I was going to ride in until I heard the wind 🚴 🌬️🚌
There you go CDTA, you’ll get your extra $1.30 off my Swiper Card and you can go buy yourself a coffee on this unnecessarily cold morning. I guess I knew it was going to be windy this morning but even I was surprised how much the skies were roaring when I woke up this morning.
It’s more time to read and flip through my library e-books on the bus. 📚 I got through Edward Abbey’s the Fool’s Progress but like so many of his books I felt kind of like I missed something when I reached the end, then starting listening to Porter Foxes’ Northland as I walked laps last night at the Empire Plaza. There was a bum sleeping in the breezeway between the doors at shuttle entrance in the afternoon 👹 but no homeless people yelled at me while I walked and no winos at Capitol bus stop. 🚏Yes, I get home about a half hour later now that Express Bus is no more, but I kind of like walking indoors on these cold days compared to my evening walk, even if it means getting harassed by the bums that have taken over Plaza. And it kind of sucks that they’ve removed the benches throughout the Concourse, unless of course you go past security and go to Capitol, though it’s not like I am going to sit down at my time to walk. 👣 I keep watching the periods of slack breeze, thinking I could ride in but then two minutes later the wind picks up. More time to read on the bus. 🍃
Honestly I can’t wait until closer to Valentines Day ♥️ when there is enough daylight in the evening to ride both ways, then I can avoid transit both ways. Tomorrow I am going to drive in as there is the office Holiday Party 🤶 but today I’ll bus it in. One advantage to busing it both ways is I don’t have to watch the bike 🚲 as I ride home on bus, so I can really get into the book I’m reading. Currently the title of choice is Phil Hashieder’s Complete Guide to Butchering. Been doing a lot of reading about meat 🥩 lately, which is kind of ironic as a lot of people think I’m a vegetarian because I rarely eat meat except those rare time I’m out or visiting people, where they make meat like the center of their plate. 🍽️ I’d rather eat more beans and other things that have less saturated fats. Finished up reading Sharon Stronger’s The Doable Off-Grid Homestead, had some interesting ideas and I would have liked to spend more time re-reading a few sections but somebody else had a Hold on book and it was due back today.
Fried up some onions last night with pea soup, spaghetti squash and balsamatic vinger, 🧅 and that was dinner followed by pulverized frozen blueberries with oatmeal, some sugar-free syrup and unsweetened coca powder for a chocolately dessert. Chocolate is good stuff, I forget, and if you get the unsweetened baking chocolate it’s pretty healthy too. 🍫 Well, compared to a candy bar. I also did strawberry pancakes with thawed frozen strawberries blended in, along with some chocolate, two shredded carrots, some Stevia, an egg, milk oatmeal, and whole-wheat flour for breakfast. And lots of giner Good stuff, I know chocolate-strawberry pancakes is the thing of kids even if I did stick a lot of shredded carrots in the mix for bulk. 🥕 Why grow up? It’s probably still healthier then even the Woke-branded Organic Health Pancake Mixture Solution. 🥞
Like usual, everything is broke at work, 🖥️ and vendors aren’t playing along good, but that’s life at Data Services. Truth is I like the coding and data gathering part far of work far better then dealing with the people and the systems. Honestly, I’m hoping we can do the big address update soon, ✉️ because I like doing that – it’s kind of mindless work reviewing the records and I can watch a YouTube video as I do it – but also often involves writing scripts and creativity to fix big batches of records at once. Though at this point, 💾 I’ve already fixed the common errors with a series of shell and SQL scripts. I love working with xargs, running things in parallel and all the other Unix stuff.
