Good morning! Happy Tuesday. Two weeks to Christmas 🎅. Ho. Ho. Ho. Cloudy and 22 degrees in Hector. ☁ There is a southwest breeze at 8 mph. 🍃. Things will start to thaw out at Thursday around 1 pm. 🌡️ LOL!

Today will be cloudy, then gradually becoming mostly sunny ⛅, with a high of 30 degrees at 3pm. Seven degrees below normal. Kind of cold, some sun at least would be nice. Things have actually been warmer in the cooler, less frozen than things outside of it. Southwest wind around 9 mph. I don’t like that so much as it means an occasional gust of wind blows into the tent. A year ago, we had mostly cloudy skies. The high last year was 34 degrees. The record high of 61 was set in 1952. 4.3 inches of snow fell back in 1970.❄

I made blueberry muffins for breakfast and have kind of been hiding out in the tent as it’s nice and warm here. ☕ Less warm outside, especially at at quarter of six when I had to run outside for a while. 💩 I think it was frozen before it hit the bucket.

The sun will set at 4:34 pm with dusk around 5:06 pm, which is 6 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for partly cloudy skies ☁ and temperatures around 30 degrees. There will be a west-southwest breeze at 9 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 6 minutes of daytime, a decrease of 44 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a chance of flurries between 8pm and 10pm, then a chance of snow showers after 10pm. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a low of 23 degrees at 5am. Typical for tonight. Maximum wind chill around 18 at 6pm; West wind 10 to 13 mph. Chance of precipitation is 50%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. In 2017, we had cloudy skies. It got down to 22 degrees. The record low of -12 occurred back in 1988.

Last night was pizza 🍕 followed by fresh baked cookies 🍪 and hot chocolate ☕. Not a half bad meal, certainly better than the stew, something I’ll have to revisit in the future. Had another nice campfire but in the cold burned through quite a bit of wood. 🔥

Yesterday I went down to Trumansburg and the Taughannock Gorge which was nice but kind of cold. 🏃I planned to get gas but none of the gas pumps were working at the station.⛽ I didn’t realize until after I swiped my card but I was told nothing was read because all of the pumps were off. I’ll get it straightened out.

Today I was originally planning to stick around camp maybe go for a walk or hunt but now I’m leaning towards heading to Watkins Glen especially if it’s going to stay gray and cold and I’ll need to charge up the batteries. 🔋But first I’ll need to gather up some firewood and get cleaned up and gear secured. Probably also go to the library for a bit to use the internet on my laptop.💻

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until Christmas 🎅 when the sun will be setting at 4:39 pm with dusk at 5:11 pm. On that day in 2017, we had snow and partly cloudy skies and temperatures between 33 and 17 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 33 degrees. We hit a record high of 66 back in 1889.