Enjoying a grapefruit on this first morning with the mercury below freezing outdoors, though it’s plenty warm inside as I have the oven full of butternut and acorn squash and cornbread and stove top cooking down onions, corn, mushrooms and eggs and a pot of coffee bubbling up. Gotta eat!

It’s a Thursday. 😀 Off to work in a bit – that is once the sun rises and there is enough daylight to ride in. Getting harder, especially in the evening, next week is the last one for riding home after work. It will be nice having more daylight in the morning for heading into work. It’s nice having the grapefruit in the morning. 🍊 The grapefruit are nice, I really appreciate them knowing the elderly can’t eat them because it interferes with their statins. See when you know something could go away, you like it even more. Terrible but true.

Tomorrow at this time I’ll be finishing up packing and showering 🚿 and then it’s off to Madison County for the weekend. 🏕️ I was on my bestest behavior and stayed in town as a coughed out my brains last weekend. So now it’s off to hills and hollows of Mad County to ride trail and kayak the Nine Mile Swamp. 🐸 Need to get propane tonight.

As the Tuesday lunch meeting was canceled, ☹️ today they’ll be providing lunch for our meeting in the office, 🏢 so I won’t have to pack a  lunch, though I’ll have to be prepared mid-day to ride up the State Street Hill. 🚲 Probably work downtown for the balance of the day, then come home and get packed, fuel up the car, get the propane and a few random supplies and it looks to be a beautiful weekend coming up. ☀️

That cornbread is so good. 🌽 I used two eggs 🥚 in the mix, which made it extra cake-like, along with a bit of stevia and lots of turmeric. It’s very yellow and spicy but so good. 🍞 Lots of protein and some saturated fat, but it will be good to enjoy when I’m out in Mad County over the weekend. 🗺️ I’m sure it will be a busy weekend for remote work 💻 but I’ll keep things moving on as the weekend progresses. That oven stinks a bit from spilled food on the outside, and it hasn’t been run in a while, but that will get better as the winter progresses.

All that squash is going to be good. 🥭 I like my butternut squash and my acorn squash, and I also have spaghetti squash created from last year’s compost seeds which is pretty darn good stuff. It’s important ot have a lot of fiber in your diet, as not only does it help food move through your system, it comes along with a lot of good vitamins and fills you up quickly, displacing less healthy fats and carbs. Good stuff. 😋

I “discovered” the new US Forest Service Vector TIle base maps yesterday, 🗺️ and I realized they would be perfect for maps both on federal and state land, with some additional layers. They are a much more standardized design, and quite attractive. I am going to explore them further with the blog in the coming weeks. Of course, with all the craziness of work going on and everything else going on it’s hard to find time to make maps, but November will come… And I’ll be busy updating the state data systems, though at least I probably won’t bringing that work home or working extra hours to do that.