John Boyd Thacher State Park

Good evening! Mostly cloudy and 20 degrees in Delmar. ☁ There is a west-southwest breeze at 15 mph. 🍃 with gusts up to 37 mph 💨💨💨. The current wind chill is 6. There are 3 inches of snow on the ground — the rain didn’t kill that off. ☃ ️Things will start to thaw out at Wednesday around noontime. 🌡️ The warmer weather and rain heading into New Years Eve might kill it off though. Plus a fresh coating of black ice and slipperiness outside this evening, though I stayed home today so I don’t really know. Turned up the heat a bit tonight, maybe too much with the cold, but maybe I’ll put it back down before bed. Doesn’t need to be set at 55 degrees, I can do 50 and lower heating bills. I’ll leave the cabinets open before bed. It’s not like sub-zero weather tonight. Wind has died down a lot.

Yesterday I got home fairly early, 🏘 and got unpacked from camping. I wanted nothing to do with driving home in the rain and snow that was predicted, especially as the day predicted. Plus my ski boots were frozen hard from the cold so I couldn’t get them on my feet ⛷ and the surface voltage on my starting battery 🔋 was starting to make me a bit nervous on my truck, so as soon as I packed up I headed home. I thought about, and probably should have used my hunting boots and hiked up to see the Rensselaerville Falls but parking was limited in the hamlet due to the snow banks, and I simply was in the mood to get home, get unpacked before the heavy driving rain came in. It came but was later then I thought at first.

Wednesday was absolutely a perfect day for winter camping, ❄️ lots of sun, a reasonable amount of snow, and no wind. It was cold enough, but not too cold that the snow wasn’t melting. ⛷ Places though where a trail wasn’t well packed down from snowmobiles, like the parameter trail at Rennselaerville State Forest proved to be a lot more difficult skiing then I had hoped. But for winter camping, the weather was awesome. Wednesday night was mild, a nice night by the campfire, but it did get dark early.

Thursday was dreary, much like today 🌧 and I spent the final two days of my vacation at home. I wanted to get to the library 📚 this evening but they closed early due to the icing of the roads. 🌨 I am sure the librarians appreciated being able to head home early into the holiday weekend. They are also closed on Monday after Christmas. It’s fine, I have the hotspot I can use at home. 🤳 Going to be cold but I will try to bundle up and get some steps in over the holiday weekend. 👣 Probably could go to Five Rivers with just the microspikes this weekend, which means I wouldn’t have to drive or take the skis there. I probably should have been more active the past two days, but while camping, it was a ton of work, especially shoveling that heavy, deep wet snow to park my truck and clear out camp, then trudging the skis through the deep snow.

Today was quiet, 📗 some reading and FreeCodeCamp and too much time probably wasted on Youtube and working on various R graphs and charts. I finished up the Web Libraries class, though I still have to do the projects. 🤖 I really don’t enjoy this unit, and while I started a bit on the web visualization class — which I think may be more interesting, I shouldn’t get too far ahead of myself. Reading another book about probability and how people always get large numbers wrong.

Had a surprise expense on my credit card 😱 which had me worried for $21 dollars. I had forgotten I got my truck inspected last week. 🔍 Truck passed inspection, despite the trailer hitch among other things beings a rusty mess under the frame. I do need to wash the truck again. It’s getting old, but with the passed inspection, I’m hopeful to get it through one more year. I am going to cut back on driving and trips next summer again, because of my truck getting older, high gas prices, and because I want to keep my focus on growing my investments and retirement. I had a good year this year, and I know if I keep my eyes on the prize 🚜 I can get to a better tomorrow.

Tonight will be mostly cloudy 🌥, with a low of 8 degrees at 2am. 13 degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -6 at 1am; Southwest wind 13 to 15 mph, with gusts as high as 37 mph. In 2021, we had cloudy skies. It got down to 22 degrees. The record low of -15 occurred back in 1989. Cold night ahead. Maybe this the cold moon, with none in sight.

