Good morning! Happy Sunday! ⛪ Kind of a cloudy gray morning. ☁Four weeks to Valentines Day ❤️ . Clouds with a few snow showers and 35 degrees in Delmar, NY. ❄ There is a west-southwest breeze at 13 mph. 🍃. There is a inch of snow on the ground. ☃ ️Temperatures will drop below freezing at around 9 pm. ☃️

I slept horribly last night 🤪 mainly because I watch a movie about Napster, the RIAA and the craziness that was the 1990s, tying myself up in a knot with the sheets my mid-evening. 🛏 I remember why I don’t have Internet at home and why I don’t like politics or things technology that much anymore. 💻 Sure I do mapping and I have my computer that runs Linux, but I only use Open Source software, a very basic window manager — XFCE — and aren’t into all that commercial technology crap. 🌍My smartphone is super basic, I think the only paid app on it is US Topo Maps which I use sometimes for hiking and was all of $6 back in the day.📱

Then I woke up at 4 AM with a toe that was beat red and swollen, 👣 with a great deal of pain. I’m not that much of a girly man but it was — super painful and swollen. Wasn’t sure what the issue was but it probably was my fault for not putting on fresh shocks before bed. I thought maybe I had an overgrown toe nail — I tried to find my toe nail clippers half awake but gave up. Once I took off my socks, and applied some anti-bacterial foot-spray the pain went away. I think it was just athlete’s foot because I didn’t change my socks being home all day yesterday. I am going to shower 🚿 today, then soak my foot and apply athlete’s foot cream around it. I did find the clippers and clipped the nail back on the toe in case that was the issue but I don’t think it is.💇

Then somebody knocked on my door at 9:45 AM, 🚪 not sure who it was but I super groggy and not in the mood to answer the door. Often I won’t answer the door if I don’t know who it is, just because I’m a bit paranoid and I figure if it’s important, they can text me, leave me a note, or give me a call and do voicemail. 📞 I am really careful about screening my calls, lest it be a television reporter, a police officer, or anybody unpleasant to speak to like the 90% of all communications these days — SPAM artists.🗑 Yes, you can stop sending me emails about guest posts on the blog. They don’t exist here. This is my personal blog, so it’s 100% Andy Arthur for good or bad. I am thinking it was the neighbor asking about the power bill I stuck in their mailbox — I think it might have been for the previous tenant. 📬 I probably should have just written return to sender on it and stuck it in my mailbox, but the address was for the neighbor. Or stuck it in the paper trash. ♻

Today will have a slight chance of snow showers, mixing with rain after 10am, then gradually ending. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a high of 38 degrees at 1pm. Eight degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around February 26th. West wind 13 to 17 mph, with gusts as high as 28 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. A year ago, we had sunny skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 24 degrees. The record high of 62 was set in 1889. 10.9 inches of snow fell back in 1994.❄

I wanted to go out to Five Rivers but with me still somewhat sore toe, 👣 the clouds and wind I’m not sure if today is the day. ☁But I’ll bundle up later and do my evening walk. Maybe stay home and do some reading. 📚 I don’t think the toe issues is a big deal, but it was so awful for that hour or so last night when I was up in terrible pain. 🙄 I certainly pay enough for health insurance that if I need to slap down $25 get my toe checked, I’ll do it but I’m hopeful it good by later. I do need to order more books from the library – not difficult to do especially with the drive-through. Now that I have that hotspot mode on my phone, it’s particularly to browse for books online. 💻 That said, I do miss walking down to the library and look forward to getting the cost of the more expensive phone plan off my books once things re-open.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 12:06 pm with sun having an altitude of 26.7° from the due south horizon (-44.1° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 11.9 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 4:06 pm with the sun in the southwest (235°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-southwest (242°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 4:50 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 17 seconds with dusk around 5:20 pm, which is one minute and 12 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see the First Quarter 🌓 Moon in the south-southwest (206°) at an altitude of 38° from the horizon, 247,838 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 5:56 pm. At sunset, look for mostly cloudy skies ☁ and temperatures around 37 degrees. There will be a west breeze at 14 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 28 minutes of daytime, an increase of one minute and 45 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a slight chance of snow showers after 1am. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a low of 29 degrees at 6am. 15 degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around March 24th. Southwest wind 7 to 11 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. In 2020, we had mostly clear skies in the evening, which became cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 10 degrees. The record low of -19 occurred back in 1957.

I’ve been trying to get Microsoft Windows running on my laptop 🖥 as I need it for work. I want to purge a lot of the spamwear on the machine and try to speed up windows.

Been doing some carpet cleaning with rubbing alcohol 🧹 which actually is quite effective after a suggestion I saw on the internet. But it does stink pand is probably toxic and very flammable. It does work great with a brush though, although I really do need to at some point get a carpet cleaning machine in here or something like that. I probably shouldn’t track so much mud in my apartment. That said, like everything in my inexpensive apartment, the carpet is starting to wear out.

🌹🌻🌼Only 62 days remain until the first day of calendar spring!🌹🌻🌼 Cue Day by Day from the Godspell sound track. It’s going to get cold by the end of the month but at least we are creeping towards the days with higher sun angle. In four weeks, the average temperature will be 4 degrees above freezing and March won’t be that far around the corner. My meteorologist friend likes to point on Meteorological Spring happens on March 1st. I am just disappointed that I will have to wait until July 1st for the official climate normals to come out for the 1991-2020 period — I’m really fascinated to find out.

Looking ahead, there are 4 weeks until Valentines Day ❤️ when the sun will be setting at 5:26 pm with dusk at 5:55 pm. On that day in 2020, we had mostly sunny and temperatures between 36 and 7 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 34 degrees. We hit a record high of 63 back in 1946.