Good morning! Happy Coldest Week of the Year 🌬! Today doesn’t disappoint on that front. Next Monday is Martin Luther King Day. 🖤 Mostly sunny and 10 degrees in Delmar. There is a north-northwest breeze at 5 mph. 🍃. Things will start to thaw out at Wednesday around 9 am. 🌡️ Winter won’t last forever or so I tell myself. I did turn the heat down a few degrees to about 57 or so, but I don’t dare go lower until mid-week when it’s going to be in the mid-30s. Too cold I risk pipes freezing and the heat unable to catch up when I get home in the evening. Hopefully this excessively cold weather 🏔 won’t last all winter, but who knows based on the latest outlook. The west coast is baking again, as we freeze.

Listening to Todd Rundgen, of Woodstock NY as I take the bus downtown on this sunny but cold morning.🎶 Sixty more scheduled session days left, I got my politician suit on in the words of the former Assemblyman Don Miller. 👔I like some Republicans but he was an asshole on the scale of suburbanite sprawler George Amedork. 👹Fortunately he was only one term unlike Amedork. I do like the sun. Public transit makes cold mornings like this so easy. 🚌 Big Red hates the cold.

Today will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 29 degrees at 3pm. One degrees below normal. North wind around 5 mph. A year ago, we had mostly sunny in the morning, which became clear by afternoon. The high last year was 16 degrees. The record high of 66 was set in 1932. Nine inches of snow fell back in 1999.❄

The sun will set at 4:46 pm with dusk around 5:17 pm, which is one minute and 10 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for mostly clear skies 🌃 and temperatures around 27 degrees. There will be a north-northwest breeze at 5 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 23 minutes of daytime, an increase of one minute and 37 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 16 degrees at 2am. Two degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around February 6th. Maximum wind chill around 17 at 6pm; Northwest wind 3 to 6 mph. In 2018, we had clear in the evening, which became mostly sunny by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 5 degrees. The record low of -20 occurred back in 1957.

It was a nice walk down at Hannacroix Preserve yesterday, 🏃although a bit icy in spots. Fair bit of ice on the falls and it was cold down by the river but I’m hoping I got some good videos out of it. We are in the coldest time of winter but it might start to warm up soon and we are due for some large snow storms as soon as the weekend.❄ I honestly prefer snow on work days because if we get a blizzard on the weekend I’ll be stuck at home versus working in my nice and warm office.

Bought a shit ton of toilet paper. Yesterday I ended spending $90 at Walmart but I got 18 rolls of toilet paper (which was only $14 part of the bill). 🚽 Running low on toilet paper is no fun. I should set for the year but that’s good because when you buy in bulk you save money and less packaging waste to get rid of although I believe you can recycle the plastic bag with other bags you return to the stores. I really put a priority on buy bulk, because not only does it save money it reduces packaging, and delays how soon I have to make my yearly winter trip to the transfer station when my trash cans fill up♻.

I am remarkably annoyed they are banning plastic bags. My liberal friends think it’s the best thing since they legalized abortion, but I don’t know.🛍 I guess I don’t have an opinion on the matter but I hope they have free well cost included paper bags as an alternative.💚 It’s a pain to have to remember my life reusable bags and over time they’ve gotten dirty and worn out. It’s not like any of mine ever go to the landfill,🗑 as I return most of them or they melt and burn just fine up at camp. 🔥

I could live with them getting rid of plastic bags if replaced with free paper, as they tend to be a far greater litter problem then paper bags. Paper rots, plus it comes from a natural resource and is easily recycable with paper. I did a bunch of ants on the cache of bags, I was saving for recycling and reuse, I had over my refrigerator, so I stuck them outside. 🐜 Probably food I spilled, as I often reuse the bags for bringing my lunch to work.I figure the cold will kill them off, and I’ll have to make sure to return them the next time I go to the store.

No plans for trips until at least February. I have plans for staying in town the next two weekends so that brings us until Ground Hog Day weekend, ⛺and I guess snow camping is a possibility then. We will see. I am expecting quite a bit of snow by then, especially if we get the big snow storm over the Martin Luther King Day Weekend.

I would like to be able to do some more skiing, ⛷ and it would nice to have more snow before winter is over. Granted, we probably have at least two more months of winter before it starts to slack off, and really four months until it gets green up north in the Adirondacks, although early May camping in the Adirondacks can be quite fun before the black flies come out.

I have the adapter for the M2 SSD drive and I am going to try to install it tonight into my laptop, 💾 pulling the existing drive, which I will plug in using my USB adapter. I have downloaded the Xubuntu 18.04 distribution and will burn it onto a flash drive, and us that to do a fresh install of Linux, then copy my files and data over to the drive. Sure I will have to re-download all my programs, although custom compiled software on /usr/local and /opt should be able to just be copied over, as the library versions should remain the same.

As previously noted, next Monday is Martin Luther King Day 🖤 when the sun will be setting at 4:55 pm with dusk at 5:25 pm. On that day in 2018, we had cloudy, mild, snow showers and temperatures between 43 and 29 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 30 degrees. We hit a record high of 61 back in 2006.