State Restrictions on SNAP Map Code
Here is the R code I used to make up this map for those who want to play around with this at home.
library(tidyverse)
library(tigris)
library(rvest)
library(ggtext)
library(httr)
session <- session("https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/waivers/foodrestriction",
user_agent("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.90 Safari/537.36"))
sh <- read_html(session) %>% html_table() %>% .[[1]]
usst <- states(cb=T, resolution = '20m') %>% shift_geometry()
sh %>%
left_join(usst, ., join_by(NAME == `State`)) %>%
ggplot() + geom_sf(aes(fill=`Summary of Request`), color='white', linewidth=0.5) +
scale_fill_manual(values=RColorBrewer::brewer.pal(11, 'Paired'),
labels=\(x) str_wrap(x, width=40)) +
theme_void() +
coord_sf(expand = F, crs = 5070) +
labs(
title = str_c('<span style="color: ',RColorBrewer::brewer.pal(8, 'Blues')[8],'; font-size: 45pt;">State Restrictions on SNAP</span>'),
subtitle = 'Restrictions on unhealthy food purchases using SNAP going into in effect in 2026.',
tag = paste(
"Andy Arthur,", format(Sys.Date(), format = "%-m/%-d/%y"), "<br />",
"Source: fns.usda.gov/snap/waivers/foodrestriction"),
) +
theme_void() +
theme(
text = element_text(family = "Roboto Condensed", size = 14),
plot.title = element_textbox(hjust = 0.5, face = "bold", size = 28, margin = margin(0, 0, 1, 0)),
plot.subtitle = element_textbox(hjust = 0.5, face = "italic", size = 14, margin = margin(0, 0, 10, 0)),
plot.background = element_rect(fill = "beige", color = NA),
plot.tag = element_textbox(size = 10, hjust = 1, color = "#555555", maxheight = 0, halign = 1),
plot.caption = element_text(size = 14, color = "#555555"),
plot.margin = unit(c(0,1,0,0), "cm"),
plot.tag.position = c(1, 0.03),
strip.text = element_text(face='bold', size=16),
legend.key.height = unit(1, "cm"),
legend.key.width = unit(1, "cm"),
legend.direction = "horizontal",
legend.spacing = unit(3, 'cm'),
legend.margin = margin(0, 0, 0, 0),
legend.position.inside = c(0,0)
) +
guides(fill = guide_legend(ncol=1, title = '', override.aes = list(width=1)))
Truth is I’m more excited about the latest issue of Hobby Farms magazine being out then reading the news 📰
It seems like the same old news stories when I open up the New York Times and NPR. Maybe a continuation of the previous stories of cruelty, corruption and abuse of the Trump administration but it sure seems like there is little actual newsworthy content these days.
Maybe it’s just my deep dive into reading, away from the politics and into homesteading, nature and woods, trying to understand what actually matters in this world, and not the click-baity headlines that dominate the news – those based more on human emotion rather then the science of what is actually around us. While hokiness is a problem when you do deep dive into the rat hole around homesteading, you actually learn a lot about practical things that aren’t just the latest farts of some obscure politician hundreds of miles aways that has no bearing on yourlif unless you are colored or poor.
Snowy, slushy day ahead 🌨️
Not going to be a good day to ride in today, necessarily so I will bus it in. Yesterday I did the drive my big jacked up truck to work thing, then inched it in and out of the tiny parking lot at the shit Glenmont Laundromat as people lined up for their slop bucket at whatever the woke restruant is next to that dump of a laundromat as I spent nearly $120 on groceries and supplies at Wally World.
I think I got some good eats out of it, 🍏 and more plastic crap ultimately to send up in smoke. But it will be good and produce much warmth with all that wet wood. Milk, eggs, flour, beans, fruit and vegetables. The usual stuff. Deodorant and toothpaste. Nothing fancy but necessary to ensure my pantry stays full. 😋 I don’t buy things I don’t plan to eat right away, though I probably didn’t need another 5 lb of carrots 🥕 this week but I didn’t want to run out as I’m using them in most meals I cook up. Had more of the green pea soup last night, probably going to put the rest of it in containers and freeze until later in the week or weekend for a change. It was such a bitch getting in and out of the laundromat parking lot, 🛻 but between shopping at Walmart and doing my clothes, 👚 I still was home by around 6:40 PM and was done with dinner by around 7 PM. I guess I read after that, maybe looked at some stupid TikTok or a YouTube, honestly I forgot and fell asleep fairly early on.
