Riding in this morning once I shower, tested the heat last night and even set it at 46 degrees to make sure it didn’t get too cold but things were good, a few degrees below 50 inside but the heat didn’t kick on except when I tested to long enough to feel the radiator get warm.
Truth is that I like the cold or at least tolerate it. ❄️ It makes it feel a lot more less cold when I ride my bike to work, as I’m used to cold. It also makes those nights up in wilderness feel less cold. But those hot cups of coffee ☕ and Johnny cakes with all the onions, garlic, spinach are so good. Winter is coming and I’m glad the heat works when I want it to, because I don’t want to have issues with things freezing, not that I really care that much about the heat. After the long commute home on the bike then yokel local bus that stops every three feet, 🚲 👉 🚌 I just want to have dinner, head to bed and sleep. 🛏️ Then get up at 4 or 5 AM to make breakfast and read.
Last night was a long one with the public meetings with Save the Pine Bush. 🌲 The Guilderland Town Meeting dragged on and on for hours and hours, after the Colonie Planning Meeting to start the evening. We got some good things in the Comphrensive Plan for the Pine Bush, and maybe the Solar Farm will be defeated in the Pine Bush. ☀️ That said, I’ve become very defensive of industrial solar in most places, especially ordinary but often marginal agricultural lands, because it seems like a rural use, just like cows and corn fields. We need energy ⚡, especially low-carbon energy more then more milk. Solar doesn’t have cow shit and herbicides running off into the creeks, no matter how careful farms are some is inevitable. 🐮 And it’s not like solar is a permanent development, as all solar farms include bonds to remove the panels at the end of the typical 40-year lease to the farmer-owner of the land. Compaction is limited, 🚜 and large parcels of land remain together, so if we want to sling cow shit again in 2060s, then it’s ready to do that. 🌲 Or maybe if timber demand is high, then it can planted as hardwoods or some other crop. And solar doesn’t complain about your burn barrel smoke or hog manure piles. 🛢️ Truth is I don’t want to necessarily smell my neighbor’s trash burning or their guinea fowl noise, but I want the right to do both things. But it’s not really right to build solar in the remaining acres of an ecologically unique ecosystem. Didn’t get to bed until around 10 PM and then didn’t get asleep for a while up after being jacked up from public meetings, 😜 but I slept into six AM.
I got listening to Joni Mitchell’s River. 🎅 I was reminded of that time two years ago when Mom and Dad were sick for the holidays, so I ended up spending Christmas 🎄 at the State Horse Camp 🐴 out Madison County, cooking the nuts and cranberries up by the fire, and hanging out by those little pavilions. I want to get back out to Madison County sometime in December, maybe around the holidays or maybe in mid-month. After Thanksgiving 🦃 I will head up to the Adirondacks. Or maybe Martin Luther Kings Weekend, depending on how bitterly cold and snowy ❄️ it is during the coldest month of the year. I want to look at getting skis at the Sportsmart this weekend, as that might be a fun activity to do this winter if we actually get snow.
I read some more of Jessica Soward’s The First-Time Gardener: Growing Vegetables and Michael Pollan’s Second Nature this morning. 🍅 Reading about growing vegetables seems like a werid topic for mid-November when everything is dying off, and it’s manure and root vegetable season 💩 far more then anything but it’s still an interesting topic I wanted to learn more about. Those books are both due back on Friday, I could renew if I wanted to finish up but I think I’d rather save my ten November Hoopla borrows for new books, 📚 maybe this month reading more about construction 🏗️ and sustainable building and Off-Grid Solar and things along those lines. And something of general popular interest – you maybe kind of along the lines of Bill McKibbean or Michael Pollen but maybe not those authors again. Environmental, political topics. 🌎 But not the political penis measuring the contest.