The day after Christmas. After a leisurely morning working on my garage door MQTT sensor we packed everything up and headed to Cory and Darshelle's house for Christmas with their family. Present were Craig, Debbie and Granny as well. We played a card game of Sequence during hors d'oeuvres. I sipped cabernet sauvignon which was excellent and had celery with Ranch dressing. Dinner was BBQ tritip and chicken with Broccoli salad. Very nice. The Lapworths had a gift exchange afterwards. Wow, the kids have too much stuff in my opinion. Helicopters, drones, monster trucks, shopkins and programmable dinosaurs make it a fancy and extravagant Christmas. We got home around 8 PM very tired. The kids were really tired and crying.

After breakfast we watched Paige open her presents from Santa. She sure got a lot of presents, mostly of Dora. Once breakfast was over we sat around the tree and exchanged gifts. At 1 PM Debbie, Craig, Mike and Janice came over. We had another gift exchange then Joe fired up his propane fired oil fryer. He made potato straws and onion rings before cooking the turkey. The onion rings were delicious. He also tried stuffing balls which I didn't care for although everyone raved over them. The turkey came out very good. Christa made cranberry with apple and orange and Debbie brought some very nice mashed potatoes. Granny brought a green bean salad which i was not keen on. It's made with canned green beans and tastes like canned. Christa loves it, me not so much. We had another gift exchange with the Lapworths then we had Christa's Tiramisu cake which was quite nice. Everyone left at around 8:30 and I went to bed and literally passed out. I was either in a food coma or tired from doing nothing.

This morning we took a walk to the store again. This time it was to Smart and Final for Candy Canes and then next door to the liquor warehouse for wine. We got some Ravenswood Cabernet for $6.79 which was a deal. The same stuff in Stater Bros yesterday was $9.99. In the evening we made Meatloaf Muffins for dinner which were a hit. They were pretty tasty. We used 2 pounds of beef instead of 1 1/2 pounds. We had the Rvenswood Cabernet with the meal. Earlier in the afternoon it was cookie baking time. Libbie and Paige made cookies then Christa came home and made her Tiramisu cake.

Libbie and I took a walk to Ace Hardware then stood in line in Lucci's Deli to get Swiss Cheese. The cheese was wonderful but the place was crowded and we waited a long time but all was well. I had to run the last few hundred feet home to make a bathroom visit. We had a nice walk in Pacific City this afternoon. It's a nice shopping mall at the beach front on pretty high priced property. We had Hot Chocolate at a coffee bar called portolo but it took them a long time and the Hot Chocolate was on the cold side. It was a nice afternoon. We came home and the kids napped then we went out later too La Capilla which was pretty crowded but the food and the company was fine. Earlier Libbie had a hard time with Emily who wouldn't stop crying. It must have been gas since Christa came home and gave her some drops which cleared everything up. At La Capilla I had the combo of a Chili Relleno and a Beef Enchilada. I had a Dos Equis amber which was a nice beer to accompany the meal.

up at 6:30. It's still raining which was unusual for So Cal. The rain barrels are overflowing, i printed out the Shrimp Pad Thai recipe for use as a shopping list today.
Took a trip to Frys. Really liked the Galaxy Note Tab A. It's a small tablet that seems to be responsive. Joe bought a fairly expensive toy for Kyle for Christmas. I also looked at the Pelican plastic cases. After Frys we went to Stater Bros where i shopped and bought the ingredients for Pad Thai while Joe walked around outside with Emily. It was pretty crowded, we ended up parking far from the store. Later in the day Joe sent me the link to Paige's 529 account. We deposited $250 in her account for Christmas. Libbie and I made the Pad Thai while Joe and Christa went out for an hour. It came out OK. We had the Shrimp Pad Thai along with a bottle of Ravenwood Cabernet Sauvignon which was pretty good.

up and at em today. It was a leisurely morning, Libbie made bacon and eggs for breakfast on toast. We then went to gymnastics with paige. I liked the other Mothers and instructor in Yoga pants. Very nice. We then went to the Ballast Point brewery where Lib and I split a chicken tosta with fries and also had black beans and salsa for the table along with chips. I had a California Amber beer to go along with it. It's raining pretty hard today.

