Good morning! Happy Thursday. Four weeks to Tax Day 💰 . I really should stopped procrastinating, and finish that up so I can get my refund from all that money I paid into my IRA last year. Yes, let me do that today if I have downtime at work or in the evening. Cloudy and 38 degrees by the Bethlehem Central High School. ☁️ Calm wind. Out for the morning walk 🚶🏻 before the rain. ☔ Tonight it will drop below freezing around midnight. ☃️

Birds are chirping 🐦 and you can feel the dampness in the air, but no rain yet. ☔ I do see it coming on the radar so I’ll probably be a work at home day. 🏡 My neck was hurting yesterday from working at my uncomfortable computer bench so I thought about going to the library 📚 to work but I made it through the day, laying for a bit on the heating pad on my neck after work. My truck seat 💺 so much more comfortable than my work at home desk.

I didn’t really get an early start this morning, with all the clouds and the darkness this morning. Plus I woke up in the middle of night, and then put on podcasts and ended up listening to them for like two hours in the middle of the night. But the flip side is I was in bed by 10 PM last night, and made it out in time for my morning walk, so I can’t complain much. The rain is going to turn everything to mud but that’s to be expected this time of year, and a lot of New York is in a bit of a drought from the dry winter. I don’t want things to get too dried out, especially if I want to go camping this spring time and have fires. Of course, it didn’t help that lately I’ve been drinking too much coffee working from home. At least I was able to get a quick breakfast in me and too much coffee and I’m out for my walk.

Today will have a slight chance of rain and snow before 9am, then rain. 🌧 High of 42 degrees at 2pm. Two degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around March 14th. Light and variable wind. Chance of precipitation is 90%. Little or no snow accumulation expected. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies. The high last year was 54 degrees. The record high of 69 was set in 2012. 8 inches of snow fell back in 1977.❄

Solar noon 🌞 is at 1:04 pm with sun having an altitude of 46.6° from the due south horizon (-24.2° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 5.7 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 6:29 pm with the sun in the west (264°). 📸 The sunset is in the west (270°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 7:06 pm after setting for 2 minutes and 54 seconds with dusk around 7:33 pm, which is one minute and 10 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see the First Quarter 🌓 Moon in the west-southwest (245°) at an altitude of 51° from the horizon, 251,784 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 8:07 pm. At sunset, look for rain 🌧 and temperatures around 39 degrees. There will be a north breeze at 9 mph. Today will have 12 hours and 4 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 55 seconds over yesterday.

Yesterday while washing my inherited Griswold frying pan I dropped it while washing it, causing the handle to crack off and a big crack to develop in the middle. I was kind of sad about that, but I guess there is no going back now. It’s garbage. Too bad, it was a nice, well seasoned frying pan I’ve used for years, cooked many a meal at home and at camp. I am not sure if was an authentic Griswold pan, made in Erie, PA but it probably was if it came from my grandparents house. Then again, it made a lot of good meals. Looking how it cracked, I kind of want to shoot it, maybe with my 30-06 but even that I don’t know how well it will fragment. I have that big cast iron griddle I use for camp but I’ll have to get another cast iron frying pan maybe at a sporting goods retailer for future use with things like burgers and even eggs, that I don’t want dripping everywhere over the stove. I’ll have to take it to camp, grease it up good and bake it over a couple of campfires before it’s really good to use the new pan.

Tonight will rain before 9pm, then rain and snow likely between 9pm and midnight, then a chance of snow after midnight. 🌧 Low of 24 degrees at 6am. Five degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around March 7th. North wind 11 to 17 mph, with gusts as high as 30 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New snow accumulation of less than one inch possible. In 2020, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 38 degrees. The record low of -10 occurred back in 1967.

Sunny and warm to kick off spring this weekend. Saturday, sunny, with a high near 53. Northwest wind 3 to 8 mph. Sunday, sunny, with a high near 57. Typical average high for the weekend is 46 degrees. I am thinking I will stay close to home this weekend, but I might walk out to Five Rivers. If I don’t get down to the library on Friday, which I might do in combination with a shopping trip, I might walk down there with my laptop to get some files and work on things. Going to be cold Friday. My neck though is bothering me from working from home, so maybe I should plan to spend more down there from my comfort of my truck on Friday. 🐲 decided to hold off at least one more week before the Adirondacks as there is still a lot of snow up north, but with the sun and warmth it will be melty slop by the weekend. But in a week or two, it will probably drop to a few inches of ice or so.

LOL! I made the mistake of doing a post about some of my ideas for work when I move west at some point in the future, and now my social media feeds are full of advertisements for grad school. I despise all the targeted advertisements. And honestly, I don’t want to go back to grad school. I made it through regular college, 15 years ago, and that was a bruising process that took me 6 years to accomplish, piecing together a degree from four different colleges I attended while working various odd jobs. And school was a lot less expensive back then. I got good enough grades in college, but I really hated sitting in a classroom or the stupid, meaningless class assignments and tests. I get some of the advantages to formal training, but also learning hands on from work and other experience has benefits too. Sometimes a lack of formal training actually leads to better creativity and better product then if you are stuck in the forced mindset that involves the use of expensive, closed-source products that aren’t even all that superior to free software.

🌹🌻🌼Only 2 days remain until the first day of calendar spring!🌹🌻🌼 That means there is hope. I remember when it seemed like an impossible 67 days away. Soon I’ll have to update the countdown for Memorial Day Weekend or something else, so I can celebrate the arrival of the black fly.

Looking ahead, there are 4 weeks until Tax Day 💰 when the sun will be setting at 7:37 pm with dusk at 8:06 pm. On that day in 2020, we had partly cloudy, snow showers and temperatures between 48 and 33 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 58 degrees. We hit a record high of 86 back in 2003.