Good morning! With all that bright sunshine it doesn’t seem like the time change impacted much but it sure is cold this morning with mercury only around 16 degrees.  There is a northwest breeze at 6 mph. Later it only get up to 29 degrees, which is pretty darn cold when the typical high temperature for today is 45 degrees.

The sun will set at 7:00 pm with dusk around 7:28 pm, which is one minute and 10 seconds later than yesterday. Today will have 11 hours and 51 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 53 seconds over yesterday. Daylight Savings Time is nice.

That said for some reason, I woke up at 2 AM and struggled to get back to sleep until around 5 AM. I ended up sitting in bed, listening to podcasts. I can say now I am an authoritative expert on the economics of violence at Chuck E. Cheese from the Freaknomics Podcast, and the hour of Cam Edwards program got me learning what conservatives are thinking – at least pig farming, bacon and gun loving conservatives. (If you raise hogs, you have to own guns to shoot them and butcher them into bacon, after all.) Cam Edwards is the kind of gun-toating, freedom-loving conservative I like, not the racist, unthinking conservative like Donald John Trump. I also like it when he has Charles Cook of the National Review on his show — he always is very interesting perspectives on the issues of the day. I guess I’m no more drowsy then the typical person on the first day of Daylight Savings Time, and I didn’t drive to work, so no risk of falling asleep behind the wheel and getting into a wreck. If I’m real tired this afternoon, I’ll set my phone alarm to wake me up before my bus stop.

My new waffle maker seemed to work fine, but I need to develop a better system at heating the frozen fruit, making lunch and keeping dishes cleaned as things go along.  I also think I need to get some better waffle mix, and get the proportions right in the mix. I only want to make to make like 2-3 waffles a day, at absolute most, but the directions often call for 8-10. You would think it would be as simple as halving the ingredients but I found that didn’t work right. I’m sure I will get the routine down in the coming days — it’s different then the frozen waffles.

Tonight will have a chance of snow, mainly after 1am. Mostly cloudy, with a low of 21 degrees at 4am. Five degrees below normal. East wind 3 to 5 mph. Chance of precipitation is 40%. New snow accumulation of less than one inch possible. In 2016, it got down to 40 degrees with periods of rain. The record low of -6 occurred back in 1948.

Today in 1991, the Justice Department announces that Exxon has agreed to pay $1 billion for the clean-up of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Petroleum spills are quite a mess, especially when you spill millions of gallons of heavy crude oil into the Alaskan ocean. Two years later was the blizzard of 1993, when 22 inches of snow fell. I remember digging snow tunnels at my parents house. I think they had nearly three feet of snow there. This time of the year for the big snow storm, and indeed tomorrow’s storm keeps growing into more of a monster. Possibly 18 inches? I’m sure the buses will be running and I’ll make it to work but I’ll want my big boots. That said, I hope to get out before 6 PM tomorrow, so I have the best chance possible of catching one of the buses that are supposedly running every 15 minutes, but probably will be either running late or be all bunched up due to winter delays.

Let us not forget that next Monday is the first day of calendar spring. I’m the words of Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth.” I always thought Buffalo Springfield had a nice cowboy hat. Possibly 18 inches of snow in the meantime, tomorrow. But if “God Puts It Here, He’ll Take It Away”. Eventually things will warm up and snow will melt away.

Looking ahead, there are 5 weeks until Patriots Day when the sun will be setting at 7:40 pm with dusk at 8:10 pm. On that day in 2016, we had mostly sunny skies and temperatures between 76 and 36 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 59 degrees. We hit a record high of 91 back in 2002. Patriots Day is never the same in Boston since the Boston bombing.