I left the house at 3:30 AM. The roads were empty but the shuttle from the Park n Relax was totally full. The Southwest check in counter also had long lines. I waited quite a while for people who had no idea how to check in to somehow get through the line. In contrast, I was the only customer at TSA Pre which was nice. I got the exit row on both flights. I had a very nice normal sized woman next to me going to houston on a very smooth flight. She was going with her family to Jamaica, a husband and two college aged kids. On the next flight I had a 300 pound woman next to me who took part of my seat space. This flight was pretty rough and felt like a trip in a dryer tumbler. The plane rocked back and forth as well as up and down. I was glad when we finally got to orange county. At least the Wifi worked on this flight unlike the RDU to HOU leg which it didn't so I could see where we were once we left Houston. Libbie, Joe and the 2 kids picked me up on time at John Wayne. Later in the afternoon we walked down Main St which was closed for the Tuesday night street fair. Paige got to see Santa. There also were Princesses in costume for the girls to visit. The Princess was more popular than Santa. Joe made a yummy pizza with Pepperoni for dinner. I went to lay down around 9 PM to read with my iPad and totally passed out. It was several hours later that I finally woke up and put the iPad away and went to bed for good.

I woke at 5:15 using the alarm and checked into Southwest for the flight tomorrow. I got A57 of the Houston flight and A53 on the Orange County flight. I started up a new version of Raspbian and configured Node-red on it. I found the version of Node-red is 0.14. i did a simple upgrade to 0.15 and all was well, the menu item "Pallette Manager" then showed up. This allowed me to add the Thingspeak node and also have access to many more nodes in the future. I was pretty happy with the final result and updated the bookmarks as well as port forwarding so that Tom's Bookmarks could access the device as well. The Pi has a power manager and a 3.6V Lithium battery for backup. It's all mounted in the keybox in my Office closet. I'm reasonably happy with the configuration and implementation. For dinner I cooked the ribs for 2 hours at 350 degrees in a glass container in the oven. They started burning near the end but I pulled them out after the full 2 hours. They were pretty good with the Kraft freebie BBQ sauce. i spent the rest of the evening packing for the trip to Calif tomorrow. At the last minute I ended up going out at 10 PM after my shower to put gas in the car. That was not intended but I was glad to find they're still open.
Earlier in the day I watched the NC electors in the Electoral college vote. It was a formal ceremony with pomp and circumstance. All 15 electors voted for Trump as the Broughton HS choir sang Christmas Carols. It was amazingly ceremonious.

It's freaky outside - almost 70 degrees. After CBS Sunday Morning I went outside and picked up the leaves Libbie racked last week then I blew the driveway off. IT's supposed to start raining today around noon then get colder.
Indoors I finished the Sonoff device I'm taking to Calif and also untangled the caroling bells I'm taking. The bells were a discard from when Peter and Christa moved 2 years ago. I tried mounting the Pi and a battery along with power manager board in the metal box in my closet and ended up breaking the SD card on the Pi.
The rains did come. IT rained the rest of the afternoon. The gentleman from Craigslist named Owen came over at 7 PM and bought the telescope for $150. He is going to clean it up and have it as a Christmas present for his Son.
After he left I baked the two last pizza shells but had to run out to Kroger to pick up more cheese. They were all out of the small packages so I bought the large package of pizza cheese.

Time is counting down too quickly. In a few days I'll have to get on a plane for Cali. Uggh, I hate travel although once I get there I have a nice time. I really like it at home, I must be weird.
I played late last night and again this morning with Node-red. It's hard to learn but easy to make good looking web pages with sensor readings. I hope it's a contender vs OpenHab.
For dinner tonight I had the other half of the ribs along with the Smoking Loon Cabernet. Nice

I mounted the dome camera on the porch ceiling yesterday but couldn't do the hookup because the wires were under th plywood flooring. Today I brought the skill saw into the knee wall and cut into the floor and did the hookup. it didn't work at first, traced the error to an RJ45 that was not plugged in all the way. Finished mounting the camera and put the dome on but forgot to include the black plastic shield. I may open it up again to add this back to where it should be. My CU ATM card came today. Now i only need a PIN number and I will have this all straightened out. We will need cash in Florida.
WEnt to Home Depot to get a 12 V transformer which seemed inexpensive at $15 for a 60 watt unit. It worked when I hooked 2 LED spotlights up to it. Now it needs a Sonoff switch to complete the job. Dinner was ribs which were pretty good along with Cabernet by Smoking Loon which was quite good. It was highly rated in Kroger, 91 points by Wine Spectator.

The camera came from China in the mail today. I ordered it on Dec 2 from Newegg. I temporarily mounted it on a ladder on the porch and plugged it into the outdoor outlet as well as plugged the ethernet into the garage router in the corner by the lights. It works similarly ot the others. Assigned an IP address to it in the router and set up some of the config including time and date and time zone. Ran some Cat 5 wire in the knee wall from the porch to the office closet. I also logged into the brokerage account today for the first time in a long time and paid the Stoneybrook maintenance payment. It's almost $1,000 dollars which is a significant amount of money quarterly. Dinner was the pizza again. I bought ribs but they need 2 hours of cooking unknown to me. I alos picked up some bagels at Brueggers. They know how to make bagels.

