Day: March 7, 2021

Good morning! Happy Sunday. Three weeks to Worm Moon . Mostly sunny and 17 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a northwest breeze at 8 mph. . There are just some big piles of snow on ground. I just wish the pile where I turn around would melt away. But regardless, things will start to thaw out at tomorrow around noontime.

Cold but sunny March morning today. I am not moving real fast this morning because I woke up at midnight and I couldn’t get back to bed. I made the awful decision to bring out my phone and watch a video about dairying in Iowa, then one about NB88’s off-grid cabin in Maine then Scambaiting channel Kitboga, where that guy wastes the time of scammers from India who rip off little old ladies. Yeah, I saw that NY Times article about Kitboga a while back and are now hooked.

Today will be mostly sunny , with a high of 30 degrees at 2pm. 11 degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around January 22nd. Northwest wind 8 to 13 mph. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with sunny skies in the afternoon. The high last year was 45 degrees. The record high of 62 was set in 1974. 10.3 inches of snow fell back in 1967.

I should get going and stop wasting time on the internet, but it looks so cold outside. I was bad yesterday and skipped my walk, just because it was so cloudy and cold. Maybe I was depressed or lazy, but I am just ready for winter to be over. I really had hoped to get out camping yesterday, but that wasn’t to be. That wind looks cold but I should take my shower and get outside.

I re-wrote a bunch of the code yesterday on the blog relating to the mapper, so now it uses a unified flat-file database for pulling all the map layers, rather then a much too longer PHP script with a lot of strings and conditionals, which wasn’t efficient or easy to maintain, but it got built up over time as I discovered new services to integrate in the blog. I also added a preview function and general improvements to the web-mapping.

Solar noon is at 12:07 pm with sun having an altitude of 42.2° from the due south horizon (-28.6° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 6.6 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour starts at 5:15 pm with the sun in the west-southwest (258°). The sunset is in the west (264°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 5:53 pm after setting for 2 minutes and 55 seconds with dusk around 6:20 pm, which is one minute and 12 seconds later than yesterday. The best time to look at the stars is after 6:54 pm. At sunset, look for partly clear skies and temperatures around 27 degrees. There will be a northwest breeze at 11 mph. Today will have 11 hours and 32 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 53 seconds over yesterday.

This afternoon I’m thinking about hiking Bennett Hill then maybe going out to the folks house for Sunday dinner. I’m not super ambitious today and I figure save fuel while I can. Another kind of cold day today but at least sunny. I’ll probably do my evening walk tonight and be back on the regular schedule come Monday. This week looks pretty nice, and I might go down to the park after work a couple of days with a book, and certainly won’t have the excuses to not walk that I’ve had lately.

Tonight will be mostly clear , with a low of 9 degrees at 6am. 14 degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around 2 at 3am; Northwest wind 6 to 10 mph. That’s a pretty chilly for what is almost the second week of March. In like a lion, I guess. In 2020, we had clear skies in the evening, which became clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 27 degrees. The record low of -2 occurred back in 1989.

I still haven’t gotten the tax form I need to finish my taxes regarding my IRA. I emailed the bank through their secure message center and never got a response. I know probably all the information I need but I don’t want to get my taxes wrong and get audited or pay a fine. Because I did the IRA option last year and pre-paid my state taxes, I should be getting a refund back this year, but the tax-provider-of-the-year that’s doing FreeFile is super complicated to use this year. Life at times can be aggrieving.

Yesterday with the cold, I left the cabinets open and was noticing how much junk I have in some of the cabinets. Some of it I could possibly use again, but some of it is things that I hope I could recycle like small broken appliances although probably that’s easier said then done. As I don’t pay for trash pickup where I live but instead haul to the transfer station and burn a lot during the summer, I tend to accumulate a lot of metal and rubber junk — stuff that’s either noxious to burn or won’t burn at all. It would be nice to recycle it but it’s kind of a pain. It’s not packaging or hoarding crap but it’s just a lot of miscellaneous stuff.

But I definitely need to clean stuff out after 13 years of living here. I guess moving would have been a good excuse to clean things out. I don’t buy a lot but you just kind of accumulate a lot of crap. Maybe next weekend if I don’t go camping, I’ll plan a trash and recycling run to the transfer station. My cans are pretty full at this and I shouldn’t keep procrastinating. Even if I do go up north next weekend, I guess I could do the transfer station first thing in the morning, then re-pack my truck and then head north to camp.

Back in 1965 today was Bloody Sunday: a group of 600 civil rights marchers is brutally attacked by state and local police in Selma, Alabama. Only so many years does the anniversary of Bloody Sunday actually match up with Sunday. It is said to have encouraged Coungress to move forward with the Voting Rights Act.

Only 13 days remain until the first day of calendar spring!

As previously noted, next Sunday is 7 PM Sunset when the sun will be setting at 7:00 pm with dusk at 7:28 pm (Daylight Savings Time). On that day in 2020, we had mostly cloudy and temperatures between 46 and 38 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 43 degrees. We hit a record high of 75 back in 1946.