December 28, 2016 8 AM Update

Snow flurries and 36 degrees this morning on the bus ride in. Most of the regulars are back on the bus this morning. Four degrees above normal. Going to be cloudy for most of the day with near constant temperatures, then some clearing for a while tonight, with a low of 26 degrees at 5am. Snow pushes in tomorrow, now they’re calling more for about four inches of snow locally. Maybe a quarter inch for the morning commute, with the worse roads around the evening commute. More of a nuisance then anything else.

Today we have the first 4:30 PM sunset in a while. Not that you will notice with the clouds making it look dark earlier.  Dusk tonight is around around 5:02 pm, which is 46 seconds later than yesterday. Today will have 9 hours and 5 minutes of daylight, an increase of 34 seconds over yesterday.

There are 9 weeks until March 1st when the sun will be setting at 5:46 pm with dusk at 6:14 pm. On that day in 2016, we had rain and temperatures between 38 and 21 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 39 degrees. We hit a record high of 61 back in 1991.

Last night I was watching the 1994 PBS special, Moon Shot about the Appollo missions, interviewing the original astronauts. It’s both amazing and sad that the United States went eight times to the moon between December 1968 and 1972 then abandoned it after four years. After 1972, man kind has never gone beyond low earth orbit 250 miles of the ground. The moon is around 250,000 miles away from the earth’s surface.

You can make the argument that the moon landing was fake, but it seems difficult to think that half a million Americans could be in on an conspiracy over flight to the moon. People like to talk and brag. The more likely explanation is that man kind got bored with going to the moon and with the inflationary times brought on by excessive government spending and the oil crisis it was no longer seen worth while. Each moon flight burned through half a million gallons of rocket fuel each launch. In a country that burns through 400 million gallons of oil a day  that isn’t much but it had to be seen as fuelish during the gas crisis. The moon is a boring wasteland of rock and human dumped space debris. 250 miles away from earth where the International Space Station is located gives man kind a much better view of the earth and its environment and gives man kind a chance to experience weightlessness and outer space like conditions.  So that’s what I’m thinking about this morning.