After the groceries today I went into the garden and fired up the tiller to prepare the planting bed for geraniums. The downhill slope and the proximity of the fence made controlling this thing hard. It really took a lot out of me to the point of exhaustion. I ended up taking a shower and laying on the bed for 2 hours reading in order to recover. I productively used the time to read about performing the integration of Alexa, OpenHab and IR Remotes. Basically, Alexa interfaces to a bridge which interfaces to OpenHab. The correct URL is activated which then activates an IR LED on a YUN which spits out the code to perform TV activities such as power on, change channels, etc.
Dinner tonight was the balsamic strawberries on a bed of lettuce with some chicken strips in it.

I did some work on the First Class May update and got it released to the server. When i installed First Class on Libbie's phone I had a chance to test the May update. It went well. Libbie's phone has First Class and the database is up to date. After lunch we went to the Farmer's Market and purchased plants for the flower garden. I found some zinnias in flats and dwarf French Marigolds. Libbie got her Salvia, Basil and other stuff. We also found Amy, the little Asian girl in a hat. We bought a planter from her loaded with a nice arrangement of plants. Left at 5:45 for the roadhouse. We ended up before dinner taking a dance lesson in WC Swing from Andy who was the substitute instructor. The other guy couldn't make it so Andy drove out. We split Salmon BLT for dinner. I had 2 Sweet Josie beers with dinner which was too much, I shouldn't have had 2. We helped close the place and danced to the last song. It was a fun night with lots of foxtrot. Andy taught WC Swing and then during the band break conducted a cha cha and foxtrot class. It was fun.

After the morning programs I went out into the garden and prepared the grow boxes. I then planted the cucumber and zinnia seeds. I tried to get fertilizer in Home Depot but only got an expensive bag of organic crap for yuppies. Took a trip to Walmart and found plain old garden fertilizer which was 6-10-4. I put my seedlings in the shade to get hardened off before I put them into the garden. While i was at Home Depot I also picked up some hooks for the BBQ tools and a case for the NCID Pi server. The case is big enough to hold the modem, the Pi and battery backup stuff. It's a little pricey at $31 but I feel well worth it. It does include an outlet in the box that I could plug the 5 volt wall tap into. Libbie made her traditional pizza from scratch for dinner. While the pizza was in the oven Joe called for Mother's day. She put it on speaker and continued with the Pie. It almost burned in the oven but rescued it in time browning the pizza on top. Joe was making pizza for a Mother's Day party for the Lapworths. The whole gang was going to be coming over.

Up at 6:00 this morning. I was incredibly tired and didn't want to get out of bed. We had breakfast and took a thermos of coffee for the road and left at 6:43. Our target was 6:30. It was an easy drive with a stop at exit 4 in VA for gas and McDonalds biscuits. We got to the meeting a little before 10. The meeting was way behind, mostly because of the 3 boxes of plants that Libbie brought. I gave my program after the break at 11:15. All went well and we eventually went to a Mexican restaurant, La Plaza Aztec which was outstanding. I ordered the Chile Rejeno which came with a beef taco that i didn't need. Chip and Salsa complimented the meal.. It was a nice afternoon, we ended up leaving the restaurant at 2:30 PM. We got to Apex non stop by 5:20 PM.. A quick change of clothes later and wash my hands and face and we left for the Roadhouse in Pittsboro to meet up with our dance friends.
What a fun evening. The band, Graymatter, were 3 siblings and a spouse. They were nice, mellow and played songs from the 60s and 70s. We had beer with our dinner. I had a Sweet Josey which is a dark beer and then a Yuengling. For dinner we split an order of salmon BLT. The group ordered some appetizers consisting of fried green tomato, potato patties and flounder bites.
Joining us were the Cain, Nancy and Art and the Rumleys. There was a large group of 14 next to us celebrating a birthday and a large cardboard cutout of Donald Trump. At one point Anne Cain decided to dance with Donald while Terry took pictures. We left shortly after 10 ending a long day.

