Good morning! Back to work on this wet January 2017 morning. We have rain to start out our Tuesday morning and mercury around 34 degrees in Town of Bethlehem. There is a east-southeast breeze at 6 mph. The skies will clear tomorrow around 5 pm. Kind of a dreary start to our new year, but at least it’s not icy and we are getting needed rain to help with the drought conditions.

Today will rain, picking up after 10am. High of 38 degrees at 2pm. Seven degrees above normal. Southeast wind around 7 mph. Chance of precipitation is 90%. New precipitation amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch possible. A year ago, we had snow and a high of 41 degrees. The record high of 61 was set in 1913. 12 inches of snow fell back in 2003.

It does feel like 2017. I don’t think I will accidentally write twenty sixteen on many sheets of paper in the office. 2016 will forever have a rather distinctive remembrance in most people’s minds, a year when liberals got cocky, exited to the far left and wondered in shock when nobody would vote for them. I guess 2016 wasn’t that bad and for me it was pretty uneventful but so be it. I think I like Lynyrd Skynyrd better then Neil Young’s Southern Man.

Gave Big Red a bath last night. He made it home reasonably clean, despite the road salt. I was more concerned about the caked on salt from the Adirondacks that I wanted cleaned off before I parked it for the week. I had to run to the store to buy some groceries and a vacuum cleaner and also stopped at Tractor Supply and bought another Carhartt hat, because I lost one of them and the other one got moldy and chucked into a fire some time ago. I like the Carhartt hats because they are unpolitical, and it’s more of a back country type brand.

The sun will set at 4:35 pm with dusk around 5:06 pm, which is 56 seconds later than yesterday. Today will have 9 hours and 10 minutes of daylight, an increase of 58 seconds over yesterday. Tomorrow we gain a full minute of daylight! 

Tonight will rain, mainly before 3am. Low of 35 degrees at 3am. Quite mild, 20 degrees above normal. East wind 5 to 7 mph becoming west after midnight. Chance of precipitation is 90%. New precipitation amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible. In 2016, it got down to 6 degrees with periods of snow. The record low of -15 occurred back in 1904.

Activated my bus pass. One month from now is the day after Ground Hog Day. Punxsutawney is a fun town and the ground hog gives them something now that the coal industry has largely faded into the background. When I was driving through Western Pennsylvania a few years I saw a ground hop sunning himself in a farm field. Even ground hogs have to take a break from making farmer’s lives miserable.

Looking ahead, there are 6 weeks until Valentines Day when the sun will be setting at 5:26 pm with dusk at 5:55 pm. On that day in 2016, we had sunny skies and temperatures between 8 and -13 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 34 degrees. We hit a record high of 63 back in 1946.

Bought a vacuum cleaner last night. I have these God awful shag carpets in my apartment, including the stairs and while for many years I’ve used an old vacuum that I inherited from my grandmother who has been dead 25 years now, it had no wand for vacuum that shag carpet on the stairs, so dirt, mud and dust have accumulated on the stairs among other places for going on ten years that I’ve rented my place. But in the mean time, I am trying to do a little bit of cleaning a few times a week. My place may not be great, but it doesn’t have to be so dirty, especially in the winter when I’m home more. Maybe this will help with the sinus infections in the winter, and it certainly makes things look less dusty.

Now, many people pretty much know me as pig pen from Snoopy. Everything I touch gets dusty and dirty. I try to go minimally as much as possible, but cleaning is not my strong suite. I tell you when I own a house on land, I think I’m going to go with concrete floors and a burn barrel out back. Scrape out the crap I don’t need, and burn it. And if I spill blood or mud on the floor, I can just hose it out. I was actually catching a later bus to work, because I was playing with the vacuum. It does a good job, but I’ve already had to empty out the dust container in the vacuum twice, because it’s sucked in so much dust in the past fifteen or so minutes I’ve used it.

I though the clear pipe on the vacuum was really cool. Of course until I used it for a few minutes. Then the pipe was just a brownish color from the dust I realized it was kind of like my childhood idea of having a clear burn barrel, cool in principal to watch the plastic melt and burn until it gets covered with black soot in like five minutes. Clear things don’t work well with soot or dirt. That said, I guess it might give some indication of where things get clogged, assume there is some transparency left in the clear pipes. Oh well.

Almost downtown. Have a great day, and get it off to a good start this first Tuesday work day of the year!