The corrosive weather of the rust belt continues today with cloudy skies and salt encrusted everything with temperatures around 36 degrees on our way towards forty six. Galvanized steel and billions in largess from the New York City somewhat covers up the rust but that road salt ultimately does its damage. On mornings like this you have to wonder why anybody in their right mind would stay in the rust belt. Millions have already left. 

I did not sleep well last night. Maybe that’s why I’m cranky.  I was in bed by a little after 10 PM but I laid in bed listening to podcasts until after midnight and kept waking up. I guess I should have put the red light on earlier and had less screen time, and taken a sleeping pill. Maybe draw the curtains. I forgot to turn the heat up when I got home last night, so everything we frigid in my apartment by early morning. I hate sleeping in the winter, I find it incredibly difficult. Kept hearing about Trump wasting taxpayer dollars on the stupid wall and going after undocumented immigrants, who just came to our country to work hard scrubbing floors and milking cows, so we can have clean office buildings and delicious milk in our cereal.

Despite the clouds, days are getting noticeably longer.  The sun will set at 5:01 pm with dusk around 5:31 pm, which is 1 minutes and 17 seconds later than yesterday. Today will have 9 hours and 47 minutes of daylight, an increase of 2 minutes and 11 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a slight chance of showers before midnight. Mostly cloudy, with a low of 31 degrees at 6am. 17 degrees above normal. West wind around 14 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. In 2016, it got down to 20 degrees under partly cloudy skies. The record low of -23 occurred back in 1994.

As previously noted, next Thursday is Ground Hog Day when the sun will be setting at 5:10 pm with dusk at 5:40 pm. On that day in 2016, we had partly sunny skies and temperatures between 46 and 29 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 32 degrees. We hit a record high of 53 back in 1981.

I’m still giggling over that article that I had some country boys calling Hillary Clinton a mean old heifer. Like all stereotypes, there is a lot of truths about it, even if it’s ugly and awful. Hillary was one of the worse candidates Democrats have had in a generation. That said she was put forward in era of rising expectations by Democratic activists and forced to be a bad candidate by those who pushed her so far to the left. I told people that 2016 was going to be a lot like 1968, and so it turned out to be. Unfortunately for us all, the Republicans nominated a megalomaniac fire cracker that’s going to blow up in all our hands. So be it, we are all victims of the results of our elections. Public policy can always be reversed in future years.  So far, I’m not a fan of the new President, but that’s not to be expected as a liberal Democrat.

The first chart is up on the blog today. Didn’t work earlier in the morning, but it has been fixed. Minor typo in the code. Many others are being worked on, and as I master ChartJS, I expect the diagrams and charts only improve. I’ve been wanting to add charts for a while on the blog but I had to implement and fully test the supporting code. There is a few glitches to fix over the weekend and I hope to further automate the code to make it easier to create new graphs and charts.