Good morning! Happy Thursday. Next Thursday is Independence Day 🇺🇸. Mostly sunny and 69 degrees at the Elm Ave Park & Ride – CDTA. Calm wind. The dew point is 63 degrees.

Finally got a chance to walk down to the Park and Ride. 🚍 Been a long time since I’ve taken the express to work. It’s a nicer commute, certainly more scenic and the walk down there is healthy. Air conditioning is nice on the bus as it’s already getting humid.

Today will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 85 degrees at 4pm. Four degrees above normal. Maximum dew point of 64 at 9am. Calm wind becoming northwest 5 to 8 mph in the afternoon. Nice beach weather. Too bad I have to work. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning, with light rain by afternoon. It became somewhat humid as the day progressed. The high last year was 73 degrees. The record high of 97 was set in 1941.

Tonight is the Save the Pine Bush Evening Hike 🦋 that I’ll be leading, tonight at 7 PM at the Albany Pine Bush Discovery Center. Wear long pants, despite the heat, due to the ticks but also bring water, as it might be warm, but hopefully it will cool off by the start of the hike — and the dew point should be dropping by then.

The sun will set at 8:37 pm with dusk around 9:12 pm, which is the same as yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for clear skies 🌄 and temperatures around 78 degrees. The dew point will be 58 degrees. There will be a west-northwest breeze at 5 mph. Today will have 15 hours and 17 minutes of daytime, an increase of 24 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be mostly clear 🌃, with a low of 61 degrees at 5am. One degree above normal, which is similar to a typical night around July 3rd. Maximum dew point of 59 at 9pm. West wind around 5 mph becoming calm in the evening. In 2018, we had light rain. It became sticky as the night progressed. It got down to 65 degrees. The record low of 43 occurred back in 1970.

On this day in 1985, U.S. Route 66 is officially removed from the United States Highway System. You could no longer get you’re kicks on Route 66 because everybody was taking I-40 and I-44 through the heartland of America. 🚙 The truth is shortly thereafter a lot of hick towns along the way discovered that was a mistake with the tourist wanting to travel along the back road, buying up the junk that was found in old barns mainly because the owners 🍸 couldn’t toss it in the burn pile because it was metal or glass or they had some kind of sentimal view of it. 🔥

As previously noted, next Thursday is Independence Day 🇺🇸 when the sun will be setting at 8:36 pm with dusk at 9:10 pm. On that day in 2018, we had hot, humid, mostly sunny and temperatures between 96 and 71 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 82 degrees. We hit a record high of 104 back in 1911.

I am going to take off the forth week of July today 🏖 for summer vacation. I am probably going to do the Finger Lakes again and spend my days at pool and the gorge swimming areas. I could change my mind, and do the Adirondacks but that’s what I’m leaning towards. The second half of the week I am thinking about a trip across the Southern Tier, possibly visiting Letchworth State Park 🏞 and Allegany State Park (Quaker Lake) before heading down to the Allegheny National Forest and maybe visiting Nebraska Bridge, especially if this time it’s not under water.

This morning I was reviewing my pension statement 📄 and I have 11.25 years of credits in as of March 31st. I should have enough hours to be up to 12 years by the end of the year as I expect to be doing state work for the rest of the year. So by 2030 I’ll have 20 years in. That’s only a decade away, which when you think about it isn’t that long away. I’ll probably still have family 👪 locally for that time, so I’ll doubt I’ll move away before then. But after that, who knows, I still want to chase my dream of having an off-grid home out in the wilderness in a freerer state then New York.