Another day in land of endless parades of 25 year old Honda Civics, riding my mountain bike past the garbage dumps, sewage treatment works and material recovery facilities, as your not supposed to burn the plastic crap out in the country. And far fewer cattle trailers, mostly because Hondas don’t come with the 10,000 GVWR package.

MONY, MONY, as Tommy James and the Shondells sings on the radio. 📻 Memories fade of Sherbune, as I watch the fire risk 🔥 and weather as I weight heading out of town one last time before Election Day for a quick trip to the wilderness for the weekend. 🗳️ A week from now the election will be over, all those hundreds of lists run having done their jobs for millions and millions of campaign mailers sent ✉️ along with texts, calls, ads, a billion other points of communication. 📢

Really things are quieting down at work, 💾 though soon enough I’ll be busy working on the big state file database update for Assembly’s database and updating state and county employee tagging in the system. Union members, gun owners, families with children, and a half a dozen other data points ✨ on nearly ever New Yorker. And thinking about other future code upgrades and ways of developing statics for communication targeting. We really should be doing more MS Excel files, PDFs are so old fashioned. I’ve been studying 🔎 Polars 2.0 and openpyxl and getting more into python lately as it’s faster than R. 🐻‍❄️ And more compatable with enterprise scale systems and some of the GIS work I do with QGIS. R is still better for some jobs but it’s not a one trick pony. 🐎 It’s all the time I spent trombing through horse shit 💩 this past weekend.

A week from now it will all be over with the elections, 🚉 and I’ll be taking the train back to Albany followed by one last after-Election Party. 🪩 And then I’ll probably go in the office on Thursday to get started on the database update, and then Friday or Saturday head out somewhere, assuming the weather is reasonable. 🌧️ Hoping for some rain to reduce the fire risk in the mean time. Not sure if it’s going to Pennsylvania or West Virigina, or maybe just somewhat closer like Green Mountains or Finger Lakes, but I think I want to be gone from November 8ish to November 16th or so just to spend some time in the woods, without processing lists of Early Voters and Absentees, or running more mail jobs. ✉️

I have gotten away, and had a fair amount of solitude in wilderness this autumn 🐺 with my SuperDuty but it’s still be in constant contact and doing at least some work throughout the weekends. I just want time to fully unplug, do a bunch of reading and thinking. 💭 And I have that still quite new SuperDuty, though I did notice the voltage switch ⚡ has a loose wire and it’s not always charging the accessory battery while the truck is on. Need that to work well before I head out for a week in woods. 🍌 Looking forward to eating healthier ❤️‍🩹, not that I haven’t at home, but when I’m at DACC 🍭 there is always so much junk food to eat, not to mention those coordinator lunches at main stream, delicious restaurant food. 🍽️ Stuff I wouldn’t normally eat at home. I’m going to miss the left-overs though, 🍔 I grabbed a bunch of containers of salad and leftover condements from the burgers they had yesterday, used them for eggs 🥚 and other meals for coming week. I dream of someday having hogs 🐽 and being able scrounge even more leftover food.

I am really enjoying that cranberries 🍒 are now widely avaliable at stores, and been using them in lots of meals. I should also get some canned 🥫 pumpkin 🎃 or better yet some baking pumpkins and make my own so I don’t have the cans to get rid of. I need to ask Mom if I can use her bin ♻️ for recycling cans I’ve accumulated after the past year or so – I rarely get things in cans or glass 🫙 but it happens some time. Need to do some baking too, to raise my electric bill and have more fresh bread. 🫓 No, I haven’t turned on my heat  ♨️ on yet, though after a few cool nights, it gets me thinking about pulling out my heating blanket, though that 1/4 to 1/3 kilowatt that blanket uses when its on every night adds up quick. And it’s not been that cold. After all, I spend all my money on gassing up my F-350 SuperDuty. ⛽

Well I should shower 🚿 and hop on my mountain bike to ride in. 🚵‍♂️ Front brake is still dragging a bit and making some noise, but it seems to free up and get better over time. I need to take it apart and clean it good, and probably replace what appears to be a very worn pad at this point, 💿 but whatever it gets me to work. As I’ll probably work remote Friday, and I’m unsure if I will drive in tomorrow as I need to get propane and supplies if I decide to camp 🏕️ this weekend, it might be the last time I can ride home after work. 🌆 I’ve been checking the bike lights and making sure everything is ready for winter commuting, as it’s always dark riding from Enterprise Drive down to local bus downtown. 🚍 I’ll be riding the bus home every night, soon enough, though assuming it’s not too snowy ☃️ on the bike trail, I’ll be riding to work each day. But at least the mornings won’t be so dark, well until we loose even more daylight in December, especially late December. But then a new year, 2027, will be upon us. 🗓️ The days go by too quickly it seems.