Those extra cups of coffee did me no good yesterday. Not only did it make it impossible to get to sleep, it contributed to my extreme anxiety I had most of the afternoon. I just kind of wanted to relax to some extra coffee yesterday but I guess I really overdone it. I swear I used to drink a lot more coffee when I was younger, and coffee ain’t as strong as it once was when sipping it, but the after effects are much worse. Between the garlic powder gas and shits, the anxiety and staying up too late, I didn’t get much sleep and sleeping past 6 o’clock is unimaginable in my mind at this point.

Good morning! Happy Sunday. Partly clear and 34 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a south breeze at 6 mph. 🍃. Temperatures will drop below freezing at around 10 pm. ☃️

Not a super cool morning. 😀 I could go for a walk but I want to get to the store pretty earlier and my guts are mess after last night I don’t want to risk an accident out walking. 💩 Could be excess coffee of yesterday ☕ but I think it’s the garlic powder I added to the tomato sauce I had last night, as that previously gave me trouble in West Virginia plus one other time at home. Big bulk container I got from Hannaford, even in moderation it keeps me running to the toilet 🚽 . Could be salmonella or mold growing in the container. I probably should empty it and toss in the recycle bin ♻️ before it gets me sick again. 🤢

Decided on pancakes this morning 🥞 as that’s all I really had left. I was playing with recipes, decided to do ground oatmeal, with one egg, apple cider vinegar and baking soda for levity, and Splenda rather then bananna for sugar. Came out fairly good, little more filling then just ordinary oatmeal-banana pancakes. Topped with shredded apples from the food processor 🍏 heated and cooked down in the microwave, along with chopped bananas. 🍌 Pretty good.

Today will be mostly sunny 🌞, with a high of 46 degrees at 12pm. Two degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around November 23rd. South wind 6 to 11 mph becoming northwest in the afternoon. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with a few breaks of sun the afternoon. The high last year was 39 degrees. The record high of 71 was set in 1921. 4.2 inches of snow fell back in 1914.❄

First thing this morning is to shower 🛀 and then head over to Price Chopper in Slingerlands for grocery shopping, 🛒 that is once I get my list together. 📜 I need to get $50 in groceries to use my $5 coupon, though that shouldn’t be hard as groceries are so expensive these days. Only shopping through Friday morning, as I plan to get what I need when heading up to the Adirondacks. Not Walmart on Black Friday, but I don’t think Hannaford will be particularly crowded the day after Thanksgiving. Mostly just restocking the pantry full of fruits and veggies, though I’m also going to get a big bag of frozen salmon fillets as I have that other coupon too. 🎫 Eating lots of omega-3 is good.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 11:42 am with sun having an altitude of 28° from the due south horizon (-42.9° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 11.3 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 3:48 pm with the sun in the west-southwest (237°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-southwest (244°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 4:31 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 14 seconds with dusk around 5:00 pm, which is 47 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see the First Quarter 🌓 Moon in the south (170°) at an altitude of 28° from the horizon, 226,654 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 5:36 pm. At sunset, look for partly cloudy skies 🌃 and temperatures around 42 degrees. There will be a west-northwest breeze at 10 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 41 minutes of daytime, a decrease of 2 minutes and one second over yesterday.

Been continuing on the Udemy Courses. 🎓 I am on my third course after two courses on remote sensing. 🛰 So far done is Remote Sensing with QGIS: Basics of Satellite Imagery Classification and Fundamentals of Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis. Been learning a lot. It’s wonderful that my public library 📚 offers these classes for free and you get free certifications 📄 after you get done watching the classes and doing the quizzes. The most recent one is Spatial Data Analysis with R, QGIS & More which is good but it’s about 7 or 8 years out of date, and doesn’t show a recent version of QGIS and uses the obsolete R library of rgeos rather then sf and terra which is used today. But still it’s interesting and good to learn as a big part of the class is about kriging, which is something I am still struggling to fully understand. 🗺 📍

Yesterday I checked out the Bethlehem Sportsmart ⛷ and was shocked at the prices of skis, especially ones in good quality. At over $100 for a pair of cross-country skis, I think I’d be best off to get a pair at a retailer, maybe after the holidays, one that fits and works properly for my needs. It was mobbed at the sportsmart, with screaming babies 👶 and children running around. 🧒 The skis I have currently are groomed-track skis, which besides being broken, really aren’t good for the kind of cross-country skiing I do that rarely involves following groomed tracks. 🤑 The problem with those skis is they are too fast and sink too deep in unpacked snow, the prior is a particular concern when descending mountains, especially now that I’m close to 41 years old, and crashing with skis may very well mean broken bones. 🤕 Plus I wasn’t in the mood to spend any money right now, to say nothing about that I’m not sure if it will be a particularly snowy winter. I might just stay closer to home this winter, do more bike riding 🚴‍♀️ on the roads. Winter ski season is so short around here, and it’s often quite cold int he winter.

