Good morning! Happy March 🌨 ! Two weeks to Ides of March ✝ . I’ve always liked the song Vehicle by the Ides of March. Rain showers and 40 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☔ There is a south-southwest breeze at 8 mph. 🍃. Temperatures will drop below freezing at around 5 pm. ☃️

Skipped my morning walk today, because it was raining and I slept in because I stayed up too late last night watching a Youtube video on my phone. Truth be told, ever since I upgraded to the unlimited data plan / 20 gb hot spot, I’ve been watching a lot more video and wasting time on the internet. I do look forward to when the library reopens and I am working back downtown and have to download videos either at the library or the park, so I’m more controlled in my internet and video watching usage. When you are all you can eat, you tend to eat more. I think once the panademic is over I’ll probably dump the hotspot and go back to a 25 GB data plan. And yes, I expect every Youtube video I watch over the next week on my phone now to have advertisements from low cost mobile carriers thanks to this blog post the Jetpack Advertising and Anaylsis network.

Today will have a chance of rain showers before 4pm, then a slight chance of rain and snow showers. Patchy fog before 9am. Otherwise, mostly cloudy, with a temperature rising to near 42 by 10am, then falling to around 33 during the remainder of the day. Breezy, with a south wind 8 to 13 mph becoming west 20 to 25 mph in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 40 mph. Chance of precipitation is 50%. Little or no snow accumulation expected. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies. The high last year was 37 degrees. The record high of 66 was set in 2017. 10.7 inches of snow fell back in 2005.❄

The weather is pretty dark and depressing today, but it looks like as the day progresses it will get sunnier but cold and windy. I think when the sun comes out later, I’ll go for a walk around 5 PM and call that my evening walk. Hoping for more sun later on, but at least after today it will be sunny — but cold tomorrow. Little worried about the temperature dropping with such high winds expected. I don’t want to loose heat.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 12:09 pm with sun having an altitude of 39.9° from the due south horizon (-30.9° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 7.2 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 5:08 pm with the sun in the west-southwest (254°). 📸 The sunset is in the west (261°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 5:46 pm after setting for 2 minutes and 56 seconds with dusk around 6:13 pm, which is one minute and 14 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 The best time to look at the stars is after 6:47 pm. At sunset, look for snow 🌨 and temperatures around 33 degrees. The wind chill around sunset will be 20. ☃️ Breezy, 24 mph breeze ⛅ from the west-northwest with gusts up to 39mph. Today will have 11 hours and 15 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 52 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a chance of snow showers, mainly before midnight. Partly cloudy 🌧, with a low of 11 degrees at 6am. 10 degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -9 at 5am; Windy, with a northwest wind 21 to 26 mph increasing to 28 to 33 mph in the evening. Winds could gust as high as 60 mph. Chance of precipitation is 40%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. In 2020, we had clear skies in the evening, which became cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 30 degrees. The record low of -4 occurred back in 1940.

Cool this weekend with temperatures running 6 degrees below normal but otherwise sunny. 😃 Saturday, partly sunny, with a high near 33. Sunday, mostly sunny, with a high near 35. Typical average high for the weekend is 40 degrees. I am considering going up to the Adirondacks this weekend. Would be good weather for camping, cold enough up north that the snow would stay frozen.

Landlord gave me notice over the weekend, that my rent is going up $25 a month come May to cover the cost of the replacement water heater. Figures, I wish he had just previously installed a quality unit that didn’t need to be thrown away every five years. He also sited in the letter the high cost of water bills, probably due to the leaking heater, although at times I’ve also noticed the toilet and sink are acting up again. The thing about it is, every time I go to call him, I tap float in the toilet and it works good for like a week and a half. Then one night at two in the morning I’ll hear the toilet tank refilling as the seal is leaking again. Maybe once it warms up a bit, and I can clean things up a bit, I’ll have him take a look again at it. He only installed the unit two or three years ago, but like all his repairs, they’re cheap but seem to work so-so for a few years before failing again.

I am really considering my options and if I should renew my lease. I have a lot of options, I actually make quite a bit of money more then when I first moved in. But my apartment is quite affordable, the rent has only gone up less then 17% over the past 12 1/2 years, while inflation has been nearly 26%. Just a casual review of alternatives would have me paying more, plus no access to the park, Five Rivers and the library. But at the same time, I really kind of want to move back out to country and own my own land. I’ve been looking at some property in Rensselear County, away from machine politics and with judges that are more reasonable when it comes to issuing pistol permits. Even though, I’d rather eventually live in a open carry state, where I can have a burn barrel for my burnable trash, have pigs and cattle , off-grid solar system , and there aren’t all the code things to be running up against, and pay a ton less in taxes. I pay far more in taxes then rent these days. But I can’t see killing the golden goose , I work hard, I have a job I like and it pays well.

That said, my Facebook friend who relocated from New York to North Carolina this weekend got a pickup load of bucket calves , and I’m so jealous of him. He moved for North Carolina because he didn’t want to register and disable parts of his AR-15, and I think he was tired of cold and harsh winters. I hate all the rust on my truck, it’s stupid after less then a decade it’s starting to look like garbage. I hate the big heating bills too and the months of gray. To be fair, already with the warmer temperature his farm is a pile of mud and manure, but that’s true up north too come another month. And I am a member of that Missouri Off-Grid Group, and I’m always a bit fascinated with the rural Midwest, where everything isn’t so expensive and folks aren’t so pretentious about everything (yes, referring to PROTECT the Adirondacks!).

I just feel like so many people I know are doing better off then me. It’s just fustrating to see how so many of my friends and colleagues are buying houses, starting homesteads, and really having a much better quality of life then me in my small, cold apartment in the suburbs. It’s cheap but it’s not nice. But all of the alternatives are expensive, and even if I did buy land and a house mostly with cash, everything else would go up and I’d have less money to save and invest. Getting a fancier apartment or even a home doesn’t get me closer to the off-grid property I want somewhere out west. And I don’t think I can get a cheaper apartment anywhere, at least without off-street parking at this point. Yes, $700 bucks plus utilities is expensive, although at least in the summer my power bill is pretty low, I don’t have wired internet or phone, and I take my trash to the transfer station, at least when I’m feeling green or its metal. And I shouldn’t complain that much, I make good money both with my regular job and in the markets.

🌹🌻🌼Only 19 days remain until the first day of calendar spring!🌹🌻🌼 That said, mos to the second half the week will feel quite spring like. But then as we head into the weekend, temperatures will drop but be sunny. The thing I look forward to most in the coming weeks is having the windows open, and nice warm evenings out back or better yet up the in the woods. I so hate living in the city, but at least I can escape where I can listen to wilderness and listen to music and have fires.

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until Ides of March ✝ when the sun will be setting at 7:01 pm with dusk at 7:29 pm (Daylight Savings Time). On that day in 2020, we had mostly sunny skies and temperatures between 48 and 27 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 44 degrees. We hit a record high of 72 back in 2019.