Good morning! Happy New Years Day 2020 🎉 ! It’s a new morning in a new decade. Next Wednesday is Bubble Bath Day 🠼򏀮 Partly cloudy, breezy and 29 degrees at the Cole Hill State Forest in Berne. ❄ More clouds then sun but when the blue peaks through its pretty nice with the ice on the trees. Breezy, ️16 mph breeze from the west 🌬 . The current wind chill is 17. Things will start to thaw out at around noontime. 🌡️ A chilly but kind of pretty morning when I got up briefly to do my business 💩 outside.

So we made it to the new decade. 🎇 I guess that should surprise no one, it’s just another stepping stone 🗻 in the great progression of things. One year closer to all hell breaking loose with climate change. That said, it was kind of neat to spend New Years Eve in the wilderness especially with that very brief winter thunderstorm. I wish it had been a little colder when I set up camp though as things were a bit sloshy 💧for a while until the mercury dropped. Made for the sled sliding well with the gear. Everything is frozen solid this morning though.

Coffee with egg nog ☕ is good on this first morning, which is a bit chilly but not too bad. Like anything it’s all a matter of how you choose to dress. 👚 Of course half the winter I keep my apartment at fifty degrees to save on the heat so I can’t complain that much about 29 degrees in the wilderness, sitting next to the propane heater. Gotta save money 💵 so I can burn it in my is jacked up truck.

A new decade with new challenges but I’ll embrace them as they come. 🎉 Always keep on learning and saving for a better tomorrow. I think by 2030 I’ll be much closer to owning land and finally getting to a better place to live with more freedom. 😍

An off grid property like a hunting camp way out in the country without running water or electricity on 40 acres is a lot more affordable than one might think 💭. Certainly a steal compared to the plastic houses 🏡 the suburbanites love. Taxes are so much lower in a place like Missouri too. I bet when you generate your own power with solar, haul your own water, heat with wood you chop your own self and meat you harvest yourself, you are a lot more conscious of waste. ♻

Only a few more weeks of plastic bags 👝 at the supermarkets. I have some cloth bags I got from work I’ve been saving for some time to use when the new law goes into effect. I’ll just need to make sure I reserve them for shopping purposes 🏪 and not bring them to work with lunch or carry them out to the woods with gear for camping ⛺. I used to use reusable bags a lot more years ago, but stopped because I never had them with me. I was thinking this morning how I’ll miss them for camping – so convenient for carrying gear, keeping things dry and storing camp trash until it’s burnt 🔥. I bought paper rather than Styrofoam bowels for camping this time – they’re actually a lot more durable in the pack, don’t smell nasty when they’re burnt and the more I learn about Styrofoam the more nasty I realize it is – especially the blowing agents and climate change. They’re not that much more expensive. 🍚 Now I get that there isn’t much of a difference between paper and Styrofoam in a landfill – waste of all types barely break down in landfills but that’s fine because I don’t want tend to burn my camp trash.

Back from dreaming to the forecast for today. New Year’s Day 2029 will have a slight chance of snow showers. Mostly cloudy 🌦, with a high of 35 degrees at 2pm. Four degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around February 15th. West wind around 17 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. A year ago, we had cloudy skies. The high last year was 53 degrees. The record high of 57 was set in 1966. 9.2 inches of snow fell back in 1961.❄

Solar noon 🌞 is at 12:01 pm with sun having an altitude of 24.3° from the due south horizon (-46.5° vs. 6/21). Still got a ways to go before the sun is high in the sky. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 3:48 pm with the sun in the southwest (231°). 📸 Might actually be a good time to take some pictures this afternoon, especially in the hill towns with all the ice. The sunset is in the west-southwest (239°) starting at 4:30 pm and lasts for 3 minutes and 24 seconds with dusk around 5:05 pm, which is 50 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 The best time to look at the stars is after 5:41 pm. At sunset, look for possible snow showers 🌨 and temperatures around 32 degrees. The wind chill around sunset will be 21. ☃️ Breezy, 16 mph breeze 🍃 from the west. Today will have 9 hours and 6 minutes of daytime, an increase of 43 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight, that is for the New Years Day Eve fondue my parents are having will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 22 degrees at 6am. Six degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around March 4th. I’m ready to skip ahead to March. Saves on the heating bills, says the boy who puts $60 bills into the tank of his big jacked up truck but hates paying $80 for heat and electricity. ♨ Maximum wind chill around 17 at 3am; West wind 6 to 15 mph. In 2019, we had mostly clear skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 20 degrees. The record low of -20 occurred back in 1970.

This afternoon having cheese fondue at the parents house 🍲 as their annual New Years Day celebration 🎉. Always a fun way to toast in the new year. Kind of hard to believe it’s already 2020, seemed like we were celebrating 2019 only a few days ago. Last year went by so fast.

Rain and snow this weekend but not really cold. 💦 Saturday, rain likely. Cloudy, with a high near 43. Chance of precipitation is 70%. Sunday, a chance of snow before 1pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 33. Chance of precipitation is 30%. Typical average high for the weekend is 31 degrees.

This next weekend is a stay at home weekend except for the Save the Pine Bush meeting and maybe hiking in the Pine Bush before it. 🚶 I doubt they’ll have enough snow to ski 🎿 there. But that’s fine. The Pine Bush often is just as pretty without snow than with it.

🌹🌻🌼Only 78 days remain until the first day of calendar spring!🌹🌻🌼

I know, what a joke 🃏 with the flowers 🌷and calendar 📅 spring. I mean by then you might see farmers in Alabama posting pictures of happy cows 🐮 grazing on grass for the first time but it’s still a month or five weeks until you’ll see any real green in outlying parts. Still it gives me something to look forward to. I have certainly camped a few times on the first day of spring.

As previously noted, next Wednesday is Bubble Bath Day 🧼 when the sun will be setting at 4:40 pm with dusk at 5:11 pm. On that day in 2019, we had cloudy, mild, rain showers and temperatures between 41 and 29 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 30 degrees. We hit a record high of 60 back in 2008.