Good morning! Happy Saturday. Finally the it’s officially spring time! 🌷 Three weeks to 8 PM Dusk 🌆 . Sunny and 28 degrees in Delmar, NY. 🌞 Calm wind.Things will start to thaw out at around 9 am. 🌡️

While it’s a cold start to the morning, 🌸 it is clear and warming up quickly. I am planning come mid day to walk 🚶🏻 out to Five Rivers then maybe Van Dyke Preserve later on for a big loop. I decided I’ll let Big Red rest today, and instead do my own walking. Tomorrow though I’ll probably go to Partridge Run for a bigger hike. I just like walking places and leaving the car home. When you get out of the habit of motoring everywhere, you kind of get to the point you don’t want to motor.

I am sure glad it’s officially spring, not that it is all that meaningful for Upstate New York, where an early spring is defined as starting to see some green in the city around April 15th, and maybe if it’s abnormally a few hints of green in the mountains come the first or second week of April. We might get some 80 degrees well before then, but ice and snow tends to stick around, and freezing nights and hard frosts aren’t uncommon until May. It’s a pretty cold climate in Upstate New York. But enjoy the warm and sunny spring days like today when you can, as they are more unusual then we want to want to admit. At least from the roads and hardened trails as everything else is likely just mud at this point.

Today will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 54 degrees at 4pm. Eight degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around April 5th. Light west wind becoming northwest 9 to 14 mph in the morning. A year ago, we had light rain in the morning, which became cloudy by afternoon. The high last year was 74 degrees. The record high of 78 was set in 2012. 7 inches of snow fell back in 1944.❄

Solar noon 🌞 is at 1:04 pm with sun having an altitude of 47.4° from the due south horizon (-23.5° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 5.5 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 6:31 pm with the sun in the west (265°). 📸 The sunset is in the west (271°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 7:08 pm after setting for 2 minutes and 54 seconds with dusk around 7:35 pm, which is one minute and 10 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see the First Quarter 🌓 Moon in the southwest (219°) at an altitude of 68° from the horizon, 248,948 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 8:09 pm. At sunset, look for clear skies 🌄 and temperatures around 49 degrees. Should be a nice night for sitting out back. There will be a northwest breeze at 8 mph. Today will have 12 hours and 10 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 55 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be clear 🌃, with a low of 26 degrees at 6am. One degree below normal, which is similar to a typical night around March 18th. Northwest wind around 6 mph becoming calm after midnight. In 2020, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 28 degrees. The record low of -1 occurred back in 1956.

I worked down at the library most of yesterday afternoon. At first it was a bit cold, but as the day progressed the wind died down and sun grew stronger. No complaints. I might work down there on Monday, maybe walk down there and work on the park bench. I also want to wash my truck on Monday. I also went for an hour plus long walk around the back part of the park enjoying the fresh air and modest temperatures, and then sat out back for about an hour until it got kind of chilly out. Made up some new 3D maps and been working on some internal code and mapping improvements, including fixing issues with maps being too zoomed in or out on different screens. Ultimately the solution for that was to define the bounding box of the map, rather then the center point and zoom level.

Yesterday I finished up my taxes, and are actually getting a pretty sizable refund thanks to the IRA I paid into for most of last year before switching back to a Roth IRA for the last month or two of the year. Of course, the main disadvantage to the IRA is I will have to pay taxes on withdrawals. This year, working back again for the state, I back to using a Roth IRA although my deferred comp is set up as pre-tax right form the payroll office, so I don’t get back anything at the end of tax season on that. I thought I still owed the state some money, but I’m getting a refund as I didn’t include the pre-payment I had made to state. I wouldn’t have made quarterly tax payments to state all last year if I calculated in the impact of IRA deduction correctly, but sometimes it’s hard to estimate what interest rates and dividend payments would look like. Both were somewhat lower then expected to the COVID fucking with oil markets and fed cutting rates.

I also scheduled my COVID-19 vaccine appointment for next Tuesday. Technically I’ve been eligible for the past few weeks, but I didn’t want to jump into line the first day and be stuck waiting. Now it seems like a lot more appointments are opening up, and I was able to get one right downtown on the bus line, so the plan is Tuesday to catch a bus downtown during what might be an extended lunch break and get my first shot. Plus I found out all the cool kids were getting their shots and I didn’t want to miss out. Then by mid-April I will be fully vaccinated, which will be good especially if I am working back downtown, although that might not happen for a while because everybody has gotten used to remote work, and it’s working well, and frankly it’s kind of a lot of fun not having to catch the late night bus home or even be able to work up from camp.

As previously noted, there are 3 weeks until 8 PM Dusk 🌆 when the sun will be setting at 7:31 pm with dusk at 8:00 pm. On that day in 2020, we had partly sunny, snow showers and temperatures between 48 and 37 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 56 degrees. We hit a record high of 86 back in 1922.