Paid the Visa bill today because the SS money was deposited. I need to log into Scottrade and pay the taxes and our condo fees. Interest rates were raised today so i don't expect the brokerage account to be pretty. I installed the LED light strip in my closet. It puts out an impressive amount of light. The goal is to clean the closet now that i can see it. I emptied most of my nightstand into the garbage can. Late today the dome camea came. Now I need to figure out hookup. The Sparkfun order of power supplies and a Pi also came but I have less need for these. The new garage door receiver arrived as well. I finished wiring the sockets in our bathroom. Replaced all three of them with new white ones. Dinner was more of the pizza rounds with tomato sauce and pizza cheese.

Did the Tuesday groceries prompted by Lib telling me to ask Alexa. She had put bowl cleaner and soft scrub on the list. I didn't need much else but got some cereal and more pizza rounds. Took a ride to North Raleigh off Blue Ridge today. Should have worked on the electrical but chose to skip it.

Left the house at 4 AM for the 5:30 flight. Traffic was light, I was back home at 4:45. I'll need to do this trip next week.
I went back to sleep and slept until after 7 AM. This was unusual.

I studied the situation with Moteinos and OpenHab with ESP8266s and decided to convert the foundation fan to an ESP device. It will be easier to manage.

I also ordered a garage adapter from Rays hobby to make the garage door part of OpenHab. Dinner tonight was pizza made on Kroger mini pizza rounds.

Got up a little later this morning. Watched CBS Sunday morning then did some AVSA website updates as well as on MAAVS. We learned that our neighbor Janet Portzer died this week at age 65. Wow, shocking. She gave us some milkweed starts this past Spring and also gave us a tour of her gardens. They had installed deer fencing everywhere to protect their plants. Libbie did hosue cleaning today and took out half the upstairs outlets with the vacuum cleaner. It was not a beaker issue. Took outlets apart one by one and found the issue at an old outlet in the sewing room. A bad connection to the outlet inside the electrical box caused the wire to heat up and pull away, This opened the circuit to at least half the outlets upstairs. I did a Home depot trip to get a box of receptacles. Started with Lowes but they only had el cheapo chinese made ones that said Hubbel. Libbie made an excellent pizza for dinner. up erarly tomorrow!!!

i started the day working on gateway code for the mooteinos to convert their transmissions into MQTT packets but changed my mind half way through the day when I came across an Open Source garage door opener using an ESP8266 and a sonar distance measurer. I ended up ordering one but i will use my own firmware in the thing which will use MQTT and will not have the Blynk software in it.
This will replace my current Moteino which works well but is not WiFi capable.
Getting on WiFi and specifically sending MQTT packets is a must have for my home automation. I may also convert the crawl space fan to WiFi leaving only the bedroom ceiling fan with a moteino but even that won't last long. MQTT control is very flexible and is a must have.
We left for Century Club at 5:50PM. Travel was much nicer than to Esquires, mostly because it was a Saturday. We sat with Susie and Russ, and two couples from our studio Nancy and Art as well as Harry and Terry. In addition, Susie had interesting guests, Luana and her husband. She was the portrait artist in Artspace a few years back that we used to visit. We had a nice time. Dinner was called heavy hors d'oeuvres with paper plates and plastic utensils but it was good. I had a little chicken, some salad and veggies as well as some potatoes and a spinach turnover thing. We got home at 11 PM and set the alarm for 5:15 tomorrow morning to check Libbie in for her Calif flight.

Today is show time!!! We do our performance tonight. We practiced two times during the day, once in the morning and once shortly after lunch. We're as ready as we'll ever be.
We left for the studio at 7:15 for the 7:30 party. I had a light dinner at the studio consisting of pulled pork and some pasta salad and potato salad. We were in the second act about half way through. This means we didn't see too much of the second act. We stayed until 10:20 in a fun night of dance and friends. Our performance went really well. We had a little trouble with no rock step before the 6 grapevines and also i didn't start turning Lib at the end until 2 steps in but everything worked out well.