Tonight will have a New 🌚 Moon with 0% illuminated. Not going to see the stars either — with those clouds.The Wolf 🐺 Moon is on Friday, January 6. The darkest hour is at 11:55 pm, followed by dawn at 6:52 am, and sun starting to rise at 7:24 am in the east-southeast (122°) and last for 3 minutes and 25 seconds. Sunrise is 27 seconds later than yesterday. 🌄 The golden hour ends at 8:10 am with sun in the southeast (130°). Tonight will have 14 hours and 54 minutes of darkness, a decrease of 8 seconds over last night.

Made my final investment and retirement account payment for the year today. 💸 I think I ended up investing $52,000 for the year, maxing out my Roth IRA, 457B retirement accounts and increasing my stock and bond portfolio quite a bit, skipping savings, due to the low interest rates and inflation. Still, my next worth ended up farther in the red this year then I would have liked due to the heavy hit on both the stock and bond markets from the rising fed rates. 📉 Killing inflation, before it gets out of hand has to be priority, and the way I look at it, I probably got good deals this year. But who knows, we might have a recession next year, and things decline further. But I think I did good, even if it was kind of a tough year with inflation, high gas prices, and finding myself sticking closer to home then I would have hoped for much of the year.

People say that I should spend more money 💵 and buy more garbage but I am concerned that I’m falling farther and farther behind in life and that I’m not going to have a secure 🔐 future. So much of the things I own are worn out and taped together, despite my good paying job. My apartment is such a dump. But I hear about so many seniors 🧓 living in poverty and not being able to afford to retire and that is not the life I want to live. Plus all my friends and colleagues are buying houses and homesteads and I don’t have that kind of money yet saved up, at least not in cash and I don’t borrow. I just hate throwing away money and my future 🔮 like so many do these days. I really do want to own my own land 🚜.

Christmas Eve will be mostly sunny 🌞, with a high of 17 degrees at 2pm. 19 degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -5 at 6am; Southwest wind 9 to 11 mph, with gusts as high as 23 mph. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 29 degrees. The record high of 72 was set in 2015. 13.0 inches of snow fell back in 1966.❄

Heading out to the folks house 🤶 for a Christmas Eve lunch with my niece and parents, and then who knows what I will do later, probably just head home because it’s cold out. But I do need to get back out and start doing my steps again. I’ve done so bad this week, with the rain and cold. To be fair, several of those days though I was out camping. And I did spend a lot of time updating and working on my blog.

No jury duty next week, 👨‍⚖️ and only one final week of the federal jury term remaining after New Years Eve. Maybe I’ll never get called in. At least I will be able to be in the office next week, when I’m the only supervisor that will be in my unit. I enjoyed my week off — well the best based on the weather — and now the other director is off next week. Will be a busy week for me, despite only being a four-day week. Who knows on jury duty ⚖ though – I think the federal term will get me off from the state, but I also know I have state deferral that they might try to get me for if I don’t serve. I almost wish I would get called in for a day to be certain.

In four weeks on January 20 the sun will be setting in the west-southwest (243°) at 4:54 pm,🌄 which is 26 minutes and 54 seconds later then tonight. In 2021 on that day, we had partly cloudy, snow showers and temperatures between 30 and 14 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 32 and 15 degrees. The record high of 53 degrees was set back in 2006.

I do want to get out camping again 🏕 maybe for New Years Eve, or Martin Luther King Day Weekend which is now three weeks off. Maybe take off the Friday before the holiday weekend to get in three nights of camping. For NYE, if there isn’t too much snow, I would like to go out to Brookfield Horse Camp, 🐴 otherwise I might do Cole Hill or another state forest. Maybe for MLK weekend, I would do Renselaerville State Forest again and ski there again. ⛷

Looking ahead, tomorrow is Christmas Eve 🎅, Bacon Day 🥓 is Next Friday and Bacon Day 🥓 is Next Friday.

