Good morning! Happy 5 PM Sunset 🌆! It’s finally here, a sign that days are really starting to accelerate in length. Five weeks to March 🌨. Mostly cloudy with some icy spots ⛸️ and 30 degrees in Delmar. Sidewalks down to the park and ride were salted and mostly ice free but that wasn’t the case with my driveway. ☁ There is a south-southwest breeze at 7 mph. 🍃. There are 4 inches of snow on the ground. ☃ Things will start to thaw out at around 1 pm. 🌡️

That’s good, it will melt the ice before the big freeze comes tonight, although I guess now the weekend forecast is more moderate than expected earlier in the week.😎 Did you hear about the big news story today about the flooding and the boats being broken free from the Troy docks? 🚤 It looks like closed the Interstate 90 Patroon Island Bridge due to fears that a boat could strike the bridge, but for me the traffic impacts were minimal as far as I can tell. There was a cop on the on-ramp to encourage traffic to slow, but it seems like it’s moving. I bet though a lot of Rennselear County commuters are very miserable this morning. Quite a bit of ice though flowing down the river from what I could see of the South Maul flyover, and it looked like there was several tug boats operating on the river. Nice walk though down to the Park and Ride.🚌 

Today will have a slight chance of snow showers after 1pm. Mostly cloudy 🌦, with a high of 34 degrees at 2pm. Three degrees above normal, which is similiar to a typical day around February 11th. West wind 7 to 13 mph, with gusts as high as 23 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. A year ago, we had mostly sunny. The high last year was 25 degrees. The record high of 61 was set in 1938. 9.5 inches of snow fell back in 2000.❄

The sun will set at 5:00 pm with dusk around 5:30 pm, which is one minute and 17 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for partly cloudy skies 🌃 and temperatures around 29 degrees. There will be a west breeze at 11 mph with gusts up to 22mph. Today will have 9 hours and 44 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 7 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 12 degrees at 5am. Two degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around 5 at 4am; West wind 5 to 9 mph. In 2018, we had cloudy in the evening, which became mostly sunny by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 9 degrees. The record low of -17 occurred back in 1920.

Last night, I was pretty tired and felt a bit sick, so I had some dinner, listened to NPR’s Marketplace, pulled out the soldering iron and did some coding for a while 💻 then watched a few Youtube videos and retired to bed. I am still pretty happy with the performance of the new microprocessor I’m using to drive the lights, and now the blue channel is much more stable without the IR remote code not interfering with the PWM on the blue channel.

I am thinking I will add a HC-05 module to the board, so I can have a dedicated bluetooth  channel to communicate to the light fixture over my bed, 🖧 as I am thinking it’s going to be too difficult and possibly too unreliable to use the built in bluetooth of the ESP 32 to switch between commands it’s getting from my phone and communicating across the room. 📶 The bluetooth serial library for the ESP 32 is pretty straightforward, some of the other bluetooth code including for setting up a bluetooth master is confusing. I don’t expect much of a difference in power consumption, especially as I’m using the buck regulator to supply the 3.3 volts, so no loses due to linear regulation like I have when it’s powered by 5 volts.🔌 It’s a work in process.

Tomorrow is the Save the Pine Bush Hike that I’m leading. 🚶🌲9:30 AM, ski trip start at the Discovery Center, then head out to the Truax Tavern trail barrens. I can’t believe it’s already been a month since the last hike and when I was camping in Madison County for that nice weekend at the end of year, but so time goes by so quickly. I do hope to get back out and spend at least one night in the wilderness come February, although the really long range doesn’t look good for Ground Hog Day Weekend.🐻 I don’t mind winter camping, but it’s can be outrageously cold and windy.🌬 I miss spending time in the wilderness, especially those long nights. That said, winter camping is a lot colder and harder to get to remote country unlike the summer. Those days and the black flies will return.🐜

Yes I was pretty tardy at posting my morning update to the blog yesterday. I forgot about clicking upload yesterday and I was very busy at work yesterday📤 so I had no time to click post especially as I got in the office as their was some delays on the bus. Today I got it posted a bit earlier. 😜

Looking ahead, there are 5 weeks until March 🌨 when the sun will be setting at 5:45 pm with dusk at 6:13 pm. On that day in 2018, we had partly cloudy, mild, snow showers and temperatures between 50 and 35 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 39 degrees. We hit a record high of 66 back in 2017.