While having lunch on the porch we heard the doorbell ring. It was our Postal carrier questioning the letter I left in the mailbox because mail for this house is on hold. We told him it is not on hold, Jessie Drive is on hold. We went to the Post Office and got all our old mail including the parts from several days ago which was good to see. I also got a check from Victoria which was the rent check. The CU camera deposit app would not accept it because it was too much money. Will deposit tomorrow. We had a dinner of hamburger and Lima Beans then went out to the studio party. Had a hard time dancing, nothing went well. Our waltz was a disaster. I signed up for a waltz showcase. We went out to the Mexican place where Chilis of Cary used to be. This was after dance and we went with Anne and Paul, Anita and Ken and Terry and Harry. The food there is fantastic. I had a beer and we split an appetizer with cheese, poblano peppers and other stuff in it. It's served with Tortillas. I was able to get two way communication working on the Pi Gateway for a change. I'm guessing the problem was a combination of bad software and improper powering of the Anarduino. The Bridge PCB by Tod also was in the mail today from OSHPark. I need to add headers and get it working tomorrow.

The driver chips came today. I removed the old chip from the NCID Display and put the new one on without any problems. The display came to life immediately. This is happiness since it allows me to continue pursuing putting environmental readings on the display using the gateway or equivalent. I'm still splitting off the large zip files from the IOS program into separate downloads. I may have to use a separate screen and user button to kick this off. Dinner was the last of the meatloaf muffins which we had with salad and Lima beans.

Made a trip to the Post Office when they opened at 9 AM. Had to visit the window at the side door to look for my package. The guy said it was sent back, he never even looked at the tracking number. He just went to the shelf and came back and told me that. That place needs to be shut down, lazy inefficient employees. The hot tub is slowly heating up with the new controller card. It's up to 90 when we went to bed. Libbie jumped in anyway, she came out cold. I worked on a separate download function for the FC IOS app. For dinner we had 2 each of the meatloaf muffins along with lima beans and a salad. Next time I would eliminate the beans and only have the salad. I ordered some more Huzzah processors from Adafruit. I'm going to use one on the gateway function to send and receive serial through an Anarduino to the sensor network. This would interface with a Pi. I possibly could replace the Pi with enough software in the Huzzah but I doubt it since the Pi Moteino framework has nice graphing and tracking functions. The Huzzah would do serial send and receive and do HTTP GETs to the NCIDD. Libbie signed up to stay with Lori tomorrow since this is her first day back from the hospital. In dance today Robert straightened out our forward progressive twinkle. I have to take small steps and make sure I step to the side. Libbie has to take a big second step back. When I'm doing the reverse progressive twinkle I need to take bigger steps back while Libbie smalls down.

My new credit card was supposed to come today by 10:30 but it didn't come until 5 PM via FedEx Priority. Oh well. The Jacuzzi controller did come today by way of UPS Blue 3 day service. Excellent. It went right in. This definitely was the problem. The motor started right up with the new controller. Now the long process of heating water begins. Today was grocery day so in addition to the groceries I added the ingredients for meatloaf muffins, a Cooking Light favorite. We had this was Lima beans and a salad. It was delicious. Instead of wine we had water. The package from Moteino was sent back by the post office because of some kind of addressing problem. I'm going to try to fetch it in the morning if it's still there.

Still no good answer on what's wrong with the uploads to Apple. Will keep trying. This is Presidents day so not much going on except we had some light frozen rain this morning which is melting as it warms up and turns to all rain. Dinner tonight was chicken curry with green beans cooked on the stove top. It's delicious.

Did a little housekeeping in the workshop, spurred on by Libbie's sewing room project. She needed plastic shoe boxes and I had them available. I freed up at least 8 or more which was good. I finished the program and tried uploading it but got an error. I put a query out on B4X forum to see if others had the same problem. Libbie made her pizza for dinner which was yummy.

