Good morning! Tonight is first Average Nightly Temperature Below Freezing 🌌. Six weeks to Christmas 🎅. Maybe it will warm up again and I can spend Christmas camping in Brookfield again. That was wild that year in 2015, warm and no snow. Hiking Glimmerglass State Park on Christmas morning was wonderful. With the heat dome in the mid west and west, I could see it pushing east by December. I’d take a 45 degree day with lots of sun for mid-December. 🌞 Climate change has its upside in the winter if you’re not a snowmobiler right now and your on the hot side of the increasingly wavy jet stream.

Heavy rain and 36 degrees in Delmar. ☔ No snow here but very cold and wet. There is a north breeze at 5 mph. 🍃.

Temperatures locally will drop below freezing at around 10 pm. ☃️ Up north I’ve heard it’s an all snow event. Yep there getting more snow there, although I don’t think the snowmobile trails open until the end of Big Game Season.🐻

Today will rain, mainly before noon, then a slight chance of showers after 4pm. 🌧 High of 40 degrees at 3pm. Nine degrees below normal, which is similiar to a typical day around December 4th. Definitely not a warm day. Northwest wind 5 to 11 mph, with gusts as high as 21 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New precipitation amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible. A year ago, we had cloudy skies with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 41 degrees. The record high of 69 was set in 1964. 6 inches of snow fell back in 1886.❄

The sun will set at 4:34 pm with dusk around 5:04 pm, which is 58 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for rain showers 🌧 and temperatures around 39 degrees. There will be a west-northwest breeze at 11 mph with gusts up to 21mph. Today will have 9 hours and 48 minutes of daytime, a decrease of 2 minutes and 13 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a slight chance of rain showers before 8pm, then a slight chance of rain and snow showers between 8pm and 9pm, then a chance of snow showers after 9pm. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a low of 24 degrees at 6am. Eight degrees below normal, which is similiar to a typical night around December 8th. Northwest wind 11 to 13 mph. Chance of precipitation is 30%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. In 2017, we had cloudy skies. It got down to 32 degrees. The record low of 12 occurred back in 1996.

Finally bought coffee. ☕ It was good having a nice strong cup of coffee this morning. Percolator pot on the stove still works great. Simple technology is the best. Helped with getting up and heading out to the bus stop on this rather rainy and cold morning.🚏Nice and warm on the bus during this rainy morning, as I listen to Hollies heading down. I’m glad they built a bus shelter 🚍 near where I live on rainy mornings like today. Plus the heated bus shelter in the plaza for the evening trip home, now. That’s so awesome.

It’s good to be back in the routine, although it’s not going to last as I’m back in the field for work for a few more days this week 🌽 but soon it will be the normal routine where I can leave Big Red parked hooked up to the solar panel for a full week or more. 🚌That’s winter, I like to save as much gasoline and money as possible until traveling season returns, especially as my utility bills increase with the heat being turned on.⛽

When I went shopping yesterday, I forgot to buy more waffle mix. I did buy frozen cherries to top them off. 🍒 I have eggs from my parents for breakfast today. Bought cheese and sausage to complement them. 🍳 Very filling meal, I packed lunch but I’ll probably skip it in favor of having an early dinner around four.

When I’m at Walmart, I usually try to buy the biggest family sized packages of food just because it saves money and reduce waste,💰 especially during the winter when I don’t have a fire to chuck the packaging into like is so handy when camping. Plus the waffle mix boxes are just paper so I can recycle them for free, no hauling to the transfer station. Saves a lot of money also buying bulk and means fewer times of running low on supplies. I think I have the same jumbo bottle of shampoo that I bought at the beginning of the year because it’s lasted so long. Every dollar saved is one closer to owning my off-grid cabin. 🏡 It’s good to have a savings goal in life. Oh, and today is pay day.

Looking ahead, there are 6 weeks until Christmas 🎅 when the sun will be setting at 4:27 pm with dusk at 4:59 pm. On that day in 2017, we had snow, heavy fog, freezing fog, mist, squalls, partly cloudy skies and temperatures between 33 and 17 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 33 degrees. That was no 2015 that year. We hit a record high of 66 back in 1889. It was even warmer I believe on Christmas Eve 2015.