Today is a nice morning with the clouds breaking up to the south and temperatures around 63. We will reach a high of 66 by mid day the drop back about ten degrees as the sky clear this afternoon. All and all not a bad day for November.

The sun will set at 5:44 pm with dusk around 6:14 pm, which is one minute and 14 seconds earlier than yesterday. At sunset, look for partly cloudy conditions and 56 degrees. The dew point will be 46 degrees. Breezy, 16 mph breeze from the west-northwest. Today will have 10 hours and 11 minutes of daytime, a decrease of 2 minutes and 29 seconds over yesterday.
Tonight will be partly cloudy, with a low of 35 degrees at 6am. Two degrees below normal. Northwest wind 5 to 14 mph. In 2016, we had mostly cloudy skies. It got down to 31 degrees. The record low of 17 occurred back in 1951.

I am struggling to accept that it’s already November. October was such a warm and quiet month and pushing back my road trip by a month it made things go by quicker than expected. Then dealing with getting my truck inspected, tires rotated and oil changed was just another time stab, along with all the things going on in my family.

The bus downtown was running late, because the driver missed the exit on Interstate 90 to Slingerlands. I don’t know how you can miss that one exit but I guess she only runs the express bus a few times a week. It wasn’t a big deal, I was to work plenty early because the express bus normally gets me to work much earlier then necessary. A little traffic on 787, but not that much.

I am very excited about getting my Arduino starter kit, and building my own electronics. Sure you can build things without an Arduino, but the programmable chip makes it easy to fire off sequenced events, and preform a lot of electronic functions with much fewer parts then you would have if you built everything with individual electronic components. I know I will need more components but this will allow me to get started. It will allow me to prototype out designs on a breadboard before building permanent designs with a soldered circuit board. My first big permanent project will be the bedroom lighting project that will give me orange and reds fading to dark at bedtime, then orange-yellow-white-blue fading in at alarm clock. Once that’s built, it will make mornings a lot easier for me.

This weekend I plan to stick in town, and decide what I’m going to do with that rattling shock absorber. It can’t be that bad if it passed state inspection and the shop didn’t even mention it to me. I should either get a torque wrench (probably a good tool to have) or take it to the off-road shop next week. I was hoping that maybe rotating the tires would help in case something there was out of balance, but I’m pretty sure it’s just the shock absorber that is rattling — and only really on the rough roads. Maybe it’s only annoyance, but I don’t want to bolt to get too loose and fall off or even the bushing in the shock aborber wear out because of the vibration. I probably should have just had it tightened when they did the inspection, but I didn’t want that to raise red flags about other things that might be broken from the rough roads. I guess I could tighten it up without a torque wrench but I don’t want to over-do it.

I’ve made no decisions about Veterans Day Weekend. I might head out of town or I might not. Depends on the weather. The nights certainly will be coming earlier with the time change. I have no idea where I would go for the long weekend or what I would do. Maybe the North Country or the Western Catskills. Or the Green Mountains or eastern Pennsylvania. Certainly though not Western NY or Finger Lakes — too far for a three or maybe four day weekend if I chose to do that.

The other  thing I’m looking at doing this month is getting hardware to mount the solar panel on the roof of my truck cap. I have figured out I should be able to use regular washers and bolts to connect two steel bars like they use for DOT signs (but maybe thinner) across the Yakima tracks, then bolt the solar panel on to that. I have seen bars like that at Lowes. Then I have mounting brackets to mount the panel to that. It will be set back far enough on the truck cap that I don’t expect significant wind resistance.

There is one month until the Cold Moon in December when the sun will be setting at 4:22 pm with dusk at 4:53 pm (Standard Time).