I guess I can ride my bike into work today, I tell myself. 🥶🚲

It is snowing out again, yes, but the wind isn’t roaring around like they threatened it would be today. Of course the evening commute back downtown on the bike will suck, but whatever, worse comes to worse, I leave my bike in office overnight and catch the shuttle or a city bus downtown and pick my bike up in the morning when I drive Big Red one last time to work.

Snowing out this morning, ☃️ just the light stuff but the wind has been relatively quiet. Maybe it will change by the time it’s to go, 🌬️ but whatever I think I can make it work if I bundle up. 🚴 I just love that feeling when I ride in, how refreshed and energetic I feel when I make it into the office. Too much snow to ride the bike path, so it’s a Corning’s Hill kind of morning. It was it is, and it’s still early enough that if I must I go back to busing it fine. 🚍 I kind of feel bad for the shuttle driver, especially if I’m the only one riding to make him have to run that last trip of the day for just me, as the other driver is on vacation, so he has to stay late to run the bus. Not a lot of shuttle 🚀 riders this last week of the year as many people are off for the holidays. I might have taken more time off but I want to maximize the time I roll over into the new year for travels in my new rig.  🗓️

Going only to work until 1 PM on New Years Eve tomorrow, 🎉 and then run to Walmart and get any last minute supplies before Red’s retirement. Go easy on the bumps so I won’t break the frame before retirement. Then maybe go for a little drive out in country until dusk when I’ll go out and meet the folks for New Years Eve Fondue and park Big Red for the winter out there in the pasture. 🛻 🐐 I’ll take off the license plates on New Years Day, return them to DMV on Monday and call my insurance and let them know the plates have been surrendered and I would like a prorated check for the remaining three months left on my policy. I decided I will just completely drop my registration with the DMV rather then suspend it, as it’s ultimately the dealer who pays for registration costs when you buy a new car, 📄 even if they pretend to pass it along to the buyer with some fictional fee.

But if there is anything I’ve learned in my research about car shopping is all fees and dealer incentives are pure fiction, the only thing you care about is the out the door price, 💰 the one you either cut a check for or get a loan against. Dealers know about money and making numbers work for themselves. I’m the knuckle-drag hick who burns his garbage, who just cares about how money I have to hand 🤝 said dealer whether it be in a town that smells like cow shit or elsewise. 🐮 I have a feeling dairy men buy a lot of trucks like the one I’m looking at. Indeed, I could get $500 farm bureau cash if I was a member on many of trucks I was looking at. I should send the farm bureau a $100 associate membership, lol. It is worth your time to get information on dealer financing once you get an agreed upon price, though if I were to go that route I would definately check out the fine print including prepayment penalities, compare it to interest I get on my investments, and probably not go for it but I’ll keep an open mind – as sometimes dealer will offer a bigger discount if you finance through them. 📄 Getting smart I guess, got to rebuild those brain cells after all the weed and burn plastic fumes. 🤓

Most of yesterday was a pretty ordinary day, 🏢 work, work, work. It was pretty damn quiet in the office, a few things to supervise and approve, still waiting on some issues to be fixed with the database from the programming department. The smart programmer people who really know how to write code and can make sense of the spaghetti C code – unlike the dope smoking, garbage burning, redneck political scientist. I ended up playing with R and updating my GitHub with a few new scripts I’ve written in recent months for maps and diagrams. 💾 The morning bus was a bit early getting downtown, I ended up drifting into thought 💭 pacing around, I looked up and realize I might have missed the shuttle 🚀 to suburban office building when I saw the time, but Ray the shuttle driver was running a bit late due to the weather. Walking the laps in Empire Plaza  👣 after work, there was a bum pushing a wheel chair full of his belongings, but the bums are were all friendly, the local bus on time, and I read some more e-books 📙 and before I knew it was I home, besides the delay around the stop due to multiple cops cars flashing helping a stuck motorist.

All I can think is some politician’s wife must have got cut off at the light and slid into a snow bank at Delaware and Cherry in the snow squall last night. ☃️ There was three cops pushing a a stuck Honda out of a snow bank and directing traffic. 👮 No damage to the car, just high centered on the snow bank. With all the cop cars and lights I thought it was a fire or a bad accident. 🚨 Literally all I could see was them stopping traffic to push a Honda out of the snow bank, and then the driver left, car undamaged. 🤷‍♂️ Must have just been the most exciting event in Delmar for all of the year. That and apparently the power failure  from overload 🔌 last summer when I was out in Finger Lakes or somewhere else smoking dope and burning shit. 🔥 I was just so amused by the commotion, especially when I saw how undamaged the car appeared from the crash. Sigh.

I got to figure out what my reading list will look like for January and get a bunch of books out on Hoopla 📚 before the month and year draws to a close. Especially not having a vehicle after Wednesday, having lots of good reads is important. I want to get a book on car buying, as while I’ve learned a lot from YouTube, information is powerful. I continue studying trucks 🚚 and car buying all month before I start climbing in them in February.  March I will start by reaching out to dealerships in Syracuse, Glens Falls, Oneonta, Newburgh to see what they can offer in out the door prices on trucks I like, and then work my way inwards to closer dealers on a price and model match basis. It’s worth it to take a Greyhound, train or bus – or asking for a ride from the friend – if it’s the rig I want at a price I’m comfortable with paying. But first I got to figure out the different SuperDuty packages, I get regular cab long bed 4×4, but beyond that,  they really are a dizzying mixture 😵 of packages and equipment and widely verying prices. I also want to find other things to read about and fun distractions, as at times the process is frustrating 😤 and confusing. But time is on my side, as it’s stupid to pay thousands more for a truck I hate and quickly want to discard, just because I want to get up in the woods a few weeks sooner to smoke weed, amd illegally burn garbage so I don’t have to wash and recycle plastic. ♻️ Still need to call Meadowbrook Dairy 🐮 to see if they can start supplying me with milk in glass so I can avoid the trash as those milk jugs have long been one of the biggest portions of my garbage. I like cow and hog people, probably because they work the land, 🚜 and typically have lots of fires. Rotted hog shit grows good weed too, I’m told.🐖💩🌿Gotta save money so I can some day have my own hogs, grow weed, have land for that downwind burn barrel ventalated with my freedom stick. 🔫 But first I need a new big ass truck.