Good morning! Happy Sunday. Two weeks to December 🎄. Christmas is coming or as the Republicans want you to believe, you can only say Happy Holidays. My view is that around Christmas say Merry Christmas and the rest of the holiday season say Happy Holidays. Nothing wrong with being a proud Christian, a Jew, Muslim or somebody who just enjoys watching wrapping papers and Styrofoam packing blocks that the Christmas toys come in go up in smoke. 💨 Stinky black smoke for that Styrofoam for sure. Greta wouldn’t approve.

Its a very cold morning Mostly sunny and cold around 22 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a north breeze at 5 mph. 🍃. Things will start to thaw out at around noontime. 🌡️ After the freezing rain tomorrow morning it’s actually going to warm up. Or so I’m told. This is why I really need a well insulated place with a wood stove. Unlike the New Scotland Armory where the Green Energy Fair was held and heated with fracked gas in a building with windows missing.

Today will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 36 degrees at 2pm. 11 degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around December 14th. North wind around 6 mph becoming northeast in the afternoon. A year ago, we had cloudy skies in the morning with more sun in the afternoon. The high last year was 44 degrees. The record high of 73 was set in 1928. 2.8 inches of snow fell back in 1992.❄

Kind of another cold day 💨 but it’s November and that’s to be expected. I’m planning to run to the store and go over to the Pine Bush for a quick little Save the Pine Bush Hike at 1:30 at Willow Street trailhead then to a meeting at the library to discuss the proposed Crossgates housing complex in the Pine Bush. 🚶 Then out to the folks house for Sunday dinner.

The sun will set at 4:31 pm with dusk around 5:01 pm, which is 52 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for partly clear skies 🌄 and temperatures around 35 degrees. There will be a northeast breeze at 5 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 42 minutes of daytime, an decrease of 2 minutes and 6 seconds over yesterday.

The Green Energy Fair was good yesterday, 🌲🌳🌻 although I thought the attendance was a bit lighter than I expected and many of the booths weren’t that exciting but we gave out a lot of the Save the Pine Bush coloring books. They had a lot of Teslas in the electric car club section, and a Chevy Bolt. I toured the Bolt a few years back, and I do recommend Weber Auto tear down of the Chevy Bolt videos on the YouTube to learn how neat the technology really is. 🚘

Then I went for a hike along the rail trail into the Norman’s Kill George. 🚉 It was cold as duck, I’m not ready for winter but it happens. At least the trail is free of ice, and they’ve installed more guard rail and benches. 🚶Water levels are very low on the Norman’s Kill. 💦 I thought that was unusual on how wet it’s been lately.

Tonight will have a chance of freezing rain, mainly after 5am. Increasing clouds 🌧, with a low of 28 degrees at 8pm. Three degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around November 27th. North wind 5 to 8 mph. Chance of precipitation is 30%. In 2018, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 30 degrees. The record low of 10 occurred back in 1972.

I am continuing to research 📖 building a new theme for the blog, replacing the old code based on an unsupported theme with a lean one that loads faster. That said, getting the Masonry library and the Indefinite Scroll libraries to play along proven more difficult than originally anticipated although I probably want to keep figuring this out. There is just a lot of unused bloat in the theme my blog is based off it and I could disable many of the unused features if I wrote my own based on the stripped down theme.

Tuesday Big Red is getting his tires rotated, oil changed and state inspected. ⛽ I think the weather will be fine but I’ll have to drop it off early on Tuesday morning as my new work hours earlier the before. I think the inspection will go fine and with the oil changed I’ll be good until May or June when the weather is nice again as I drive few miles in the winter – although I’m thinking about a winter camping trip to the Finger Lakes like last year during black powder season.

But before then I’m thinking about heading to the East Branch in the Adirondacks ⛺ come next weekend or maybe Black Friday, assuming that I have the day off and the weather is decent. I could see a lot of the snow melting in the Adirondacks this week although it could be icy from the freezing rain tomorrow morning. Or will it be all snow up north? God knows. But a nice big ol fire 🔥 in the wilderness will be fun. Maybe do some hiking, skiing 🎿 and hunting 🔫 not spent enough time out in the field this year.

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until December 🎄 when the sun will be setting at 4:23 pm with dusk at 4:54 pm. On that day in 2018, we had partly cloudy, rain showers and temperatures between 45 and 31 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 41 degrees. We hit a record high of 67 back in 1934.