Continued the day trying to split the IOS program up to do a better job on the progress indicator. Listened to Trovatore this afternoon while reading online. Libbie is cleaning her sewing closet. We had a light dinner of salad and lima beans. It's just what I wanted. We went out tonight to the United Church of Chapel Hill. Gary couldn't use his tickets os he gave them to us las night. We had a great time eating chocolate and dancing to a 13 piece big band. The music wasn't too overpowering even though it was a small room. We danced quite a bit and sat at a table with an older couple, Raleigh and Betsy Mann. He was the band announcer and singer. They were a delight. We had a great night. It seemed easier to drive back than going there. Total mileage was around 27 miles which wasn't too bad. The chocolates were delicious, especially the mint fudge brownies.

I spent the morning breaking the original 5 zip files into 10 of them to do a better job on progress indication. I made pretty good progress on this then went outside to work on the hot tub. Even with the overhead heater it was cold outside so I dug up the kerosene heater. We used all the kerosene in the Fall when we started a fire at the greenhouse to burn scrap lumber. I first went to Sheetz and then DQ but could find no kerosene. I next went to the old NAD on 55 but the kerosene pump was gone so I used my smartphone to find kerosene. It said Jordan Oil so I went there. The very nice lady said that there is a pump at the Marathon on the corner of 55 and Salem. I went there and found an old pump next to the building. I picked up 4 gallons which cost 12.09. Started the heater on the back porch and diagnosed the hot tub. Indicator is showing a bad hot tub temperature but I found a chart of the thermistor readings vs temp and measured ours. IT showed 52k which was about right. The motor is good because I manually pressed the relay and it worked. The only conclusion is a bad controller board. I ordered one from CA. A few minutes later I got a text from Capitol One telling me there were suspicious charges on my card. Three gas stations in Orlando had $65 charges on the card. I wish I knew how the card got out. Had a dance lesson with Melanie covering waltz. We did extremely well, I really have the waltz down pat. After a dinner of salad and Lima beans we went to the CBC party. Esquires was postponed tonight because of the threat of wintry weather which never materialized. At the party I tried to Waltz with Libbie but for some reason she wouldn't move. It's so frustrating.

Tried working on OSPi today on the porch. The fuse seems to be blown, I may have had something to do with this while cabling the external battery and battery manager. I left for the airport at 2:30 to pick up Libbie but stopped by Kroger first to get gas. I made an earlier trip this morning to get Lima beans and salad dressing but forgot to get gas. Her plane was early. We went home where I continued to do the IOS program. Libbie decided to change he hot tub water which involved me a little. We made shrimp and green beans with Mexican Cooking sauce for dinner before trying to turn the tub on again. While we had the dinner the tub was filling. Unfortunately it didn't start up with the new water. I'll deal with this tomorrow.

It's cold today. i continued on the Mote to garage interface and discovered that after the F: of temperature there is a space. The gateway treats a space as a delimiter so it wasn't picking up the temperature. I fixed with a routine that removed all spaces from the character stream representing the temperature number. I also go the router configured with fixed addresses for both the NCID display and the gateway by entering the mac addresses in the lan setup. When it sees those addresses it assigns specific IP addresses. This works. Melanie called asking for my dance lesson to be moved up to 2:45 from 3:30. The lesson went well, I picked up quite a few tips on the waltz. On the way home from dance I picked up a bag of mandarin oranges. They didn't have cuteys. this is the best orange ever. What flavor. I continued working on the gateway and discovered that the atmega part has trouble doing 115kbaud at 3 volts. I bumped it to 5 volts and it worked better although it risks the Pi I/Os since they are not 5 volt parts. I ordered some Moteinos from Low Power Labs since they seem to think their Moteinos do OK at the higher baud rates. I'll give them a shot. They seem to be running them at 16 Mhz but I can't confirm that anywhere. The Mega versions do run at the higher speeds. Dinner tonight was a salad and a bowl of beans in Mexican sauce. This morning my weight was at 229 which finally moves the needle off 230 all week. Got to keep going with the program.

