Good evening. Currently 50 degrees and cloudy this Saturday evening in December. Remarkable. It’s a warm evening for sure.
Made a bunch of maps. Continuing to get back into QGIS mapping, including some outdoors mapping and a lot of election mapping, which is new and fascinating for me. I probably should have spent more time outside but so be it.
Good morning. Happy Hump Day! Cars don’t have those enormous humps in the center for drive trains anymore and hopefully weeks won’t have too big of humps. I’ve been busy at work lately crunching numbers and making pretty graphs so time seems to be going quickly.
Currently right at the freezing point and mostly cloudy. The sun is peaking out to the south and for a while today we may see some clearing.
Today will be partly cloudy and 49 degrees. Not bad for mid-December. Sunset still comes early at 4:21. In two weeks the days will be getting longer once again when we enter calendar winter. The lack of snow and especially road salt makes winter seem not so bad.
Sometime next week I will take a day off from work and make my yearly pilgrimage up Overlook Mountain. I like watching the sun set on that mountain.
Good evening. Currently 29 degrees and partly clear. As the evening has progressed, there is more stars you can see. When I went for a walk in the Albany Pine Bush Preserve around 8 PM it was mostly cloudy.
Gradual clearing through the night and slight warm up. Tomorrow will be partly sunny and 49 degrees which is pretty darn nice for December. The low for Wednesday night heading into Thursday is only 41 degrees. Sunrise at 7:21 AM.
Cleaned the mildew off a few more panels in my crappy apartment as part of my effort to slowly but surely make this cheap apartment in the suburbs not so nasty. I bought rubber gloves which means that I can remove the mildew without removing so much skin from my hands using the mildew remover. The gloves are tight on my hands but they keep them from stinking like bleach or mildew remover. I’m making good progress, but it’s a tedious job as I have never done a full scrub of the walls for mildew or even dust and dirt since moving in here eight years ago. The walls come out such a nice white when cleaned.
Besides a short evening hike up Overlook Dune, I did my evening walk. Certainly a pretty pleasant evening outside for mid-December. I’m not complaining about the warm weather although I wish the days were longer.
Tried on the Carhartt jackets at the Carhartt store at the Maul. I discovered that I fit nicely in a 2XLT. I’m a big boy. Still chewing over color but I found a store online with free shipping, good prices, and no sales tax. I still don’t like how they are no longer union made and some of the design changes make it seem lower quality then the previous models.
Dick’s didn’t have the propane adapter I needed for the lantern but I studied what they had at Walmart and figured what I need to order online – basically a high pressure ‘y’ connector. Walmart has the step down adapters. I think I will order it tomorrow.
I don’t envision heading out of town this weekend as the past four weekends I’ve taken trips, and really have stuff I need to do in town. The forecast is warm but cloudy for the weekend. Then again, I might change my mind as I want to do as much roadside camping before the snow ends that. But then again with the heated tent I probably will camp all winter. The following week I have to stay in town to lead the Save the Pine Bush Hike. So we will see.
It’s late. I need to get some sleep!
There are people who don’t like how political parties zealously defend their constituencies, regardless of their overall popular status. I am not one of them. It’s good we live in a country where minority rights are protected, where one political party can act as an effective check to the ideas of the other party.
I’m a Democrat. I’ve always been one. But I’m glad that Republicans vigorously defend those who they represent and act to restrain the progressive agenda. Not because progressives have bad ideas – many are quite valid – but because some progressive ideas while good for the constituencies that they represent are bad or even devastating for other constituencies.
In many ways I believe today’s democracy has never been healthier.
Good morning. Currently we are up to 29 degrees on a bright and sunny morning. All week looks to be sunny to partly sunny with increasing temperatures reaching 60 degrees on Sunday. Hello, spring. I just wish the days weren’t so darn short.
It’s somewhat foggy in the city but not nearly as bad as last night. The fog last night was pretty scary for driving on the expressway or any place driving over about 40 mph.