Didn’t end up being able to fix the vacuum cleaner yesterday, 🧹 turns out that after I got it all apart, then put it back to work, I found out the source of the rattle — bad ball bearing. After fiddling for it for a few more hours, I ended up pulling the motor and any part I could reuse or scrap. ⚙ Heck of it is I had it back to together and it was working until it’s started sparking and not working again. ⚡ Disappointing crap, I bought it only 7 years ago but ever since I got it constantly plugged, burned up belts and malfunctioned. If I get another vacuum, I am going to get a small rechargeable hand held 🤲 one as I don’t really have that much carpet in my apartment and then I can do the stairs and vacuum out the mud and dust from my truck better. I’m just annoyed by all that plastic trash, even I will be able to reuse the switch and cord from the vacuum for camp lighting, 🔌 and may be able to part out parts of the motor for electronics projects or add to the stack of scrap metal for eventual recycling at the scrap yard. ♻️ It wasn’t a real cheap vacuum — it was like $70 or $80 bucks, a Dirt Devil Pet Hair Vacuum but it constantly plugged on wads of hair and dust. I bought it because the reviews were good originally, and I figured a pet hair vacuum wouldn’t clog as much as a standard vacuum. 🐶 I guess don’t believe the review. I just hate carpet, when I have my own land, I don’t ever want that indoors. Especially not the gross, nasty worn out shag carpet like in my apartment.

The broken vacuum cleaner, the debate in my mind to renew or not renew my certificate of deposit,  the signing of Clean Slate last week, getting my ego knocked down a peg for that messed up background at work, and cold weather 🤪 plus all that coffee just really got me into a bad place by last night. 🤯 My mind was racing, I just kind of felt sick. The whole thing was stupid, it wasn’t entirely my fault I messed up the background, the researcher and big boss didn’t catch it either. 💣 The vacuum cleaner was cheap shit it never worked right. The truck is going to be fine for another year. Then I got the shits from that garlic powder. 💩 Yuck, I was so sick for a while. Did I mention I burnt my finger 👆 on the soldering iron when I was working last night. 😠 I was just so bitter, angry and frustrated all evening. I mean it’s stupid, what happened at work isn’t the end of world, moving to a new department soon, the seven-year old vacuum cleaner was less then a tank of gas these days, my truck will likely make it another year, it’s winter it’s cold but I am still planning adventures, I can get better skis somewhere else, and the coffee and shits will wear themselves off.

But regardless, I had a nice bicycle ride out to Voorheesville. 🚲 The bridge is fully re-opened, they did a nice job, it’s a very smooth ride up and over the bridge. On the west side of the bridge it’s a slight upgrade, but the expansion gaps are remarkably smooth and it’s blacktop, all the more surprising for a “temporary bridge”. Truth is they did such a nice job on the “temporary” bridge that they really don’t have a good reason to necessarily replace it anytime soon. Sat and watched the 4 PM freight train roll through Voorheesville 🚂 then watched the sunset 🌆 from Bender Mellon Farms and rode home quickly, thinking it would get dark but it didn’t so I rode down to Adams Street then back along the designated bike route through the back roads of Delmar. Great evening even if it was shitty day in so many ways. That part of the day was pretty nice, even if I got sick in evening 😫 and my mind was racing the rest of day. 🤪

Tonight will have a slight chance of showers before 8pm. Partly cloudy 🌃, with a low of 26 degrees at 6am. Four degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around December 3rd. Northwest wind 8 to 10 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. In 2022, we had clear skies in the evening, which became partly cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 24 degrees. The record low of 6 occurred back in 1986.

Last night made homemade tomato sauce with canned tomatoes, Italian spices, spinach, peas, chopped garlic, crushed red pepper, smoked paprika and kidney beans. Added a little bit of lentil pasta towards the end. Tasted good, very filling and kept me full. 🥘 It as all good until I added some garlic powder (really not much), which totally blew up my stomach starting around midnight, with frequent visits the bathroom and everything stinking of garlic. I don’t know why I have such problems with this garlic powder I got the other day — crushed garlic is good. I thought the problem was the whole wheat flour I got from Price Chopper but I’m pretty sure it’s the garlic powder. Been having a lot of stomach issues lately, I thought I would adjust to the high-fiber diet but it’s proven difficult. 🤰

Got reading about the latest generation of single board computers 🖥 which keep getting more and more powerful and cheaper. Technology on this front is advancing so quickly, it’s a golden age to be a hobbyist with things like the original Arduino from years ago seeming so out of date. 🤖 Then I got reading about stomach issues as my stomach grumbled, and this really weird thread on the internet where people fight about whether or not sugars in excessive fruit consumption 🍌 🍏 🐒 lead to fatty liver disease and diabetes. Most of the experts think the benefit of the extra fiber far outweigh any downsides to a diet rich in fruits, though I do eat a lot of fruit (and vegetables too). Probably too much fruit but I like sweet. But I also don’t eat any food with added sugars if I can all avoid it, which is what most doctors 👨‍⚕️ think really are a big threat to health. I am a bit obsessed with fatty liver disease after people warned me about the risk of loosing so much weight so quickly. Hell of it is I don’t have much control over my weight, it really is a just a side effect of diet. Hard to gain too much when your stuffing your face with fruits, vegetables and beans all of the time, and riding to work and walking everywhere.

Next Friday through the following Monday is looking good for the Adirondacks 🏕 though only time will determine for sure. ❄️ It looks like the snow event in Wednesday isn’t going to leave feet of snow up north, so I should be able to get back to camp without doing a lot of shoveling or hauling gear back, though worse come to worse, I’ll bring the sled and drag gear back. 🛷 The weekend looks to be cool but not as cold as they first predicted ☕ and warm coffee and meals along with the heater should be good. And I can get away from it all.

Looking ahead, there are 3 weeks until 7:15 AM Sunrise ⌛️ when the sun will be setting at 4:23 pm with dusk at 4:53 pm. On that day in 2022, we had mostly sunny and temperatures between 31 and 20 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 40 degrees. We hit a record high of 64 back in 1966.