I completely failed with Amazon Echo. Today I used a Youtube video that put an app in AWS and also an app in the Alexa Skills kit then hooked the two halves together. No luck other than Alexa seems to think there is a skill there but reports an error response. After lunch we went to JC Penney and shopped the MLK Sale. I had a 15% off coupon as well as a $42 gift card from Christmas a year ago when i returned a Christmas sweater. Next stop was Sears for a vacuum cleaner belt which had broke. Unfortunately I should have also bought the second belt which is the power brush belt. It seems stretched out. Then it was off to Walmart to get our groceries which included wine and triscuits. I checked the frozen salmon filets and found they were from China. No thanks.
Dinner was tuna sandwiches with celery and tomato on the nice Hispanic rolls.

Painted the board today for the kitchen passthrough. It dried quickly so I was able to get a second coat on before evening. Then when it was dry I brought it inside to completely dry overnight. I struggled with trying to get a hello world sample recognized by my Pi. The great news is the SSL is working great. Also, systems at home are working great. I'm able to log in to Traviata and then use the browser to contact the Stoneybrook Pi via https which indicates the SSL is correctly installed. Yes!
We had wine and cheese at sunset then ordered a large cheese pizza from the Italian Grill. It was ready in 15 minutes and was good.

I made a morning run to Publix and picked up Shrimp for dinner along with fruit and cocktail sauce. I did quite a bit of reading about configuring node-red to accept an Amazon request. I cut and sanded the board for the kitchen pass through so I could hang the grow light. I'll paint it tomorrow. We listened to La Boheme live on the radio while running a tutorial on YouTube. The pin fell out of the front door opener so I took it to Lowes and bought a screw and nut of the same diameter and put it in while trying to damage the threads on the screw so it won't come apart. I was mildly successful at this. After our sunset of wine and cheese with Triscuits Libbie boiled the shrimp in Old Bay seasoning. We had this along with Basmati rice and fresh broccoli. Mondavi Cabernet complemented our meal. I bought Moose Tracks ice cream but forgot to serve it.

Libbie is determined to be well so we took a 6 mile bike red to the North end of the trail. In the PM we picked up our newly transferred prescriptions at Walmart as well as dinner fixings. Picked up some Hispanic rolls which were delicious. We had the rolls filled with sauteed onions and prime rib. This was delicious! Previously today we watched the sunset while having wine with cheese and crackers.

Libbie is down and out today. I spent most of the day watching YouTube videos. We did have one trip to Walmart where we transferred our prescriptions then picked up a grow light in addition to replenishing some of our groceries. I'm going to hang the grow light in the space over the kitchen sink but first i need to pick up some hooks and chains. We went over to the Clubhouse for rib night. Tonight i had the half rack of ribs along with a yuengling.

We had lunch here in the Condo, leftover chicken sandwiches then we went to Selby and took a slow walk around. The African Masks are back in the Payne house. Libbie couldn't resist and picked up 3 violets in the Garden shop. We came back and went over to the clubhouse for Pub night. Besides the very nice salad I had a beef and pork Lasagna with veggies which was very good. It was a different kind of Lasagna but tasty.

It's a beautiful day out today. I spent some time getting a Sonos interface configured on the Raspberry Pi. I finally got it all set up, now i need to get a Sonos and also install the skill on Amazon.
Libbie is still not well so i went over to Publix and picked up a rotisserie chicken and some fixings for dinner. Sunset tonight was spectacular. We watched it while having cheese and wine to toast the end of the day. Romeo and Juliet was live on the Met tonight on Sirius. I listened but wasn't too interested. I continued to configure the Pi. Tonight I added back the Nodered which was disabled when I had to upgrade node.js to accommodate the Alexa to Sonos Api code. Dinner was rotisserie chicken with macaroni and potato salad.

There was a WSJ outside the door of our condo this morning! They found me. I wasn't sure if this was going to work. Libbie has a cold today so we didn't go out. It's very cold out today anyway with a stiff wind as well. I ran over to Publix in the evening and picked up some chicken from the Asian buffet for dinner. We had wine and cheese for sunset but the sky was clear enough it wasn't spectacular. Listened to Sirius XM live from the Met this evening.

