February 2, 2020 Night

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Good evening! Snow flurries and 32 degrees in Delmar, NY. ❄ Calm wind.There is a dusting of snow on the ground. ☃ Things will start to thaw out at tomorrow around 8 am. 🌡️ Snow won’t last but maybe more later in the week.

Dinner was good at the folks house 🍲 with bean stews although I left right after dinner to avoid the snow. No snow coming home but it certainly looked like it was close by from the radar. It was nice getting to Five Rivers Environmental Education Center both days this weekend, got lots of walking in plus some nature study. I have to say I’m lucky to live within walking distance of a cute little preserve like that. 🐸

Tonight will have a chance of light snow before midnight, then scattered snow showers between midnight and 3am. Cloudy 🌨, with a low of 29 degrees at 11pm. 14 degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around March 24th. Calm wind becoming west around 5 mph after midnight. Chance of precipitation is 40%. Total nighttime snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. In 2019, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became partly cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 31 degrees. The record low of -18 occurred back in 1955.

Tonight will have a Waxing Gibbous 🌔 Moon with 61% illuminated. At 9 PM, the moon was in the west-southwest (239°) at an altitude of 51° from the horizon, some 245,690 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 7th. Buckle up for safety! 💺 The Snow ❄ Moon is on Sunday, February 9. The darkest hour is at 12:10 am, followed by dawn at 6:40 am, and sun starting to rise at 7:10 am in the east-southeast (113°) and last for 3 minutes and 9 seconds. Sunrise is one minute and 3 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌄 The golden hour ends at 7:51 am with sun in the east-southeast (120°). Tonight will have 13 hours and 58 minutes of darkness, a decrease of 2 minutes and 25 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will be mostly sunny 🌞, with a high of 44 degrees at 2pm. 12 degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around March 15th. West wind 7 to 13 mph. Nice warm day for a change. February thaw. Ground Hog didn’t see his shadow. A year ago, we had partly cloudy skies in the morning, remaining cloudy in the afternoon. The high last year was 45 degrees. Well, warmer last year. Even warmer four years ago. The record high of 57 was set in 2016. 6.1 inches of snow fell back in 2004.❄

After reading about spy equipment in hotels and Air BNB I’ve become fascinated by all the little inexpensive recording devices Ali Express. I discovered how many small audio recorders 🎤 there are out there – I was thinking that would be perfect for history interviews I do with John Wolcott and others but for now I think I can just use my phone. 📱 Then I got into the rat hole 🐀 of trying to find an inexpensive GPS logger that saves to text files similar to the one I built with an Arduino until it broke with no luck. I should rebuild the one I previously built and mount it again in my truck, this time using an external regulator so that the higher charging voltage in my truck doesn’t fry it in short order. I got to practice and do more electronic projects again. Maybe tomorrow.

I’ve been working on some new physical terrain maps – more like artwork 🎨 then useful maps to put on the blog. I had forgotten about the ones I had previously created and how nice they came out until somebody emailed me asking about the techniques I used. I couldn’t find the old QGIS project files so I had to recreate them and I exported the style files and emailed 📧 them over. 🌐

In four weeks on March 1 the sun will be setting in the west (261°) at 5:45 pm,🌄 which is 36 minutes and one second later then tonight. In 2019 on that day, we had partly cloudy and temperatures between 39 and 14 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 39 and 21 degrees. The record high of 66 degrees was set back in 2017.

Looking ahead, Snow Moon 🌕 is in 1 week, March 🌨 is in 4 weeks, Read Across America Day 📚 is a month away, Daylight Savings Time 🌆 is in 5 weeks, Ides of March ✝ is in 6 weeks, Palm Sunday 🌴 is in 9 weeks, Easter 🐰 is in 10 weeks, Mothers Day 👩‍ is in 14 weeks, Pack Rat Day 🐀 is in 15 weeks, Strawberry Moon 🌕 is in 18 weeks and Fathers Day 👨 is in 19 weeks.

🇺🇸🦅Only 109 days remain until the start of Memorial Day Weekend!🦅🇺🇸

Recently Cut Area

My comment to the off grid group I joined

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Earlier in the week I joined a Facebook group about off grid living and homesteading. They asked for a brief explanation on why new members were interested in odd grid living, and here is what I wrote…

I am interested in the off grid life because I back country camp about 30 nights a year, mostly in my truck camper shell which I installed a 100 watt panel on it with two 12 volt deep cycle batteries for lights and other small appliances for camping. I like working with electricity and the forced conservation and thought about energy that comes with generating your own.

I also toured an off grid home back when I was in college and eventually want to own a house up in the woods where I can have fires, chop and heat wood, burn my trash, have livestock that I can process myself, hunt and fish, shoot my guns and listen to music as loud as I want to. I am a bit of a electronic hobbyist. So much cool little components you can get from China for a few bucks these days.

I don’t have internet at home and I certainly would never want one of those creepy smart devices or televisions in my home. I have a basic smartphone for internet was $45 that I bought two years ago or visit public hot spots. I hate all the advertising and consumerism end of the disposable plastic electronics that’s everywhere. I also like the idea of having a simple home that is easy to clean and fix when things break.

I hate how so much of modern life is hidden and fake, from distant power plants to landfills to massive slaughterhouses while the virtuous liberals pretend that they’re not part of it with their renewable energy credits that come with a glossy brochure with pictures of industrial wind mills and 1,000 acre solar facilities, they recycle their milk bottles and even buy over priced organic fair trade materials as they look down at the common folks who hunt and fish, farm or even burn their own trash.

Lastly I’m very concerned about climate change. I doubt off grid living is much of a way to reduce emissions but it can protect myself from the vulnerablity caused by an increasingly unstable climate that puts all life at precarious position. Most thermal generating nuclear and fossil plants are going to be trouble in coming decades due to warming waterbodies used for cooling and increasingly extreme storms and flooding. If I have a tractor I can fix washed out roads on my own land and recover from severe weather better than the urbanites.

Two Years Alone in the Wilderness | Escape the City to Build Off Grid Log Cabin

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One man leaves the city life behind to build a cheap off grid log cabin and homestead in the Canadian wilderness, including a log home, an outdoor kitchen, an outhouse, a woodshed and a sauna bathhouse. Building mostly with hand tools, Shawn James harvests building materials from the forests north of Toronto, Canada and crafts them into functional tools and shelters using traditional woodworking tools and methods. He practices bushcraft and survival skills every day, including fire starting, tree identification and harvesting, wild edible foraging, fishing, hunting, camping in the summer and winter, travelling by canoe and snowshoe, navigation and water collection and purification. Continue watching in 2019 as Shawn finishes the sauna, plants a forest garden for fruit and vegetables, builds an underground root cellar, ice house and cheese cave, a timber frame workshop and a remote hunt camp closer to fish and game.

The wood work and brushcraft that Shawn James does is nothing short of amazing. He also is a really good videographer, and this hour and half video is inspiring.