Good morning! January is almost done. It froze its you know what off. Two weeks to Valentines Day ❤️. Mostly sunny and -4 degrees in Delmar. Light breeze. 🍃. It would be a lot colder if there was a breeze but there is none in the burbs but I’m sure it’s breezy in the city. There are 9 inches of snow on the ground. ☃ Things will start to thaw out at Sunday around noontime. 🌡️ But then again, I hurried to the bus stop and timed it so I didn’t wait long outside at all. 🚏 I also knocked the snow off the solar panel on my truck, so to top the accessory battery off in my truck, both to protect it from the cold and to have it as a boost when I start my truck up this evening.

Today will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 13 degrees at 3pm. 19 degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -22 at 8am; West wind 13 to 15 mph. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies. The high last year was 30 degrees. The record high of 58 was set in 1913. 6.9 inches of snow fell back in 2000.❄ Definitely a cold day. I left the heat turned up again, and the cabinets open to make sure I have hot water when I get home, as that’s the pipe that’s least insulated in my apartment. But honestly, we’ve had colder days, and assuming the heat keeps up, I don’t anticipate much cold when I get home.

The sun will set at 5:08 pm with dusk around 5:37 pm, which is one minute and 19 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for mostly clear skies 🌄 and temperatures around 11 degrees. The wind chill around sunset will be -3. ☃️ There will be a west breeze at 10 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 58 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 20 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be mostly clear 🌃, with a low of -2 degrees at 6am. 17 degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -8 at 5am; Southwest wind 3 to 8 mph. In 2018, we had mostly clear in the evening, which became partly cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 28 degrees. The record low of -20 occurred back in 1920.

Tomorrow will be mostly sunny 🌞, with a high of 16 degrees at 3pm. 16 degrees below normal. West wind 3 to 5 mph. A year ago, we had mostly sunny. The high last year was 39 degrees. The record high of 65 was set in 1989. 15.0 inches of snow fell back in 1898.❄

Yesterday was a busy but much more sane day at work, in part because everything in the Buffalo offices was shut down from the blizzard. The relative quiet was nice. 💼

I left the heat relatively high yesterday when I went to work so it was very comfortable after I got home after my frigid commute.🔥 It was very cold at the bus stop in the evening with the wind whipping around but everybody mostly piled into the shelter and was warm so close together. Roads were a bit slick but I had the speedy driver so we weren’t held up much. ❄Very comfortable at bedtime but cool in the morning upstairs. I thought about turning the electric heat on but I figured I was getting ready for work downstairs in the kitchen and I could accept the coolness until I headed out to Siberia for work. Even Siberia wasn’t that bad as there is a lot of sun and not much wind in Delmar.

Fixed the VMS display in my apartment. There was a loose connection between one of modules that was causing invalid data and errors to pop up on the display.♒ Generally the SPI interface is pretty reliable but if you have noise in the line from a bad connection it can cause all kinds of problems. I just like having random climate and sunset stats being displayed in my bedroom. 💻I should hook the one back up in my office too, although I’d like to make that one also ESP32 based so I can have more messages and displays just like at home.

I had a hard time soldering at first last night. I thought I might have had some defective solder, as I used a roll that I’d never used before, but it turns out the iron just wasn’t hot enough. 🔬 That and I was a bit tired, so my handling wasn’t great when I soldered some pins onto another Arduino Nano board that I was using for testing purposes with the VMS display, but I was able to clean up the solder bridges, and get things working well once the iron got up to temperature.

Still thinking about painting over the indicator LEDs on the buck converter and maybe a few others on driver boards across my apartment. The light from the glow of the LEDs is annoying even if all they draw is measured in nano watts. 💡I thought about trying to bridge them out with solder but that might allow to much power through or trying to desolder them but that would be difficult due to the size. I realized that I also forgot to turn them off before I left but its not that big of deal, maybe a half a kilowatt or less will be wasted before I get home. Maybe I should add a line of code to shut them off automatically when it’s a weekday after 9 AM.

Discovered that for some reason I can no longer edit files in the Arduino IDE. Something locked, I’ll have to search the internet🔏. I’m planning on doing more programming going forward though using my favorite Geany text editor with the Arduino app’s command line mode. The Arduino IDE ain’t awful but I prefer the native GTK look of Geany and it’s also a bit quicker to load and has better syntax highlighting in my book. Also, I’m having trouble getting mysql for development work restored on my laptop, it’s a permissions issue I’m still trying to fix.

Cooked up macaroni and cheese using some macaroni and grated cheese I bought from the store last week. Tossed in a large bag of mixed vegetables in the mix and some hot sauce. Pretty good meal.🍛 Breakfast was waffles with frozen pineapple chunks and blueberries again.

I’m not sure what happened to the ants I kept finding on the counter. The first time I cleaned the counter well with soap than bleach they came back but now their gone. I did stick an old container of ant bait I had up there but I doubt that worked.🐜 Stuff was old, from a previous tenant over a decade ago. I’m still going to get some ant bait to ensure they’re all killed off, probably after I go and visit Mr. Wolcott tonight.

As previously noted, there are 2 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.

Right now, a split verdict on the weekend. 😕 Saturday, partly sunny, with a high near 32. Southwest wind 3 to 6 mph. Sunday, mostly cloudy, with a high near 35. Typical average high for the weekend is 32 degrees. Still not so cold and come later February the average high for weekends is above freezing.

In four weeks on February 28 the sun will be setting at 5:44 pm,🌄 which is 36 minutes and 7 seconds later then today. In 2018 on that day, we had rain and temperatures between 60 and 32 degrees. I’ll take that. Typically, you have temperatures between 38 and 20 degrees. The record high of 63 degrees was set back in 1903. Didn’t break the record last year.

Looking ahead, Valentines Day ❤️ is in 2 weeks, Spring 🌷 is in 7 weeks, Average High is 50 🌸 is in 8 weeks, Average High is 60 🌼 is in 11 weeks, Average High is 70 🐮 is in 15 weeks, Independence Day 🇺🇸 is in 22 weeks and August 🌻 is in 26 weeks.