Past few nights I’ve been sleeping like shit, 🛏️ not totally sure why except it’s that time of year with the windows closed. It’s not like the electric blanket isn’t nice and warm, though I just toss and turn and find myself waking up during the night. I thought the solution was getting to sleep real early, you know bedding down at 7 or 8 PM and getting up at 4 or 5 AM but I find myself waking up during the night. Maybe it’s dreams 💭 of a better tomorrow, as I watch the minutes fall of the clock ⏰ madly and another year draws to a close. I really hope to get out to Madison County after Christma or at least before the year is done for a few nights in wilderness.
I got busy yesterday, 🔎 and never made the appointment for the inspection and tire rotation for Big Red but I’ll do that today. I also need to do my time sheets at work, 📄 and a half dozen other things that got put off as the line of people and problems piled up at my office, and I furiously wrote out little scripts and fixes to fix random things. Driving in and out was fine, 🚗 but I made the mistake and took Southern Boulevard in on morning, and while it was probably faster then South Pearl, it mean sitting in traffic which I despise. 🚨 There were so many cops on the road last night, I think I passed three of them driving home and running errands. I wasn’t doing anything illegal but come on, give me a break. Why do we have so many jack-booted thugs working for the government? Aren’t their jobs in the private sector, you know like selling roof-top solar panels and Woke-branded organic vacuum cleaners? 🚍 With the snow coming, busing it in today. I’ll bike 🚲 in tomorrow.
Continuing to push my way through Stewart Stronger’s Doable Off-Grid Homestead, 📚 which I need to finish up today before it’s due back at the library and almost done listening to Edward Abbey’s the Fool’s Progress 🃏 which I know is going to end in such a sad and ironic fashion as all of his books do. Honestly, I think I am running out of Edward Abbey books to read. But then again, I still have more Hunter S. Thompson books to explore. I’ll read the Doable Off-Grid Homestead on the bus this morning, and listen to the remainder of Edward Abbey walking the Plaza in the evening. Then I still have a bunch of books to read this weekend. It would be good to go out camping, so I can have a fire 🔥 and listen to audio books late into the night, though this weekend looks cold. I think my Hoopla borrows are all due back a week from Thursday,
Times Union Radio Ad – Support Your Local Journalists 🗞️
I guess, go out, buy a paper and support your local journalists if that is your thing. I’m skeptical though, as most local papers grow thinner and thinner, with most of their staffs being college interns and a handful of old timers who hope their company will stay around long enough for them to retire.
Truth is local journalism is a lot like local restaurants in the era of McDonald’s and the interstate highway system. It serves less and less of a purpose, when local and even state government is mostly about implementing the policies set out by science and the federal government. In a complicated, engineered world, where people float freely from community to community, there isn’t a lot of need for the local anymore. Regional, state, and national planning make a lot more sense, whatever is local is quaint and a throwback like that stubborn café that pokes along on the back road, as most people fill up their Joe at Dunkins and Starbucks.
Not only are local papers thin and often just repetitive of national narrative of today, for the most part local news is news like the articles in Playboy make it a series publication. Newspapers are mostly about salecious stories about the latest violent crime and gory traffic crashes, rarely do they provide much of substantive valley. Often they are little more then propaganda for their publisher, giving comfort to ideology of those who read them regularly. News is good, but I’d rather dig into the data myself. Draw my own conclusions. Or read the positions and reports put out by activist groups themselves, reflecting the views put forward by those money interests, rather then hear it second hand in newspaper.
Maybe it’s better people are getting more of their information directly from the government and interest groups. Why read a newspaper article, when you get the original press release or report? Does the news media do that much of a service over what you can find put from the source? Investigative journalism sounds good, but how does it compare to the opposition digging up dirt on questionable institutions? Maybe I’m just skeptical of the lofty position that journalists often write themselves to be in.