Good morning! Happy Boxing Day 🥊! Rednecks 👨🏻‍🌾 everywhere gotta burn those gotta burn those boxes 📦 and wrapping paper 🎁 to keep it out of the landfill 🔥 and have fun. Two weeks to Static Electric Shock Day 🧼. Definitely gets dry in winter, especially on a cold day on the carpeting in the office.

Partly cloudy and 26 degrees in Delmar, NY. ⛅ Very cloudy to start out the day, but more sun now. I’d say the day is improving, but still quite a bit of slippery ice around. There is a southwest breeze at 11 mph. 🍃. The current wind chill is 15. There is a dusting of snow on the ground and on the untreated pavement but let’s be honest, snowman had a meltdown on Christmas Eve. ☃ ️Things will start to thaw out at tomorrow around noontime. 🌡️

Much sunnier today but cold ❄. Gray up north I was told. So I’m staying home. Yesterday I mostly stayed home and read 📖 and worked on some coding and other projects for the blog. I was hoping to get get out of town but it rained all afternoon and when I was ready to go fi my evening walk it turned out all wet and sloppy. ⛽ By it being warm yesterday I saved by keeping the heat off 📴 and I won’t need to burn the fuel for camping.

Today will be partly sunny 🌞, with a high of 31 degrees at 1pm. Two degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical West wind 10 to 15 mph. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning, remaining cloudy in the afternoon. The high last year was 41 degrees. The record high of 59 was set in 1895. 13.9 inches of snow fell back in 1969.❄

While at one point I had ambitious plans for the weekend, 🚶 I think I will likely just end up going for a nice walk out to Five Rivers mid-day. 🐦 That is, once the ice is off the sidewalks whic I think will happen with the sun. 🌞 The days are pretty short now, and the weather looks like it will be cloudy but cold up north. 🏕 Will I be able to get up north next weekend, for the New Years holiday? Doesn’t look good but then again, it’s rare when the stars align for winter camping — it’s either depressing cloudy, too snowy, or super cold and clear during most of the winter. So is life in Upstate NY. 💰

But it’s good to save money as the end of the month is coming, rent and my credit card bill is due, so many is tight. 🎫 I really try to live paycheck to paycheck, as my checking account earns no interest, and having no money in any my account keeps me spending less. 😳 It’s rare that I have more then $40 in my wallet. Worked well until late November when my direct deposit got interrupted and I was glaring at the checking account with the number dropping much too close to zero.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 11:57 am with sun having an altitude of 24° from the due south horizon (-46.8° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 13.4 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. Starting to gain a bit of sun altitude, slowly though. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 3:43 pm with the sun in the southwest (230°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-southwest (238°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 4:29 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 25 seconds with dusk around 5:00 pm, which is 40 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see a nearly Full 🌝 Moon in the east (93°) at an altitude of 31° from the horizon, 251,186 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 5:36 pm. At sunset, look for partly cloudy skies 🌃 and temperatures around 30 degrees. There will be a west-southwest breeze at 10 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 3 minutes of daytime, an increase of 21 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 20 degrees at 6am. Three degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around December 20th. Maximum wind chill around 18 at 6pm; Southwest wind 7 to 10 mph. In 2019, we had light snow in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 40 degrees. The record low of -18 occurred back in 1914. A little cool but shouldn’t be bad for the evening walk.

Tomorrow I might go out to the Wolf Hill Preserve and do some hiking there. 🚶I don’t really feel like going too far from home and it’s been a while since I’ve been there. I don’t expect much more then a dusting of snow and except for one or two parts, I can’t imagine that trail will be super wet up there. Next weekend maybe I’ll go up to the Adirondacks 🏕 — all week looks pretty warm and sunny, and while there is a New Years Day/Eve storm to watch, I’ll have to see how things work out timing wise for next weekend. I could also go out to Madison County if they don’t have a lot of snow out there — as it looks like if anything most of the residual snow will disappear this week.

Been continuing to read various books on GIS and also the Foxfire Books. 📚 I actually like reading books on my phone, it’s small and easy to handle. It has web access and is easy to download and load things, although for some books that print is pretty small. I am trying to invest more time in reading and learning, I spend too much time flipping through Facebook looking at cute pictures of Jersey calves 🐮 and Kune Kune hogs. 🐷 I am actually learning a lot more about the practice of mapping making — stuff I had picked up by practice but I didn’t have a formal, structured way to look at it. 🗺

I am not finding any digital terrain models, that show tree canopy 🌲🌳 and building heights made up as digital elevation models, but it looks like I could derive that information from the LSZ LiDAR files but I am not sure if it’s worth downloading the 500 MB plus tiles, then a bunch of time running CPU process to get the data. It looks like there are open source tools to do this, but they’re not super well documented and it’s area I don’t know much about. 🧑‍🏫The DTM data is pretty neat, especially for making 3D models, and could make for some interesting maps comparing tree height to ground elevation (digital surface model or bare-earth models that are common and available in normal LiDAR DEM files). For example, are trees shorter at the top of the peaks compared below them? It seems like they have DTM data in the LSZ files for much of state, but I think I’ll hold off from now on addressing.

I also need to work on my budget for next year. 🔍 I think it will pretty much stay the same as this year, but I need to figure out if I do the Roth or regular IRA this year. I pay so much in taxes, but I think this year it probably makes more sense to go back to the Roth. I am continuing to look for ways to trim things so I can invest and save more going forward. But honestly I am pretty content with my simple way of living, and knowing that in a few years if I want to buy land, I’ll be able to pay cash, and I will have enough money saved for retirement (if I stay the course for the rest of the decade). 🏚️ Still thinking of eventually buying an off-grid property, maybe an old hunting camp or otherwise run down house out in the country, where I have enough land where I can do what I want and nobody is going to care if I have noisy or smell livestock 🐷 or have bonfires, 🔥, ride ATVs, shoot guns 🔫 or burn trash.♻ It’s just a matter of having the resources, and that takes time to save. I want to do it right and have the resources all lined out and planned first.

The hotspot on my phone is working good, 📶 and I have enough data for reasonable amounts of web browsing, as long as I don’t do a lot of streaming or downloads of big GIS data. I still will probably go down to the library on nice days to get bigger files, but I should be set for working from home during the winter, and because it’s mobile I can take it other places if we have nice winter weather and I decide to do some traveling. It’s a lot cheaper and more flexible then having a wired connection. That said, as soon as the vaccine is out and I’m working back downtown, I will go back to the normal cell plan.📱 I’d rather dump that expense from my budget, and I actually like the walk down to the library after work.📚

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until Static Electric Shock Day 🧼 when the sun will be setting at 4:40 pm with dusk at 5:12 pm. On that day in 2020, we had partly sunny and temperatures between 30 and 13 degrees. Cold yes. But then spring comes. Typically, the high temperature is 30 degrees. We hit a record high of 62 back in 2008.