Pam made us breakfast at 8 as usual. We left shortly after breakfast and started the long 11 hour trip back. I chose to take I-4 which seemed like a good choice until we got to the St John's river and spent 1 hour and 4 minutes with all lanes stopped due to an accident at the DeBary exit. An SUV crashed and caught fire. After that we stopped at Ormond beach for a Big Mac lunch and gas. Next stop was just over the SC line for gas. Stopped at the Pilot on Exit 170 in SC for dinner at Wendys and more gas which was 1.49 For dinner I had a salad with crispy spicy chicken. It was called a half salad and cost around 420 calories. I also had a few of Libbie's French Fries. It got dark in Florence, the rest of the trip home was made in the dark. We got home around 9:30 which was longer than normal due to the delay on I-4. Our mail was waiting in the mailbox when we arrived. Everything looked great except the bike rack two bikes slid closer together due to the rails on the thule rack sliding on their support. I will separate them and drill a hole for a pin to stop them from sliding.

After breakfast we went to Selby Gardens which was beautiful since there was an Orchid show. We had lunch inside of Selby gardens. Took a ride out to Siesta Key. We got stopped at the light on the bridge. Went down to Turtle beach to find info out about kayaks then walked the beach. i saw lots of lovely bikinis. It was a treat seeing so many up close. For dinner we went to our traditional Bangcock Thai place. It's always good. Took a ride around the Cove today and all the way out to Stickney Point Rd through the houses without going out to Tamiami. I like it back there.

Last day of the month. I got a lot of the issues solved on IOS, i'm ready for an updated version to go to the store once I learn how.
We took our bikes to the legacy trail and rode to Sharkeys pier. I had a nice lunch of crab cakes and fries with a yuengling. Came home and took a nap. Did not go dancing tonight. We went to dinner at a sandwich shop called PDQ qhwew I had a chicken cali club with bacon and avocado. It was a long but satisfying day.



















ios

Pam our host cooked us a nice simple but adequate breakfast. Libbie had a bagel with an egg and I had a bowl of cereal with fruit. The strawberries and blackberries were a nice touch.
We tried to go to Selby this morning. Traffic going there of course was horrible. Once we got there was a line directing traffic into the parking lot. We found it was an orchid show and some kind of dinner. Too bad. We made our way to Osprey and when we got to Mortons Market we parked and went in looking for a cafe. We saw Libby's Bar and Cafe across the street so went over and had lunch. Yumm!!! I had a spinach and beets salad with pear slices surrounded by roasted beets accompanied by a piece of grilled chicken. What a taste treat. Also on the salad were blue cheese and sesame vinaigrette dressing with some granola crumbles over the top instead of croutons. it was a nice touch.
Returned to take a walk of the neighborhood before settling in to programming. I fixed a few problems in the app which was happiness. We left for the Opera at 4:50 but had way more time than necessary. We were going to meet Bill and Barb at 5:45 at the Parking garage but arrived on Palm at 5:15. We found street parking and stayed in the car listening to Anna Netrebko live on Sirius. We found a little pizza place across the street called Patellini which was pretty good. We each had a slice while Bill and Barb split a sandwich. The performance of Aida was over the top. Sarasota is the little Opera house that can! They actually staged a wonderful performance of Aida complete with a ballet and a nice triumphal scene featuring 4 ceremonial trumpets which they played well. It was a fantastic but long evening of grand opera.

We left home at 7 AM which was the plan. It was an easy drive down, the sun was bright in the sky but it was only 30 when we left. By the time we got to Georgia we had the AC on. Stopped at Florence to top off gas and get a bacon-egg and cheese biscuit. Next stop was on Commerce Ave in Jacksonville for a Wendy's single and to fill up again. Arrived at our BnB run by Pam and Charles at 6:15 PM. It was a good trip. Later in the evening we went out for dinner at Casey Key Fish House where we had fish and chips with a Yuengling. Very nice.

This was a busy day. I packed for our trip tomorrow, worked a little on some bugs in the IOS program and also paid the 5K deposit for our cruise. I also took a look at flights but didn't book anything. After a busy day we went to dance a little after 8. The party was noisy and I had a chance to talk with Sharon Hammill about signing up for New Orleans next Mardi Gras. It sounds great, I want to do it. Libbie is neutral. We will bee in Florida at that time. Dinner tonight was Lima Beans and a salad. I put too much Tapatio sauce in my beans, my mouth was burning. Libbie's Republic wireless phone arrived today but we won't activate it until we get back. Had a nice night at the studio party tonight. Talked with Paul and Anne, Libbie apologized for hijacking their trip with Anita and Ken. Earlier today Anita sent an email saying they couldn't afford an Uncruise and ended up booking with Princess. Paul was glad we signed up since we "rescued him" from a large ship cruise. We did not go out after the party, choosing to go home and resume packing.

