Good evening. Kind of muggy but rain free with some breaks in the clouds, sitting out back around 76 degrees in Delmar. ☔ There is a south-southeast breeze at 11 mph. 🍃. The dew point is 70 degrees. Honestly, we’ve had worse evenings this summer, and we need the rain.

All things considered, this was a pretty productive evening. I got the broken hammock exchanged, not the same color but the same model. 😐Sucks that the carabiner broke like that but I’ll be extra careful to make sure that it fully locks the next time I set it up and if it still gives me problems I guess I will buy heavier carabiners.♊ Took them almost 45 minutes to do the exchange due to having trouble finding the hammock and then figuring out how to get the exchange processed in the system.

I thought about going for a walk this evening at the Albany Pine Bush to see if I could spot Karner Blues but the constant threat of thunderstorms I decided against that. 🌲It looked for a while that the sky was just going to open up. Never ended up raining but I was sure it was going to pour.

Instead, I ended up going for a walk around the maul. Pretty quiet on a summer Monday evening at the maul. Almost a bit cool based on how much they had the air conditioning jacked up there. Not a single store interested me.:? I guess not owning a television or paying much attention to contemporary culture there isn’t much for a maul to interest me. Heck, even the one store I liked – Sears – for swanky clothing for work is no more.

The only reason I went there was for LL Bean exchange and only because I had a rewards card from there that got me the hammock inexpensively😎. The quality of their products has gone down since the brand has gone mainstream, pushed by Wall Street investors for more profit. I probably won’t shop there anymore now that I have a different credit card that pays me bigger rewards on gas and groceries including everything I buy at Walmart💰 and gives me cash back rather than outdoors goods that are over priced and of dubious value. I shouldn’t complain, they did the exchange without too much trouble but it was slow.

The maul and suburbanite culture really doesn’t appeal to me. Television with the shouting car salesman💻 and flashing images with happy people and murder and rape scenes on the evening news just confuse me and give me headaches. 🚜I’d rather spend my money up in the wilderness, eventually where I can have my land and my off grid cabin, heat with wood, make my own electricity, burn my own trash. I guess living in a vinyl cocoon with a big screen television and high speed internet is wonderful but it’s no interest to me.

I got to Krum Kill Road and the darn traffic light wouldn’t give me a green arrow. 🚦So I ended up taking the next road past the Giant Oaks suburbanite doctor facility where I think my parents get their eyes checked. I ended up in Voorheesville.🍤🍞🍗🍔 Got the necessary groceries for the rest of the week. That Hannaford in Voorheesville is pricey but it’s compact and fast to shop.

Made it home before dark. I have so much trouble driving after dark but the new headlights burn brightly. I have a regular eye check up on August 11th but I really should talk to a specialist about my bad night vision. 👀I was disappointed when I chucked the old bulb in the fire over the weekend to see if it would burn, it didn’t explode or even pop.💥

I’m working on renovating some of the code on my blog, which I think will be ready to be made live tomorrow that will make it easier to update my location and status when I’m traveling. 🔀♋I noticed that there are more Facebook API changes coming down the pike on August 1st, so I hope the Facebook part of my blog won’t stop working while I’m at camp on summer vacation.

Definitely looking forward to vacation. 🐮 Camping in the National Forest is a a little like living on a farm, listening to the cows bellow and moo, and the ripping sound they make grazing. It will be fun to have a nice campsite set up, shop every few days for groceries, spend all day hiking, kayaking, fishing, then coming back to camp and making a delicious meal, then maybe laying out at Forrester Pond watching the stars as the crickets sing their song well after midnight.

But first it’s eleven o’clock here. Time to go to bed as I have to work four more days before vacation.