Day: December 30, 2019πŸ’Ύ

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December 30, 2019 Night

Good evening! Cold and damp and 34 degrees in Delmar, NY. β˜” Calm wind. Temperatures will drop below freezing at tomorrow around 10 pm. β˜ƒοΈ

We got some pretty good icing midday β›„ so I’m kind of glad that I stayed home. The commute home in the ice and slush could have been miserable. Never got to upload my photos from my trip as the library was closed. 📙 My truck is not solid froze with ice. I know they predicted it in the outlying areas but I didn’t expect any ice in Delmar. I’ll deal with it eventually. I haven’t been shopping yet this week so I do got to kind of dig it out.

Tonight will be drizzle at times, mainly before 11pm. Cloudy ☁, with a low of 33 degrees at 1am. 17 degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around November 12th. Light and variable wind. In 2018, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 29 degrees. The record low of -17 occurred back in 1917.

Tonight will have a with 31% illuminated. The moon will rise at 11:01 am. The is on Wednesday night with partly cloudy skies. The is on Wednesday night. The sun will rise at 7:25 am with the first light at 6:53 am, which is 12 seconds later than yesterday. 🌄 Tonight will have 14 hours and 54 minutes of darkness, a decrease of 37 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will have a slight chance of drizzle before 10am, then a slight chance of rain and snow showers between 10am and 11am, then a chance of rain showers after 11am. Mostly cloudy 🌦, with a high of 41 degrees at 2pm. Nine degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around December 3rd. Light and variable wind. Chance of precipitation is 30%. Little or no snow accumulation expected. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning, which became light snow by afternoon. The high last year was 41 degrees. The record high of 61 was set in 1895. 7.9 inches of snow fell back in 2007.❄

I looked at a lot of dash cam videos and photos 📷 to share on my blog over the coming days when I get a chance to upload them. I want to better tell my story and how seeing the open farm country and rural lands really made me feel. It was so nice to get away and out of the basement where I work, even if I didn’t make it to the Finger Lakes. I also have been getting really interested in the path of moon and sun and are going to incorporate more astrological data into my blog 🎑 in the coming weeks.

I am leaning towards backcountry camping tomorrow night 🌃 to close out the decade but that’s to be decided in the morning. 🎇 I think they’re is enough snow and ice left out in the hilltowns to drag my gear back on a sled. I’ll have a nice fire 🔥 and toast out the end of the decade. I might even buy some egg nog or hot coca to have around the fire. It will be a simple campsite with the heater to keep me plenty warm. Too much ice and snow might make it hard to get a fire going. Not a done deal though for sure.

In four weeks on January 27 the sun will be setting at 5:01 pm,🌄 which is 30 minutes and 58 seconds later then tonight. In 2019 on that day, we had partly cloudy, snow showers and temperatures between 40 and 11 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 31 and 14 degrees. The record high of 62 degrees was set back in 1974.

Looking ahead, Make Your Dream Come True Day 🏡 is in 2 weeks, National Popcorn Day 🍿 is in 3 weeks, National Pie Day 🍰 is in 3 weeks, Clean Your Computer Day 🧹 is in 6 weeks, Presidents Day 👴 is in 7 weeks, Read Across America Day 📚 is in 9 weeks, Worm Moon 🌕 is in 10 weeks, Arbor Day 🌳 is in 17 weeks, 8 PM Sunset 🌇 is in 18 weeks, Flower Moon 🌕 is in 20 weeks, Memorial Day 🇺🇸 is in 21 weeks, June 🍹 is in 22 weeks and Average High is 80 🏖 is in 25 weeks.

Rays Across the Reservoir

Map: Tug Hill State Forest (Inman Gulf Area)
Map: New Forge State Forest

How Our Cities And Towns Are Killing Us | The Daily Caller

The Landscape Of Despair: How Our Cities And Towns Are Killing Us | The Daily Caller

While many Americans deplore suburbia in a general way — including many who live in it — its actual dynamics are poorly articulated in the public arena. Interestingly, one of suburbia’s biggest defects is the impoverishment of public space, and with it the degradation of the very public arena where ideas are exchanged and vetted for value.  Most public space in America is devoted simply to the movement and storage of cars. The highway is a hostile environment for humans and few people seek camaraderie or stimulation in the parking lots. The ambiguous leftover scraps of land, like the woodsy berm between the Walmart and the Best Buy, have no civic value. (That’s where kids go to drink malt-liquor.) Everything else is private space, including the shopping mall, by the way, where you can be arrested for making a speech, or just wearing a T-shirt with a provocative message. Public space per se has been relegated insidiously to TV and the Internet, and neither of these are an adequate replacement for real-live social relations with other human beings in a real place worth caring about.

I know from experience that the public’s attempt to understand all this can be laughably dim. If you show a slide of some schlocky boulevard of strip-malls to an audience in a town hall — as I have done many times — and ask them what’s wrong with this picture, you’ll probably get this answer: “It all looks exactly the same!” That is quite true, of course. The strip malls outside Syracuse, NY, look just like the strip malls outside Baton Rouge, LA, or Seattle, WA, except for the shrubs that decorate the parking lot. But sameness alone is not exactly the problem.

Map: Coulumbe Creek Trail

Breakfast at Basecamp

WV Outdoors is an interesting channel on bushcraft and back country camping in West Virgina. People think West Virginians have a strong accent, but as you can tell from this video, the Northern West Virigina accent is pretty similar to Rural Eastern New York.

Thematic Map: Black River Watershed

Recycling of Polypropylene (PP)

Recycling of Polypropylene (PP)

While PP is easily among the most popular plastic packaging materials in the world, only around 1% is recycled, which means most PP is headed for the landfill. These decompose slowly over 20-30 years. This raises severe environmental issues, quite apart from toxic additives in PP such as lead and cadmium. Incineration may release dioxins and vinyl chloride, both of which are poisonous.

To determine how recyclable polypropylene is, companies have undertaken ‘life cycle’ studies that look at the plastic from the raw material production to the final stages of waste management to assess the sustainability of the product. The general consensus from these studies is that PP has considerable potential as a sustainable product.