January 8, 2020 Night

Good evening! Snow flurries and 22 degrees in Delmar, NY. ❄ Breezy, ️18 mph breeze from the west-northwest 🌬 with gusts up to 32 mph 💨💨💨. The current wind chill is 9. I know it gets colder most winters and this is probably not the coldest of the winter but it’s still kind of cold out tonight. Tomorrow will only be in the upper 20s. The sun thought will help. But then things will start to thaw out at Friday around 10 am, with the mercury expected to reach the 60s by Saturday or maybe even the mid 60s by Sunday. 🌡️

Tonight will have a slight chance of snow showers before 11pm. Partly cloudy 🌃, with a low of 13 degrees at 5am. Two degrees below normal. But that ignores the wind that is howling around. Maximum wind chill around 2 at 6am; Northwest wind 11 to 18 mph, with gusts as high as 32 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. In 2019, we had mist in the evening, which became light rain by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 32 degrees. The record low of -20 occurred back in 1968.

I didn’t miss not having to do anything with the state of state this year. 🎤 That said the endless hours listening to this interview I was taking notes on 📝 for several hours was quite tiresome. The report I was writing for work is going slowly as it keeps getting more complicated and the NYC subject matters are a bit out of my wheel house 🎡. But at least I got to go home at five. I’ll catch up on the important stuff from the governors speech 💬 from the news headlines.

It was cold enough waiting for the express bus 🚍 home with the wind. 🍃 My neighbor was out so I stayed home and rode the exercise bike while watching another video about skinning and gutting rabbits 🐰🔪 (I must have downloaded several before). While the process is the same, some people have different techniques. Then I watched a video about off grid living in Alaska (very cold this time of year) β›„ and a phone battery manufacturing plant in China. 🏭 Those high tech factories are incredibly automated and fast in China. I only rode for about 45 minutes to 8:45 but I could have ridden later as my neighbor was still out. 🚲

I also worked on a program to extract captions from YouTube into a text file 📄 for easy reading. Sometimes I like to skim the captions file before I watch a long video to see if it’s worth watching. I also started to prepare and type up the index 📇 to John Wolcott history file. 📂 There is a lot more to do on that. Also worked on developing more content for the blog and read for a bit. 📙 Had a quick dinner of macaroni and cheese although once I stated cooking it I wish I had made fish 🐠 as that’s what I was more hungry for.

Tonight will have a Waxing Gibbous 🌖 Moon with 96% illuminated. At dusk you’ll see the moon in the east (81Β°) at an altitude of 25Β° from the horizon, some 238,886 miles away from where you are looking up from the earth. 🚀 The Wolf 🐺 Moon is on Friday, January 10. The darkest hour is at 12:03 am, followed by dawn at 6:54 am, and sun starting to rise at 7:26 am in the east-southeast (120Β°) and last for 3 minutes and 22 seconds. Starting to put push a bit further north. Sunrise is 11 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌄 The golden hour ends at 8:11 am with sun in the southeast (128Β°) at an altitude of 6Β°. Tonight will have 14 hours and 45 minutes of darkness, a decrease of one minute and 13 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 28 degrees at 2pm. Two degrees below normal. Northwest wind 5 to 8 mph becoming light and variable in the afternoon. Without the wind and with the bright 🔆 sun it shouldnt be too cold. A year ago, we had cloudy skies. The high last year was 40 degrees. The record high of 62 was set in 2008. 9.9 inches of snow fell back in 1953.❄

In four weeks on February 5 the sun will be setting in the west-southwest (249Β°) at 5:13 pm,🌄 which is 34 minutes and 29 seconds later then tonight. In 2019 on that day, we had partly cloudy skies, mild weather with a few rain showers and temperatures between 57 and 32 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 32 and 15 degrees. The record high of 59 degrees was set back in 1890.

Getting to bed at quarter to ten 🔟 because I’m tired 💤 and I plan to get up at six thirty again tomorrow 😮so things aren’t so rushed getting to work. I really like having extra time to get going in the morning and because I’m getting out at five every day now there is no excuse for staying up late.

Looking ahead, National Bird Day 🐦 is in 1 weeks, 37th Birthday 🎉 is in 3 weeks, Average High is 40 β˜€οΈ is in 8 weeks, Daylight Savings Time 🌆 is in 2 months, April Fools Day 🤡 is in 12 weeks, Pink Moon 🌕 is in 3 months, Tax Day 💰 is in 14 weeks, Earth Day 🌎 is in 15 weeks, Latest Sunset 🌆 is in 24 weeks and Inauguration Day 2021 👴🏻 is in 54 weeks.

Gully

Sixty-four degrees on Sunday? 🌑️

Sixty-four degrees on Sunday? 🌑️

It looks like both days this weekend might head into the sixties although with rain during the warmest part of the days. But still not too bad for what is supposed to be the coldest part of the year with high temperatures around 30. The climate has warmed quite a bit even in the past decade in Albany to the point where nearly every winter we have temperatures heading into the sixties and seventies at times. 

Can you be a zero-waste advocate and burn your own trash? πŸ”₯

Can you be a zero-waste advocate and burn your own trash? πŸ”₯

Burn Baby Burn

I am a member of several zero-waste groups. They attract a wide variety of people, some urban-hipsters, some rural farm homesteader types. Inevitably there is some culture clash between the two. One of them over whether or not you can be a zero-waster and have a burn barrel at your rural home or farmstead for non-recyclable, unavoidable packaging and similar trash.πŸ›’

There is no question that anything you burn can’t count as zero waste. Anything that gets burned ends up becoming pollution, be it carbon dioxide or a wide variety of chemicals. But on the other hand, if you are working to aggressively reduce your waste, forgoing weekly trash pick up in favor of reduction of consumption, reuse, burning, composting, and occasional trips to the recycling center, your doing a lot more to reduce your waste output then the typical urban consumer.♻️

Zero-waste living is ultimately not about how you dispose of your trash. It’s about reducing it all together, meaning less that goes to the landfill, the municipal incinerator, the compost pile, or the old burn barrel out back. It’s about living with less, fully utilizing what you have, creating more efficiency in your life, so ultimately your disposal method has a lower impact on the environment.πŸ—‘

The 6X6 Monster Hearse – 1967 Cadillac Mortis – ThrottleXtreme

The 6X6 Monster Hearse – 1967 Cadillac Mortis – ThrottleXtreme

Built by master mechanic and Naples, Idaho-native Jimmy Driver, the 10ft high, 20,000 lbs beast known as β€˜Mortis’ has been causing a stir in the local community.
Jimmy has been modifying the Cadillac to suit his mud-bogging needs, and according to his wife, Leah, the giant project has brought friends and family together.

Because of its imposing physicality, the beast itself will only reach speeds of up to 12 mph. But the monster hearse’s huge build and slow crawl is perfect for traversing the rocks and mud bogs of rural Idaho.