Good morning! Happy Saturday on this first weekend of the New Year! Twenty Twenty One. 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣1️⃣ Tomorrow is week 1️⃣, officially. Hopefully a time of change, we will have a new president in 20. 🕴 Or well, maybe a throw back from the way-back machine. 👴 Normalcy this year with the vaccine? Adults in the White House? No more midnight crazy tweeting? I am glad I deleted my Twitter and Facebook accounts, and created new private ones for browsing only. Honest. No more inappropriate comments except my own on the blog. It feels good. Next Saturday is Static Electric Shock Day 🧼. Be careful when you are referenced to ground this time of year. ⚡ That dry air, walking over carpet can make some good shocks and make your hair look wild. 🤪 Not that you’d know with the pandemic and working from home. Rain and 33 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☔ There is a south breeze at 7 mph. 🍃. There is two inches of snow on the ground. ☃ ️Temperatures will drop below freezing at around 7 pm. ☃️

While it looks like it was mostly snow up north, 🌨 I am thinking I am glad to be back home as it would have been kind of a cold and wet morning, and I enjoyed sleeping in my bed at home. The tent was fine but the ground was hard sleeping on a sheet of ice, below the ground tarp and layers of sleeping pads of course. But with the ice and snow, I’d probably be stuck up north, and I’m not sure how early it would clear out. Plus I enjoyed hiking back to Stewart Creek 🚶 yesterday, although that drone 🚁 was a bit odd to see fly over head when your in the wilderness. But I tell you, drone footage sure is cool. 📽 That said, I had fun on Campsite 7 on East Branch and I’m thinking I might do another winter camping trip, hopefully for multiple nights, should the weather cooperate later in the winter. The trick is to bring a shovel, park at Cod Pond, then dig out enough space on the driveway before carefully backing in. 🅿

Today will rain and sleet likely before 10am, then a chance of rain between 10am and 3pm. 🌧 Cloudy, then gradually becoming mostly sunny 🌦, with a high of 41 degrees at 1pm. 10 degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around March 7th. Breezy, with a south wind 7 to 12 mph becoming west 17 to 22 mph in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 37 mph. Chance of precipitation is 70%. Little or no sleet accumulation expected. A year ago, we had partly cloudy skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 45 degrees. The record high of 61 was set in 1890. 7.1 inches of snow fell back in 2014.❄

Today I am planning on going out to the folks house later. 👪 We are doing a socially-distanced fondue, which I know seems like a stretch but I guess it involves masks, 😷 a soup ladle 🥄 and sitting on opposite sides of the room. ↕ Or something like that. It’s not like any of us go out anymore anywhere, with everything shutting down. 🧀 And who knows, time is tight and limited. 👵 Tomorrow with the snow coming, I’ll stay home, well except maybe for the evening walk.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 12:00 pm with sun having an altitude of 24.5° from the due south horizon (-46.3° vs. 6/21). A long ways until summer but right now the transit is perfectly at noon. A six foot person will cast a 13.2 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 3:49 pm with the sun in the southwest (231°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-southwest (239°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 4:34 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 24 seconds with dusk around 5:05 pm, which is 53 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 The best time to look at the stars is after 5:41 pm. At sunset, look for partly sunny skies 🌃 and temperatures around 36 degrees. The wind chill around sunset will be 25. ☃️ Breezy, 21 mph breeze ⛅ from the northwest with gusts up to 36mph. Today will have 9 hours and 8 minutes of daytime, an increase of 51 seconds over yesterday. It won’t be long before we gain a minute each day — lots in the evening, and even

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 23 degrees at 4am. Seven degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around March 8th. Maximum wind chill around 20 at 6am; Northwest wind 6 to 11 mph becoming light after midnight. In 2020, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 39 degrees. The record low of -14 occurred back in 1970.

As previously noted, next Saturday is 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. Typically, the high temperature is 30 degrees. We hit a record high of 62 back in 2008.