I went over to the greenhouse at 10 and worked the rest of the morning until 1 PM on the heat exchanger for Hot Dawg 1. The job went pretty well but I was sore from bending in odd positions while crawling around on the ground. the outdoor temperature is nice as well. It's 65 out today. Ran out to Trader joes for fruit and supplies then came home to wait for my pump. UPs brought the pond pump. I measured the outlet and went to Lowes to get the correct size tubing as well as a diverter. dinner was bean burger with Lima beans. Listened to Traviata on the met Sirius channel while studying preferreds. I need a $10 preferred for my Roth since I only have $1000 and dividends into this account are very slow. My other choice would be something like 25 shares of an MLP such as EPD.

Jennifer called from the greenhouse that Avery tried to deliver the Modine heat exchanger. I called Avery and said I would do a pick up. Hooked up the trailer and went to Morrisville and got the heat exchanger then took it to the greenhouse. It's huge. Lots of packing all around it. Carried it down the aisle to where the heater is but did not work on it. The greenhouse was busy with JoAnne Raymer, Joann Hoover, Jack Shannon and Jennifer. Libbie stayed home to do book keeping. I went to Home Depot and got one inch fittings and built a new water distribution system inside the bio filter. Since the pump is 1800 GPH into 1 inch tubing I didn't think restricting the flow in a 1/2 inch pipe was a good idea. The plan is to use 1 inch distribution pipe inside the bio filter. The one inch feed to the biofilter will have a 3/4 inch tap for the waterfalls which will allow me to use one pump. I'll put the existing bioballs into the new biofilter. Today I finished painting the output pipes of the biofilter black. Dinner was a bean burger and salad.

Did the groceries then worked in the back woods picking up logs, a hopeless endeavor. Hooked up the boombox upstairs and started on the MagJack footprint again. Finished the footprint, printed it out and held it to the window with a real magjack. Alignment seems good. Finished the schematic and then did a PCB layout. Worked on this all day until I uploaded the gerbers to AP Circuits. The PCB is now done. I made the MARS and PHOBOS PCB common. I really want the Phobos board since the article is based on Phobos but I decided to make it universal for MARS and PHOBOS. I'll order a second mbed from digikey. Dinner was Briyani with fresh cooked chicken pieces.

Gave Libbie my box of candy and homemade valentines card (birds with love poem). She said she'll take the candy to the greenhouse as giveaways. Reviewed some of the Grammy stuff on Tivo today and also assembled the biofilter. Was thinking of hooking it up to the existing pump temporarily. Talked to Arbor Landscaping about the tire tracks. They took the message (again). We worked on the TAVS Show Schedule because Sheila needed this to turn in for approval. Dinner was pasta from Trader Joes.

Did not get a newspaper. Woke early and read my book some more before going to Lowes and reviewing pumps and plumbing. chose not to buy one but got the sandpaper instead. Sanded the box and then painted it black. It's another nice day outside. Didn't do too much else today. Libbie made some excellent mozzarella only pizza then we watched the Grammys. I enjoyed the completely musical show. It went quite well, lots of musical acts. Didn't get to bed until midnight.

Started out int the garage early. Used the nail gun and assembled the support box. This went well. Had to cut a few scraps of plywood for the surrounding walls. Tried sanding but I only have one sanding disk for my drill. Need to buy some sandpaper, possibly with the trip for a pump and media. Left at 11:36 for the Opera. The theater, auditorium 8, was very empty. Supposedly Aud. 4 was full. Saw Jim outside, he said he needs a Peter Sellar haircut after seeing the interview with the guy wearing beads, a flower shirt and spiked red hair!!! After the opera we went to BJ's and got Lloyds ribs and dishwashing soap. Dinner was ribs, garden veggies and shiraz wine. I've been reading Four Corners of the Sky and really enjoying it. It's about Annie who is a navy pilot and her estranged father who is a con artist but dying in Miami Beach. We don't know what mystery secret he's keeping down there on his deathbed. All Annie wants to know is who is her Mother.

Had a nice day. Measured the base for the biofilter but accidentally dumped the fish feeder into the pond. Hope it still works. I left it out drying. Cut some of the filter wood. Need another 2x4. Worked on the "Winners Circle" category of the MAAVS web site. This is a new category with winners of the past.

