The coldest part of winter 
As they say, the darkest hour is always before dawn.
Thatโs what I have to remember today. It was a nice riding to work, even if I had use the Delmar Bypass and Corning Preserve and deal with a lot more traffic then I normally do. Diesel smoke, merge ramps at rush hour and fighting the pot holes and semi trucks on my little mountain bike. Everything on my mountain bike is white from all the road salt and my pant cuffs black from all the grease on the chain. The Express Bus never showed up this evening, and it was not a cold evening and the 18 bus showed up at 5:50 PM as expected, despite what the app showed. It was fine. At least it was not that cold. Those heaters in the bus stationa are nice. They hauled off the homeless to a dumping ground at least not downtown which is nice, just like my neighbor did finally hauling off his growing pile of garbage bags.
I was refactoring and documenting my code I use for work for pulling together various records for tagging things, and noticing despite my optimistic beliefs on Friday, I am still missing a lot of people and misclassifying others. A lot of times the data I get isnโt perfect, and Iโm trying to join on name and location and make guesses about the data. And I donโt really think people get what Iโm doing, or how important it is as itโs the future of communications targeting. I think if anything my staff and clients are annoyed how much Iโm pushing the stuff and ideas I am working on. But at the same time, it never was done before to such a great extent before I became the Data Services Director. I am doing my weekly email about new products Iโm rolling out, mostly to crickets. The code is a lot cleaner and faster since I refactored it, and Iโm trying to document it so others can use in the future, but Iโm not sure if there are many R programmers where I work. Weโre mostly a C and AWK shop. Just as long as I donโt overflow the database, though at least according to the documentation I have on my desk we should be good for a while.
Landlord still hasnโt removed the old refrigerator, I need to spend more time cleaning again. Each day I keep an eye on the mailbox to see how big the rent increase will be come June. Iโm sure itโs coming, I guess legally he doesnโt have to tell me until March 1st. I need to follow up about the broken refrigerator, itโs quite possible the delivery guy couldnโt get it out and didnโt even tell the landlord. Or itโs been forgotten. Of course, who knows, and I assume this year Iโll be getting a COLA and it will be based on a percentage of my salary, and that will take out the sting out of it. I do wish my blog revenue wasnโt so in the crapper lately. I get it, not many people are looking are looking for places to camp and hike this time of year. And my job has been so all consuming โ I donโt want to spend my evening programming or developing new content for the blog.
February is just tough. While I figure in a few weeks Iโll be able to ride both ways to work now that the evenings are brighter out โ when itโs not so darn cold and snowy out โ it just feels cold. Maybe itโs my insistence to keep the heat 50 degrees or use public transit and my bike to get to work at the office with acres of free parking. But Iโm just trying to save every dollar I can for a better future. While I know I could own my land tomorrow if I sell stock and cut a big check, what is available locally is not right for me. I donโt want a suburbanite house, just because you can find them in areas that smell like cow shit, doesnโt make them better if itโs still a pissy little piece of land with a massive plastic-covered house heated by propane or oil and eat frozen chicken nuggets after driving the SUV home from work like is the American way. I couldnโt believe the health newsletter I subscribed to was warning about metal or bone contaminates in chicken nuggets. How can you be subscribed to a healthy living newsletter and eat such crap?
The news is also just so damn depressing. Joe Biden was mediocre at best. Donald Trump, the man I voted for is just awful. I almost regret as much voting for him as voting for Elliot Spitzer and volunteering for Howard Deanโs operation in Burlington. I mean, things were so broken and dysfunctional under Joe Biden, but when your whole campaign is things ainโt bad as the other guy, you have shrug. Inflation and $5 gas sucks. Ukraine was a disaster. War is evil. We should ban war and legalize psychedelics. While I donโt care that much one way or another about the immigrants or transgender thing, I do thing itโs idiotic that we are blocking all progress on wind and other renewable energy. While I do think maybe we needed to take a hard look at renewables, and even electrification, we canโt go back to fossil fuels in an era when the climate is being cooked. Drill baby drill ainโt the solution to organic granola bars and plastic recycling being fake. And while Iโm deeply skeptical about government at levels, I just think Trumpโs purges and pardons are only making things worse. I donโt know what to think about the PFAS and biosolids thing. I think itโs great that weโre recovering some of the nutrients in sewage sludge unlike many cities that either are tossing it on their garbage heaps or burning it like Albany does. I think PFAS are a lot of hype drummed up the hysterics and ambulance chasers. Iโm much more concerned about the stuff that boring, like NOx, CO and CO2 from the millions of car tailpipes and smoke stacks. Shit that isnโt theoretical but actually burns your lungs and roasts the climate, even if you eat organic granola bars in your Prius. The stock market is down, and thatโs bad too, even though in the long run itโs probably good because itโs saving me money. Like Trump, I value so much of myself based on my net worth, and I hate to see it go down, even as my total assets increase.
I can be a Negative Nancy a times. But things will get better. When you are in the darkest hours of winter, the days are getting longer and warmer. Slowly but certainly. Spring will occur. I remind myself that my 42nd birthday is Wednesday, and that represents only 13 years until I am 55 years old and with nearly 30 years into the state, I can hang up my hat at least from New York State at that point if I so choose. Iโve had Big Red for more than 13 years now. Build that cabin up in the wilderness, have my homestead with livestock, own whatever guns and have whatever fires I want. Play whatever music I want to listen, smoke pot and drink beer all day if I want to. Though truth is I plan to keep working, but maybe in a job as far away from the cities and politics as possible. And in the mean time, there are plenty of long summer days from March through November, lots of cold beer and cannabis, rip-roaring fires up in wilderness. Times floating down creek, riding trail on the mountain bike (and to and from work). Make a little black smoke late at night, travel and see the good parts of America. Itโs not like Iโm not becoming a pretty awesome programmer, even if Iโm not educated in things, just by writing all that R code, along with SQL and bash scripting to make things work at work. Plus that title sounds pretty cool on the resume, and pay is good, even if I do miss being with the old team up on Capitol Hill like I did before I moved to suburban office.
I mean Hunter S Thompson was not wrong.