I tried quite a bit to configure the router and secure nodered on the stoneybrook Pi. So far i have not had any luck. At home it is quite cold after about one inch of snow. The weather station stopped reporting at 8 AM but 2 or 3 hours later it began reporting again. I don't know what's going on but I need to get the wireless Moteino reporting to a Huzzah sending MQTT packets ASAP. In the meantime I fretted about the potential for freezing pipes since our crawl space fan is activating every hour even through temperatures in the lower teens. This is bad and needs to be replaced with an MQTT based controller as well as supplemented with an outdoor temperature sensor.
We had wine and cheese outside even though it was only in the 50s then we ordered a mushroom pizza from the Italian Grill for dinner. While having pizza I watched the Golden Globes which was pretty boring.













t

It rained pretty hard this morning after some thunderstorms overnight. We left at 11:30 in a rainy mist for the theater in Bradenton. Got there very very early, there were only 2 other people in the theater. I also bought tickets for the Romeo and juliet performances in 2 weeks. We thoroughly enjoyed this opera. It was full of choruses plus James Levine and Placido Domingo were good. When it was done we went over to Walmart across the street and bought a yoga mat for Libbie as well as a Brita water filter. We then drove over to Bill's condo on a golf course. We had some nice wine and cheese at Bill and Barb's then wnt out to dinner at Anna Maries Oyster Bar. We had coupons for Margaritas. I also ordered Fish and Chips which were quite good. Left there happy and drove home via Siesta Key where we saw what was left of the Christmas lights.

Played some more with configuring a Pi for the HVAC closet in the condo. We went out at lunch time to the club house for lunch. I had a Southwestern chicken salad with a Yuengling. It was good but needed some spice to turn it into a Southwestern dish. We then drove to the Whimsy Museum. It was fun walking around viewing all the art and kitschy stuff on display. I talked to Marietta about her Backus paintings. She must have about 10. and another dozen or more of the highwaymen paintings. She said she is working to catalog the collection.
We came back and had our wine and cheese at sunset then a peanut butter sandwich. That was our dinner.

We took it slow today. After the long drive yesterday which really wasn't too bad, it was just long, we eased into acclimating ourselves into the condo. We unpacked our suitcases, found towels and missing items and set up the satellite radio. Lunch was the leftover fish and chips from yesterday. We then went out for a bike ride around the neighborhood. It's a warm 78 degrees out with a little bit of wind. It was nice to be on the bike again. We had wine and cheese for sunset. Libbie had a very nice conversation with her Dad this evening. He talked about the book he finished reading which made her incredibly happy. We then went out to rib night where we had a nice booth. The ribs and horseradish were delicious which I had with a yuengling that I couldn't finish.

We had a leisurely morning since it doesn't make any sense to leave before 9 AM due to Tampa rush hour traffic. We left at 8 and surprisingly breezed through the south side of Raleigh on the beltline. We stopped for breakfast and coffee just before Florence at the McDonalds/Shell combo station. Once we got back on I-95 we ran into a traffic jam. We lost around 30 minutes creeping into a merge then a single lane over the PeeDee River where there was bridge work. Further down I-95 there was another closing so we went around. unfortunately a bridge was also out on our alternate which was 301 so we went back and further down to June Burn Road to Manning, SC. It was a quirky road through the swamp and wetlands. incredibly scenic in it's own way. We lost a total of 1 hour. Our next stop was Darien, GA for gas and Wendy's lunch. Darien is an old rundown outlet mall and barely any serviceable services. The Wendy's looked like it should close soon, the dining room furniture was in tattered shape. We sailed further down the highway and had a small backup merging from I-95 to I-295 in Jacksonville. We chose to avoid Gainesville at rush hour and kept on 301 to just before Ocala. With the bikes onboard our gas mileage was only 26 so we stopped again in Zephyrhills at a nice Marathon where I also did a bathroom break. We got into our condo at 8:15. After putting away the bikes and unloading some of the car we went out to dinner at Mad Moes. I had Fish and Chips and a Yuengling. I was hungry and it was good. It came with some nice fries and coleslaw.

Today I got a webscraper running on an ESP8266. I was going to work on the garage door sensor but chose to do this instead. The gamble paid off because by late afternoon I had the device scraping the enphase hub page and publishing the solar production numbers via MQTT. I'll do the Nodered portion of this remotely from Sarasota. I spent the rest of the time packing. Dinner was spaghetti using the rest of the tomato sauce and leftover pizza cheese.

I spent quite a bit of time with a Pi and SSL. I want to be able to use Alexa to send commands to it so i need a certificate on port 443 of traviata. I installed Apache and successfully got a certificate. I spent some tinkering getting it working with Nodered. I finally was able to get Nodered to work with the SSL certificate. The settings had to have the exact path to the certificate in Pi. Apache is no longer needed. Unfortunately I did not work on the garage door sensor. Dinner was penne pasta and the leftover spicy marinara sauce.

My first entry of the new year! I spent the day organizing files, both the end of year ones and some basic organization of photos and other files. I got the old Manon 2 up and running and copied a lot of older files over and also fired up the Family Address list which is on Pagemaker. It's a pretty clunky computer and takes a long time to do anything but i survived.
I also tried to install a free SSL on nodered but so far I have failed. I do have the SSL port exposed which is 443 as well as the traditional port 80. Found a neat tool called Webmin which manages the server. Libbie made our traditional Sunday pizza which was excellent as usual.