Still don’t have maps working on my laptop yet but hopefully soon. There was a lot going on last week and the weekends I’ve been out camping. I’m sure cold nasty winter weather will eventually come and I’ll have more time for that.
Good morning. Currently 25 degrees and clear this morning. The fog has lifted on this Monday morning. There may be some places of dense fog and potential black ice so be careful this morning on the trip to work. Slippery sidewalks are just as likely to cause injury as icy roads.
Today will be mostly sunny, with a high near 43. Calm wind becoming northwest 5 to 7 mph in the morning. Sunset at 4:21 PM. The days certainly are short and dark this time of year. Fortunately, the shortest day of the year is two weeks from Wednesday and then the days get longer with a noticeable gain by the end of January.
So far winter has been mild. It seems like the pattern will last through the start of calendar winter, and maybe longer. No accumulating snow in much of New York. I’m not complaining.
Good evening. A combination of laziness, forgetfulness, and the crazy weekend camping left me without posting many pictures or updates. So here we go.
Currently 27 degrees with light freezing fog. The fog is pretty heavy in the valley but lighter than before. It’s cold enough that some bridge surfaces and other locations are starting to ice up. So be careful out there. In the mountains it’s clear and a few degrees warmer due to the temperature inversion impacting the Albany-area and surrounding deep valleys. Might drop a few more degrees by morning.
Tomorrow morning the sun will rise at 7:10 AM, that is if you’re at an elevation where you can see it. Widespread dense fog before 9am. Otherwise, mostly sunny, with a high near 47. Calm wind becoming northwest 5 to 7 mph in the morning. Nice day on tap.
This weekend I went out to Cherry Ridge Camping Area at Charles Baker State Forest. It was a nice weekend but cooler and cloudier then expected. Spent some time in the woods hunting, drove down to Sherburne for a short walk at the Rogers Environmental Education Center and to pick up flashlight batteries as the stupid flashlight accidentally turned on again rolling around in the back of my pickup. Now I always take the batteries out of the flashlight.
Friday night was cold and damp on the woods, at least until I got a fire going and the big buddy heater keeping my butt warm. Hot tented on Friday night. Delightful as always but the gray skies of Saturday disappointed. Ran out of propane on Saturday evening, so while Saturday night was clear and relatively warm, and ice fog and no heat made the evening chilly. I guess I should have just put more layers on. Campfire helped but a lot of the wood I gathered in the woods was wet and slow burning. Slept in the truck cap on Saturday. I wish I had my comforter for extra warmth, but I still liked camping in the truck for the various comfort over an unheated tent.
Came back midmorning on Sunday. I should have headed back out in the field with my gun but so be it, I was cold being under dressed and with no heater to warm up by. Hunting was nice at Charles Baker, fewer hunters on this public land then one would expect. Drove through Unadilla Forks but didn’t see the famous dirt track.
When I got home, I continued on my new found obsession with cleaning quite successfully the mildew in the kitchen and bathroom. I hate the stink and irritation on my hands from the mold remover, but carefully sprayed on, it has proven quite effective at restoring bright white mold free surfaces. I bought gloves to help protect my skin going forward. If I’m not moving out soon, I really need to get the mildew problem under control because at times, especially in the winter it can be quite irritating. It’s part of living in a dirt cheap apartment. I want to buy a small house I can fix up myself without dealing with the landlord and build equity towards a nicer place on land in the country, hopefully off-grid where I can burn my trash and shoot fun but ever so NY illegal guns like AR-15s but right now it’s tricky with all the time I travel for work. I do like the convenience of public transit in the city. I make good money which pays for my road trips now. Some day though I’ll move to a free state .
Driving out to Mom and Dad’s for Sunday dinner, the fog was intense. You struggled to see the stoplights and car taillights. But once you got past Feura Bush and put off the valley, it was a clear evening. As I got some Windex and cleaned my windshield inside I didn’t have the glare problems I normally have at night. I’ve never cleaned my windshield inside since buying my truck and with all the dirt roads I drive on in the summer it really needed a good cleaning.
