Good morning! Happy Saturday. It’s Presidents Day Weekend. 👴

It’s the weekend we celebrate the old foggies in the White House, and in some cases not so old people like Barack Obama. But lately we’ve been electing or maybe selecting a lot of old farts, with ideas about as dated as their advanced age. Maybe I shouldn’t engage in such ageism, but I can tell you pushing forty, and I’m in some ways less sharp then I once was when it comes to learning new stuff, and much more stubborn, although probably more learned. But I still don’t think the President should be of the retirement age. No way in hell am I working into my seventies, unless you consider work to be feeding goats, pigs or cattle or hauling feed, manure and water.

Snow flurries and 20 degrees in Delmar, NY. ❄ There is a south breeze at 15 mph. 🍃. The current wind chill is 6. Things will start to thaw out at around noontime. 🌡️

I was really hoping to get out of town this weekend 🏕 and maybe I’ll do tomorrow, but today looks bad with the snow squalls. They expect them to be particularly severe with the front coming through mid-afternoon and I don’t want anything to do about that. 🌬 Plus tonight looks to be incredibly windy and gusty, with very cold windchills. But then moderating Sunday into Monday. 🌞 Maybe 50 come Presidents Day.

I might go out to Five Rivers but I don’t want to get caught in snow squalls. 🌨 Plus I think it might be mighty cold come later in the afternoon. But we will see. I should go out for a walk 🚶‍♀️ to build on my progress of yesterday, where I got my 10,000 steps in for the first time in a week. I think it might be very cold later on, so I probably should either stay home or maybe walk down to the library. 📙 Truth is I haven’t been down the library since November, mainly because I don’t like wearing the muzzle and with my cellphone I can pretty much do whatever I need to do from home.

I was happy to see my credit card bill for all of January was only $352. 💳 Not traveling much, not putting much gas in my truck and only shopping once a week really is helping make the money go farther. It’s not like I haven’t wanted to get out of town, but January was exceptionally cold, I’ve been busy work 👨‍💻 and I’ve had little incentive to venture far from home. Come April I plan to do a lot more traveling though.

Today instead I want to learn more about mapping 🗺, specifically how to make better, nicer looking maps that are eye pleasing. I tend to lard up my maps with way too many layers and details, and don’t always use the best label positioning or coloring. R is showing me how to make simpler, easier to read maps but there is a lot I don’t know, having learned a lot of this by doing rather then formal education. Picking up somethings from the free PACE GIS class I’m taking but I could learn some more. There is some good lectures on making quality cartography from a professor I’m finding on Youtube, giving me some good ideas.