I fired up the ESP again today in the back shop and used the scope to figure out what was wrong. I eventually hooked up just the sensor lines to the ESP on a breadboard. This worked well!!! I decided to build a second prototype by cutting another proto board and then gluing with expoxy the two RJ45s and the power jack. i soldered down the 4 pullup resistors and the two ESP 0 pin headers.
Dinner tonight was the leftover Rotisserie Chicken from the chicken soup yesterday. We had this with baked yams.