Good morning! Happy Tuesday. Next Tuesday is National Bird Day 🐦. Cloudy at the freezing point in Delmar. ☁ Breezy, ️16 mph breeze from the south 🌬 with gusts up to 28 mph 💨💨💨. The current wind chill is 21. Sidewalks and the grass have a glaze of ice on them but it’s not terribly slippery in Delmar. The skies will clear Friday around 2 am. Then it will get really cold, well relatively speaking. Fortunately though the heat in my apartment has been turned back on. The burner control switch was accidentally shut off when they were servicing another units boiler.

Today will have a chance of freezing rain before 9am, then rain showers likely. Mostly cloudy 🌦, with a high of 39 degrees at 1pm. Nine degrees above normal, which is similiar to a typical day around March 1st. South wind 10 to 16 mph, with gusts as high as 28 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. Little or no ice accumulation expected. A year ago, we had cloudy in the morning, which became light snow by afternoon. The high last year was 27 degrees. The record high of 60 was set in 2008. 8.3 inches of snow fell back in 1923.❄

The sun will set at 4:39 pm with dusk around 5:11 pm, which is one minute and 3 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for rain 🌧 and temperatures around 39 degrees. There will be a south-southeast breeze at 10 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 15 minutes of daytime, a decrease of one minute and 15 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will rain before 1am, then rain and snow. 🌧 Low of 34 degrees at 6am. 19 degrees above normal, which is similiar to a typical night around April 6th. South wind 8 to 10 mph becoming southwest after midnight. Chance of precipitation is 90%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. In 2018, we had cloudy in the evening, which became mostly sunny by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 24 degrees. The record low of -20 occurred back in 1968.

Tomorrow is the first day of the year session, 👔so I’ll have to dust off my politician suit. I actually need to buy another ironing board cover as the old one got mildewy and tossed into a fire at some point along the way. Mom was saying they sell them at Walmart. I have to stop and buy some file folders too before I head over to John Wolcott’s house to continue sorting his archives as part of a local history project that Save the Pine Bush is doing.📂 At some point they will end up in a local historical library and contain probably one of Albany’s richest collections of history.

Last night I got my flu shot, 💉 and then went to the public hearing of the Guilderland Industrial Development Agency where they proposed giving a generous sales and mortgage tax exemption💰 to Crossgates Maul to build apartments in the Pine Bush across from preserve lands on a parcel that connects habitat for the Karner Blue. 🐥 Stupid proposal but Crossgates is failing as people don’t shop at mauls anymore and they’re trying to be part of the overbuilding of apartments in Guilderland 🏢 which will certainly crash in price in the coming years. Make money now and leave others holding the bag I guess is the thing now.

Still really busy with the report I’m working on with work, 📝but hopefully that will wrap up soon and there won’t be too many late nights later this week. I just want things to go smoothly as we head to the weekend. Going to be cold and maybe snowy this weekend but with family obligations and other necessary things I expect another busy weekend. The good news is it’s making January pass by quickly. 🌀

As previously noted, next Tuesday is National Bird Day 🐦 when the sun will be setting at 4:47 pm with dusk at 5:18 pm. On that day in 2018, we had cold, partly cloudy and temperatures between 21 and 5 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 30 degrees. We hit a record high of 65 back in 1995.