Good evening! Partly clear and 19 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a west breeze at 5 mph. 🍃. There are 2 inches of snow on the ground. ☃ ️Things will start to thaw out at tomorrow around 1 pm. 🌡️

I decided to stay home tonight, ride the exercise bike 🚲 for a while, have some dinner and read 📖. There are other things that I could have done but I was tired 😴 and decided to call it a night early. Almost done reading that book on Storm Lake Iowa. 🌽 Reminds me a lot of the colorful people I knew growing up in a small town.

Sink seems to have freed itself up but I’m going to avoid using it and will go out tomorrow and get more drain solvent after the Guilderland Planning Board meeting I’m attending. No need to make multiple trips. 🛀 I got a little paranoid when I opened my mailbox 📬and saw an add for a plumber – they’re reading my blog – and marketing to me but the truth is I only mentioned it in the morning and it came as a large flat in the bulk mail. At any rate, if it was a serious problem I’d call my landlord 📞 and he’d have it fixed quickly. Nice thing about renting although the plumbing is constantly problematic here.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 12 degrees at 1am. Two degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around 11 at 8pm; West wind around 5 mph becoming light and variable in the evening. 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 0 degrees. The record low of -20 occurred back in 1984.

Tonight will have a Waning Crescent 🌒 Moon with 7% illuminated. The darkest hour is at 12:07 am, followed by dawn at 6:49 am, and sun starting to rise at 7:20 am in the east-southeast (117°) and last for 3 minutes and 15 seconds. Sunrise is 40 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌄 The golden hour ends at 8:03 am with sun in the southeast (124°) at an altitude of 6°. Tonight will have 14 hours and 24 minutes of darkness, a decrease of one minute and 57 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 36 degrees at 4pm. Six degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around February 19th. South wind 3 to 5 mph. A year ago, we had light snow in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 18 degrees. The record high of 62 was set in 1906. 12.9 inches of snow fell back in 1987.❄

It really kills me how much paper garbage I get in my mailbox 📮 every day. Yeah, I have a milk crate where I toss all the non confidential paper trash into and I take it to the recycling dumpster at the park and ride ♻ every few weeks but by then the bin usually is already overflowing in my apartment and the paper recycle dumpster is pretty full most of the time too. And while they pulp and recycle the waste fiber a lot of it still ends as residue taken to the Colonie landfill. Recycling produces a lot of waste too. Even if I heat with wood when I eventually own my off grid property and use paper every night to start the fire I’ll always have an unlimited supply of waste paper for starting the wood stove just from the junk mail. 🔥 And half of that mail ✉ is the glossy stuff that is half clay and produces a ton of ash when burnt and is not good with the glossy coating to burn inside in a woodstove. I guess that the burn barrel can take care of it when I have my own land but it seems like such a waste to cut down all those trees just to burn off the carbon for no real reason. At least no Time Warner Cable ad today but I’m sure there will be one tomorrow.

In four weeks on February 18 the sun will be setting in the west-southwest (255°) at 5:30 pm,🌄 which is 36 minutes and 26 seconds later then tonight. In 2019 on that day, we had snow showers, partly cloudy and temperatures between 26 and 13 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 35 and 18 degrees. In another month, it definitely starts to warm up a bit. The record high of 63 degrees was set back in 1981.

Looking ahead, Don’t Cry over Spilled Milk Day 🥛 is in 3 weeks, National Drink Wine Day 🍷 is in 4 weeks, St. Patrick’s Day 🍀 is in 8 weeks, 7:30 PM Sunset 🌇 is in 11 weeks, Cinco de Mayo 🤠 is in 15 weeks, Primary Day 🗳️ is in 22 weeks, Election Day 2020 🗳️ is in 41 weeks and Election Day 2020 🗳️ is in 41 weeks.