I took a look at Energy Transfer pricing as well as SPH today. I am pretty devastated at the potential losses in these two holdings of mine. I dread to see the rest of the portfolio. I had too much energy exposure and need help.
I studied the Backup battery board from Moteino and decided they need a new case before I can mount the battery and controller. The plant room may be OK since there's room inside for the backup. On the porch I may need an external battery pack. I saw the FB post about Lori. She is in bad shape with broken arm, broken leg, broken ribs and broken vertebrae. She seems to be in high spirits.
Added an external case to hold the battery on the porch. Got everything mounted and wired, awaiting a flash card which is in another Pi in my office where I configured it. I got the gateway working for the Motes. It's reading the garage sensor but not the temperature, only the humidity. It also is not polling the status. Dinner was the last bean burger. i had that with some Lima Beans in Mexican cooking sauce which I really liked. Picked up another jar of that stuff today in Kroger.

I put the cover on the garage door motor today finishing that job. Now I need a Pi gateway to talk to the thing as well as talk to many other sensors that don't exist yet. I have lots of plans for this and am spurred on by watching YouTube videos. I tried a pre main banner but it didn't work. I think the best ocurse of action is to start main, call a banner page and do the unzipping, then return to main. This is beginning to make the most sense for me.
Did a Walmart trip to get an SD card for the Pi. I couldn't read the card from the outdoor sprinkler controller so I needed a replacement. i eventually found out the problem was the Dell computer Bios. Once I installed a Bios update the card reader worked perfectly and allowed me to write tow images, one for the Mote Gateway and one for the outdoor sprinkler. I didn't need the new Walmart 8 Gb SD cards I purchased but I certainly can use them on future Pi projects.
Dinner was a treat. It was raining so I didn't want to cook on the grill so I took the leftover frozen shrimp in the freezer and combined it with the Mexican cooking sauce I got once free at Kroger and made a delicious shrimp dinner which I will repeat with some veggies next time. Maria Stuarda was live from the Met this evening. I don't care for this opera and probably won't do the HD performance.

After the CBS Sunday Morning programs at 10:30 I went into the garage and started working on the garage door motor. Fortunately I have a step by step disassembly guide. All went pretty well but took a long time, especially with adjusting the open and closed stop state. I also hooked up the magnets to the Moteino and enabled the gateway transceiver in the house. The door worked well reporting the open/closed state as well as the temperature. I'm pretty happy with the results. I didn't put the cover back on. I'll reserve that for tomorrow. Dinner was a Trader Joes frozen italian gnocchi entree which was a pasta and spinach in a tomato sauce. It wasn't great from the microwave and would probably be better if cooked conventionally. The Superbowl was on tonight but I didn't watch it. I spent some time upstairs at my desktop computer instead.

Last night I got the Anarduinos sending packets across the room. My node was the garage mote sending temperature and humidity data that I previously added to the platform and worked on the software to packetize it. This morning I wired up the hall devices to the Anarduino and successfully got it transmitting door sensor status to another Mote which will be the gateway Mote. This is happiness. Next step was to locate a project box and mount it on the door opener. So far everything is going along smoothly. I'll have to disassemble the garage motor when the new gears get here since the old nylon ones are disintegrating. The opener is 10 years old. Weight loss is stuck at 230, same as yesterday but not unexpected. The first 6 were pretty easy now it will slow to a pound or two per week. Why did I let my weight get away like this?
Dinner once again was a bean burger along with a salad.