Lots to do today. Tried the IOS program but I screwed up something and now it won't compile and won't show me what the error is. Worked on sorting and weeding out slides for tomorrow's program in Richmond. I made the wings recipe for dinner tonight but used the remaining Chicken drumsticks. They were excellent. We had this with lettuce for dinner. In the afternoon we had an additional lesson with Robert. It was a great review of the dance routine for our waltz showcase. We sort of made it through a few times, we are beginning to remember the routine. Sadly I am finding that I can't remember a lot of the steps. I'll just have to work twice as hard. We left for dance at 8 and had an excellent night. There was a group of young people here from an NC State dance club. They were quite good. We also met a couple of newcomers - Karen and somebody. This was their first party. I have the slide program for tomorrow pared down to about 90 slides and also packed the lights, cloth, cameras, monitor and extension cord for Richmond tomorrow. After dance we went out to Sprits in Cary and only had a beer, no bar food which was good. It was a great time.

Another cold and rainy day. I was going to plant the grow boxes but opted out because of the rain. The Amazon Alex device came today so I spent some time getting acquainted with it and giving it commands. I used IFTTT to control the Honeywell Thermostat but I was not impressed with the lack of control available. My best bet is going to be to use my own server to do this. i have an outline on a blog of how to talk to Alexa. I finally got the IOS app doing updates using the password file. Next step is import and export of User db files. Still more to do.
Dinner tonight was spaghetti with cheese sprinkled on. I continued to read about using Alexa to issue MQTT commands. This is what I need for general purpose Home Automation. I also spent some time converting the old Nashville powerpoint into jpg files so I could easily pick and choose which ones I will use at the Richmond meeting on Saturday.

Struggled with SQL saving and retrieving. I'm a little fuzzy on SQL but eventually got it working. We had a good dance lesson at 3:30 with Robert and signed up for Fridays at 3:30 as well. After the lesson we went to Trader Joes. I enjoyed Yeti today since I discovered the hash tags. There's a lot of college kids having sex on there and posting photos.
Dinner was chicken drumsticks using a cooking light recipe, Spicy Honey glazed Drumsticks. It was OK but not terrific. We had it with Lima beans and Shiraz that we picked up in Trader Joe's today.

I worked more on the IOS program and finally got it to do an update! Now I need to store the user supplied password and display it on the updates page. We had another wicked hail storm with twisting winds and tons of rain. the power actually went out which was an issue with NCID since I couldn't easily get the display to run again. Eventually it rebooted when I connected to the hotspot it sets up. The power went out and we ended up having tuna sandwiches. The generator kept the TV and the table lamps running as well as our can opener.

We had a hail storm this evening. I continued working on the IOS program through the day then at 5:45 we left for the Roadhouse in Pittsboro. The Tuneswingers were playing, Bill Moore had made reservations for us. We sat with Sharon and David Raymer. It turns out their son Ryan was in Joe's class. They had a younger son, Carson, who died of heart failure in his 20s. David was the guy we always saw in the cool clothes at the various dances. Fun night. We split an order of Salmon BLT which we had with 3 Yuengling bottled beers. We stayed until around 10:20. The roads were clear on the way home. We seemed to have picked the correct times to go and return in between storms.

Tried writing the part of the software that decodes the updates file. Kept downloading an incorrect file. Went to the desktop and tried uploading the file on the server again, it was not the issue. A few days later I discovered the problem was a typo in the file name I was receiving. Libbie made her yummy pizza again for inner.

Painted on the porch this morning and did the wall with the furnace and stuff on it then finished the roller off on the other wall. the job is almost complete! Went to Elektra at 12:15. Really enjoyed this stirring emotional opera. i know the music so it was nice to see how it melded with the story. the opera as sung by Nina Stemme was intense. After the opera i stopped at Kroger and got shrimp and wine for dinner along with some new selections of Birdseye steamfresh Southwest rice. I liked it all.

Dinner of course was the shrimp with Southwest Rice and a bottle of Malbec from the Kroger wine sampling.

Tonight is the studio party. I prepared 4 lbs of chicken wings this morning after they thawed overnight. Put on a rub and put them in the refrigerator for cooking tonight. Worked on IOS and got the decryption algorithm working. It was crashing and found out the password was incorrect on the upload yesterday. Now I need to figure out what to do with the decrypted password list. Went onto the porch and spackled, taped the sink, and put Kilz on the water spots on the wall. While I was at it I also used Kilz on some spots on the ceiling. I will paint the side porch wall tomorrow.
Cooked the ribs and prepared 2 dishes to pass. One was the sweet and sour ribs which i thought were the better and the other was classic buffalo style with butter and hot sauce. This one won first place. We had a nice time. Lana and Janet were single tonight so I danced with both of them. It was a fun evening, probably made more fun by our first place win.

