Day: February 23, 2025

So this afternoon I decided to ride out to Five Rivers after going to the grocery store, at first a bit tired and unsure of my plans, so I sat down at the pavilion next door to parking lot with my bike at my side. I’m sitting there, just watching the birds and wildlife, thumbing through my phone, and a with binoculars man starts knocking ice off the building to get my attention I guess — and then comes and starts asking accusingly – are you riding the trails? Nah, too icy. I haven’t ridden any trails since I rode the bike trail to work on Tuesday when it very icy. The man huffs back at me and says NO BIKES ALLOWED HERE and huffs off.

Now this is the kind of wokerism that people find so despicable. I mean I rode there as I wanted some time of tranquility, and it’s a public park. There is a ton of snow and ice the ground, I didn’t tie my bike up to the bike rack as I soon got as there was a snow bank pushed up against the bike rack, and I had just got there, and was tired. Nobody likes an asshole, especially a granola-eating bird watcher. I am sure he came here with his electric-powered SUV that runs on fracked natural gas, and will be heading home after his bird watching to his 5,000 square suburban house heated to 75 degrees with the latest in fracked natural gas-powered heat pumps. Sometimes you just got to say nothing, but greenies with their condemnation of all those less then them are just so despicable. It was a nice walk at Five Rivers, saw lots of deer, birds, and wildlife in the preserve. Truth is unlike the greenie, I haven’t powered up Big Red since President Days, I take my bike or bus to work and keep my heat 50 degrees. And it won’t be that long before I own my own land, and I’ll have the off-grid cabin, and be producing a lot of my own calories. While the idiot will be feeling so good about washing out their plastic bottles of organic kale enhanced with pure cane sugar on way to landfill 300-miles away via a short detour the landfill. I did tighten up the solar panel connection on Red, and with all the sun we had, particularly on Saturday, the accessory batteries should be topped off and hopefully some is now going into the starting battery. We will see when I fire up Red tomorrow after work do the laundry and get supplies including refilling propane for camping. A greenie didn’t ruin my experience though at Five Rivers, it was quite tranquil over getting over being yelled by the greenie.

Social media keeps serving me all these ads about depression and mental health. Probably the AI was confused by me posting a dairy meme on Facebook showing a farmer catching the milk from a cow letting down before being milked into a cup of coffee. I’m not depressed, I’m just lazy, trying to keep out of cold and save money. I googled my symptoms, I’m nutty as shit but not depressed. I do have hope for the future, someday I will own a four wheeler, burn barrel, goats, and a black rifle to ventilate it well so the papers plates and plastic wrappers burn down to nothing while I eat pork and chicken I butchered with my own hands. Fuck the landfill industry and big coal power plants. I can almost smell the burnt plastic and hog shit already! Truth is I’m conserving today for a better tomorrow — haven’t taken any big trips lately because the weather sucks, and I’m trying to save money both for the summer and a better future. Why spend all your money burning up gas and warming the climate, when there are places you can ride your bike to locally? Like tearing up nature preserves on your mountain bike in a foot of snow – when I can legally fall and crash in North Bethlehem or Normans Kill Ravine Mountain Bike Trails. But I’m scared as shit since last Tuesday’s crash riding on the ice on the way to work, so I’ve been staying on the well salted asphalt for the most part.

It’s been kind of a lazy weekend, I will admit, working on some various maps, code and reading. And probably too much watching Youtube and scrolling through social media. It’s not I lack hope, it’s just that it’s winter and it kind of sucks being so cold and icy out. The bike trail is shit to ride, with all the pock holes from walkers, and while I kind of wanted to get out Rensselearville State Forest for a night in the woods with a good fire and some grass, the ice scared me. I’ve been so careful around ice since wiping out on the bike path by the Corning Preserve last week. That ice was so slick. It didn’t hurt that much immediately but I was achy later in the day. No visiting the family this weekend as Dad then Mom have been sick with a cold. Of course, it probably wouldn’t feel so cold out if I didn’t refuse to turn the heat above 50 degrees in my apartment, but yeah. I mean, I’m not a solder in war on poverty, compared to how little many people make these days, though six-figures doesn’t go the way it once did.

I rode down to Hannaford and got milk, and a few bags of frozen vegetables. Enough to hold me over until I go to the laundromat, get propane, wash my truck and stock up at Walmart tomorrow night after work. Eleven bucks. I was always getting my milk at Stewart’s but I’ve found the grocery store milk is just as good and a fair bit cheaper even with the milk card. Stewart’s milk comes from the Saratoga plant, while most of grocery store milk is made over in East Greenbush, so regardless it’s mostly local. I do wish you could get milk in deposit glass though as while sometimes I recycle the plastic bottles when I have a lot of them, plastic recycling is pretty much fake, even the DEC doesn’t seem to build as much using that recycled plastic deck board as much nowadays probably due to issues with UV degregation of boards in harsh rural environments. But at least there is much more of a market for No. 2 plastics, for at least one product, locally made, unlike glass which for the most part if it gets recovered through single-stream recycling seems to end up being used for aggregate for landfill roads and similar projects.

One of the things I’ve been working on is learning the ins and outs of XML2 library and parsing KML files to style them for making maps. The plotKML library I used to use for exporting KML files out RStudio stopped working when rgdal was retired a few years back now. So I can export them using SF but the issue is that SF doesn’t style KML files so I have to read them using XML2, and make appropriate adjustments. It’s good to be handy with XML manipulation, as that’s yet another form of data that is common, something that I see sometimes for work and also for other purposes. Being able to effectively read and manipulate all formats of data is important.

Tomorrow is the work week. I didn’t do any coffee today, as I’m trying to dramatically cut back on caffeine as for a while I was really abusing it. I mean those caffeine pills are fun while getting high up in wilderness, but I shouldn’t be consuming them plus several cups of coffee at home, then several more at work, trying to be super energetic. It’s rather bad for my heart, especially having to elderly parents now with heart issues. Of course, they eat all that processed crap that I will never buy and bring home since I’ve gotten concerned about eating well in my 40s. But a bigger issue is it really screwing with my sleep. Taking sleeping pills before bed also isn’t a great idea if I don’t want to start my morning in a complete haze. Busing it in tomorrow, just because I’m bringing my laptop in and I want the bike trail to melt down more, but I’ll probably ride in on Tuesday and Wednesday, though Thursday looks like rain and who knows about Friday. Hopefully if the bike trail isn’t complete mess, I can ride both ways, as there is definitely enough light in the evening to safely make it home before it’s pitch black out. And only one more weekend left before we get more light in evening with the time change. If I get propane, then I’ll be ready to get up to woods, once the weather improves.