Good morning! Happy Election Day. 🗳

Have you had a chance to get out and vote yet? I voted earlier in the week.

Mostly cloudy and 36 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁ Calm wind.Temperatures will drop below freezing at Thursday around 1 am. ☃️ They are talking about lake effect snow later in the week for Western NY and Tug Hill, I am watching this carefully to see how this might impact my plans. It could mean I have to plan an alternative routes to avoid having to deal with snow when camping.

Yesterday, I hiked at the beautiful Kinderhook Creek Preserve in East Nassau 🏞 and some of the new Albany – Kinderhook Electric Trail outside of Nassau. The rail trail had some nice views, but it was kind of boring, but the Kinderhook Trail was extraordinarily beautiful in the gorge, although the views from the top weren’t that great.

This morning I plan to do so visibility with the Bethlehem Democrats 🐎 to remind people to get out and vote. It’s voting day — and it’s an important one if you haven’t gotten out already. That said, these days it’s more of a season then a day with Early Voting and no Excuse Early voting. As I note, voting might not change your world, but it sure is an easy one to have an influence on your community, at least a chance to raise your voice in hope of being heard. DeCanacio is fantastic and hope he gets elected to Town Board. Plus those Republicans are obnoxious with their opposition of replacing the notoriously dangerous four lane section of Delaware Avenue, with a 2-lane with turn lane and pull offs for buses and bicyclist. It will make it a lot easier to get to the Dry Cleaner and Hardware store for sure.

Then I want to get down to the library 📚 to order up my camping permit from PA DCNR, 🏕 and a new lantern globe, and maybe boots. I am still chewing over my camping plans for next week — a lot depends on whether or not get the lot of snow in Western NY from the Lake Effect and so forth. It looks like I picked a good week — cool but sunny. 😎 Actually, pretty awesome weather for November.

I’ve been thinking more about West Virginia and Dolly Sods, 🌲 so that possibility hasn’t been totally discarded, but if I have the DNCR permit, it’s free and I am in no obligation to Elk Country but that is still a possibility. I like to keep my options open especially with weather so variable this time of the year, but next week looks super nice. 😀

Been playing a lot the past few days with the R Language and Mapping. 🗺 R is great, especially GGPlot because it makes such nice, clean graphics and maps out of the box without a lot of tweaking. I feel like it’s a good technology to master, because it provides an excellent way to make graphics for sharing both on the blog and social media. The SVG files are particularly nice, as they are very scalable for putting on the blog and are only one file. 🔺 ⚪ ◀️

Finally closed the windows in my apartment and got the storm windows in. ⚪ I’ve also been working on improving the seal around the door with some of that insulating tape and some blow in foam for where the door sill is broke. Stuff that can be easily removed when I move out at some point in the future but hopefully will stop air leaks and improve energy efficiency as we head into this probably cold winter ❄️ with high energy prices. I probably could ask the landlord to do it, but I’d rather not have my rent go up, and he still wants me to pay for the broken door. 🚪