I totally plan on driving Big Red in this morning, assuming I can get him fired up as he has run since last Monday when I got back from camp. Yesterday was sunny for the balance of the day and I cleared off the solar panel, so I think things will be reasonably well charged to get the engine spinning but it’s only about 5 degrees this morning.
I think it’s a good day to drive in 🛻 as I want to get to the Walmart and the laundromat on the way home, as tomorrow looks like snow and ice, and I think I’d rather be busing it on that day. 🚍 That said, despite the cold, I honestly enjoyed the bike ride both in and back down to the local bus home. No stepping over homeless people as I got my steps in at Concourse, 👣 though there was some black dude smoking mildly shitty weed and drinking a Natty Light at bus shelter by SUNY World Headquarters last night. 🌎 Honestly, I’ve smelled worse weed been smoked by colored and poor in the ghetto before. I know, it’s my high brow liberal urbane tastes when I smoke up in wilderness with my Budwiser and PBR. 🍺 They made a big deal a few years back about adding heaters to the bus shelters, but all year they’ve been off, probably because the Bus Authorities blame the winos and homeless people for hanging under them, but I am sure it’s to save money on electricity at the bus service is completely broke these days. 💵 See when Trump came in he cut funding to bus authorities in many different little ways.
Well I do hope Red starts up, 🔋 as otherwise it will be a pretty cold bike ride in. But maybe it’s an excuse to finish up Edward Abbey’s The Fool’s Progress, as the woke commuters in their warm Honda WOKE-branded SUVs see a Doc Sarvis want-a-bee riding his bike in single temperature down Corning’s Hill. 🚲 I’ll leave early so I have some extra time to head in plus I want to give the engine a good chance to warm up before I head out, being that it’s been eight days since I last ran it. I’m sure at first it will sound like engine is lacking lubrication for a second or two until it gets up to oil pressure. I’ll be yelling at truck, OIL PRESSURE, PLEASE!!! 😱 But even then when it’s so cold, it won’t have much power until it warms up. Got most of the snow and ice off the truck last weekend, including making the sure the solar panel was well cleared off. Sunny ☀️ yesterday, so that should help. But Saturday I didn’t get the panel cleaned off until mid-day, and it wasn’t really completely free of ice and snow until Sunday, but that way was cloudy.
Pea soup last night was good, 🥣 pretty much congealed by the time I got home, and I should have added some water but I enjoyed it in moderation, dipping my homemade bread in it. 🍞 Eggs this morning with onions and spinach. 🍳 Didn’t sleep well last night, not sure why, it was plenty warm under my heated blanket, and honestly on the cold nights my apartment tends to stay warmer, as it’s so dang drafty, that the heat runs far more, plus I tend to push it up to 53 or 54 degrees from 48 or 49 degrees, to make sure pipes don’t freeze. That and leave the cabinets open which brings in even more drafts. But for the wasted energy, it is far less then what I would pay in rent or mortage/taxes if I owned a big house that would take more energy to heat, ♨️ to say nothing of all the gas burned in the commute, even if I didn’t drive a big jacked up truck. ⛽ .
I can’t complain too much, I have this elderly neighbor 👴🏻 the one who drove into the old masonry fireplace next door, who has such a poorly insulated building that their house is always the first on the street with the roof free of snow. I few years back they replaced their old gas or maybe oil boiler with an zero-chimney high efficiency boiler but you can see the condensation coming out the exhaust pipe nearly non-stop on most mornings, they must have real high gas bills. I’m not saying though that the gas heat didn’t run a fair bit in my apartment last night, but it’s off now because I stopped it back a bit now that sun and mercury is rising and I’m up and going. ❄️ I just like the cold, and the heated blanket helps a lot.
I didn’t sleep well last night, 🚜 and ended up pushing my way through about half of the E-book, Shannon Stronger’s The Doable Off-Grid Homestead. Only about 370 pages on E-book version, it actually is a fairly quick read about one family’s vision of how to turn a few acres of raw land in Texas into a sustainable homestead with livestock, gardens composting, out houses, and solar. 🍅 Nothing super out of the ordinary from many other permaculture books I’ve read but still interested. I renewed the Backyard Guide to Farm Animals but this other book got greater priority 🐐 as somebody else has that under reserve, so I need to finish it up before it automatically returns on Thursday. I saw this book before I went up to camp two weekends ago, and got it out but I got reading other things while I was up at camp. 📚 Past few nights I’ve not slept well, a lot of broken sleep, maybe it’s too much caffeine but at least I’ve been in bed by 7 PM and usually asleep before 8 PM most nights, so I’m not that sleep deprived. 🛏️ I want to get raw chocolate when I go to store tonight, ☕