Made a material list for the pump today. Went to Jerrys for paint for our class then looked at the pond at Logans. They don't have a pump for me. I'll probably use my coupon and get it at Lowes. Dinner was chicken breast with veggies. Glued together the pipes for the biofilter after dinner. Spent most of today trying to recover from a front page error in the website. the introduction is formatting into a very narrow column. Worse, the column setting doesn't seem to work. Lots of hair pulling until I discovered that a <div> tag got inserted into the intro text from a copy/paste. the tag wasn't visible and was reformatting the article into a skinny column regardless of page column settings. I spent two days looking for this but I learned a heck of a lot. Website fixed!!!

Not too bad of a day, it's in the 40's and sunny but supposed to snow tonight. I researched filter pumps and surveyed them at Lowes. The rental check for $2800 came so I went to the Cu and did Lowes again with pencil and paper writing down models, price and power consumption. I would like a single pump for both the waterfalls and the filter. I updated the MAAVS website but screwed up the joomla so that the front page is now incorrect. Dinner was pasta before Libbie had to go out to give a violet talk in Holly Springs.

Bought opera tickets from Fandango for 4 more Met Hd operas. These are pretty expensive, $200 spent in one morning. The Visa signature gives a 20% discount so I spent $160 for $200 worth of tickets. Violet meeting included a lunch of my Broccoli salad and small sandwiches of chicken salad and egg salad. Topic was planning the June violet show. Dinner was leftover salad and sandwiches from the meeting.

Not a great day. Spent the whole day trying to get a heat exchanger for the Modine Hot Dawg. Gorrell no longer handles Modine, they referred me to a company in SC. That company referred me to VanWingerden. The warranty was supposed to be 10 years but I had to send $350 because they didn't know about coverage. In the meantime, the heat exchanger is not in stock and must be custom built. This is going to take a while. Uggh. I'm depressed. We also had to clean the place for a Violet meeting tomorrow. Dinner was the leftover Tilapia from Saturday.

Picked up some more plumbing parts at Lowes for the BioFilter as well as two 50 foot rolls of poly rope for use as filter media. Did some gluingof the pipes and cutting of the plastic grids. The new thermostats are performing well in the house. Watched the Black Eyed Peas halftime show and was disappointed. I so awanted ot like them! Dinner was Libbie's wonderful pizza. Marinara instead of tomato sauce today. Not as good.

Went over to the greenhouse to look at the Hot Dawg in House 1. The heat exchanger is blown. will call on Monday for a new one. Prior to this I went to Home Depot and got 2 new thermostats for the house. The upstairs one failed and needed replacing. I did them both. We went to Fresh Market and got Tilapia which we had for dinner along with purple sweet potatos and Melbac wine. Nice.

It's a crappy day, cold and wet outside. Worked on Phobos some more. this time I implemented the time function so that it doesn't update more frequently than every 3 minutes. This is a requirement of a free account at Pechube. Went to the airport at 3 and picked Libbie up at 3:30. We wnet for dinner to La Cocina. I had the Pollo Chipotle which was outstanding with a Margarita.

I got the Pechube interface working on Phobos as well as the serial interface. The big issue was the serial interrupt handler needs to be attached with the attach function. Dinner was a Chile Rejano.

It's a warm day, 75 degrees. I worked in the woods, dry cleaned my jacket and did the W2's for the greenhouse. Busy day. I had a beanburger with salad for dinner.

Lots of Feb 1 stuff this morning. Changed the Vonage phone from Vonage lite for Stoneybrook. Reconciled the stock accounts to get end of month totals for performance tracking. Went to Krogers for groceries and stuff. Libbie is not going to fly tomorrow because of the huge winter storm approaching the Northeast. I continued my woods cleanup in the back. The pathway is now clear from the creek to the Bluebird house at the top of the hill. There were a pair of Bluebirds checking out the house while I was piling up sticks and twigs. I worked on the Mbed this afternoon and surprisingly I successfully got the Mbed to attach to the home LAN and monitor packets, printing them out using printf's which direct to a terminal program on the attached laptop. I picked up some nice salad ingredients today including olives, raisin, sunflower seeds and Asian Sesame dressing. Wow, was it a good salad. I need to add up the calories of this treat. Listened to Simon Boccanegra live with Dmitri in the evening and loved it. Earlier I watched a movie, The Collectress which was a psychological thriller from Lithuania. I had the salad for dinner but I had two chicken tacos for lunch, 250 calories each.

