Good morning! Yeah, it’s Friday! Long weekend ahead but it’s Martin Luther King Jr weekend in the bleak of winter and it’s going to rain during the pandemic so don’t get so excited. Two weeks to my 38th Birthday 🎉 . Getting old you might say. Probably not wiser, but I haven’t burned my hand with dripping plastic in a few years. Maybe because I live in the city for now, less chance for making black smoke and injuries with fire.

Partly cloudy and 30 degrees in Delmar, NY. ⛅ A little bit more sun right now for my talk then lately, but hardly a banner morning. But wait there is more — going to cold around my birthday but probably with more sun. Calm wind. So it make it feel fairly mild. There is a dusting of snow on the ground. ☃ Things will start to thaw out at around 10 am. 🌡️

Honestly, right now a pretty nice morning for the walk 🚶🏻. Seeing the sun ☀ is refreshing not that is expected to last. But it is promising to return for late January and be cold ❄. I expect an absolutely frigid February like has been the norm but the strengthening sun angle means any extreme cold and snow 🌨 we get in late February won’t last.

Today will have patchy fog before 11am. Otherwise, mostly cloudy 🌥, with a high of 40 degrees at 2pm. 10 degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around March 4th. Calm wind becoming southeast 5 to 8 mph in the morning. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 47 degrees. The record high of 65 was set in 1995. 13.4 inches of snow fell back in 1983.❄

Morning walk now, 🚶and later it’s off to head downtown for paperwork and a meeting. I am a bit hesitant with the Corona 👾 and riding the bus, but I’ll mask up. 😷 🚌 I was surprised to see from that graph I posted last night that 1 in 20 Albany County residents so far has had COVID — it’s really been popping up a lot the past two months, although some has to do with testing. At least Albany County is still not in the yellow or orange zone. 🚦 I really can’t complain about the weather. At any rate it’s nice to get out of the apartment — the morning and evening walks are great but working from home seems so trapping at times, especially when it’s cold and I can’t be outside or in the wilderness. ❄ No more of this working and camping outside of Speculator at least until the springtime.

Yesterday I got to the store and bought the world’s biggest box of Bisquick and cereal. 🥣I try to buy in bulk to reduce the amount of trash because I don’t like going to the transfer station as it costs money and living in the city means fewer opportunities to burn things. 🔥 No more free paper recycling. ♻ I think buying such a big box of Bisquick last time, and eating so many Bisquick biscuits like five years ago was why I stayed away from it. 🥞 I guess there is also Bisquick pancakes and other things on the package I can make to use it up. I also fueled up Big Red ⛽ because my tank was low, and I wanted to have fuel in case shit gets real next week 💣 and I need to evacuate. I don’t expect next week to be crazy, but there are some on the left who are sure it’s going to be nuts. 👊 Well I have my truck, and I’m working from home and I know plenty of places to hide out if necessary. 🚗 That said, I expect Inauguration Day to be boring, and I’ll watch it from home or maybe down at the library. 🖥 Really do need to cut down my bandwidth a bit to make it through the month. Too much streaming video, even though I have a so-called unlimited plan.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 12:06 pm with sun having an altitude of 26.3° from the due south horizon (-44.5° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 12.1 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 4:04 pm with the sun in the southwest (234°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-southwest (242°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 4:48 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 18 seconds with dusk around 5:18 pm, which is one minute and 11 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see the Waxing Crescent 🌒 Moon in the southwest (223°) at an altitude of 20° from the horizon, 242,654 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 5:54 pm. At sunset, look for mostly cloudy skies ☁ and temperatures around 38 degrees. There will be a southeast breeze at 8 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 25 minutes of daytime, an increase of one minute and 39 seconds over yesterday.

I am watching the bandwidth I’ve been using with my phone 📱 over the past three weeks, and I think 🤔 I need to be careful about how much data I use. While I’m well below the 20 gb Hotspot limit I want to keep the unlimited mobile under the 60 gb for a month to avoid potentially triggering a teems of service review even if I think my usage is consistent, but I don’t have Wi-Fi at home and I use it for a lot of work video streaming and video meetings. 📹 But I really don’t need to watching hour long videos on my phone of manure drag lining as fascinating as that may be. 🐮 🚜 💩 I can always download those kind of videos at the library and watch them on my laptop.💻 I also don’t want to get to addicted to watching videos on my phone — one the pandemic is over or warmer weather comes back, I fully plan on going back to my cheaper phone plan without the hotspot or unlimited mobile data. I like walking down to the library or the park when I want to use the internet at night. Keeps me on a schedule, makes it so I’m not staying home all of the time.

Tonight will have a slight chance of rain and snow before 10pm, then rain. 🌧 Low of 36 degrees at 8pm. 22 degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around April 11th. Southeast wind 8 to 14 mph, with gusts as high as 24 mph. Chance of precipitation is 90%. Little or no snow accumulation expected. In 2020, we had partly cloudy skies. It got down to 24 degrees. The record low of -16 occurred back in 1971.

Tomorrow will rain, mainly before 1pm. 🌧 High of 41 degrees at 12pm. 11 degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around March 7th. East wind 9 to 14 mph becoming light and variable. Winds could gust as high as 24 mph. Chance of precipitation is 90%. New precipitation amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 42 degrees. The record high of 62 was set in 1995. 15.1 inches of snow fell back in 1945.❄

Well I could have dreamed of getting up to the Adirondacks this weekend, 🏕 but I knew that was unlikely with the normally lousy weather that is the norm this time of year. It’s going to be kind of wet, but I downloaded several videos and I have books to read too. 📚 I really should do more reading. I am probably going to go out to the folks house on Monday, but I’ll see what it’s like. I would be nice to get out and some hiking — maybe Martin Luther King Day but it’s going to be cold.

Looking ahead to Sunday, isolated snow showers. 🌧 Mostly cloudy, with a high near 38. Breezy, with a west wind 9 to 14 mph increasing to 16 to 21 mph in the morning. Winds could gust as high as 36 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. Typical average high for the weekend is 30 degrees.

🌹🌻🌼Only 64 days remain until the first day of calendar spring!🌹🌻🌼 Day by day spring is coming. Did you see my post about Rensselearville and trout season? It’s only like a few months away until April 1st, although truth be told, most of the good trout holes are located in places where I don’t have cell service which makes it bit hard to work on the laptop with a fishing pole in the opposite hand.

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until my 38th Birthday 🎉 when the sun will be setting at 5:05 pm with dusk at 5:35 pm. Happy Birthday to Me. I am working from home so I won’t have to stay in the office or necessarily do anything special. On that day in 2020, we had partly cloudy and temperatures between 35 and 19 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 31 degrees. We hit a record high of 54 back in 2002.