Good evening! Rain and 33 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☔ There is a east breeze at 5 mph. 🍃. Back home on this rainy evening. It would have been fairly miserable camping tonight and it looks like we are stuck in this rainy pattern for a while, then it will get cold. Temperatures will drop below freezing at Wednesday around noontime. ☃️

I got home and unpacked. 💼 Not too difficult as my gear didn’t get that muddy and I only had one day worth of food and clothing packed. Moreover I’ve been leaving more and more of my camping gear in the truck year round and I have seperate cooking utensils now for at home versus at camp. 🍴 I had fish for dinner 🐠 and started looking at storing the dash cam photos and videos 📹 I got. Tomorrow I’ll walk down to the library and upload them if it’s not raining too hard. It’s kind of nice that I don’t have to work tomorrow.

Tonight will rain before 1am, then rain or freezing rain. 🌧 Low of 33 degrees at 10pm. 17 degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around November 12th. East wind around 6 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. Little or no ice accumulation expected. Probably just rain here. In 2018, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 23 degrees. The record low of -21 occurred back in 1933.

Tonight will have a Waxing Crescent Moon 🌙 with 22% illuminated. The moon will rise at 10:33 am. The is on Wednesday night with partly cloudy skies. The sun will rise at 7:24 am with the first light at 6:52 am, which is 13 seconds later than yesterday. 🌄 Tonight will have 14 hours and 55 minutes of darkness, a decrease of 33 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will rain or freezing rain before noon, then rain between noon and 4pm, then rain and sleet after 4pm. High of 34 degrees at 12pm. Two degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around December 22nd. Southeast wind 8 to 10 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. Little or no ice accumulation expected. New sleet accumulation of less than a half inch possible. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning, remaining cloudy in the afternoon. The high last year was 33 degrees. The record high of 53 was set in 1984. 10.9 inches of snow fell back in 2000.❄

I have tomorrow off because the original plan had me out camping. ⛺ It will be a bit of a staycation I guess. Tuesday if there is still snow left in the hilltowns I’m thinking to a local state forest to back country camp in a hot tent for New Years Eve 🎇 but the key 🔑 is I need snow on the ground and roads not too icy for that to happen. No guarantees at this point.

I do want to do more winter camping for sure. Ideally I’d prefer to stay somewhere I can drive my truck to so I have electric 💡 and gear nearby but that’s not a show stopper for me. I’m really interested to find out if Moscow Hill campground is plowed, as that would be perfect even if it’s just far enough to get off the road. That said, I bet there are a lot of snowmobiles that assemble in that area going brap brap all winter long but even so I bet it thins out at night. 📞 I’ll have to call the DEC office in Sherburne and find out. Also if the snow isn’t deep I should be able to get there as the ground is really solid there due to the reinforcement for the horse trailers and hooves during the summer 🐴.

I don’t know but I was just taken in by the beauty of Southern Madison County and Northern Otsego County. 🐮 Yeah things did kind of smell earthy and like cow poop 💩 but that’s country living. The browns and the grays were pretty, they stirred something in my soul. I think it’s so fortunate to those who are able to chip a life out of the rural country, if by agriculture and one of many other jobs, some small, some decent paying but all tough with limited opportunity compared to the big cities.

Between the forested, snow covered hills full of wildlife and the rich farmlands below its such beautiful country. ⛲ So many quaint old farm houses and run down trailers, homesteaders with a family pig 🐽 or cow to muddy farms with old fashioned tie stall barns 🐮, milking twice a day with surge milkers and fifty year old open cab tractors with box spreaders. Weeds growing up around broken and forgotten farm equipment, piles of manure rotting away to be spread someday in the future. Trees to be split and someday warm the farm house. Four wheelers for fun and getting around the farm, a goat 🐐 tied to a tree, piles of junk to be scrapped some day or burnt to a crisp in a bonfire. 🔥 Rural scenes like this exist across the nation but I live in the city and make my money 💵 doing the urban thing now saving for a better tomorrow when I can own land in a freer state and have an off grid property, hopefully in an area as beautiful and wonderful as Southern Madison County.

I’d someday love 😍 to live in a place like that but not in an oppressively liberal state like New York which doesn’t really understand rural communities. After all two out of three New Yorkers live in the metropolitan region 🚇 – that is Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Westchester, New York City and Long Island. Might soon be 70 percent of New Yorkers. Pennsylvania is nice but it kind of suffers from the same problem – and its also an incredibly expensive state to live in especially with the recent gas tax hikes ⛽. City life may be getting better, as may regulations for fair commerce with business but its also an incredibly hard to make it in the small towns. I don’t think Trump is the answer but neither is his counterpart closer to home who exists 180 degrees out of phase but in many ways is similar.

2020 is going to be a big year for all of us 🎇 but my hope is it will be another step forward towards a better life. I’ll work hard and try to advance my career and help my company grow and move forward. What’s good for them is ultimately good for myself. 💼 I know working in the windowless basement office 🏢, paying my dues, someday will pay off with more career advancement, more money to save 💵 towards that off grid property out in the country.

Climate change will probably really kick in during the next decade, and it’s going to be a wild ride for mankind. I don’t think whatever comes out of the next election in the coming year will change that but it will bite us in the next decade and prove that we are doing much too little too late. 🌎 People use per capita stats to blame the guy with the rusty pickup and burping cows in the tie stall barn in Madison County but if you don’t look at the big cities for the root of the problem your just playing games with statistics. 🔢But my focus is enjoying life and saving for a better future and not saving the world.

In four weeks on January 26 the sun will be setting at 5:00 pm,🌄 which is 30 minutes and 26 seconds later then tonight. In 2019 on that day, we had partly cloudy and temperatures between 28 and 14 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 31 and 14 degrees. The record high of 59 degrees was set back in 1950.

Looking ahead, National Bird Day 🐧 is in 1 weeks, 5:30 PM Dusk 🌆 is in 4 weeks, 37th Birthday 🎉 is a month away, Ground Hog Day 🐻 is in 5 weeks, Snow Moon 🌕 is in 6 weeks, March 🌨 is in 9 weeks, Daylight Savings Time 🌆 is in 10 weeks, Ides of March ✝ is in 11 weeks, Palm Sunday 🌴 is in 14 weeks, Easter 🐰 is in 15 weeks, Mothers Day 👩‍ is in 19 weeks, Pack Rat Day 🐀 is in 20 weeks, Strawberry Moon 🌕 is in 23 weeks and Fathers Day 👨 is in 24 weeks.