Talked to Libbie in RI. She's thinking of changing her Wednesday flight because of a snow storm scheduled for the northeast. Worked in the woods clearing a new path in the back. It's only 50 today which is chilly compared to yesterday. Dinner was leftover piece of chicken and a chicken leg.

Up nice and early today, went to the machine at Mickey d
D's for a newspaper. Came back and looked some more at mbed while GMA is on. It's almost 40 out now, to go to 60's later. More snow in the NorthEast while it should be 65 here on Wednesday when Libbie arrives.
worked more on woods cleanup then went to BB and checked everything out. Took garbage home and tested the generator.
went to Trader joes for pizza for dinner, also some desert - chocolate cake. not good since it tastes so great. I also bought a bag of salad.
Wrote the pachube interface for Mbed. It needs an Mjack to connect to ethernet which has to be hand wired. I'll probably build a board for this.
In the evening worked some more on mbed code.

This morning I paid the comcast bill, stoneybrook cc bill and paid for the watercolor course on St Simon. The course iis $1046 for 5 nights including meals and instruction for 2. I think it's a good deal. Worked outside on the Maple log and the downed tree doing basic chain saw cleanup. I got a lot done. My milk was sour this morning so I didn't have breakfast. I had fried chicken for dinner with chips. I spent some time learning about mbed, arduino and Pachube. Pachube is a web site that collects data from everybody for dissemination. Went upstairs after watching a little of Giganto Sabado and filed the AVSA sakes tax statement. Before dinner I filled out the Form 943 for FICA taxes, wrote a check and carried it to the Post Office. It needs a postmark before Jan 31. Stripped down a Frame thrower card to salvage the MagJack and the board itself. I'll mount the jack along with Mbed and TT4 into a case. With luck once I get the data onto an ethernet connection I can send frames to Pachube and Traviata.

Spent the day trying to get the avr to receive serial data from the TT4. I did find a wiring error in the TT4 to AVR. I also decided to get rid of the intervening conversion chip and put the jumpers on the TT4 to use the aux serial port in TTL mode. Still no luck. I crawled through the uart setup and single stepped various scenarios putting in lots of modifications to look at received frames. It was always corrupt and unrecognizable. Finally I changed the fuse bits for the crystal oscillator from an RC setting to the external 8 Mhz crystal setting and everything worked as expected. The AVR is correctly decoding TT4 data and displaying it on the LCD. Next step is to get the data on the web. I need something with a serial interface to receive data and an ethernet to either serve web pages or else send data to a server application somewhere. Dinner was fried chicken from Krogers.

Spent some more time on the packet without much luck. Played online with various road scholar courses, reading and looking. Dinner was Progresso Soup. Looked around at BP for locals. Did some catchup on accounting and documenting of bills.

Left the house at 6 AM for Libbie's trip to Providence. dropped her at the airport, stopped in Brueggers on the way back for a bagel and coffee. She later called at 8 AM that her plane was in hold on the roadway because of snow in BWI. She was supposed to take off at 7:45 AM. She finally landed around 3:"30 in light snow in PVD. For dinner I went over to Krogers for French Bread pizza.

Did some catchup on mail and finances. Sent Nancy Hayes descriptions of the pics for the AVSA calendar. The pictures are the Raleigh convention pictures. Did a grocery store run but only picked up bananas and OJ. Nothing else needed since Libbie leaves tomorrow and I want to cut back. Moved another Maple tree log to the brush pile. There are 2 logs left plus the piece attached to the stump which needs shoveling to cut out. Watched the Oscar nominations and was motivated to look for True Grit and Toy Story 3 online. Found both and downloaded them. Dinner was beanburger with mixed vegetable medley.

Last night I went to Publix for Lo Mein for dinner and also a slice of cheesecake. This morning I got up and packed the car and took off at 5:22 AM. The trip was great, traffic was lighter than normal. A little slowdown at Orlando but never stopped. Once I cleared downtown it was back to the speed limit. Stopped at Ormond Beach for a biscuit at McDonald's, gas at exit 1 Hess in Georgia for 3.02. Next stop was a rest area before Florence for bathroom and a banana. Got gas in Florence for 2.87 and got my apple out. Spilled some gas on my hand during fueling. Used the banana peel to wash my hand and a Mickey D napkin to dry it. It worked well. Got home at 4:00. Listened to Norma, Eugene Onegin and Meistersinger today from the Met on Sirius. I really like the satellite radio. For dinner Libbie and I went to LaCocina for a quesadilla and Margarita.