Good evening! Partly clear and 29 degrees in Delmar. 🌆 There is a northwest breeze at 9 mph. 🍃. There are 6 inches of snow on the ground. ☃ ️Things will start to thaw out at tomorrow around 1 pm. 🌡️

Launched my new blog theme, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, 🤔 since after my experience in the free coding camp, which taught me a lot more modern coding techniques like CSS3+4, ES6 javascript and modern HTML. A lot of the code on my blog was kind of a mess, it was good to try to clean things up, especially as since I moved over to PHP7 things were kicking up hundreds of errors on the back end due to not always testing array keys before calling them. ⌨ I decided I am tired of all full-screen pictures and particularly how slow they can load a times. Kind of a throw-back to an older blog look but using the latest in HTML codes.

This was kind of a stay at home day, 🏘 as I have this week off from work and I did not sleep well and wasn’t feeling good for a lot of the day. I’ve been continuing to work on my free coding class, 🤖 deep in the bowels 💩 of Redux which is a Javascript-HTML library for building high-speed interactive apps like your favorite email program and social media program. I don’t love it, in part because I doubt I will ever use it, but it’s good to expand my horizons, and know about it because all the cool kids are using it.

Later in the afternoon I went down to the library, 📚 and uploaded the latest version of the blog theme ⏫ and then went out for my evening walk. 🚶 With my boots falling apart and leaking badly, 👢 I’ve not done as many steps as I should. I should either order or go and get some more boots but I’ve been procrastinating a lot lately.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 20 degrees at 6am. Two degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around December 25th. Merry Christmas, lol. 🎅 Think of all that colorful wrapping paper Santa will bring to burn. 🎁 Maximum wind chill around 15 at 5am; Northwest wind 7 to 9 mph. In 2021, we had mostly clear skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 15 degrees. The record low of -19 occurred back in 1951.

Tomorrow will be mostly sunny 🌞, with a high of 33 degrees at 2pm. Four degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around January 5th. Northwest wind 5 to 8 mph. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with a few breaks of sun the afternoon. The high last year was 32 degrees. The record high of 61 was set in 1957. 8.4 inches of snow fell back in 1975.❄

I am thinking about going winter camping tomorrow ⛺ ❄️ before the real-cold weather blows in on Thursday into Friday. I am thinking two nights hot tenting, not too far from here, but I am still a bit worried about the snow being so deep, and how much I would have to shovel out — and if the roads will be icy. 🧤 I guess I don’t have to decide right away, and indeed I probably will just pack the bare minimum for hot tenting, as anything I don’t use at least food and water-wise will most certainly be frozen by Thursday. But at least it should be cold enough to keep things from getting all melty. Or if I wait to New Years Eve, then there might be less snow come the rain on Friday.

Before that though, I do need to think about going to the grocery store. 🏪 I keep finding things to eat around home, but my pantry is quite depleted at this point, especially as I planned to go shopping on Wednesday at lunch time during my work-at-home day, which became plans to go shopping Thursday for both myself and the then-canceled Christmas Party at work, 🎄 which then was going to be after the snow storm, which then became Monday after I visited the folks, which didn’t happen. 🚽 I do need toilet paper, so I really should think about doing that.

Today in 1974, Nelson Rockefeller is sworn in as Vice President of the United States 👔  under President Gerald Ford under the provisions of the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Very cold for Christmas Weekend. 😕 Saturday, Christmas Eve, partly sunny but ball-chillen cold with a high near 23. Christmas Day, sunny and cold with a high of 26. Typical average high for the weekend is 36 degrees. I hope Santa doesn’t freeze off his you know what. 🎄

Looking ahead, next Monday is Boxing Day 🥊 when the sun will be setting at 4:29 pm with dusk at 4:59 pm. On that day in 2021, we had mostly cloudy, mild, rain showers and temperatures between 42 and 34 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 35 degrees. We hit a record high of 59 back in 1895.