Good morning! Happy First Sunday of Advent ✝️! Probably a lot of people are watching them light the advent candles 🕯 at online church ⛪ this morning. Four weeks to Latest Sunrise of the Winter 🌄️. Happens in January believe it or not. Mostly cloudy and 27 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁ Breezy, ️20 mph breeze from the northwest 🌬 with gusts up to 31 mph 💨💨💨. The current wind chill is 14. Haven’t seen it talked wind chill in a while. Things will start to thaw out at around noontime. 🌡️

Kind of a blustery cold morning start to Sunday. 🌅 I was hoping for more sun this morning but that’s nowhere to be found. I am hoping to maybe go to Five Rivers this afternoon 🐸 and then I’ll have to see if my parents are having visitors or I’ll go to the laundromat. 🚿 I haven’t showered since Wednesday so I probably should do that and wash my sheets and clothes 👚 at the laundromat.

Today will be partly sunny 🌞, with a high of 33 degrees at 1pm. Six degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around December 23rd. Breezy, with a northwest wind 15 to 20 mph, with gusts as high as 32 mph. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 34 degrees. The record high of 68 was set in 2001. 12.5 inches of snow fell back in 2003.❄

Solar noon 🌞 is at 11:48 am with sun having an altitude of 24.8° from the due south horizon (-46° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 13 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 3:38 pm with the sun in the southwest (232°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-southwest (240°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 4:23 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 23 seconds with dusk around 4:53 pm, which is 6 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌇 The best time to look at the stars is after 5:30 pm. At sunset, look for partly cloudy skies 🌃 and temperatures around 32 degrees. There will be a northwest breeze at 15 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 10 minutes of daytime, a decrease of one minute and 3 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌃, with a low of 23 degrees at 5am. Two degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around December 10th. Maximum wind chill around 16 at 12am; Northwest wind 7 to 13 mph. In 2019, we had mostly clear skies in the evening, which became partly cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 9 degrees. The record low of -7 occurred back in 1901.

Yesterday I was working on some electronics projects. 🔬 I was using perf board but I think I’m going to just use wire on solderless breadboard with short solid wire jumpers going forward.🔗 In my opinion that is much more flexible, quicker to build and easy to modify or upgrade and you don’t have to worry about accidentally bridging pins or solder drying out. 👨🏻‍🏭 And it can be made to be quite pretty. The trick though is to use solid copper wire that doesn’t flex easily and seats well into the breadboard.

25 days remain until the end of the year. ⏳ I hope you’ve worked to maximize this year to the best of your ability. I know a lot of people had complaints about the year that was but I think it was a fun year. 😁 I mean the markets are doing well 💰and I spent something like two months camping in the woods ⛺ doing remote work. Not sure what next year will be like but I think we are getting closer to normal.

Today in 1902, a coal mine explosion at Monongah, West Virginia, kills 362 workers. 💥And in 1953, Vladimir Nabokov completes his controversial novel Lolita. 💌 More uplifting is Adrian Kantrowitz performs the first human heart transplant in the United States in 1967.💓

Looking ahead, there are 4 weeks until Latest Sunrise of the Winter 🌄️ when the sun will be setting at 4:34 pm with dusk at 5:06 pm. On that day in 2020, we had mostly cloudy, mild, rain showers and temperatures between 47 and 39 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 31 degrees. We hit a record high of 61 back in 1913.