a slight chance of snow showers before 9pm. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a low of 26 degrees at 4am. Seven degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around December 4th. Maximum wind chill around 24 at 4am; South wind 3 to 8 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. In 2019, we had light rain. It got down to 8 degrees. The record low of -18 occurred back in 1942.

They still haven’t done the sidewalks near where I live ❄ which is super obnoxious. I thought about a day time walk 🚶🏻 – it’s plowed on the Bypass sidewalks but not Elm at this point. I guess it’s just a lot of snow, there has been budget cuts and probably workers are quarrentined with COVID. 👾 I don’t know, it’s frustrating 😤 as I sure miss my morning and evening walks, especially as I work from home these days.

Today a train moved very fast in America — that is relatively speaking. 🚉 In 1967, a Pennsylvania Railroad Budd Metroliner exceeds 155 mph on their New York Division, now Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. But they would never operate that fast and frequently broke down and would be scrapped by the late 1980s or used as coaches towed by diesel locomotives. But the truth is that Penn Central was in bad shape by the 1960s, and while the Northeast Corridor was still profitable to the system, the entire railroad suffered from Penn Central decades of neglect.

Tuesday I am thinking I’ll work down at the library parking lot 🅿 for probably the balance of the day. It’s going to be in the upper 30s and sunny ☀ so it should be warm enough. I have a Zoom meeting then and I have plenty of cellular bandwidth I still prefer to use the library wifi 📚 as then I can do the Zoom from my laptop do other things while the meeting drags on. Plus I want to do some things with WMS map services and I don’t want to use too much of my limited Hotspot data on my phone. 📱

It looks like Christmas Eve 🎅🏻 is going to be warm and rainy, ☔ so I’m hoping that I can go up to the Adirondacks for a long weekend of winter camping 🏕 with the hot tent starting Christmas Day. Its been a while since I’ve slept outside and that really does wonders for my sleep.

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until Latest Sunrise of the Winter 🌄️ when the sun will be setting at 4:34 pm with dusk at 5:06 pm. On that day in 2020, we had mostly cloudy, mild, rain showers and temperatures between 47 and 39 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 31 degrees. We hit a record high of 61 back in 1913.