George W. Sears – Wikipedia

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George W. Sears – Wikipedia

George Washington Sears (December 2, 1821 – May 1, 1890) was a sportswriter for Forest and Stream magazine in the 1880s and an early conservationist. His stories, appearing under the pen name, "Nessmuk" popularized self-guided canoe camping tours of the Adirondack lakes in open, lightweight solo canoes and what is today called ultralight camping or ultralight backpacking.

Canoeing had been popularized by Scottish lawyer John MacGregor in the 1860s, but the typical canoe trip of the day employed expert guides and heavy canoes. Sears, who was 5 feet 3 inches (1.60 m) tall and 103 pounds (47 kg) had a 9-foot-long (2.7 m), 10 1⁄2-pound (4.8 kg) solo canoe built by J. Henry Rushton of Canton, New York. He named it the Sairy Gamp (the name of a Dickens character) and in it he completed a 266-mile (428 km) journey through the central Adirondacks. He was 62 years old and in frail health (tuberculosis and asthma) at the time. William Henry Harrison Murray's Adventures in the Wilderness, published in 1869, had praised the Adirondacks as having a healthy atmosphere for consumptives and Verplanck Colvin's enthusiastic writing about the Adirondack wilderness had further inspired the trip. The Sairy Gamp was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution and is now on loan to the Adirondack Museum.

He grew up the eldest of ten children in South Oxford (now Webster), Massachusetts. He took his pen name from a Native American who had befriended him in early childhood. He was fascinated by the few books about Native Americans his family possessed, which left him with an abiding interest in forest life and adventure. A period of factory labor while still a child left him with a fondness for the writing of Charles Dickens. At age twelve he started working in a commercial fishing fleet based on Cape Cod and at nineteen he signed on for a three-year voyage on a whaler headed for the South Pacific; it was the same year (1841) that Herman Melville shipped out of the same port bound for the same whaling grounds. On his return, his family moved to Wellsboro, Pennsylvania where he was to live for the rest of his life. However, he continued traveling for adventure, from the upper Midwest and Ontario to an Amazon tributary in Brazil (in 1867 and again in 1870).

Sears wrote Woodcraft, a book on camping, in 1884, that has remained in print ever since. A book of poems, Forest Runes, appeared in 1887. He died at his home in Pennsylvania seven years later. Mount Nessmuk, in northern Pennsylvania, is named after him.

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“And the victims learn to giggle, for at least they are not bored.”
~ Phil Ochs

Why Two Masks Are the New Masks – The New York Times

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Double-Masking: Why Two Masks Are the New Masks – The New York Times

But the fashion trend that most excited me was the double mask! Double-masking is a sensible and easy way to lower your risk, especially if circumstances require you to spend more time around others — like in a taxi, on a train or plane, or at an inauguration. Pete Buttigieg, the former presidential candidate and now the nominee for secretary of transportation, was spotted double-masking. It appears he was wearing a high-quality medical mask underneath a black cloth mask. His husband, Chasten, was sporting a similar double-masked look, but with a fashionable plaid cloth mask that coordinated with his winter scarf.

We should all be thinking about the quality of our masks right now. New variants of the coronavirus continue to emerge, and one in particular is cause for pressing concern in the United States because it’s so contagious and spreading fast. I wrote about the steps you can take to better protect yourself.

I think I'd rather just stay away from other people then wear a muzzle, much less a double muzzle.

Received a package you didn’t order? It could be a brushing scam – CNN

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Received a package you didn’t order? It could be a brushing scam – CNN

Most people who buy things online just have to worry about their deliveries being delayed or never arriving. But some people are dealing with a different problem altogether: getting weird stuff like hair clippers, face creams and sunglasses they never even ordered at all. The Federal Trade Commission and cyber experts have been warning consumers about these deliveries, which can be part of something known as "brushing" scams. Here's how these scams work: Third-party sellers on Amazon, eBay and other online marketplaces pay people to write fake, positive reviews about their products, or do it themselves. To be able to post the reviews, these so-called "brushers" need to trick the site into making it appear that a legitimate transaction took place. So they'll use a fake account to place gift orders and address them to a random person whose name and address they find online. Then, instead of actually mailing the item for which they want to post a review, the brushers will send a cheap, often lightweight item that costs less to ship. Sending an item (even the wrong one) creates a tracking number, and when the package is delivered, it enables brushers to write a verified review. If you're on the receiving end, you usually aren't charged for the purchase and your real account isn't hacked — but you are left in the dark as to who is repeatedly sending the mystery packages. In many cases, there's no return address. You don't need to worry that anything bad has happened to you or will happen to you if you get a package that might be part of a brushing scam, experts say. But we all need to be concerned about the scams affecting reviews we rely on when buying products.

