Good morning! Happy Thursday. Four weeks to Valentines Day ❤️. I love it with all the sun, as it makes it pleasant, even if it is cold. Sunny and 12 degrees in Delmar. 🌞 There is a northwest breeze at 6 mph. 🍃. Won’t need the lights on my in office until late. Things will start to thaw out at tomorrow around 11 am. 🌡️

With the sun and not much breeze it really doesn’t seem that bad. I walked down to the express park and ride with my coat unbuttoned but I was burning calories. 🚌 Sitting in the woods I would probably have a different impression of the cold. I didn’t get a real early start, so I was skeptical about catching the bus, but somehow I managed to do that today. Traffic was heavy heading into the city, as the right lane was closed with a crash or a break down being assisted by the state police, and the left lane was closed ahead due to road-construction.👷 Another big commercial vehicle inspection thing going down today at the Park and Ride today.👮

Today will be mostly sunny 🌞, with a high of 25 degrees at 2pm. Five degrees below normal. Northwest wind around 6 mph becoming calm in the afternoon. A year ago, we had light snow in the morning, which became cloudy by afternoon. The high last year was 28 degrees. The record high of 62 was set in 1889. 10.9 inches of snow fell back in 1994.❄

The sun will set at 4:50 pm with dusk around 5:21 pm, which is one minute and 12 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for partly cloudy skies 🌃 and temperatures around 24 degrees. There will be a calm wind. Reasonable for mid-January. Today will have 9 hours and 29 minutes of daytime, an increase of one minute and 46 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will snow, mainly after 11pm. 🌨 Low of 18 degrees at 8pm. Four degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around February 17th. South wind 5 to 7 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New snow accumulation of less than one inch possible. In 2018, we had mostly clear skies. It got down to 2 degrees. The record low of -19 occurred back in 1957.

Last night was the Save the Pine Bush Dinner. The history of the the Rapp Road Historical Association is always a fascinating, and Anne Pope, Rev Sam Johnson and Stephanie Woodard had a great talk about it. 🗣 Good lasagna too, nobody left hungry or without their tastebuds full. 🍝 Definitely listen to the podcast.🎧 And also check out WMHT’s Crossroads: The History of the Rapp Road Community, if you are more into the video side of things and want a shorter introduction.

Definitely a good dinner, although like I do too often, I drank too much coffee and while I fell to sleep fairly early, 💤 the quality of sleep I get after having so much coffee definitely suffers. ☕ I also have a bit of a low-grade cold I’ve had on and off and by morning I had a bit of a sore throat and some aches. By the time I had my shower and was going, I was feeling a lot better, good enough to walk briskly down to the express bus stop this morning. 🍳 I made up egg waffles again, melted some cheese on them, although I got some egg shell in one, and it made it a bit crunchy.

Tonight is the sold-out lecture at the Pine Bush Commission about climate change.🌍 It should be a very interesting lecture. Going to be a cold night, so I hope I don’t have problems with the sensor not letting my get the truck out of park, but I think I figured out how to address that if I have problems — tap the brake a few times. After the first start and driving a bit, it seems fine. I probably should get it fixed, but if it’s fine once it’s warm, at least for now. I know driving a jacked-up truck to a global warming lecture is well, umm… but the Pine Bush center is out in the sticks and not easily accessible via public transportation. Depending on how willing I am to brave the cold, I might go for a short moonlit hike after the lecture.🌔

The other day, I watching the Steven Family Farm homesteading channel on YouTube. What a nice homestead they’ve built out of one of the shed-to-house conversions in the Ozarks of Arkansas.🏠 They’re really popular down south I’ve heard. I’ve actually never been to the south outside of Virginia, but I do like the laid back way of doing things down there, at least if your white and don’t live in a big city. I found the cultural norms in backwater Virginia to be just werid, kind of racist and repulsive.

Homesteading and off-grid shed-to-home seems like such an affordable way to do things, especially if you don’t want a big house and want to live out in the sticks with as minimal of material things as possible.🐷🐔🏠 Sure, not much value retained in the building, but it also means you might be able to pick up something used real cheap. On the Stevens Family Farm use solar for electricity, heat with wood, raise a lot of their own food and livestock such as pigs, chickens, duck, hunt, burn their own trash and compost their poop and organic matter (so nearly zero landfill), use bulk propane for their refrigerator and stove. Kind of like my old neighborhood.🚜 And they have a great view from their homestead. I don’t know though, 8 people living in a 800-foot structure must be tight especially in the winter, but they probably save a lot of money and resources, and don’t have to work nearly as hard for their lives. Living in the city and making a lot of money is fun,🤑 but I’d rather live a life based on reality rather then escape.

I’ve been also watching the cannabis debate in the state carefully, and what it will mean for people that want to grow their own marijuana.🌱 Not sure I would want to do that even if it was legal, but it’s an interesting discussion, and I think if they do legalize it I would hope home growing would be allowed. It’s a good crop from everything I read, and while I hardly have a green thumb or a desire to get stoned, it might be nice one day when I finally own land, and we come towards a rational national public policy as it related to cannabis. I could definitely see more low tax, conservative states allowing marijuana for on-farm growing and consumption. Like cigarette smoke, it marijuana isn’t pleasant to be around when others are smoking, but I feel like I should be able to do what I want on my own land. 🚭

Still watching the weather for the weekend, as it might be very snowy. Saturday going out for breakfast with my parents and then hopefully the snow will hold off until I get back home that evening. I have to return some library books 📚, then Sunday I will probably strap on skis, and head over to the rail trail for some winter skiing in the fresh snow they expect.⛷ I want to get that SSD drive installed and files moved over, and the software re-installed on the new drive. I will have to figure out if I should order a replacement sound connector for my laptop, and also if I want to get an enclosure so I can put my second old hard drive in the DVD bay now.💿

Looking ahead, there are 4 weeks until Valentines Day ❤️ when the sun will be setting at 5:26 pm with dusk at 5:55 pm. On that day in 2018, we had mostly cloudy and temperatures between 45 and 28 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 34 degrees. We hit a record high of 63 back in 1946.