Good morning! Yeah, it’s Friday! Four weeks to Good Friday ✝️ . Partly sunny and 17 degrees on my morning walk today. Breezy, ️20 mph breeze from the west-northwest 🌬 with gusts up to 32 mph 💨💨💨. The current wind chill is 0. Yeah, it’s pretty cold. Bare ground, snow free locally, although there are piles of snow around. ☃ Things will start to thaw out at Monday around 11 am. 🌡️

Out for my morning walk, I wish I had worn gloves and a hat. I didn’t want to as I thought I would get overheated with the bright sun this morning, but that wind is a good reminder it’s still early March. I really wanted to get up north this weekend to the Adirondacks, but every time I look at the forecast it just gets cloudier and grayer. 15 degrees and cloudy doesn’t seem like good for camping. Next weekend with the time change, looks a bit warmer.

Today will be mostly sunny 🌞, with a high of 28 degrees at 3pm. 12 degrees below normal. Blustery, with a northwest wind 20 to 22 mph, with gusts as high as 37 mph. A year ago, we had cloudy skies in the morning with more sun in the afternoon. The high last year was 47 degrees. The record high of 71 was set in 1964. 8.6 inches of snow fell back in 1917.❄

Solar noon 🌞 is at 12:08 pm with sun having an altitude of 41.5° from the due south horizon (-29.4° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 6.8 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 5:13 pm with the sun in the west-southwest (256°). 📸 The sunset is in the west (263°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 5:51 pm after setting for 2 minutes and 55 seconds with dusk around 6:18 pm, which is one minute and 13 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 The best time to look at the stars is after 6:51 pm. At sunset, look for partly cloudy skies 🌃 and temperatures around 26 degrees. The wind chill around sunset will be 11. ☃️ Breezy, 23 mph breeze ⛅ from the west-northwest with gusts up to 39mph. Today will have 11 hours and 26 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 52 seconds over yesterday.

Today I want to get the grocery store and to the post office. I decided to ultimately renew my lease, because I think it’s the best option for the next year but maybe mid-winter next year I will take a more careful look at what my options are. I will have to keep an eye out for small houses or maybe mobile homes over the coming year, but really I think my rent is still very affordable and I’m better investing and renting at this point, in a place where I can catch a bus to work and walk down to the library for internet, once things re-open. I don’t really need groceries that badly, but I want to stock up n a few items, most notably envelopes. I find I am doing a fair bit more mail now that I’m working remotely.

Tonight will be scattered snow showers, mainly before midnight. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a low of 16 degrees at 5am. Six degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around February 10th. Maximum wind chill around 10 at 6pm; Breezy, with a northwest wind 18 to 23 mph decreasing to 6 to 11 mph after midnight. Chance of precipitation is 30%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. In 2020, we had partly cloudy skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 25 degrees. The record low of -21 occurred back in 1948.

Today in 1970, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty goes into effect after ratification by 43 nations. In 1933, during the height of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declares a “bank holiday”, closing all U.S. banks and freezing all financial transactions.

Tomorrow will be partly sunny 🌞, with a high of 25 degrees at 2pm. 15 degrees below normal. Blustery, with a northwest wind 7 to 12 mph increasing to 17 to 22 mph in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 32 mph. A year ago, we had cloudy skies in the morning with more sun in the afternoon. The high last year was 48 degrees. The record high of 63 was set in 1974. 10.5 inches of snow fell back in 1887.❄

Looking ahead to Sunday, sunny, with a high near 30. Light northwest wind increasing to 5 to 9 mph in the morning. Typical average high for the weekend is 40 degrees.

I took the skis out of my truck this morning and started to clean up and organize my camping gear. I think it’s pretty cold out today, so I should probably wait until it warms up to get the rest of the stuff out of the truck. I do need to get things cleaned up for a trip to the transfer station as I’m running out of places to put recycables, in part due to the fact they no longer have free paper recycling and because I had more things in cans while camping during remote work this past summer.

🌹🌻🌼Only 15 days remain until the first day of calendar spring!🌹🌻🌼 Some good news. Only two weeks of winter left in other words. And next week we set the clock ahead one hour, to give us that extra hour of daylight.

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until Last Day of Winter 🏂 when the sun will be setting at 7:06 pm with dusk at 7:34 pm (Daylight Savings Time). On that day in 2020, we had rain and temperatures between 51 and 38 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 46 degrees. We hit a record high of 78 back in 2012.