"If you buy a house on the 9 million acres of agricultural districts in New York state, you sign a disclosure form that says the farmers near you have the "right to farm" even when it causes noise, dust and odors."
Good evening! Mostly cloudy and 32 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁ There is a south breeze at 5 mph. 🍃. Things will start to thaw out at tomorrow around 10 am. 🌡️
Busy long week at work this week. 💼 That’s the thing with my new job, I’m always dealing with a stack of work on my desk. It’s nice that I get to go home at 5 pm nightly but I’m always so busy.
Not a bad evening, had some pasta for dinner 🍲, rode the bike 🚲 for a while and went for my evening walk. 🚶 Going to sleep shortly. Started a book called Radical Simplicity which I vaguely remember reading 📖 previously but I think I put it aside and never finished it one summer reading down at the park.
Honestly I think I know why I put down that book after reading it before – the first few chapters relentlessly attack cows 🐮 and farmers 🚜 while supposedly talking at length about the noble savages, far east cultures which the book 👯thinks embodies sustainable living. I don’t know but I think I’ll read 📖 more and learn for new perspectives even if I don’t agree with the author.
Speaking of farmers, especially big time ones, I was watching that video 📹 Minnesota Millennial Farmer at Andy Hourrigan’s dairy in Southern Onondaga County, up on the hills off of US 20. 1,400 cows 🐮, they send off multiple bulk trucks full of milk every day to Byrne Dairy in DeWitt. I’m always actually a bit surprised how big some of the farms are down there on the hills – they must own or rent a lot of good fertile land in the valleys to produce that volume of high quality forages necessary to sustain such a big herd. 🌽
Byrne Dairy, as anybody who has gotten gas ⛽ in the Syracuse areas, sells milk in refillable deposit bottles 🍶, “Have Less Trash, Buy Milk in Glass“. I wish we had that locally, so much of my trash is those single use plastic bottles – while I recycle some and burn the rest – it seems like a terrible waste of plastic. They’re a remarkable amount of energy in a single use milk bottle. ♻
Tonight will have a chance of snow showers, mainly after 2am. Cloudy 🌧, with a low of 30 degrees at 12am. 15 degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around March 27th. South wind around 5 mph becoming calm after midnight. Chance of precipitation is 30%. Total nighttime snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. In 2019, we had clear skies in the evening, which became partly cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to -8 degrees. The record low of -20 occurred back in 1920.
Tonight will have a First Quarter 🌓 Moon with 41% illuminated. At 9 PM, the moon was in the west-southwest (251°) at an altitude of 30° from the horizon, some 250,012 miles away from where you are looking up from the earth. 🚀 At the state speed limit of 55 mph, you’ll make it there by August 8th. Buckle up for safety! 💺Those g forces can be rough on the body. YThe moon will set in the west (281°) at 11:52 pm. Too cloudy to see the moon tonight. The Snow ❄ Moon is on Sunday, February 9.
The darkest hour is at 12:10 am, followed by dawn at 6:42 am, and sun starting to rise at 7:12 am in the east-southeast (113°) and last for 3 minutes and 10 seconds. Sunrise is one minute earlier than yesterday. 🌄 The golden hour ends at 7:54 am with sun in the east-southeast (121°). Tonight will have 14 hours and 2 minutes of darkness, a decrease of 2 minutes and 20 seconds over last night.
Tomorrow will have a slight chance of rain and snow showers before 1pm, then a slight chance of rain showers after 4pm. Mostly cloudy 🌦, with a high of 36 degrees at 2pm. Four degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around February 19th. Calm wind becoming north around 5 mph in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation is 20%. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies. The high last year was 18 degrees. The record high of 65 was set in 1989. 15 inches of snow fell back in 1898.❄
I don’t think tomorrow is going to be a really nice day so I’ll stick close to home. ☁ I don’t have a big agenda, I might walk out to Five Rivers and go to the store 🏬 and wash out my truck. Gotten mad dirty with the road salt. 🛀 Needs a bath. Probably should do some cleaning around the apartment too.
In four weeks on February 28 the sun will be setting in the west (260°) at 5:43 pm,🌄 which is 36 minutes and 11 seconds later then tonight. In 2019 on that day, we had snow showers, cold, partly cloudy and temperatures between 28 and 10 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 38 and 20 degrees. The record high of 63 degrees was set back in 1903.
Looking ahead, Valentines Day ❤️ is in 2 weeks, 7 PM Sunset 🌆 is in 6 weeks, Spring 🌷 is in 7 weeks, Good Friday ✝️ is in 10 weeks, May 🕊 is in 13 weeks and 8:30 PM Sunset ️⛱️ is in 18 weeks.
🇺🇸🦅Only 111 days remain until the start of Memorial Day Weekend!🦅🇺🇸
The new all electric city buses (well excluding the seasonally uses diesel cabin heaters) that CDTA has bought use 488 KWh battery packs to provide roughly 200 miles of range in city traffic for a 10 or 12 hours of operating service. City buses are heavy, they do a lot of stop and go driving, they burn a lot of energy. Diesel buses get 3.5 mpg or burn roughly 55 gallons of diesel for a 200 mile day.
The thing about it is that 400 kWh a day (save 88 kWh to avoid over depletion) or two megawatt hours worth of electricity for a five day service week is an incredible amount of energy when you’re trying to get it from any renewable source. A week operating a single bus is equivalent to burning one ton of coal or the output of 9,000 250 watt solar panels operating for one hour, assuming a real world output of 200 watts on the panels. The energy math of powering a whole urban fleet of buses on solar power or even wind is pretty insane when you think of all the other energy demands of the economy.
I do think electrifying the bus fleet makes environmental sense and provides long term cost savings and flexibility. It is more energy efficient to use electric motors and batteries in city buses as diesel motors pale in efficiency to large power plants and energy efficient electric motors. But the idea that electric buses are going to be powered by renewable anytime soon is pretty silly in my book.
While the days of the late President Franklin Roosevelt by October 1953 must have seemed a ways in rear-view mirror, Eleanor Roosevelt was still sharp as nails.
It will be interesting to see how much the local climate has shifted. I expect the average lows to have a noticeable shift throughout the year and the average high in the winter to be a fair amount warmer.
