Did last minute packing and loading of the bike onto the rack. I am taking Libbie's non electric bike home to get it out of the way in the shed. Left at 8 AM. Had a little trouble with slow traffic an exit before I-4 but all cleared up as I went through Gainesville onto 301. There was heavy truck traffic on 301. I stopped for gas in Jacksonville on I-10 at an easy on easy off Pilot gas station. I continued and was happy at how empty 95 was through Georgia. I listened to a combo of Met Opera and 50s on 5 as well as a touch of 40s on 4. Next gas stop was exit 170 just past Florence. I wasn't sure I could make it that far but when I pulled into the Pilot station my range showed 70 miles to empty. I only took 10 gallons, the light wasn't even on. Gas was 1.92 per gallon. The remained of the trip was easy, twilight struck as I turned onto I-40 and by the time I got home at 7:33 it was dark. The trip took 10 1/2 hours which is excellent and is due more to the fact that I didn't stop for food. At home I went over to Chipotle for the first time and had a Burrito Bowl. It was outstanding. I would like to do that again. Because Iw as a first time customer my meal was free. Hard to believe.

Did not lose a single pound. Still 240 which is incredibly fat. Measured the cereal. Half of the bowl is one cup so I must have been having 2 cups every breakfast. Bad, bad, bad. This is a 500 calorie breakfast. Debating about going to Swan Lake today vs staying here to visit some Open Houses. All the Silly Bowl hype today may limit the number of Open houses. I'll check a paper.
Bought a paper at Publix along with some salad greens. Checked out the open house listings but nothing stood out. Online is quite a bit better. I got on the bike and went to two Open Houses. Visited Lolita on Knightbridge. Didn't like the house, it did back up to the woods but i prefer a more open feel onto a lake. Visited an expensive house which was 4 bedroom shown by Charles Offer who lives in Stoneybrook Estates. The house had a pool overlooking the lake and updated kitchen with wood laminate floors.
For dinner I ordered online a Dominoes pizza advertised as 3 topping for 7.99. I got onions, peppers and cheese. It was incredibly tasty, especially the sauce. The crust was a Brooklyn hand stretched but was a little soggy. This is probably because it's done on a conveyer belt instead of a stone.
Packed my suitcase and am ready to take off tomorrow.

Drove down Honore and went to Nokomis Groves where I picked up some Oranges (Honeybelle) and a jug of Orange juice. I had the spinach and Kale salad from Walmart but I didn't like it because it seemed slimey. I'll get a bag of Spring Mix from somewhere. Listened to the Met broadcast this afternoon of Rigoletto. It was great as usual. I like this Opera. The router and/or the internet keeps crashing here. It's so frustrating. Spent a few hours reading ASSTR instead of technical stuff. Dinner was a can of Light Chicken Corn Chowder, 200 calories total. I was still hungry later so I had a bowl of cereal. I'll have to measure the cereal quantity in the bowl. It's 180 cals per cup without the milk. Yikes.

Need to really try hard with this weight thing. I thought I was cutting back but weight has not changed even with long bike rides. Rode to Mer Del Lago and went inside scoping out some villas I found on Zillow. Price is attractive around 300k and maintenance is all inclusive including landscaping and building exterior for $275 per month. I really like the place, it covers all our requirements including a garage. When I got back Bill called. He's at the bike shop in Sarasota with a dead battery or a dead charger. He came over and I determined it was the charger because on my depleted battery it was green and not charging. Bill borrowed Libbie's battery. Dinner tonight was leftover Lasagna from the Italian Grill several days ago.

Watched the rest of the "On the Edge of 17" movie this morning and then played with Sonos presets some more. I started work on the crawl space ventilation program. I need this to be able to be controlled remotely. Hopefully I can install it next week when I get home, probably on Tuesday when I'm home alone.
Libbie will come on Wednesday. Did another long bike ride this afternoon, this time on the Venice waterway. Took Honore and then Pinebrook all the way to Venice Rd which is the road with the train station. This is a superior way to go to Venice. Weight has not changed so today was another light eating day. Salad and an orange for lunch, leftover chicken parm for dinner. I need to lose some weight somehow. Maybe when the last of the leftovers is gone tomorrow I'll really cut back. I still can't believe I got so fat. Watched a poor movie, "Good Kids", this evening.

