Good morning! January is almost done. ⛄

But will the coldest month of the year be February? It’s been a cold January but it seems like it might get even colder in February. Although, it’s going to be difficult for it to be much colder in February, as by that month the sun angle is getting much stronger, the days longer and the average high warmer.

Mostly sunny and 1 degrees in Delmar, NY. 🌞 Calm wind. There are 3 inches of snow on the ground. ☃ ️Things will start to thaw out at tomorrow around 2 pm. 🌡️

Another fairly cold night, 🚪 I left the cabinet doors open but didn’t turn up the heat this time. I didn’t have any problems, I really don’t know if it’s absolutely necessary to turn up the heat further except in exceptionally cold nights. I really don’t have much problems with the temperature falling much below 50 degrees, and with that heated blanket, 🛌 things always are nice and warm and comfortable. I find I don’t like sleeping when it’s too warm, so I turn off the blanket before I go to sleep and then turn it back on when I wake up. Works well.

I got a text asking me to come into work early today ⏰ but truth be told that isn’t going to happen on a session day when I have to dress up with session attire and take the local bus to work. 👨‍💼 If I had more warning, I probably could have gotten up earlier and gotten dressed, and caught the earlier bus, but at 7:45 AM that’s too little warning ⚠️ to get in earlier. The local is running a bit late 🚍 but I have my phone with email 📧 and hot spot if anything needs to get done right away.

I wanted to get out hiking 🚶 at the Hannacroix Ravine outside of Clarksville up on Wolf Hill 🐺 but with being on call for work it just wasn’t going to happen. I did get out to my parents house for Sunday dinner 🍲 which they made up Stuffed Shells for my birthday 🎂. And a cake which the dog 🐶 managed to take a bit bite out it fortunately after I had my slice. 😴 I have to admit being on call for work 📞is often far more bothersome than just coming into the office 🏢. I kind of wish it could just be remote work.

I have to admit I spent a good amount of the day refreshing Twitter and the LATFOR site yesterday. 🤖 waiting to see when they would post the block list for the proposed congressional and state legislative seats. I was on call all week for work so I couldn’t get up to the woods and truth be told I’m a bit of a politics geek besides being a map geek.

I got a bit of a chuckle from the reporters struggling to make sense of the block list on Twitter. 👨‍💻 joining the block list to the Census TIGER/Line shapefile is a pretty trivial task if you have a little experience with GIS software like QGIS. Then you just have to dissolve it on the district field. 🗺 LATFOR also posted a shapefile of the congressional districts, which is even easier to load but they messed up the uploads and it was corrupted. I don’t blame them, they’ve been working long hours. It’s not like it’s difficult to do a join on the block files, and certainly having the raw data is a lot more flexible, like figuring out which EDs are in which Congressional districts.

Because my political junkie friends I’m sure were waiting with baited breath, 😋 I posted an interactive map on my blog and an image atlas on Facebook of the new Congressional Districts. I had them up within 20 minutes of reporters talking about them on Twitter. Not because I had special access, but because the GIS task of making them was pretty trivial, especially with me making maps daily of various things, and having a lot of templates ready to go, and load up in the QGIS Atlas Generator. Some of the maps I posted though have issues –namely, they are overplotted with labels and lines in the bigger upstate districts. There are ways to automatically scale labels in QGIS when working with atlases but I need to learn them. I’ve been using QGIS for so long now and have to learn the newer techniques.