Good morning! Happy Saturday. Still only 38 years old. Not 40 yet. No need to rush that, as there is so much more to do. It’s a cold one. ❄ And not the kind you crack open unless your ice fishing on plywood today, because the ice is still pretty shallow on most lakes. Four weeks to Snow Moon 🌕 . Last night’s Wolf Moon was pretty nice, at least looking out my window at the cold landscape outside. Mostly sunny and 7 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a northwest breeze at 7 mph. 🍃. The current wind chill is -14. There are 3 inches of snow on the ground. ☃ ️Things will start to thaw out at Thursday around 1 pm. 🌡️

Yeah, it’s a cold morning. I guess that’s to be predicted this time of year. 🏔 We really haven’t had much cold this winter, so I guess it’s a good change. We got to have some cold to remember what the cold feels like. My apartment is nice and warm, well relatively speaking, as I turned up the thermostat a few degrees before the big chill, and honestly 7 degrees is nothing like the negative 15 we have some years. I think it got down to around 0 last night. We are though past the coldest time of year at least on average, although in recent years it seems like the cold comes later in the season. I will be very interested in seeing the updated 30-year climate normal come July 1st.

Decided to make to make a nice big pan of eggs up. 🍳 With ham, broccoli and Swiss cheese. I bought $76 worth of groceries, an unusually high amount for my weekly shop, so I should be set for all week. I do like those big 2-lb blocks of Swiss cheese I get at Wally World. 🧀 I was thinking about going to Aldi’s this weekend but I needed to go out yesterday, and I wasn’t going to make a trip across the river just for groceries, even if Aldi’s is a good savings. Walmart is better for bulk purchases though with more food and less plastic packaging.

Today will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 19 degrees at 3pm. 12 degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -14 at 7am; Northwest wind 7 to 11 mph. A year ago, we had partly cloudy skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 32 degrees. The record high of 56 was set in 2013. 11 inches of snow fell back in 1966.❄

I am thinking about hiking out to Five Rivers, as this morning is quite still but every once and a while a big gust of wind pops up and makes me think twice about my plans. I think I will make a decision by 9 AM. I took a shower yesterday, so with some clean underwear and socks I should be ready to go. Just need to get the binoculars out of the truck and maybe pack a day sack with some water. Will definitely want gloves and a hat today though. I could drive out there, but I think I’d rather walk. I’ll probably talk about it and decide to stay home as it’s cold.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 12:09 pm with sun having an altitude of 29.8° from the due south horizon (-41° vs. 6/21). Getting close to dirty thirty, and you can actually feel the stronger sunshine this time of year as you walk outside. A six foot person will cast a 10.5 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 4:25 pm with the sun in the west-southwest (240°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-southwest (247°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 5:07 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 10 seconds with dusk around 5:36 pm, which is one minute and 19 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 The best time to look at the stars is after 6:11 pm. At sunset, look for mostly clear skies 🌄 and temperatures around 17 degrees. The wind chill around sunset will be 5. ☃️ There will be a northwest breeze at 10 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 55 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 18 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be mostly clear 🌃, with a low of 1 degree at 6am. Got to make sure to take the “S” off degrees. 14 degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -6 at 5am; Northwest wind 5 to 9 mph becoming light north after midnight. In 2020, we had cloudy skies. It got down to 15 degrees. The record low of -26 occurred back in 1948.

Yesterday, despite getting off to a rough start, including loosing my balance and falling flat on my face and feeling super itchy and congested, was great after I took a shower, got cleaned up and the antihistamines got up to speed. I think that bright sunny morning and the cold got my mood up a lot and made me feel a lot better. Got a bunch of groceries, got to the library and synced the blog, and ran updates on the laptop and then I’ve been working on finally porting the various parts of blog over to Gutenberg.

Yeah, I do use WordPress Internally on the Blog, a piece of mass-produced widely used software. While I don’t like to drink out of the trough that everybody else has been defecating in, WordPress has been a pretty stable piece of software with a large API that makes it’s easy to develop a custom front-end for. It’s also OpenSource, which is the only kind of software use. Years ago I wrote my entire blog in PHP, then Perl then back to PHP, but it got to the point I didn’t like having to update and administer everything myself, and having access to the big API is nice. And it’s probably faster, more secure and better code base then anything I could write without a formal education in programming. Kind a big switch to move all the shortcodes over to blocks, but it’s good to learn the current API.

🌹🌻🌼Only 7 weeks remain until the first day of calendar spring!🌹🌻🌼 It might be cold out there this morning but there really is reason for hope with February just around the corner. Monday is the first, Tuesday is Ground Hog Day. Will he see his shadow? Gawd only knows, sing the Beach Boys. Goat farmers everywhere love the cover of Pet Sounds. A very experimental time in music.

As previously noted, next Saturday Save the Pine Bush Turns 43 🦋 when the sun will be setting at 5:15 pm with dusk at 5:45 pm. On that day in 2020, we had freezing rain and temperatures between 33 and 27 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 33 degrees. We hit a record high of 55 back in 1991.