I downloaded the Visa bill which closed on Dec 6. The bill was $4,700 which was higher than expected but it did include the last payment for Mardi Gras as well as the hotel, meals and car for the Plano trip. Libbie had about $1200 worth of charges on this one which lessens the burden on the checkbook.
I started work on the gateway code which will translate the moteino wireless devices transmission into MQTT packets by receiving the moteino status over the air then use a Huzzah to put it on the internet. The goal is to replace the LowPower Labs gateway.
I got dressed in my tux and Libbie wore a new evening gown for Esquires tonight. We left at 5:50 but had a very very slow trip because rush hour traffic was horrible like it always is. It took us almost an hour to get to North Ridge.
We sat with Charlie & Terry, Jim and Jane and Gary and Janet. At the buffet I had Salmon, a single piece of beef and some squash casserole. I finished the meal with chocolate cake and coffee. Yumm. We did well dancing and had enough room to practice our swing routine for tomorrow night. We left after the second set by the Tune Swingers, about 9:30. It was a good night of dancing.

I got my temperatures from the new Huzzah sensor displaying on Openhab2 hosted on a Pi 3. This is great. In addition, the sunset outdoor light controller has been successfully turning the landscape lights on and off without a miss. I'm amazed this is working so well.
At dance today we had our last lesson before the showcase. We used the big ballroom to practice our routine which had a few issues but nothing too bad. After that we went to the regular studio and brushed up on some Rumba which was pretty useful. It was another good lesson.
Dinner tonight was leftover chili from yesterday. Good stuff. We finished the Zinfandel from last night with one more glass each.
Later i tuned into the Adafruit Youtube broadcast and got the promo code, bonnet. to get 10% off on 5 more Huzzahs. I'm currently using one for NCID, one for the greenhouse/porch monitor, one for the attic/plantroom and one for the Internet monitor for a total of 5 Huzzah devices. I needed some more. I'm also running out of 5V supplies but ordered 5 more from Sparkfun last week. They are slow shipping.

I finished the new Huzzah based temperature receiver for the plantroom and the attic sensors, a total of 5 sensors. I built the software with bits and peices of code and soon had it reading temps and sending out MQTT packets wit the readings. This is great news. I did the groceries today as usual and picked up the ingredients to make hominy based chili from cooking light. This was good. The original recipe called for using pork but we decided to use stuff we already had so we got out some frozen chicken breasts and made a chicken and hominy chili for dinner. We had this with Ravenswood Zinfandel.

A pretty good day. Libbie went out with Anita dress shopping and I continued to configure Openhab2. I finally got it displaying a frame with my temperatures which it received from MQTT. Success at last. As a final thought I configured the router to do port forwarding to the Pi so I can access the house environment from outside. Hooray. I got a haircut this morning when Great Clips opened at 9. Later at 11 I went to Costco for wine and coffee beans. Surprisingly they were selling stamps for less than face value, 46.75 for sheets of 100 stamps.
I'm so happy with the Openhab display that I went ahead to begin building another ESP based sensor to replace the attic and plant room arduino. It will be nice to get those temperatures onto MQTT. Then I have to get the moteino to MQTT gateway working so the moteinos can report-in properly. In addition, the light sensor in the greenhouse needs to be populated with a moteino so it can send it's data to the gateway.
Dinner tonight was spaghetti with cheese.
After dinner I worked on the code for the new ESP while listening to Salome live from the Met. I really like Zika Lucic's voice and singing.

I spent the whole day trying to understand OpenHab and it's configuration. It will probably do the job receiving MQTT packets and displaying them on a web page, both internally and outside the house. I found a Pi 3 in the table next to my chair and configured it while watching the CBS Sunday morning show. I enjoyed CBS sunday Morning since they did a promo for the Rolling Stones. They also profiled Billy Bob Thornton and his movie "Bad Santa" which I donwloded today. I ended up installing Openhab several times before I found a great way to install it using the Debian archive thanks to the website "instructables". I put a copy of their webpage on Tom's Life Bits. Dinner tonight was Libbie's pizza on a crust she made from scratch. We went out this afternoon and tried to go to Costco but it was s crowded we went to Walmart for our Christmas Cards after picking up 25 prints of us at Walgreens.

I persisted today and finally got the new temperature board with the ESP8266 working and reporting via MQTT. Now I need to receive this data and display it somewhere. However, only 3 of 4 channels are working. My scope says the 4th channel is not responding so it's probably a broken connection to the sensor. Dinner tonight was shrimp, baked yam and a failure at Crawfish which Kroger had for 3.99 per lb. I bought a handful for $1 to try. Not good. We had the dinner with Columbia Crest Cabernet.

Today I wired up the second ESP sensor board. This seemed to go well. Dinner tonight was leftover Coconut Curry Soup. We went to the studio in the evening for the Friday night party. It has been a while since we were there. It was nice to see everybody. Afterwards we went out to McGregor Tavern where we split a Quesadilla and had 1 1/2 Yuengling drafts.