The month is almost over. Where did April go? It's amazingly almost all gone. Cynthia posted that her cousin passed away. This lady was still running Manatee Technical College and planned to retire in June. I posted the obit on my Life Bits. This was the first time I have used the new dokuwiki to post an article with a picture. I like it a lot better, the user interface is much easier to use.

Libbie went to quilt group and a massage this afternoon. While she wasout I struggled with the map encryption but after 3 or 4 hours I found a German post with an easy to use wrapper around the encryption library. Kudos to Google translate for the capability of translating the comments in the program that allowed me to understand the flow. Under the covers he uses stringutils and the byte converter to take a text string and encode/decode it. It works on both B4A and B4I. WooHoo!
We had a nasty storm around 5:30 that Libbie was out in. Quite a bit of hail came down covering the ground and destroying our rose bushes and the iris blooms. Lots of foliage has holes in it but other than that, no major damage. Dinner tonight was a sesame bun with tuna salad, celery and lettuce. Yum.

Libbie started painting the porch while I finally started to work on the updates portion of the IOS program. We went to dance today and tried to go through our whole routine but kept screwing up the releve' and the dosey doh. I'm determined to make this work! I did some rearranging of the 401K this morning, getting rid of KMI and picking up the CEFs I was looking at. The portfolio probably still needs tweaking but for now it looks OK. Dinner was spaghetti with cheese sprinkled on.

Did a minimal grocery trip with the biggest purchase being another 4 lb bag of wings. I'll use up the current bag tonight. I spent a lot of time researching income issues and ended up doing a lot of purchases and sales on Scottrade. The IRA wasn't in too bad of a shape. This is the first time I have looked at it in a long time probably almost a year. There was 42k in cash sitting there which I did some purchases with. I also sold some turkeys such as Gastar. I may also have to dump Kinder, KMI, since they have seemed to lose their way with borrowing and the downturn in oil. I also made some CEF purchases since they seem to be stable with 8% yields although stocks such as SO and O which only have 4% yields seem to be doing better in total returns. I made classic buffalo sauce this evening for dinner but it came out salty. The recipe said to use unsalted butter and I made it with salted. Will pick up unsalted butter and try again for the party.

I got all Mary's issues with the AVSA website resolved this morning. Started researching displaying data on the NCID display using MQTT. This is something I really want to make happen!!!! I need to get off my ass and make this happen instead of talking about it all the time. I ordered a professional recorder on eBay this morning. I finally decided on a Tascam DR100 Mark II. This is for AVSA as well as recording Operas and other stuff where an audio recorder is needed. Hopefully I can take the MP3 files off this thing unlike the Olympus device which doesn't allow this. For dinner tonight I made wings with the sweet and sour sauce which we had with a salad. I only coated 4 wings at first but they were good enough to use the sauce for all the rest.
This afternoon I purchased the PSEG bond after talking to a broker at Scottrade to see if I was missing any red flags with this bond.

I heard from Mary about the AVSA website. I had not answered her for a week so I need to get busy on this. I attempted to do an update to the IOS program but ended up putting it off and did some reading on the porch with the music streaming from my tablet to the bluetooth speaker. This did OK. I researched more bonds on Scottrade and am interested in the PSEG bond. Libbie made her pizza again which was excellent after not having it a while.

Early this morning I made a shortened extension cable for the 5 volt supply inside the controller box so that I could close it up. This went well. I then got out the ceiling paint and touched up the water spots. They still show through after the touch up. Libbie acme home from the beach at 12 with a quart of fresh picked strawberries today. We won't have dinner here because we have Toppers tonight which includes a sort of dinner.

Got dressed up and left at 6:19 for Toppers which was a little early since the food doesn't go out until 7 PM. We sat with Charlie, Jim, another couple and Andy. Andy had a beautiful date, Camille, who was an excellent conversationalist and a ballroom dancer in a gold gown. She was quite nice and definitely a keeper. We struggled trying to do waltz but did OK on the other dances. The food was as expected, some salads and wrap sandwiches with an open bar. I only had one glass of wine and a chicken salad wrap which had a lot of lettuce in it. We stayed until 10:40, the dance lasts until 11. It was a nice evening.

