Good morning! Back in the crawl gear of the week. But before you know it, we will be shifting it down into overdrive and it will be the long weekend. Three day weekend next week with Martin Luther King Day. Maybe  some snow for next weekend? Not a lot but maybe four inches on Saturday at least in the city that could certainly impact plans that at least for me don’t exist yet.

Five degrees in the city. Overcast with the sun peaking out in all points south and east with some blue to the north. Heading up 24 later but expect the wind to drop the wind chill to the single digits or maybe even slightly negative.

The sun continues to set later every night. We’ve gained nearly twenty minutes of daylight since early December. The sun will set at 4:41 pm with dusk around 5:12 pm, which is 1 minutes and 5 seconds later than yesterday. Today will have 9 hours and 17 minutes of daylight, an increase of 1 minute and 21 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy, with a low of 11 degrees at 12am. Three degrees below normal. Wind chill values as low as zero. South wind around 7 mph. In 2016, it got down to 37 degrees with periods of fog and rain and thunderstorm. The record low of -13 occurred back in 1968.

As previously noted, next Monday is Martin Luther King Day when the sun will be setting at 4:49 pm with dusk at 5:20 pm. On that day in 2016, we had rain, snow and temperatures between 40 and 29 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 30 degrees. We hit a record high of 62 back in 1995.

Yesterday afternoon out sorting the trash and recycling I found my headphones. I must have dropped them in the snow. They seem to be working fine although I did wash them off well.  They aren’t real expensive headphones at $7, but I’m happy that I don’t have to buy another set. Not sure how they ended up out there, as I thought I looked in that general area last week. Maybe they were in the snow that melted. Sometime later in the month I’m going to have to go to the transfer station as I’m running out of space in doors. When I’m home all the time and not camping it seems like I have a lot more trash and especially recycables. It’s a good excuse to clean out the back of my truck and put the remaining camping gear and extension cords in the attic.

Got some more expensive drain cleaner and now the bathtub drain seems to be faster. Or maybe not. I’ve been putting in drain cleaner every two weeks or to keep it moving it along, as the drain since the fall has been a bit sluggish at times with the bathtub not draining as fast as it fills with the shower. Now it seems better, but maybe it’s the cold weather that is causing problems. I guess I could call the landlord, but the slow draining is more of an annoyance then a problem — and it seems to speed up every time I use cleaner. The less I complain, the more I figure my rent will remain affordable.

Working on pushing forward some new code that will improve social media sharing on the blog. Hopefully it will go live after work this evening. It will improve the appearance of shared posts, and speed and simplify the code enormously. I am getting rid of scheduled twitter and facebook posts, as I don’t usually share things that aren’t also on the blog for people to read. Lots of other clean ups are happening on the back end.