Got up at 4:30 today thanks to Alexa. Libbie's cell didn't go off, she set it for PM instead of AM. We left at 5 AM and had no trouble except i missed the turn onto 60 for the airport. Got off at the next exit and used navigation on Libbie's cell to get to the terminal. Arrived there at 6:20 for her 7:30 flight. Coming back was a lot longer due to congestion at Bradenton where I was in stop and go traffic. Got back at 7:50. I saw a beautiful dawn over Tampa Bay and then the Sunrise when I was on 75 in Sarasota. Weighed myself and was shocked I was at 240, an incredible setback from 220 of last year. Decided to do something about it. Took a 10 mile bike ride today and only had an orange and a salad for lunch. Dinner was the leftover ribs. Sonoos is really doing well with Alexa. I burned a new SD card and got some autostart going for the node.js program of alexa and also for the drive mount of samba. Samba needed a chron job with a delay because the usB takes so long to initialize before the external hard drive could be used.

I'm happily controlling Sonos with the Pi and Alexa. I decided to do some enhancements today adding another preset. Of course it doesn't work, I still need to figure this thing out. We went to the Nokomis Groves before lunch and got some more oranges, a jug of grapefruit juice and an Orange peeler. Libbie bought us 2 cones. Mine was pineapple. Wenwent out for dinner to the italian Grill where I had Chicken Parmesan and Libbie had Lasagna. Both were incredibly good. This comes with a salad, i chose ranch dressing. I wanted a simple Yuengling so ordered a Stella. No luck, she came back and said it's warm. next I ordered a crafter beer but they were out. Tried to order a bottled beer, she brought me a dark Porter chich was too bitter for me. She removed it from the bill after Libbie spoke up. Our waitress Kelly was incredibly slow. It took a long time for her to take our order and then a long time for the bread which ended up coming with the meal. Finally the bill took forever, she said it took so long because she tried to get the beer removed.

Struggled all morning with Sonos and Alexa integration and then finally I had a breakthrough when I found my skill was in upper case and the Lambda was sending lower case to the pi. In addition, I simplified the preset itself reducing it to it's minimum. We went this afternoon to the Opera House to buy apprentice tickets for March and then to Ringling to see art. It was my first time in the new Chinese section. There is a bunch of interesting Cyprian art objects there as well as a few dozen traditional Japanese watercolors. We came home around 3 then had an open faced grilled cheese with a tomato slice for dinner. We left at 6:00 for the ballet and got there at 6:52. Traffic is pretty heavy on Beneva and downtown. No problems at all coming home. We found a new way to get to Beneva using MacIntosh to Palmer Ranch Parkway. It's a lot nicer than going around the mall streets. The ballet was a tribute to Ashton, The first piece was a grouping of Ashton waltzes which was the least interesting of the program. The next was by Graziano and was Before Night Falls, a sequence of Pas de Deux between two lovers and their relationship. It was lit in blue with movement being diagonal. I really liked this piece. The last was Changing Light and involved the whole company in shades of oranges and blues with lighting ranging from the bright white at the opening to darker shades in between. I liked this very much as well as the second number of the night.

I got up early this morning and burned a new image of Raspbian with Samba that I had previously saved on my laptop. I had to mount the hard disk but once this was done it was functional. I then did some port forwarding of the new IP for nodered on the condo router. It was a success, after setting https to false in the Alexa skill I was able to control the Sonos via the web and logging into Traviata. Next I got the voice skill working successfully. I am able to pause, change volume and select various favorites. It won't select anything in the music library yet but this is still a work in progress. Earlier this morning the two used Panasonic cameras I was watching on Amazon were 15% off today so I bought them. The seller has 100% feedback so I should be good except that they are used. They are BL C10 models which are exactly what I have on the Lanai now, an older technology that are only 640x480 but they are PTZ and adequate for monitoring the plant shelves. Lunch was a new (for us) variety of Progresso soup called Chicken Tuscany. It's a white bean in a clear broth which was delicious.
On the home control front I heard from Joe who has successfully gotten nodered running on his Pi. We did a short walk today around Forest Circle. The sun came out and we had to remove our jackets for a very pleasant walk.
Alexa is successfully controlling Sonos in the condo. Now I want to get some presets built to select our music library favorites. After a reduced cheese and crackers without wine we ordered a large pizza from the Italian Grill.

It's cold out today, only in the fifties. While Libbie went to Yoga this morning I struggled with the Alexa device. I moved it to a static address at 192.168.1.140 but lost the ability to recognize the device name of SBnodered when I try to start the sonos app with "npm start" in the sonos directory on Pi.
This is frustrating. i spent a few hours doing a reblog on my new Tumblr of only a few days. Sometime in the afternoon my account was terminated. I'm not sure what i did but I suspect some images may have contained minors? i'm not sure but I tried not to reblog anything that looked questionably young. I guess I'll never know their reasoning. Several other blogs also were gone that I was following so maybe they just cleaned house?
We made an attempt at eating lighter. Our nightly wine, cheese and crackers had no wine and half the cheese. Dinner was left over prime rib sauteed with onions and put into one of the delicious Hispanic buns. It was delicious, even with cold water. We did a walk around Forest Circle in the afternoon because it was cooler today so we didn't do a big walk.

