“The only constant in the world is change, and some changes are good and some are personally devastating. That’s the conclusion I got from looking at the graph of the hilltown population over the years. The economy changes and sometimes people lose their livelihoods and half to move on. Despite promises of politicians, it’s very hard to reverse creative destruction of the economy but government can encourage new industries and new uses of the land. Exurban uses of the land, small homesteads and hunting camps brought back by increased wildlife replaced the agrarian economy of an earlier era. “

Heading into the 9 o’clock hour we are up to 34 degrees on our way up to 40 degrees. Some sun and breaks in the clouds, with some light snow showers later. Not a lot of snow, probably just a dusting and no more than a inch or two. Snow is starting to melt somewhat.

The sun will set at 5:28 pm with dusk around 5:57 pm, which is 1 minutes and 18 seconds later than yesterday. Today will have 10 hours and 37 minutes of daylight, an increase of 1 minutes and 43 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a slight chance of snow. Cloudy, with a low of 26 degrees at 4am. Seven degrees above normal. West wind 13 to 18 mph, with gusts as high as 31 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. In 2016, it got down to 18 degrees with periods of fog and rain. The record low of -20 occurred back in 1943.

Tonight is the Save the Pine Bush Dinner at the Westminster Presbyterian Church. Tonight we have Chris Hauver of the Pine Bush Commission speaking. Throughout the evening we will have a slideshow of 1,912 photos — from the archives of Albany Pine Bush along with several photos I’ve taken over the year. I was going to use my laptop but due to the two snowstorms over the past week, my HDMI to VGA adapter was delayed in the mail. Save the Pine Bush’s projector is a few years old, and it doesn’t have HDMI, which is a new standard. It was only $10 and I was going to donate it to Save the Pine Bush after the showing, but I guess I will hold on to it for now and use it for a future presentation. Hopefully it will work well. I have a VGA port on my monitor, and I will test it out at home.

Watched the American Experience Special on Ruby Ridge, followed by Independent Lens show on the Charles Witman shooting at Austin college back in 1966. Talk about a depressing series of shows, but I like to be informed about history and how we got from there to where we are now. I still blame President Bill Clinton for much of the 1990s, the heightened hatred he spawned by his unneccessarily atagonistic policies towards the west. I think Bill Clinton is a lot of reason why the Democratic party is in as serious trouble as it now — there was a time when the Democratic Party was more focused on helping people and improving our infrastructure and not a party primarily focused on helping liberal ideologues.

We are starting to head towards the big climb in temperatures as we head to spring time. Maybe 45 or 50 degrees come the weekend. We might get a few more big snow storms but I don’t expect snow to last at this point. We should have averages a few degrees above freezing everyday now.

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until March 1st when the sun will be setting at 5:46 pm with dusk at 6:14 pm. On that day in 2016, we had rain and temperatures between 38 and 21 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 39 degrees. We hit a record high of 61 back in 1991.

I hope it warms up a lot by the weekend, because I really don’t want to have to dig my truck out by the weekend. The landlord cleaned up the driveway nicely over the past few days, but my truck is still buried under a lot of snow. The good news is where it’s parked, I don’t have to move it for a while, and when I do, I can just knock the snow off it, because it’s not parked on the plowed driveway. Hopefully it won’t be all ice.

I’m almost to work! Have a great day.