Good morning! Happy Festivus 🍖! It’s the holiday for the rest of us, at least those who don’t raise hogs. 🐷  I like meatloaf but I’ve been forever banished from having my parents meatloaf, because a decade and a half ago, I told mom I liked the traditional drier meatloaf 🍞 they had at college over the dripping in A-1 steak sauce and Worcestershire sauce that my mom used to make, 🍽with it’s very strong, rather salty flavor. ✊ I walked down to the Park and Ride this morning and it was pleasant, but hardly a feat of strength.

But more importantly — grunt, grunt — Next Monday is Bacon Day 🥓. I’ll have to buy some bacon to fry 🍳 up at camp. Bacon is not my favorite but maybe because I don’t own heritage hogs. 🐽 Maybe I’ll have to stop at For the Love of Bacon 😍 on my way out to the Finger Lakes. I bet they have good bacon, well worth the price. It’s now right off of Interstate 88, closer to the Mariaville Farm. 🚜 I’ve been by the farm, they have lots of hogs there, far more than my parents neighbors. Pigs are great recyclers – actually upcyclers ♻ of food waste. 🍲 I know, I probably watch too many off-grid hog farmers from Idaho on the Youtube.

A really pleasant morning for sure. Sunny and 27 degrees at the Elm Ave Park & Ride – CDTA. 🌞 There is a south breeze at 5 mph. 🍃. There is about three inches of snow on the ground, based on what is at the traffic island.. ☃ ️Warming up quickly: things will start to thaw out at around 9 am. 🌡️ Better not leave your bacon outside, it might go rancid.

And now, as Simon and Garfunkel once sung many decades ago, “I can gather all the news I need from the weather report …”. It is a beautiful day for sure!

Today will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 49 degrees at 1pm. 16 degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around November 14th. I’ll take mid-November weather around Christmas. 🎄 South wind 5 to 9 mph. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning, remaining cloudy in the afternoon. The high last year was 35 degrees. The record high of 64 was set in 1990. 8.8 inches of snow fell back in 1947.❄

The sun is good, as it will give me a chance to calibrate and play with the voltage switch. I am going to monitor both the starting and accessory battery banks in my truck, to see what gets the maximum charge on both batteries, but for now I’m using the 13.7 volt switch relay on, 13.1 volts switch relay off solar panel. 🔋

Definitely a lot of traffic going into the city 🚓🚕🚐🚑🚗🚒🚌🚎 which is surprising being the day before the holiday. But it’s moving past the traffic light 🚦, might just have been the timing. I’ll be to work plenty early I’m sure. Over the past two months, so far I’ve only clocked in late one time ⌚. So I can’t complain much. It was definitely a nice walk down to the Park and Ride, and I will enjoy my lunch time walk, no matter how brief it is.

The sun will set at 4:25 pm with dusk around 4:57 pm, which is 32 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for mostly sunny skies 🌃 and temperatures around 42 degrees. There will be a south-southwest breeze at 9 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 3 minutes of daytime, an increase of 5 seconds over yesterday. Yes the days are finally getting longer. 🌱 Before you know it the grass will be green, well in another 20 weeks or so.

Tonight will be mostly clear 🌃, with a low of 26 degrees at 6am. Eight degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around December 4th. Northwest wind 8 to 11 mph. In 2018, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 31 degrees. The record low of -15 occurred back in 1989.

It seems like the Redshift app worked great on my laptop and phone last night, 📱 although a few times it crashed and clicked off and I was left with a face full of blue light. But if I’m controlling the rest of the light in my room, I should work on reducing the blue from the my screens. It really helps with my big monitor, as it was really flooding my room with blue with the Youtube videos, especially when I dimmed down the red in my room.💡

Mild but cloudy this weekend in Albany. ☁ Saturday, mostly cloudy, with a high near 40. Sunday, a chance of rain and snow. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 42. Chance of precipitation is 40%. Typical average high for the weekend is 32 degrees. A similar forecast for the Finger Lakes it looks like, but with a little more sun on Saturday and a bit warmer and a lower chance of rain on Sunday then the place I’m planning on leaving behind for a few days.

Definitely looking forward to my road trip, especially if the weather isn’t too bad, 🌄 and there isn’t a ton of snow and icy to deal with. 🏕 Been a long time since I’ve spent a night in the wilderness, and that’s one of the best things I find for my restoring my sleep cycles. Even with the red lights in my bedroom, I just find sleeping at home hard this time of year. In the summer months it’s not too bad. I keep my bedroom cool, which I think helps, but I keep waking up at 3 AM and finding it hard to get back to bed. Maybe come spring time, I’ll have to think about retiring to bed at 8 or 9 PM and getting up at 4 or 5 AM each day, and taking full advantage of the morning, before it gets too hot. I don’t know.

As previously noted, next Monday is Bacon Day 🥓 when the sun will be setting at 4:30 pm with dusk at 5:02 pm. On that day in 2018, we had mostly cloudy, snow showers and temperatures between 33 and 23 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 32 degrees. We hit a record high of 53 back in 1984.