I tried hooking up the outdoor sprinkler and had a disaster. The booster board got fried when i shored the output leads. Meanwhile the Pi and sprinkler board got very hot. Something is very wrong. I shut it all down. I studied flights today to Alaska and I think I picked out some winners. We mos likely will go the day before to avoid hassles of being late for the cruise start. Dinner tonight was Lima beans and salad. Very nice.

I posted that First Class was in beta for IOS. 50 people liked the post and over 16 commented they couldn't wait for it. I added 2 ladies as beta testers from the AV facebook group. The lady from un-cruise reserved some cabins for the three couples. I sent the invoices on to the Cain's and the Kretchmans. I also checked trip insurance with a few other providers and found it cheaper at John Hancock. We had a great lesson with Robert who started our choreography and had us pick our song. We settled on Nuit A Paris by Antoine Simone. It's a nice mellow slow waltz that sounds like a night in Paris. I love the music.
We have a sever storm passing through the area this afternoon with strong winds and tornadoes. We got a call from Heather that she is stranded in RDU with a canceled flight. We finished spaghetti and salad for dinner and had we known that Heather was coming we would have waited. Got to RDU at 7 PM and picked them up. It was a joy to have Heather and Nate here.

I finally finished up the photo album and submitted it to MyPublisher. I also used the $30 voucher to buy a phone for Libbie from Republic Wireless. Hopefully we can activate it after March 1 when our Verizon plan runs out. Spent some time on the phone with Un-Cruise and arranged for our trip to Alaska. We reserved two trips, a pre-cruise on the Denali railroad and overnight in the park then the Muir trip on the Safari Endeavour. This thing is pricey at almost $20,000. We still need to get plane tickets.
Dinner tonight was salad with some tuna over the top.

The app was approved by Apple so I went through the motions to get it listed and get the notices sent out. This was a big relief since it's been a long time in development, almost 2 years. I heard from John C that the pictures are not there and also from Bob Clark that the yellow search box on the front screen is not working. I found that the search box doesn't clear.
I started work on the next photo album mainly because a voucher I have is expiring. It's been hard filling 80 pages. The Open Sprinkler came today. It's different since the Pi plugs into it instead of using ribbon cables. This is a problem since I want to splice into the supply line for battery backup.
Stayed up until midnight working on the album. Dinner tonight was a chicken and french cut green beans in Mexican cooking sauce. I had a salad to accompany the meal. Weight loss has come to a flat line. At least I'm staying down but I need to get back on the losing curve.

Got the post hole digger working and hauled it out into the woods where I drilled a hole for the new birdhouse. After lunch Libbie helped me install the house into a very wet hole. It filled with water when I drilled it. When we were all done tamping the mud slurry into place a pair of bluebirds showed up and were checking the house out. Wow, that was only about 10 minutes. We have a daffodil blooming in the garden. It's a little early. Crocuses are also blooming. Paul sent the links to the Alaskan cruises he is considering. This looks interesting if we can go along with them on the trip. After Libbie's delicious dough from scratch pizza tonight I got to work on IOS Test lfight. I got my first pass of the program into the test flight but it needs review which may take a few hours or days, unknown. We shall see. The bottom line is that I finally got the app completed enough to release to Apple for beta testing.

I put the connectors on the wrong side of the OSHPark board. I chose to populate a second board instead of trying to deal with removing the connectors. The Mote-Pi gateway works very well. It is two way communicating with the only sensor on the network for now. My next sensor may be a crawl space humidity sensor although we went to Lowes today and picked up some epoxy for me to glue down the RJ5s and power connector on another perfboard to make a sensor for the greenhouse. We went to Shriners for the 8 PM dinner which was one hour later than normal. It was a fun evening. We brought a bottle of wine and had pork chops and beef at the buffet. The food was cold but tasty. Our table had Ken and Anita, Paul and Anne, Harry and Terry and Nancy and Art. It was a fun group and we had a nice time. We didn't stay to the end which was supposed to be midnight. We went home at 11 PM which was late enough.

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.