We went to the Sarasota Opera lunch at 11:30 today with Eggplant Parmesan at noon with Tiramisu desert and a glass of Cabernet. After lunch 3 studio artists from the Sarasota Opera. They were quite good performing an aria from Walkure, Lehar and the love duet from Boheme. Incredibly good! I wanted more and was ready to go to the opera. Later in the afternoon I took a ride to Walmart to pick up cereal and triscuits. For dinner we had too much because after cheese and crackers I was stuffed and didn't want to eat anything else. We had a salad, leftover brisket with bread, cole slaw and beans accompanied by a glassof Cabernet. Way, way too much.

Today I didn't do much. Replaced a light in the bathroom then installed the board in the kitchen passthrough and applied caulking. Libbie went with Barbara to Dunedin to the quilt store. I heard from Sharon Hammil about the Mardi Gras party. She sent her address and the amount for the bike tour and the tips. I tried using Colts but kept getting a Server error. Will call the Credit Union tomorrow. We went over to Rib night at the clubhouse. I didn't feel like eating but ordered a half rack. Our waiter was terrible. It took a long time to take our drink order. When he finally took our food order he offered bread, After another long wait the bread came but then the food came out at the same time. I was having problems breathing i felt so stuffed. I really need to cut back significantly. Listened to Rigoletto live on Sirius when we came back

This morning I got the photo index posted to the AVM website for January. I found I also needed to modify the view to add 2017 to the dropdown. Once all this was done the photo index was read into the database and now displays properly. Libbie went to the clubhouse yoga class. I took the opportunity to work on the first class updates.
I got all the updates created and uploded the master file but I was not able to upload the map which uses an android app. HTTPUtils is deprecated so I ended up rewriting the software to not use this library. It now uses the FTP built into the NET library. Once the rewrite was done and debugged I uploaded the map files using the built in FTP. Now I only have the IOS subscriptions left to fix.
For dinner we went over to Pub night and got a booth almost right away which was a surprise. I had the beef brisket which had a nice smoked flavor. It came with slaw, baked bens and french fries. I am eating way too much. Need to stop.

The Sonos music has worked very well. I made my first attempt at controlling it via Alexa. I first did a backup of the Pi SD image to my laptop then started adding the Alexa to Sonos install. I also did all the work on Amazon in the Skills service and the Lambda service. Next I created a favorite on the Sonos. It tested well standalone on Amazon but when I tried testing it to the real device I got an endpoint error. I believe this is because I do not have https enabled for the connection. I think I need a setting file pointing to my certificate keys. I have not done this part.
We went for a 10 mile bike ride today to the quilt shop on Clark and Honore. This was a long ride but enjoyable. We also stopped at the Publix on Honore to pick up some more cheese and triscuits. After the ride we decided to go to the Club house for lunch. I had a chicken salad wrap which also had bacon and avocado plus tomato. I had it with a Yuengling. Yummy! This wiped me out for the day so we chose not to go to the Saradance studio tonight. instead we had triscuits and cheese with wine then an hour later a bowl of Clam Chowder for dinner. I spent the rest of the night reading, looking at blogs on Tumblr and also some work on the AVM article index that Terry sent me for January 2017. I got the article index posted but not the photo index. Since this is a new year, 2017, i had to figure out how to add the 2017 tag to the picture.

I was happy this morning. The Pi Samba share showed up on my laptop. Since the power went out abruptly yesterday I didn't know what to expect. I screwed around with permissions and did a chown changing the file permission recursively from root to Pi. This made the music directory browsable. I installed the Sonos app and set the player up. It worked fine. We spent a little time today listening to our music collection on the Sonos. Dinner was a salad with the leftover eggplant parmesan from Saturday night and a glass of Cabernet. Loved it, it was so good.

Struggled with the Samba stuff some more. Decided to use the nodered Pi to do a fresh install of install. Before I did that I made a copy of the image to my hard drive. I then installed Samba but had a lot of "not found errors". I changed the pi to Google's name servers and did a lot better. It found everything but i still had configuration problems. Tweaked the configuration but had to go to the ballet. We left at 12:10 for the 1 PM performance. Got good seats at the AMC 12 at the mall. This is a better theater than Bradenton. The sound is way better abd the picture seems clearer. After the performance we went to Walmart for needed groceries. We ordered a sausage pizza from the italian Grill for dinner which we had with wine. After dinner i worked some more but the storm arrived around 9 PM and power went out. We went to bed in the dark. The power came back about 90 minutes later.