At long last we had rain! It got dark in the morning then started raining big time. i did the relay test on the box on the family room floor and everything seems to be wired correctly. I had to search quite a bit for a 24 volt AC transformer but finally located one with my outdoor lighting stuff in the garage. Mounted it on the wall and wired up all the sprinklers. Ran a one minute test on 2 zones in the greenhouse and the correct solenoids activated.
I'm very happy with the results. I ended up in the pouring rain at 3:30 in the afternoon on the beltline which was all jammed up. Took some side roads to avoid the beltline. What a mess. Dinner was a salad and I previously had a hamburger for lunch so i had protein today. Left for dance at 8 and was shocked when I got there. It was prom night, I totally forgot. Danced with Mary, Luann, Anita, Lana and Anne. It was a fun night. We went out afterward to JDs tavern on the corner of 55 and the Peakway. I got home around 11:30 PM. A great night except I was wearing a golf shirt and jeans while everyone else was dressed up in tuxedos and gowns.

Luis came around 11 today with 3 other guys to paint the porch. They stayed until 7 PM working in the dusk but with the porch lights on. When they left I noticed some watermarks still showing through the paint. Not sure if they missed some paint or if the paint is too thin to cover them. I'll touch this up myself. I got the power management for the Pi working outside the controller box today. Now I need to test the relay wiring and button it all up. Dinner was the good wings recipe again. I was going to saute' some onions to have with garlic and other ingredients in a sweet and sour sauce but ran out of time so I had the wings like yesterday's, straight from the overn. Betsy Blake called yesterday offering 2 tickets to Toppers this weekend. I called Libbie then called Betsy back and told her we would take them. I put a $60 check into the mail this morning for the tickets.

Louis called today and said he won't come at all. This was great news because I have a lesson with Robert. I spent some time memorizing the routine then went to meet him at the studio, This was a different lesson but pretty good in that he showed me a few things about how to lead. I need to memorize more of the routine, especially part 3. Tonight I perfected wings!!!! I'm happy with the simple flavor of garlic, pepper, onion and salt. I found that SIP, formerly OSPi, has a plugin to use relays instead of the Open Sprinkler hardware. I started wiring a cable for my 8 relay Chinese board I bought a while back. After blowing up 2 hardware boards I'm going to carefully wire the relays to the Pi. I also got NCID configured correctly. The alias file is case sensitive, I saw the errors in the log which helped me debug the file and get it working.

Louis came today about noon and started caulking the porch. Not sure what he was caulking but he spent the day doing that. He left at 5 and said he had another job somewhere to finish up tomorrow morning. I'm used to this behavior. I need to next focus on the outdoor sprinkler. Both Open Sprinkler boards are shot. Will probably have to order another one but I'll try some more. The roll of black mesh fencing arrived but I'll wait for Libbie before dealing with this large unwieldy roll. I made wings with cumin and ginger this evening for dinner. I'm not happy with the results. Will try a basic recipe tomorrow. The wings were crispy but I'm unsure of the cumin and ginger flavor. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

I spent the morning finishing the K-1s for our taxes. I had 4 K-1s from Breitburn to enter. This completed the federal return. Pushed some buttons and did the state return. I also had to enter some credit union numbers and Libbie's Scottrade numbers. When done I electronically filed the federal taxes and then printed the forms to mail to the state. I oculd have done both electronically but they wanted $25 to do this so I chose to use 2 stamps. Marinated my first batch of wings this morning using the baking powder and a seasoned salt and pepper mixture. They came out way too hot to be edible. I like hot food but these had too much cayenne. The crispiness was ideal. Will do again but I will modify the pepper content a little. Dinner was the wings with a batch of homemade slaw.

Libbie left this morning a little after nine. She texted me around 11:30 that she arrived while I was on the phone with Anne. Anne spoke for over an hour talking about her younger brother who passed away. I found out about the education fund for her brother's kids which we will contribute to. Dinner tonight was a hamburger on a bun with a salad. I built the housing for a second LED display I'm building and spackled the nail holes. When the spackle dries I'll sand and paint it black like the first one.

I did a little tax work today. Got so involved I forgot the Saturday Opera was on. Joined it later at 1:30 while we sat on the porch and had lunch. Got ready for Esquires and took some pics of Libbie's new dress and me in my tux in the driveway before we went. Also took pictures at Esquires but it was too dark. We really enjoyed the dance. It wasn't very crowded. I had the fried catfish with a salad and the squash casserole. Very good. We left a little after 10 in a very nice evening of dance.