Good evening! All I can say is brrr….  Cloudy and 34 degrees in Delmar. Breezy, 24 mph breeze from the west-northwest with gusts up to 44 mph. The current wind chill is 22. The skies will clear tomorrow around 8 am.

All I can say is I’m glad that the 719 bus is running on time. It’s cold enough tonight with the wind that had the bus been more than a few minutes late, I would have returned to the lobby of the building and just caught the local home. 

Tonight will be mostly cloudy, with a low of 30 degrees at 4am. One degree below normal. West wind 13 to 17 mph. One year ago, mostly cloudy with a low around 34. The record low of 9 occurred back in 1969. 

In four weeks on December 19 the sun will be setting at 4:24 pm, which is 2 minutes earlier then tonight. The average high is 35 degrees, and the record for that date is 54 degrees was set back in 1895.

It certainly is dark taking the bus home from work. The sunsets a lot earlier in Albany then in Western NY. I really don’t like it especially on the Delmar bypass, when it’s so dark and you can not see out the windows from the lit inside bus. That said, my phone is keeping me busy and city lights are somewhat pretty for the evening commute.

Continuing to research laptops. I am having second thoughts the Lenovo Flexpad aka Yoga 710 that caught my eye at the store about a month ago. It apparently has various issues with Linux out of the box that can be mitigated but it requires a lot of work arounds including patching the BIOS and tweaking the kernel. Some of the Linux drivers are also buggy on the machine because it’s relatively new and different. I don’t mind doing that stuff long as it works. A bigger issue for me personally is the screen is difficult to replace compared to conventional laptops. And knowing how good that I am at breaking screens and shit more generally, makes it a bit of a non starter for me. I may research other more conventional laptops that can easily swap hard drives and buy a 512 GB SSD hard drive and install it. 

It’s going to start snowing again shortly, so I really don’t want to go out especially with the cold. It would be a bad night to slide off the road or breakdown. Granted it’s not as harsh as mid January but it sure ain’t nice with the wind. I hope I didn’t turn the heat down too much before leaving home this morning. 

I finally took action last night to clear out the drain in the bath tub. It had been getting slower over time, so I bought some drain cleaner and with the plunger, and now it’s mostly restored to full flow at draining. It’s not perfect, but it’s better. I might get more drain cleaner and try cleaning it again in another week in an attempt to make it drain as fast as the shower water comes down, but I don’t expect it work perfectly with the marginal plumbing in my shitty little apartment in the suburbs. 

Also been doing some general cleaning and sprucing up around. Maybe will do more tonight.  Still have some camping gear left to unpack. The cooler still needs to be cleaned, but most of the gear is done. Hit a few mildew spots in the kitchen with some bleach and try to get things cleaned up because things are a bit musty from the time I spent gone, and because my apartment is cheap and awful. But it sure is nice being able to walk around town and catch the bus to work. 

I don’t expect to be driving Big Red that much now that winter is upon us, except to go out to my parents house for Sunday dinner and occasional camping, hiking, and hunting trips in the wilderness. Big Red does need a bath some point from the mud of the previous trip and now the road salt from driving home last night.