Good morning! Happy Last Sunset After 6:30 PM 🌆 !

On a rainy morning it’s particularly dark but then again the evenings are also pretty dark. Winter is coming. But first a Monday. My goal is to make it to work on time and duck everything up as I stumble around.

Rain showers and 60 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☔ Calm wind. The dew point is 58 degrees. More rain later.

It looks like I might be able to walk down to the express bus without getting soaked 🌧 assuming the rain hold off until I get to the office. For a while during the overnight hours it was absolutely pouring. But it at least wasn’t cold with the windows open. I refuse to close my windows at night, as I like the fresh air ⬜ although some mornings lately have been rather cold as the mercury has fallen into the upper 30s by morning a few days last week. But I sleep so much better with the windows open.

This was kind of a stay at home weekend, the highlight of the weekend was going to the grocery store 🍊 so that I had food in my pantry. Spent a lot of the weekend reading and learning, studying up on using Python for making graphs and charts, along with maps and GIS things. I did go for the evening walk on Saturday and down to the library, but Sunday rained a lot so I spent my focus on learning as much as I could. 👩‍🏫 A lot of Saturday wasn’t bad, but my gas tank is relatively empty, ⛽ and I don’t have any money, so that’s kind of a problem especially if Big Red’s suspension is getting fixed in two weeks and I’m spending $3,000 on tires and repairs for my truck this month. 💸 I don’t know what the alternative is — it’s a bad time to buy a new truck, and it’s not like my truck is that old, having less then 100,000 miles — and I’m not quite ready yet to give up motoring, although I do less and less of that lately. I just know that every time you get in your car, 🚘 it’s like smoking a cigarette 🚬, slowly killing yourself assuming you don’t crash and the environment one toke at a time, says the boy with the big jacked up truck who burns his trash rather then recycling. 🔥

After reading that book on personal finance, 📕 and crunching the numbers 📐 I think I am going to get away from saving much more in CDs and high-interest savings, and move towards bonds to balance my portfolio. Not planning any big bond purchases in the short term, until at least my CD expires and the markets go back up — better to buy bonds when the stock market is strong as it depresses bond prices — but I think I will replace a big portion of my ordinary paycheck-to-paycheck FDIC savings with bond fund purchases, as I think that’s a better idea on the long haul, and I have too much put into savings with so little interest these days. Plus, I will roll back the rate on savings, but I am lately just struggling so much to pay the bills lately. 📄 It just seems like everything is going up in price lately.

I am really trying to master the Python graphing and mapping 🗺 libraries, as I think being able to make quality graphics and maps on the fly is such an important skill to master – along with being able to process and make maps. I’m pretty good but there are still skills I could get better at. 🖥 It’s not about being a computer geek but just being able to effectively promote and manipulate data.