Good morning! Happy Tuesday. Two weeks to 5:30 PM Sunset 🌆. Cloudy, damp, muddy and 46 degrees in Delmar. ☔ There is a south breeze at 8 mph. 🍃. There are 1.25 inches of snow on the ground. ☃ Temperatures will drop below freezing at around 10 pm. ☃️

One more mild day today. Then February weather returns for the second half of the week, although honestly a bit above average until the weekend when it will be closer to average. 🌞Today will again be relatively busy but still not too insane or so I hope. 💼But maybe I’ll be able to catch the five o’clock home.🚌

I was running late again but fortunately so was the bus ⌚ so I made it with time to spare to the bus stop. 🚏I’ve been trying to get to bed earlier but I’ve been bad at that. I wake up at the normal time but then delay getting out of bed. That and I was planning on wearing the same pants as yesterday but I stopped when I discovered that there was mud on them from just walking around the city streets, kicking it up. I don’t care about mud that much, but I’m supposed to look nice for work. 👔It pays the bills and let’s me save for a better tomorrow, owning my own land in the wilderness. 🗻

Today will have isolated showers before 11am. Mostly sunny 🌞, with a high of 53 degrees at 12pm. 21 degrees above normal, which is similiar to a typical day around April 3rd. I’ll take April weather in early February. Not all warm days are a result of climate change I tell myself. South wind 7 to 15 mph becoming west in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 26 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. A year ago, we had cloudy in the morning, which became sunny by afternoon. The high last year was 34 degrees. The record high of 59 was set in 1890. 10.4 inches of snow fell back in 2014.❄

Snow has been doing a lot of melting yesterday, it was quite damp but mild. 💧I’m glad it’s been warm enough to give the heat a break – I’ve left the thermostat at fifty since yesterday and with the solar radiation hitting the building yesterday it was 63 degrees inside by the time I got home.🔥 I’m not going to pay to keep the heat warm when it’s above freezing, I’d much prefer to keep it colder. Money is always tight, my heating bills this year seem a lot steeper than years past. But then again, I don’t hesitate to turn up the heat like I did years ago when I was younger. 💸

The sun will set at 5:14 pm with dusk around 5:44 pm, which is one minute and 19 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for mostly clear skies 🌄 and temperatures around 44 degrees. There will be a west-northwest breeze at 15 mph with gusts up to 26mph. Today will have 10 hours and 10 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 29 seconds over yesterday. Even longer, getting closer to twelve hours of daylight in a month.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 22 degrees at 6am. Six degrees above normal, which is similiar to a typical night around March 4th. Northwest wind 6 to 14 mph, with gusts as high as 24 mph. In 2018, we had clear in the evening, which became light snow by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 15 degrees. The record low of -20 occurred back in 1948.

Tomorrow will have a slight chance of rain and sleet between 3pm and 4pm, then a chance of rain. Increasing clouds 🌞, with a high of 35 degrees at 1pm. Two degrees above normal, which is similiar to a typical day around February 15th. Light and variable wind becoming southeast 5 to 8 mph in the morning. Chance of precipitation is 30%. Little or no sleet accumulation expected. A year ago, we had cloudy in the morning, which became sunny by afternoon. The high last year was 30 degrees. The record high of 55 was set in 1991. 10.8 inches of snow fell back in 1978.❄

Monday wasn’t too bad of a day, work got out around 7:40, I ended up taking the 8:15 bus 🚌 home and having a quick bite to eat before going on my evening walk around the block.🌯 A nice starry night, warm enough that I could walk with just a t-shirt and my vest.👕

I ordered some micro USB cables from AliExpress. I ordered the UGreen brand which if they are anything like the latest ones I ordered are built to be very high quality, durable, heavy while in minimal but professional looking plastic envelopes. 🔌Not a lot of waste.♻ I ordered a 3 meter and two 1.5 meter cables for $10, which if they are like the last two I ordered from them are a very good deal. I know that you can get cheap USB cables from Amazon but they aren’t as nice as the UGreen cables. The 3 meter cable is nine feet long which means that I can reach either microcontroller mounted on the wall from my laptop without moving it from where it sits by my desk.

For simple components, I swear by most of the things I have gotten from AliExpress. Only one or two things have either gotten lost in the mail✉ or been below expectations but most components arrive within two weeks and are all within specs, same quality as if you ordered from a United States retailer.📦

While I was on AliExpress I also bought some 5 volt linear regulators. I am thinking about building a smart switch for the solar panel and the dual batteries so that when I have a lot of sun I can not only top off the accessory battery 🔋but also the starting battery while automatically disconnecting them when there is little sun to avoid the batteries fighting or over discharging. I could use the built-in linear regulator of the Arduino Nano but I fried one last year with the 15.4 volts of the alternator output at times and the summer heat. I’ve 3.3 volt regulators in my toolbox but no 5 volt ones.

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until 5:30 PM Sunset 🌆 when the sun will be setting at 5:32 pm with dusk at 6:01 pm. On that day in 2018, we had rain showers, partly cloudy and temperatures between 44 and 23 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 36 degrees. We hit a record high of 66 back in 1981.

A bit cool but sunny this time weekend. 😎 Saturday, mostly sunny, with a high near 28. Sunday, mostly sunny, with a high near 31. Typical average high for the weekend is 33 degrees. Should be nice, certainly not frigid. I’ll take it.

I am still chewing over my weekend plans. Maybe I’ll go up to Johnstown or maybe not. It’s still quite a bit of a drive for a relatively small outdoors show and I’m still thinking about heading out of town for Presidents Day Weekend.⛺ Weather depending of course. This weekend doesn’t look that bad but kind of chilly but that’s expected for February. I should see when the Adirondack Ice Races on Lake Algonquin are – if they were this weekend – that would increase my incentive for going north. Of course the other problem is finding a pull off where I can park and hike back to a campsite along route 8 this time of year. Maybe I should just wait and save my mileage and gas expenses until it gets warmer.⛽ Two months from now will be early April after all. But in the mean time, the only weather is expected to moderate a bit…

In four weeks on March 5 the sun will be setting at 5:50 pm,🌄 which is 35 minutes and 39 seconds later then today. In 2018 on that day, we had cloudy, snow showers and temperatures between 38 and 31 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 40 and 22 degrees. The record high of 71 degrees was set back in 1964.

The ants seem to have disappeared from the counter. I’m glad about that. I don’t know if it took a while for the ant bait to work or just spraying the area where they were coming from was enough. It’s been over 24 hours since I saw the last ant so I’m hopeful.🐜 I have this big bottle of spray now so I may use it when and if I see them again. Much like mice and other pests,🐭 they tend to come and go in cycles – you have mice until you catch them all and then they are gone for months if not years.

Looking ahead, 5:30 PM Sunset 🌆 is in 2 weeks, Cinco de Mayo 🤠 is in 3 months, 8:30 PM Sunset ️⛱️ is in 4 months, Dog Days of Summer 🌻 is in 5 months, Last Sunset After 8:30 PM 🌆 is in 23 weeks and Election Day 2020 🗳️ is in 91 weeks.

91 weeks until presidential Election Day! Now you know. I’ll already be thinking my post election November road trip at that point. The bus is almost downtown, it’s off to work. Have a great day for sure on this Tuesday!