I watched Croquis Cafe video and a few others from my subscription and stumbled across Bruce Winter's videos. He is the Mr House guy from years ago. He's an IBM engineer still working in MN but telecommuting. I got inspired by his Smart Things videos in his new house in Alabama. After doing some research I ordered a hub on eBay and also an Arduino Smart Things shield and a GE smart outlet. The GE outlet plugs into the upper outlet of a duplex pair. It reminds me of the old X10 appliance modules sold by the old Radio Shack. The reason for Smart Things was because it uses the Z-Wave standard so i can get it from many vendors and the appliance modules look decent enough to use in a room. It has an interface to both OpenHab and Alexa. I can use Alexa to control it immediately.
The weather is fantastic. There is no humidity and the temperature is perfect. I started running the conduit for the outside outlet at the greenhouse that the fence will plug into. Libbie and I also worked on the pond to get the water clear. We ended up going to Lowes and purchased a new 560 GPH pump which is an exact replacement for the old one. I also picked up some glue for the conduit

I mixed up the gallon of stuff i need for tomorrow's colonoscopy prep. It has to be refrigerated to make it more palatable. Dinner was Lib's excellent pizza with fresh garden basil.