SunnySlope Homestead had the solution to those non-ordered masks that showed up in his mailbox. The burn barrel was quite happy to burn them with the other burnables.

January 28, 2021 Morning

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Good morning! Happy Wolf Moon 🌕 ! I wonder what Sauk County’s 🐮 most famous resident, Aldo Leopold would have to say about such things? 🐺 I bet if he was still around, he’d be saying thing that made both liberals and conservatives hate him – uncomfortable truths. Five weeks to Average High is 40 ☀️ . That just seems depressing at this point. Overcast, and 23 degrees in Delmar. ☁ I don’t understand where the sun is? Must be the Trumpster’s fault. There is a northwest breeze at 9 mph. 🍃. The current wind chill is 7. There are 4 inches of snow on the ground. ☃ ️The skies will clear around 9 am.

So the million dollar question, is where is the sun? 🌥 I thought today was supposed to be sunny and nice but cold. I want a little bit of sun so my battery bank in my truck gets a bit of a trickle charge, so I don’t lug the batteries too hard with the starter or have a sluggish start. 🔋 While I don’t really expect difficulty starting, I don’t like to turn-over the engine without a good solidly charged battery. I cleaned off the truck and solar panel yesterday, so things should top off once the sun comes out. 😎 And I’m sure that thanks to this blog post, I will get dozens of advertisements about car batteries that are on sale. 🤬 I probably wouldn’t have even noticed any issue had I not had all those meters all over my truck and probably some vampire loads I could disconnect but they don’t really harm anything, especially when the panel is topping off the full bank.

Today will be partly sunny 🌞, with a high of 24 degrees at 2pm. Seven degrees below normal. Northwest wind 9 to 18 mph, with gusts as high as 32 mph. 🌬 And the wind chills will get more noticeable later. Albany Police take notice, that’s 2 miles over the speed limit. 🚓 A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with a few breaks of sun the afternoon. The high last year was 37 degrees. The record high of 56 was set in 1916. 9.6 inches of snow fell back in 1897.❄

Going to be a cold day 🍃 but I’m really hoping on sun ☀ later. I plan on going to the store 🏬 during lunch time and then to the library during the afternoon. 📚 Probably won’t spend a great deal of time there because it’s kind of cold ❄ although not as bad as tomorrow. I’m going to notch the heat up a few degrees too, so things don’t get too cold inside, and the landlord asked that I keep the cabinets under the sink open so they don’t freeze. Tomorrow I’ll probably stay home except for the morning walk. Last night I skipped the walk — I was feeling kind of lazy and was concerned about slipping on the ice.

I sent in $15 in memory of Mr. Franz for the local foodbank.🍓🍏🍒 I think it’s nice that he asked that donations be made to the local foodbank in his name.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 12:09 pm with sun having an altitude of 29.3° from the due south horizon (-41.5° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 10.7 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 4:22 pm with the sun in the west-southwest (239°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-southwest (246°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 5:04 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 10 seconds with dusk around 5:33 pm, which is one minute and 18 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see the Wolf Full 🐺🌝 Moon in the east-northeast (67°) at an altitude of 7° from the horizon, 238,139 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 6:08 pm. At sunset, look for partly clear skies 🌄 and temperatures around 21 degrees. The wind chill around sunset will be 6. ☃️ Breezy, 18 mph breeze ⛅ from the northwest with gusts up to 33mph. Today will have 9 hours and 51 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 14 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 3 degrees at 6am. 12 degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -14 at 6am. How negative an outlook to have. Northwest wind 15 to 18 mph, with gusts as high as 32 mph. In 2020, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became partly cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 19 degrees. The record low of -10 occurred back in 1925.

Cool this weekend with temperatures running 13 degrees below normal but otherwise sunny. 🌬 Saturday, sunny, with a high near 17. Northwest wind 8 to 10 mph. Sunday, mostly sunny, with a high near 20. ☀ Typical average high for the weekend is 31 degrees. I’ll have to think about my plans. Not quite as windy this weekend, so maybe I’ll get out somewhere this weekend. Normally on these cold weekends I walk down to the library but we aren’t living in normal times. Maybe I’ll do Five Rivers, or the rail trail is fairly protected from the wind in the gorge, but I don’t like how it’s gotten so overridden by yuppies lately.

🌹🌻🌼Only 51 days remain until the first day of calendar spring!🌹🌻🌼That means tomorrow will be 50 days, and Saturday will be seven weeks. Dully noted. Good for hauling water and heavy equipment, but stay out of the mud, so you don’t sink out of sight. Don’t ask me how I know.

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until Don’t Cry over Spilled Milk Day 🥛 when the sun will be setting at 5:22 pm with dusk at 5:51 pm. On that day in 2020, we had cloudy, rain showers and temperatures between 39 and 34 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 34 degrees. We hit a record high of 59 back in 1981.

The Pond