Good evening! Partly cloudy and 35 degrees in Albany. Breezy, 16 mph breeze from the west-northwest. The skies will clear around 4 pm. Definitely another dark evening for the commute, and a cold one to boot with the chilly breeze. Grabbed the hot seat on the bus next to the engine. 

Once I get home, I will make dinner and I might walk down to the library. I don’t really have a laptop I can bring down there to use, but I like to go for a walk after work and I think it’s a bit too chilly to do the loop around the high school.  

Tonight will be partly cloudy, with a low of 27 degrees at 5am. Three degrees below normal. Northwest wind 10 to 14 mph. One year ago, mostly clear with a low around 22. The record low of 5 occurred back in 1972.

Waning Crescent Moon tonight with 38% illuminated. The moon will rise around 12:13 am. The New Moon is next Tuesday. The Full “Cold” Moon is on Wednesday, December 14th.

Traffic is quite backed up heading north out of the city. Heading south bound, traffic is backed up both getting onto the Thruway and Southern Boulevard. In contrast, I thought traffic yesterday southbound was very light probably due to state workers taking off the full holiday week. Maybe there is a breakdown or crash slowing up things. I’m sure I’ll still be home before 6 pm as things are starting to free up a bit. 

Continued cold with the breeze but much sunnier. Ir will be mostly sunny, with a high of 39 degrees at 1pm. Six degrees below normal. Northwest wind 7 to 10 mph. Last year, mostly sunny with a high around 40. The record high of 72 was set in 1931. There was 5 inches of snow back in 1943.

Tomorrow’s weather is expected to be quite nice. However we need to watch the forecast for Wednesday night going into Thanksgiving, especially if you plan to be commuting. Sleet, snow, and rain are expected for the morning of Thanksgiving but it will all turn over to rain later on in the afternoon.

In four weeks on December 20 the sun will be setting at 4:24 pm, which is 1 minute earlier then tonight. The average high is 34 degrees, and the record for that date is 61 degrees was set back in 1957. We are ten days out from the earliest sunset of year in Albany which occurs at 4:23 pm. 

Still looking at laptops. I am thinking about the HP Pavilion 15 which seems to check all the boxes for me, including being on sale for $500 come Thanksgiving through the Saturday after Black Friday. It’s a conventional full size laptop, doesn’t have a fancy touch screen or tablet mode that I would never use.  The one thing it lacks is a SSD and installing one seems like it would be a pain but I guess can be done eventually if needed. The factory conventional hard drive is 1, 000 GB. It has a fast i7 processor and 12 GB of RAM. My general impression is that HP computers aren’t that reliable or durable but they seem to get decent reviews nowadays and their parts are cheap, generic and well supported by Linux. Screen replacement is something I can do with ease. They seem fairly serviceable although not quite as simple for the hard drive as the Samsung or ThinkPad I had before it.. 

 Other than that, it was a fairly quiet Tuesday before Thanksgiving at work. I walked three laps and around the museum today during my lunch break, which added about 5 miles of walking to my day. I’m trying to walk more each day to shave off a few pounds and build up my ankle, which hasn’t hurt since the beginning of vacation but I don’t want to risk further injury. I’m a big boy, and I could use to do more walking while things are relatively nice and quiet at work during lunch. 

I’m glad that we haven’t gotten the snow they’ve gotten in North Syracuse, but almost everywhere I normally camp has a significant amount of snow. It looks like the snow will last for a while. With my heated tent, camping in the snow really isn’t that bad but I think I’ll wait for nicer weather before I head out for another night in the wilderness.