Updated the AVSA website with the current AVM and also uploaded a family pic to CVS for Libbie in Tiverton. My weight this morning was 230 even. That's 6 pounds since Feb 1 which is about right for the early part of this process. I expect the loss to slow down to about a pound or two per week but at least I'm in the groove. Weight at the Dr office last year was 222 with clothes so I need around 217 nude to equal it. That's 13 pounds in 7 weeks. It will be a challenge but a good challenge. Tried to get cereal in Kroger but once again they were out of shredded wheat. I had to go to Walmart to get the cereal.
Worked the rest of the afternoon on temperature conversions for the garage Mote. I finally have it converting from C to F and then converted to a string for sending in a packet. Now I have to configure a receiver to see if it makes it across the room. For dinner I had a bean burger with tomato and onion. I also had a salad with the meal.

Yesterday I reported I was at 232 but that was today's reading. I updated the journal today and got the date wrong. Yesterday was only 234. This morning I did my first over the air update of the NCID Display. It went fast, I was impressed. Did a little looking at the web code for the Huzzah. It looks straight forward. I think I can build a WiFi remote control for the thing relatively easily. I also set up the Arduino tool chain and libraries for the Moteino clones (Anarduino) and was able to burn a test program into one of them. Put FTDI headers on a second and a 433 Mhz antenna but did not burn it in. Will do that tomorrow along with testing the garage mote. Dinner was a bean burger using the cooking light recipe and grilled outside in the rain. It wasn't bad but kind of thick. I had it on a sesame bun with onion and ketchup. I had the last slice of pineapple for dessert. It was all pretty filling.

Left at 6:30 am to take Libbie to RDU for 8 AM flight. Later it started raining while I worked on taking the door opener apart. I'm figuring out how to mount a garage Mote to monitor garage door closure. The drive gear is falling apart. Found the part number for a gear and ordered it from eBay. The whole kit has the drive gear, a worm gear, various washers and O rings and some grease. It was $14. A new opener is $200 from Home Depot. I built the garage mote and discovered I ordered a 433 Mhz unit. I put a 915 Mhz antenna on the mote which I need to change to a 433 unit. I found code on github to run the TH02 temperature-humidity sensor that I'm also going to mount on the garage mote.
I finally lost a few pounds when I checked the scale this morning. Down to 232 from 236. Continued to diet by only having an orange and a slice of pineapple for lunch I went out and bought the ingredients for a bean burger using black beans but was too lazy to make them so I had the butternut squash casserole. It was delicious and was 140 calories per serving. I had 2 servings.

The Garage Mote from Low Power labs came today. Studied a lot about the Mote gateway, watching You Tube videos about this. Libbie found a problem with changing the values of the inventory. She consistently gets a crash. We had a salad again for dinner.

First day back home! I wrote a check for Esquires and put it in the mailbox. We ran over to the Jessie Rd site and checked the keys before putting them in the mailbox as well. We were going to take the mailbox but found out the new owner had a power bill in there so we left it behind. It has our name on it. I spent the day getting the Huzzah working. Soldering headers was straightforward. The issue was configuring the Arduino IDE with the correct version of the WiFi manager and with support for the Adafruit board. Got it all working after working on it all day. Dinner was a salad with Balsamic.

We got up at 6 and started cleaning the condo. I made many trips to the car with our stuff which really wore me out. We had a breakfast of shredded wheat and then out the door at 8:15. We stopped for biscuits at Mickey Dees in Lake Mary. Libbie met an interesting old lady who told her they have cookies 13 for $4 here and you get choose between oatmeal and chocolate chip. She said she comes here a lot and also buys $10 gift certificates for presents and people think they hit the jackpot. Too funny. We had a little traffic slowdown around Lake Buena Vista then got going again full speed. There were a number of speed traps out. We saw one in Georgia that caught 4 speeders at once. Gas stop at Brunswick byut the Mickey Dees had a long line for lunch so we drove to Darien and had a Wendys lunch. I had a single. There were about 20 young girls there ordering for lunch, they were a gymnastic team. Next gas stop was exit 170 in Florence, SC where gas was 1.49. Wow! I didn't think it could get any lower.
We got home around 8 which was longer than normal, probably because of the number of stops. Once home we ordered a pizza from Annas in downtown Apex. It was pretty good, not as good as NY Pizza but not bad. It was thin crust NY style. I originally wanted a CiCi pizza from McGregor Village but Libbie couldn't find them on the map. Maybe they're gone by now.

