Good morning! Merry but very wet Christmas 🎅! It could have been a blizzard like a few years back, but instead too warm. Actually it looks like Next Friday, New Years Day 2021 🎉, will be far more wintery. Heavy rain and 62 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☔ There is a south breeze at 15 mph. 🍃 with gusts up to 31 mph 💨💨💨. The dew point is 57 degrees. With temperatures in the 60s, there is abut 5 inches of snow on the ground and I just saw a jogger in shorts and spandex run down Elm Avenue. ☃ It’s Delmar, yuppies like their physical fitness. ️But it will get colder as the day progresses, although not until late. Temperatures will drop below freezing at around 10 pm. ☃️

Yesterday had a nice Christmas dinner with the folks. 🦃 Turkey and all the fixings. We decided on Christmas Eve this year, as I wasn’t sure if I was going to be out of town this year for Christmas Day for camping. Today I’ll probably stay home, work on some projects I have around, do some writing and reading, 📖 and maybe watch some of the videos I downloaded yesterday and the day before. 🎅🎄I don’t have any big Christmas plans, as I think it will be much to wet to head up north today.

A White Christmas? ❄ That point is debatable. We have snow but it’s disappearing fast. It actually looks kind of muddy and mucky, and I’m sure it’s even worse in farm country with the dirt roads. Christmas Day will rain before noon, then showers likely, mainly between noon and 2pm. The rain could be heavy at times. Areas of fog before noon. Temperature falling to around 47 by 5pm. Breezy, with a south wind 20 to 25 mph becoming light in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 41 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New precipitation amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 39 degrees. The record high of 66 was set in 1889. 19.2 inches of snow fell back in 2002.❄

Solar noon 🌞 is at 11:56 am with sun having an altitude of 24° from the due south horizon (-46.8° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 13.5 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 3:42 pm with the sun in the southwest (230°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-southwest (238°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 4:28 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 25 seconds with dusk around 4:59 pm, which is 38 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see the Waxing Gibbous 🌔 Moon in the east-southeast (105°) at an altitude of 36° from the horizon, 252,054 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 5:36 pm. At sunset, look for rain 🌧 and temperatures around 50 degrees. There will be a calm wind. Today will have 9 hours and 3 minutes of daytime, an increase of 16 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be scattered rain and snow showers before 9pm, then scattered snow showers between 9pm and 2am. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a low of 24 degrees at 6am. Six degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around December 9th. Northwest wind 5 to 10 mph becoming south in the evening. Chance of precipitation is 40%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. In 2019, we had mostly clear skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 27 degrees. The record low of -17 occurred back in 1914.

Tomorrow will be partly sunny 🌞, with a high of 31 degrees at 1pm. Two degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical Southwest wind 8 to 11 mph. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 41 degrees. The record high of 59 was set in 1895. 13.9 inches of snow fell back in 1969.❄

Originally my plan was to head up to the Adirondacks this weekend, 🏕 and do some winter camping but now it looks like today will be very wet, and then tomorrow will be cloudy up north and pretty cold.☁ Honestly, I find a cloudy day to be more depressing and cold then a cold but clear day. I have the propane and fuel in my truck and enough supplies, 🏔 and it looks like it will be snow-free but the weather down here looks much nicer then up north. I guess Brookfield is another alternative but there is probably still snow and ice on Cherry Ridge and even the lower Assembly area is still probably muddy and smelly after all the rain, even if the sites are hardened for horses and trailers in the summer. I do like Madison County and agricultural landscape, but also the Adirondack wilderness is nice too. Now the next weekend forecast looks nicer, but I’m sure that certainly subject to change too.

Looking ahead to Sunday, mostly sunny, 🌞 with a high near 34. West wind around 6 mph becoming light and variable in the afternoon. Typical average high for the weekend is 33 degrees. Not a half bad day, but I expect in the

So maybe I need to figure out alternative plans for the weekend. 🚶It seems like things will be quite snow free in most locations, and it will be cold enough that the ground is relatively frozen for walking on, although I certainly wouldn’t want to drive anywhere the ground is not well hardened by asphalt or gravel. But it could be good for hiking. That said, I think there may still be snow in some higher elevation locations.

I have the hotspot service hooked up to my laptop and it working fine, 📲 although I will have to keep an eye on the bandwidth it will use and avoid streaming on my laptop, as I have a 20 GB monthly cap but it should get me through the winter okay for basic work tasks without having to go down to the library parking lot in frigid weather to do work. I have data use monitoring tools on my computer, and I might use wondershaper to limit bandwidth further. It certainly is a lot cheaper then getting Verizon or Spectrum cable service and a lot more flexible as I can travel. It’s pretty fast, and it’s month to month, so come the summer months and the end of the pandemic, I can drop the service and go back to my normal level of cell service, saving like $17 or so bucks a month. Truth be told, I use my phone for most work things these days, so the laptop really is just going to be for things that I can’t do from my phone — a handful of websites or some research may be easier on the laptop.

And while I get that Americans love an all you can eat buffet, 😋 truth be told I like having to conserve and working in a somewhat constrained environment. It makes you think about what your using, and not be so wasteful. I like paying for things in advance, and watching as they get used up and things creep down towards an empty tank. It just is a much more thoughtful of a form of consumption, then the standard of consume now without worries, pay later. 🤑  That honestly may be the reason I am most interested in owning an off-grid property when I own my own land — it’s much more fun to watch the battery bank drain down or propane tanks get used or wood pile to get burnt up, then just use whatever this month and then have to end up mailing a check to the utility company.

As previously noted, next Friday is New Years Day 2021 🎉 when the sun will be setting at 4:32 pm with dusk at 5:04 pm. On that day in 2020, we had cloudy, mild, snow showers and temperatures between 40 and 34 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 31 degrees. We hit a record high of 57 back in 1966.