I am sure I had a catchy name for the blog post 🗒️

Please don’t murder me, I think the lyrics of the Grateful Dead song goes.

I actually really like how that Maryland map I just posted came out. While it seems like these days I’ve not been doing as much map making as I should, it’s always fun to develop interesting and pretty maps in QGIS. The key is do to all the data preparation and development in R, and then focus on using QGIS to make the actual map look pretty. Trying to manipulate data through QGIS’ user-friendly GUI interface is awful compared to running it through a pipeline of chained together R commands.

It snowed, and it will continue to snow this upcoming week. It’s still the first half of February for a few more days, and that’s to be expected. Next weekend, President’s Day Weekend still looks like crap for heading out of town, but maybe that will have to wait until a future week. The forecast could though inevitably changed, but for now we are stuck in the cold and snowy pattern.

It was nice riding yesterday, I think I got in around 15 miles of riding and it was fun walking around on the frozen Black Creek Marsh. I do wish I had brought my bike down to creek and ridden on the ice, it would have been so much fun, with that layer of snow on it for good traction. Looking forward to the red wing black birds returning, but this winter that’s probably more then a few week off. Maybe a future week, though now there is probably too much snow. Don’t think I’ll be riding in much this week either as the rail trail has quite a bit of snow and it’s going to be cold and snowy a good portion of the week. I guess there is always is the Corning Hill and riding up past the Port of Albany, but I hardly enjoy that but maybe it beats busing it every day.

Made chicken soup last night, using up the last of the noodles and rice I had in the kitchen. Also used up the remaining black beans and tomatoes dish I made up for the chilli cooking contest on Friday. My dish when moderately well, but it also made some good meals at home. I have more black beans and great white beans cooked and frozen in the freezer, but my stomach needs a break from all those beans I’ve had this past week. I mean I’m pretty gassy from all those beans.

Besides map making, eating, and riding trail and road, been doing some reading. Started a book about Tiny Houses and more about writing Linux programming code. Trying to learn a few more skills here and there, and continue to explore my options for an actual, real home and not my dumpy apartment.

Going out to see the family this afternoon and then I’ll probably head over to Walmart to stock my pantry. The idea is if I leave at 6:30 PM tonight it won’t be so late in the evening, but after all the Superbowl attendees have burrowed in front of their tele eating terribly unhealthy food and watching terribly bad for one’s mental health commercials. Truth is I don’t really understand football or care one way or anothe about the spot.