Good afternoon! Lunch time, two weeks to Good Friday ✝. Sunny and 33 degrees in Albany, NY. There is a west-northwest breeze at 17 mph. 🍃. The current wind chill is 18. Six weeks ago the Ground Hog saw his shadow. 🐻I guess at this point, that’s just an empty platitude. Cloudy morning, but then the sun came out and filled my office with sunlight. While I was out walking this afetrnoon, it was frigid with the wind whipping around.

🌹🌻🌼Only 4 days remain until the first day of calendar spring!🌹🌻🌼

Today will be partly sunny 🌞 , with a high of 35 degrees at 3pm. Ten degrees below normal. Breezy, with a northwest wind 11 to 16 mph increasing to 20 to 25 mph in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 38 mph. A year ago, we had partly cloudy skies. The high last year was 32 degrees. The record high of 82 was set in 1990. 13.4 inches of snow fell back in 1956.❄

The sun will set at 7:03 pm with dusk around 7:31 pm, which is one minute and 10 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for partly clear skies and 30 degrees. The wind chill around sunset will be 14. ☃ Breezy, 18 mph breeze ⛅ from the west-northwest. That’s definitely going to feel pretty cool. Today will have 11 hours and 59 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 55 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy ☁, with a low of 23 degrees at 2am. Five degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around 15 at 6pm; West wind 9 to 15 mph. I hope soon we can be replacing the maximum wind chill with maximum maximum dew point. I don’t have air conditioning but I do have cold beer and that’s enough, as I sit out back late into the evening on very hot evenings. I much prefer the warm weather, because it means I won’t be paying for the heat. In 2017, we had mostly clear skies. It got down to 16 degrees. The record low of -1 occurred back in 1916.

I think my plans for camping this weekend⛺, are going to fall off the agenda because with the wind I expect it to be bitterly cold. 🌬Not so much the mercury but the wind.  It would be a starry night, but camping in the snow with the wind whipping around, especially on Saturday doesn’t seem that much fun. Of course, I may wake up on Saturday morning, and change my mind with the bright sun that we are expected.☀ At this point I may just want to wait until the snow is ultimately gone. I’m not interested in partaking in the St. Patricks Day festivities, 🍀in part because I don’t really drink much alcohol these days, much less green pissy stuff, especially not in the winter when I’m not camping.

A few months, I stopped listening to the news reports, because much of the news these days really isn’t of interest to me. 🌄 I do like the weather reports, because that’s the news most relevant to me. It just seems like the news reporting is so negative, and my local representatives are no better. I was very disappointed to see all the cheer leading for the student walkouts for gun control — it’s  just unfortunate that High Schoolers are being exploited by billionaires for political gain but I get it.  I understand the Democratic Party needs the money of the billionaire gun controllers.🤑 To get their money, it needs to pretend to support the fake social movements to fund their campaigns. Organized labor has been crushed by a changing economy and GOP policies, so we have to go to billionaires pushing an expansion abortion across our country and banning guns. It’s expensive to run a political campaign these days, I know I’ve run many for people over the years.

That said, I really don’t have an opinion on the happenings of local government as long as my taxes and rent remain low, so I can continue to save and grow my savings so eventually I can afford to pack up my bags and never look back. 📦I can’t change the world, but I can work to my own life better. 🌎There is a lot of injustice in the world, and there are people working hard to change those things, but for my focus is on my life. I do use public transit to get to work, I recycle and burn things to avoid using the landfill, I don’t buy frivolous things (except fo my big jacked up truck), and I don’t have television or Internet at home. And I spend a lot of time in the wilderness.

I’m not happy about yet another hike in my gas and electric bill from Niagara Mohawk, as my bills lately have been quite high, pushing $100 many months, for reasons I’m not totally sure. I’m thinking my old, falling apart refigerator in my apartment and the electric water heater have been using a lot of power — I’ve been pushing 150-200 kwH a month but is much lower in the summer.🔌🍳 I’m thinking it’s because when I am camping I’ve turned off the breaker to electric hot water. Maybe I need to make sure I turn it off when I’m not home for an extended period. Then a few times I’ve left the oven and stove on by accident. I rarely use the electric heat. Looking back from the record, it doesn’t seem like my power consumption has gone up much, it’s just NiMo is charging more now then they used to.

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until Good Friday ✝ when the sun will be setting at 7:19 pm with dusk at 7:48 pm. On that day in 2017, we had snow, mostly cloudy skies and temperatures between 48 and 26 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 51 degrees. We hit a record high of 86 back in 1986.