This is the last entry for this year. I started building a perfboard to fit into a case for the garage sensor hardware. We leave Wed for Sarasota, much to do before then. I researched an SSL once again for Traviata. I need it to get HTTPS for Amazon Alexa. Talked to Vicki today. She told me Barbara Cybulski died but i knew that from Facebook a few days ago.
I studied how to implement an SSL certificate on Apache or some other web server. I even tried a few times to validate my domain traviata.dyndns.org using the free ssl along with a webserver. I had no luck but need to read more.
Around 8:15 we started the oven and I cut the baguette in half for the party. I coated both halves with spicy marinara sauce then coated them with cooked italian sausage that Libbie cooked in a skillet. I topped it with cheese and put it in the oven for 450 for 10 minutes. I took them out and sliced them in little squares for the party and served it in aluminum pan. For dinner earlier in the evening we had tomato sauce and a peanut butter sandwich.
We went to the party at 9 and danced quite a bit. I was really tired towards the end of the night. We met all our friends there and had a good time. I danced with Anita, Anne, Terry and Jennifer (I think). I had a great time. We had a champagne toast at midnight, kissed, said Happy new Years to all our friends then left around 12:15.

Today i tackled the new garage door receiver in the garage. I mounted a new electrical outlet below the opener and then mounted the receiver. Everything worked. I also removed the old Moteino with the intention of using either open Garage or a custom huzzah implementation to monitor the door remotely. I needed a new jewelers screwdriver and ended up going to home Depot for a husky screwdriver set as well as the box for the new outlet below the door opener.
We had a dinner of spaghetti with sauce and cheese then went over to the studio secret party at 8 PM. It was light attendance but a fun evening. Getting together with everyone was fun. I danced quite a bit. After the party we went to BJs Brew house at crossroads. We ordered BJs Amber beer and a plate of flatbread nachos which was delicious but not what i expected. I thought it was nachos with a plate of beans but was a pizza style with some black bean sprinkled on and also avocado and sour cream. We got home at midnight.

Didn't get up until almost 8 AM this morning due to our late night arrival. I sorted the mail and surprisingly quite a bit of it was not junk. Did a quick grocery run for supplies then settled in on putting up the LED light in Libbie's closet. The job was harder than mine since I had to cut through the plywood in the attic to access the old recessed light. My measurement was spot on and after doing the cutting i was exactly over the old light. It took a few more hours and finally the light was working. I previously covered the clothes in Libbie;s closet with drop cloths to protect her clothes since i would work in the ceiling. I'm glad there is no dance tonight. I'm pretty tired. We had tuna noodle casserole and peas for dinner.

Joe made banana pancakes and bacon for breakfast. I finished up the work on the EPROMs for garage door configuration. Would love to test it. Went to gymnastics with Joe and Paige then Inn and Out burger for lunch. Next stop was John Wayne airport. Tsa was light and no problem. We were at the gate around 12:40 for our 2:25 pm flight.
The flight was quite bumpy. We hit some pretty good turbulence crossing into AZ. The plane really rocked around before settling into a chop pattern. We landed on time into Houston, it was a quick turn. We hardly had time for bathroom and a 6 inch turkey sub we split from Subwy. We were late getting off the ground waiting for three other flights to connect. Lib and i both were in the exit row with no one in the middle seat. The flight to Raleigh was smoother than our first leg. we waited a while for our luggage and once again waited a while for Park and Relax. Some people couldn't get parking so they took keys and parked cars when space was available. This meant we had to wait for them to retrieve these valet keys before we could go into the parking lot. We waited in the bus a while which was not great since it was after 1 AM. We finally got going and luckily our car was first. We got home at 2 AM. All was well.

Joe made banana pancakes and bacon for breakfast. I finished up the work on the EPROMs for garage door configuration. Would love to test it. Went to gymnastics with Joe and Paige then Inn and Out burger for lunch. Next stop was John Wayne airport. Tsa was light and no problem. We were at the gate around 12:40 for our 2:25 pm flight.

This morning after breakfast I worked some more on the garage door firmware. I worked on adding the config page which uses Java Ajax for configuration parameters. I mostly got it to compile before lunch but the EEPROMs need some work storing int values which require more than one location. We took Paige and Emily to the park for 2 hours so the house could get stripped of Christmas and vacuumed and cleaned. Libbie and I had brought Turkey sandwiches for lunch. Once we got back from the Park we checked into our Southwest flight at 2:25 PM for tomorrow. I got Christa's cranberry salad recipe typed into Tom's Life Bits.
We went out to the downtown street fair around 6pm. Paid 1.50 for parking and found Joe at the HB Brewery. We ordered appetizers of nachos and beans as well as chicken and fries. Had this with a blonde beer then ordered a Catalina chowder bowl which came with clams, clam chowder and salad. The chowder came in a sourdough bread bowl. I was stuffed and tired. On the street we danced severa swings and Rhumbas to a live blues band. Very nice.

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.