Good morning or good evening, wherever you may be, across the nation and across the world. It is just past 5:45 a.m. in "The City", where the wind-chilled temperature is a brisk 27° due to a strong wind out of the northwest @ 13 mph. The actual temperature under cloudy skies is 36°,

The NWS forecast for today calls for a high temperature of 37° and an overnight low temperature of 29°, accompanied by yet another Small Craft Advisory from St. Joseph to Manistee until 10:00 p.m. tonight. Wind speeds from 15 to 25 knots will produce waves from four to seven feet in height.

The sunrise today will be @ 7:49 a.m. and sunset @ 6:09 p.m.

Yesterday was rainy, so we didn't accomplish much outdoors. In fact, the only outdoor activity we had was watching the rain fall and letting Ginger out for her daily visits. 

While I was reading and Mary was stitching, she played a podcast regarding the future of battery/electric powered vehicles and the effects of mining for lithium needed to produce the necessary batteries. I had only half an ear at first, but I listened to the second half and found the podcast interesting.

Mostly, I came away with the thought that the answer to a reduction to the negatives associated with mining for lithium could be alleviated by more public transportation and less use of personal automobiles. Yeah, like that will happen in this car-crazy society in which we live.

As was pointed out, the larger the vehicles get, the larger the batteries become and so the benefits of electric vehicles are offset by the huge batteries they need, that old adage, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, was cited by the podcasters as the way to go. 

Oh yes, we can recover the lithium from old batteries and reuse that, but even a fossil-fueled bus with numerous passengers was better for the environment than one person in an electric SUV on the way to the grocery store.

I started that new book, Mary continued to ear-read and cross-stitch, and I finished two crossword puzzles. Collectively, we ear-read more of Little Souls, we are nearing the end, and we watched very little TV. As far as I'm concerned, that's just fine, as long as we have a local newspaper. 

It's not that we aren't concerned about the future, we are, but right now, it seems like too many people are too busy to care about what really matters.

Today, finish the old crossword puzzles and the daily crypto quote, more art, more music, more cross-stitching, more newspapers, more print-reading, more retirement, more ear-reading, etc. Ciao.