This was non stop cleanup day getting ready to vacate the place tomorrow. We left at 11:45 for Turandot in Bradenton. We bought the tix when we were there 2 weeks ago. The Sarasota theaters were sold out. We stopped on Clark at the Subway for a turkey sub before we got on the Interstate. The performance was wonderful, the tenor not so wonderful. The lady next to me decided to use the entire first act to unwrap gummy bears in crinkly cellophane. The guy next to Libbie decided he would join in on the choruses. ugggh. We stopped at Albrittons on the way home to get Honeybelles. We bought a bagful but they turned out to be not so good. They are overripe. I have always liked Navels better and will stay with my Walmart Navels for 50 cents each. For dinner we had our last wine and cheese at sunset then had a balsamic vinegar salad. I am going to start my weight loss program Feb 1. I need to lose 20 pounds before April 7.

I washed all the mouldings today with a brush. This wore me out. Libbie continued with scrubbing all the floors. The place is looking good. On the IOS program I switched the main list over to a tableview that can handle very large lists. It works well. I also finished up the icons on the results page with icons for tap, wish, wish report, inventory edit and inventory report. It looks great, I'll probably remove the menu for these items. We didn't have time to get out today since the Wisconsin party starts at 6. We were seated at table 2, a table for 6. One couple from ILL and one from Wisconsin. The other couple were a guy and his younger blonde date. The buffet was excellent, my favorite being the trout with a cherry glaze. Also a nice medium rare prime beef. Buckeyes for dessert along with a sugar cream pie that I never had before.

Still raining today but it's warm. It's Richard Nicholas's birthday. We had a long talk with them about videos and grandchildren. I got the camera app working in IOS but haven't figured out how to save it yet. It needs copying to a program folder then added to the database. Lots to do. Libbie started deep cleaning the condo for our exit on Sunday. This month went by too fast. For dinner tonight we went over to the clubhouse for rib night. I had a half rack of ribs with baked potato. Saved half of the half to take home for lunch tomorrow. We met a Canadian couple who bought in forest Circle 2 years ago. They said they were on #4. They needed a table for 3 but their third didn't seem to show up yet.

This shouldn't be as good a day as it is because it's pouring rain out. It's around 70 degrees. I had lots of success moving forward on the IOS program. The icons are nice looking and I have most of them working. Still need to implement a few more features. I made an appointment for tire rotation. Tire Kingdom offers this service free if you bought the tires there but it took an hour. The good news is the job is done.
We went over to pub night where I had the vegetable torte which was eggplant, squash and portobello in layers with a beurre blanc sauce. it was chocolate cake day so we had chocolate cake for dessert. The cake was a rich chocolate with chocolate mousse filling and coated with dark chocolate chips. it was the best chocolate cake ever.

The month is slipping by too fast. It's warm today, over 80. The majority of the snow in the yard has melted as viewed by the web cam. I finally got a good handle on the pinch to zoom as well as the layout problems. if I use the webview with the url mode instead of html mode I get a normal sized image that can be zoomed. With html mode the image is shrunk to a tiny little speck on the screen, not acceptable. We took the bikes to the Venice train station and rode the waterway. Unfortunately we did not recharge the batteries all week. I used the throttle to just keep the middle or yellow light on. the green one was totally off. I ran out of power about half a mile before the train station on the return which wasn't bad. We stayed on one side of the waterway to conserve power by not having to go up the hump on the bridge over the waterway. We felt that would use too much power. Dinner was a salad after the wine and cheese on the Lanai at sunset. I listened a little to Turandot but went to bed for the 3rd act.