As we head towards 90 degrees on this hot and humid day, we are making good progress. Mostly sunny and 86 degrees in Delmar. There is a west breeze at 5 mph. The dew point is 63 degrees.

Today will be sunny, with a high near 91. Nine degrees above normal. Dew points will be sticky, mostly in the mid 60s. West wind 3 to 7 mph. The record high of 97 was set in 1886. Tonight the sun will set at 8:35 pm with dusk around 9:09 pm, which is 21 seconds earlier than yesterday. Today will have 15 hours and 10 minutes of daylight, a decrease of 1 minutes and 2 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be mostly clear, with a low around 68. Seven degrees above normal. Sticky conditions making for ddifficult conditions, with a dew point reaching 67 by 10 pm. Light and variable wind. The record low of 44 occurred back in 1979.

It gets even hotter for Thursday. Yeap. The mercury may only reach 88 or 89 degrees but the dew point will likely break a tropical 70, possibly reaching 71 degrees. How oppressive is that? Most standard air conditioners can only handle dew points up to 76 degrees, at which point they’ll run non stop and produce no cooling. In Florida they sometimes have dew points in the upper 70s but that’s unheard of here.

On this day in 1947, The AK-47 goes into production in the Soviet Union. Even after almost seven decades, the model and its variants remain the most popular and widely used assault rifles in the world because of their substantial reliability under harsh conditions, low production costs compared to contemporary Western weapons, availability in virtually every geographic region and ease of use.

There are 6 weeks until Thrift Shop Day when the sun will be setting at 7:52 pm with dusk at 8:22 pm. The average high temperature is 81 degrees, with a record high of 97 in 1913. The sun sets much earlier once August gets well underway. 

I haven’t had any problems with the truck last night. I’ll keep taking it around for trips, but I think the glitch I noticed over the weekend has gone away. But I given it some more thought, and I’ll take Big Red to the shop to get the air conditioning recharged, the transmission and axle fluids changed scheduled maintenance and a pre-summer road trip inspection done. I could do most of those things done myself but I’d rather leave it to the professionals and not waste my Saturday doing things that can be done better while I’m a work. After all, I can’t get back time lost should I break down on a summer trip (or the cost of a rental car, hotel, etc.). Plus I don’t want to be hot on a summer trip, even though things cool down after a while. Figure budget $500-1,000 but hopefully it will be on the low-end of that.

I don’t expect summer vacation to be enormously expensive. I figure I will mostly need $200-250 in gas, plus food (much of which would normally be spent in a week), plus a few miscellaneous supplies like paper towels and ice. Maybe stop and get ice cream or a few other things. Camping is free in the National Forest and I get into state parks for free with my Empire Passport. Maybe $500 for the week — which should be nice.

I’m going to hold off on getting the intertube for floating. The ones I’ve been looking at aren’t real expensive, but I don’t think I’ll use it until August. Still thinking about the Bluetooth speaker, as that would be good for my summer vacation trip at camp. We will see. I think I can make the math work for all these money priorities.

We will see how this all plays out. Have a good Wednesday.