Good evening. As we head into the 10 o’clock hour we are 50 degrees with a heavy, cold rain coming down out of the sky. Certainly not a nice night to be going out if you can all avoid it. The heavy rain will make for tricky driving conditions, limiting visibility and traction on the road. It may not be freezing rain or heavy snow, but it’s definitely a night to stay home and relax. It was raining so hard I bailed on my evening walk and going down to the library. I’m just glad that I didn’t get it in my head to go up to the Adirondacks and spend a very cold and wet night in the woods.

The rain is supposed to stop by tomorrow morning with some clearing by afternoon. If your planning on to barbecue with a coat on tomorrow afternoon, it should be fine. 54 degrees isn’t too bad for mid-November. While some of the forecasts continue to show a dusting to an inch of snow in the Southern Adirondacks for Friday, for the most part things look like they will be mostly wet but snowless in the next few days. Surnise tomorrow is 6:41 AM but unless you want to get wet, they’re isn’t much of purpose going out and looking for the sun to rise.

I almost broke down and turned on the heat. Kind of chilly in here, with the dampness tonight. But I resisted as I still don’t have the storm windows in upstairs. I’m sure running the heat without the storm windows wouldn’t waste that much heat – or I could put them in – but I’m still not ready to accept winter is rapidly coming. I turned the electric floor board heat on 15 minutes a few weeks ago, but not since. Gas heat is still off. Today was in the 50s and even tonight isn’t expected to get that cold. Being an apartment, my place doesn’t cool down that much, and with a big south-facing roof, when the sun comes up, 50 degrees outside can mean it’s 70 degrees or warmer inside.

Once real cold weather comes, I’ll turn the gas up to 60 degrees when I’m home and awake – and possibly electric baseboard heat up briefly in my bedroom to 70 – and when I’m not home/awake back down to 50 degrees on nights about 10 degrees and 55 degrees when it’s going to be excessively cold or a snow/ice storm is approaching. I’ve never been a real big fan of hot rooms, although I’m sure when I get my place in my woods, I won’t mind having a roaring woodstove from time to time.

It’s fall again, so I have a mouse or two that moved into my apartment. This happens every year, in part because one of the walls in my apartment has shifted away from the slab foundation, so they have pretty much free range on their way in. This time, one of the mouses chewed a hole through one of the walls between the kitchen and the bathroom, through a kitchen tile. I was not pleased. I had a mouse stuck in that wall a year or two ago. He died in there. I just got to get some traps set up to kill the mice. Eventually, I will trap them all and they’ll be gone for another year. It’s a cheap rental, so I don’t really care. I keep food locked away, and except for one time when they got into a cabinet and chewed up some stuff, things have been pretty much fine.

By any frame of the imagination my apartment is pretty awful. Mold, mice, and general deterioration. It’s an ugly building indoors and out. Then again, I hardly invest much time in upkeep or cleaning. But it’s in a great location with off-street parking and ample public transportation. I am within walking distance of a small wilderness park along with a developed park (with wireless Internet), and a very nice public library. For milk and bread – and a beer cave with beer – I can just walk to next door.  I don’t have to drive on the weekdays, much less worry about snow or inclement weather. It is certainly not my dream location – I’d rather live in the middle of nowhere, where I could make as much noise and smoke as I want without bothering no one. It would be nice to be able to shoot guns and have roaring fires in the backyard. Camping kind of makes up for it now. I am looking forward to spending some quality time this year in lean-tos and hot tenting, so the weekend trips don’t have to come an end once the snow falls and backcountry roads are closed for the year.

Spent some time banging out some new state land maps on QGIS, mostly replacing and modernizing maps from Chautauqua and Allegany Counties. A few are new maps, others are replacing missing maps, and some just have updated data and coordinates. Nothing too earth shattering or new, but something to keep me busy and keep my blog up to date with the latest batch of maps. I haven’t been out to Western NY, especially not the Southern Tier portion of the state since fall 2013, but I figured I would still update these maps, as there is a lot of good state land out that way. Probably revised St. Lawrence County maps will be done next.

Once winter comes, I expect I will be doing a lot more map making – today was the first time in months that I had my laptop hooked up to my big screen monitor and keyboard in a long time. The big screen makes map making much easier. I know, a 23 inch screen is tiny compared to what most of the kids are using these days. I don’t have Internet or television at home, so to keep busy at home by either making maps, coding, reading or listening to podcasts. I find map making to be incredibly therapeutic, as it works my artistic side of the brain, as I load the data, style it, and appropriately scale it. Map making to me is like watching sitcoms and other cheesy prime time TV most people use to pass the time.  Map making is somewhat productive too.

I screwed the first batch of maps up. I left off the contour line elevations. I had to redo them. To compound the problem, I forgot to save the original map templates. Fortunately, undo saved my ass. Next time I’ll remember to save the map layout templates before I export the map PDFs.

Have a good evening. Sleep well!