May 20, 2020 Night

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Good evening! Clear and 60 degrees in Delmar, NY. Calm wind. 🌃 Beautiful evening for sure but it’s time for me to head in and retire to bed. I’m sleepy 😴 as I took a sleeping pill 💊 and the last of the doxycycline.

Nice evening after a beautiful day, ☀ got a little sunburnt on my left arm 🙋 working out of my truck most of the day. I did both a morning and evening walk for a total of 5 plus miles today. I participated in the virtual Save the Pine Bush Dinner which lacked lasagna but had a good dinner speaker 🍲 over the Zoom and the phone 📱 in my case. Worked on some stuff for Save the Pine Bush.

Didn’t get out to Five Rivers Environmental Education Center today but I did some backyard bird watching 🐦 along with spotting some deer, rabbit 🐰 and squirrel. A great beautiful male cardinal too. So much nature right in the backyard.

The day was kind of messed up in my head for work 💼 as they changed the times for meetings and I was groggy from the sleeping pill 💊 I took the previous night 🌃. I drove down to the library with my tailgate down but fortunately nothing fell out despite having the camping gear loaded in back. Fuse box and bus bar are working good as is the solar in my truck.

Tonight will be clear 🌃, with a low of 41 degrees at 4am. Eight degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around April 27th. South wind around 5 mph becoming calm after midnight. In 2019, we had partly cloudy skies in the evening, which became cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 50 degrees. The record low of 32 occurred back in 1949.

Tonight will have a Waining Crescent 🌘 Moon with 2% illuminated. Going to be a very starry weekend. 🌟 Bugs might be bad though and I’ll be hiding out under the screen tent 🎪. Coming tomorrow! The darkest hour is at 12:53 am, followed by dawn at 4:56 am, and sun starting to rise at 5:29 am in the east-northeast (61°) and last for 3 minutes and 17 seconds. Sunrise is 52 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌄 The golden hour ends at 6:10 am with sun in the east-northeast (68°). Tonight will have 9 hours and 10 minutes of darkness, a decrease of one minute and 49 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 74 degrees at 3pm. Three degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around May 31st. Calm wind becoming south 5 to 7 mph in the afternoon. A year ago, we had partly cloudy skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. It was somewhat humid. The high last year was 67 degrees. The record high of 92 was set in 1941. There was a dusting of snow in 1895.❄

I’m getting ready for bed as I’m tired 😴 and have stayed up too late lately and need to get up by five o’clock in the morning on Friday to get up to camp, get set up and start work at nine. Friday and Monday will be working vacation days. Plus if I don’t get there early enough there is no way I’m going to get the campsite I want. ⛺

I’ve already gotten the stuff I need out of the attic and the started packing the truck. Water jugs have been filled. Coolers prepped and started packing clothes. Tomorrow I’ll go to the laundromat and work from there 👚 while I clean my clothes then after work get beer 🍻 and food for the weekend. Load the kayak up and pack everything but the coolers so I can hit the road no later than 6:20 Friday morning to leave plenty of time before I need to clock in 🕒 and work using my phone and work laptop.

I am going to bring the kayak 🚣 and do some paddling and fishing 🎣 over the weekend but because I’m working on both Friday and Monday – and fielding inevitable client calls 📞 over the weekend this will be a somewhat downscaled trip. But still relaxing and it will beat being home. 🏡

In four weeks on June 17 the sun will be setting in the west-northwest (304°) at 8:35 pm,🌄 which is 19 minutes and 35 seconds later then tonight. In 2019 on that day, we had partly sunny and temperatures between 80 and 61 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 79 and 57 degrees. The record high of 94 degrees was set back in 1994.

I am hopeful in the coming weeks that Piseco Road ⛺ will get finished rebuilding and reopened for access to the potholers and Powley Place. 🏊 Last autumn that got it partially repaired for the snow machines but apparently not fully rebuilt for car traffic. 😔

I am thinking Moose River Plains for the fourth of July again this year ⛺ but I’ll take a wait and see approach. Things should hopefully quiet down a bit by then at work. That said I might want to camp in a more remote part of the plains if it looks like the pandemic is still raging come July but I doubt with the heat and sun, it will be in a slumber until autumn.

Looking ahead, Summer ️⛱️ is a month away, Latest Sunset 🌆 is in 5 weeks and Inauguration Day 2021 👴🏻 is in 8 months.

🇺🇸🦅Only 2 days remain until the start of Memorial Day Weekend!🦅🇺🇸

Springtime

The more I read about contact tracers the more I’m convinced it’s important to protect myself from them. 🔎

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The more I read about contact tracers the more I’m convinced it’s important to protect yourself from them. 🔎

  • Always wear a hat and banada over your face before going to the store to ensure facial recognition software can not recognize your face 😷
  • Always remove the battery from your phone or leave it home when going shopping📱
  • Pay with cash so your credit card information is not on file with the store 💳number
  • Don’t take calls from unknown telephone numbers 📞
  • Don’t answer your door or appear to be home when unexpected knocks occur 🚪
  • Never answer any questions by government agents, take the fifth amendment and ask for a lawyer to be present 🙇

I Enrolled in a Coronavirus Contact Tracing Academy | WIRED

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I Enrolled in a Coronavirus Contact Tracing Academy | WIRED

Every agency has its own protocols, but here are the basics: Every day, hospitals and clinics report any new positive tests to their local public health department. Teams of tracers work their way through these lists in shifts. They’ll try the phone number listed on that person’s health records first. If that doesn’t work, they can get more creative—looking at lab reports or in other databases available to the health department. Sometimes, the tracers are the first ones to let people know they’ve tested positive, so they usually spend some time answering questions and checking in on their symptoms. The first thing tracers do is try to determine when those symptoms started. That allows them to calculate the number of days each sick person needs to isolate at home. The general rule is to stay home for 10 days after symptoms begin, provided the person has been fever-free (without medications) for at least three days. Tracers will then try to help each person remember a list of names and places they were in contact with during the days they were infectious. That will serve as a roadmap for the next phase.

I am very interested in learning more about contact tracers. I do worry a lot about the civil liberties implications of contact training, and how such services could be abused by law enforcement and politicians. But it sounds like most of the stuff they are doing is pretty basic, it's not a lot of combing through credit card databases or cellphone pings or even private social media posts, to figure out where people have been.