I tried to get Saamba running on the Pi. I got Samba working but trying to mount the hard drive in the right place turned out to be a challenge. i failed. We left for Bradenton at noon for the 1 PM performance of Romeo and Juliette. I loved the opera but not the people around us. One couple next to us talked out loud about how dark the picture was. The guy behind me had awful breath, I ended up switching seats after the intermission. Our host was very good, a Soprano named Ailyn Perez. The music for this opera is fitting, emotional and moving. I loved it. After the opera we went to the Ellenton outlet mall. Libbie needed slacks and shoes. We spent 2 hours there which was 2 hours too much. On the way back we went to the Italian Grill which was excellent. We had a short wait for a table then had Kelly for our waitress who we had the one other time we went there. We both ordered the same thing, Eggplant Parmesan with salad that had Ranch dressing. The bread was excellent, it was yeast flat bread similar to pizza dough. The Parmesan wa over spaghetti and had fresh basil leave in the food. Wow, was this yummy. I had a Stella to accompany the meal.
When we got back to the condo the Sonos was finally there. It took 10 days and it really was new in the box. The real surprise was it was shipped by Amazon from the Amazon warehouse in Ruskin. I got it set up but have not been able to get the Samba share working where I want to serve music.

I finally heard from the eBbay seller about my Sonos. He supplied a tracking number that shows it's in Ruskin and should be here tomorrow. I spent several hours transferring files to the new Hard Drive, 500 Gb worth. The drive is a 1 Terrabyte drive. We spent the whole day watching the Trump inauguration which was good because the files were getting copied while I watched. In the evening we went out to the clubhouse for dinner. I had the Captains platter. The shrimp were overdone and not great but the rest of the seafood was excellent.
i started reading about what it takes for Samba on a Pi since I want to share the Music on the hard drive with the Sonos.

It's a nice day and not supposed to be so nice this weekend so we went over to Spanish Point and purchased 2 $10 admissions. We walked the gift shop which was high quality then watched the movie as in introduction. We then drove over to the gazebo entrance and joined up with a walking tour which was really worthwhile. We learned about the history of the property and the land from the early settlers to later Mrs Palmer's estate. I enjoyed the walk around the property which is 30 acres. The sun, nice weather and the bayfront add to beautiful atmosphere.
When we finished with Spanish Point we didn't feel like going back to a bowl of soup for lunch. The outdoors and the sunshine feel so nice. We drove to Spanis Marina which has been refurbished and had lunch. The plastic chairs have been replaced with patio furniture but the venue is still beautiful and the food good. We started with nachos and chili-head Salsa which was fantastic. I really like the Salsa. Libbie ordered Queso for her chips. The Salsa was the clear winner here. I had the chicken sandwich with jerk sauce and grilled pineapple which was accompanied by fries. It was delicious. We made this our dinner and only had a bowl of tomato soup for dinner.

The disk drive and the usb drive adapter both arrived today. I struggled recognizing the drive until I downloaded the Seagate Wizard and partitioned the drive which was a start. Next I used the Microsoft built in format program and formatted the drive successfully. I decided this was enough for one day, I'll resume the drive loading tomorrow. We went to the clubhouse for pub night. We met Teri and Sue from last year who live in the condos that are not in the golf portion of Stoneybrook. Lucky them!!!! I ordered the blackened redfish which was delicious. I ate it all including the veggies. A Yuengling accompanied my meal. Terri talked about Bocci in the morning at 9:30. We were going to go ballroom dancing afterward but it was 8:15 when we got out so decided not to.

I finally had some luck today with Alexa. I followed an excellent YouTube video where a guy supposedly opened the Alexa Skills and Lambda functions for the first time. He loaded the color example from Amazon so I followed step by step. It didn't work at first but I found when I went one step beyond, into the part that fills out the privacy statements, the app was able to be used. My Alexa worked successfully with the favorite colors I told it. Based on this success I revisited the Spaceball app I loaded yesterday. I discovered the logs on Amazon and found it was indicated a bad intent. Studying the code I found that the intent "spaceball" was case sensitive. I fixed this and everything started working. I'm ready to move on to Downing place apps with Alexa.
We went over to Lowes to get screws for the board I want to install in the passthrough. Next stop was Sears for a vacuum cleaner belt then the seafood store I found online. We bought tuna steaks at the place just before Southgate. I tried to get the grill running but never got it quite warmed up. We grilled the steaks anyway. There were mosquitoes around the grill which buzzed in my ear. I hate that. The steaks came out OK but seemed a little dry. We had this with Mondavi Cabernet, broccoli and rice. It was a nice meal. I started writing again, this time a short story. I feel rusty at the process but I know this improves with time.

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.