I found the undercut tool and carved out the top hinge on the closet door. This was an accomplishment. I continued working on my garage door monitor. Today I'm adding configuration via MQTT and reporting settings via MQTT. Settings are stored in on-board EEPROM.
We got back to the studio today for our Tango lesson. IT was fun as usual and we even may have learned a few things. I was really tired after the lesson. Dinner was the leftover chicken with dumplings.
After dinner we were bad and went to the ice cream shop Brewster's and each had a waffle cone. I had the vanilla with chocolate covered peanuts and caramel. Wow, was that sweet. Late in the evening I studied stocks looking for a replacement for my NGG which is British Power Company that doesn't seem to be doing too well.

The super glue worked great overnight. My relay board is solidly glued down in the garage door monitor. I wired it up and the ESP didn't even boot. I added a driver transistor from some info I googled and the info was totally wrong. I put another relay and Huzzah on a breadboard and played with it. Found out to turn the relay on requires grounding the input to the relay board. About 1.6 ma flows when doing this as measured by my multimeter. I put a 4N32 optoisolator into the breadboard and chose some resistors large enough to still work while keeping the idle current down. The opto output has a 2K and the input has a 200 ohm. The relay switches reliably now. I put this circuit into the garage door controller and it works well with MQTT packets. Now i need to be able to supply config info via MQTT.
For dinner we had a new Cooking Light recipe, Chicken and Dumplings. It used a chicken breast along with bag of frozen veggies, flour tortillas and chicken broth plus a few very mild spices. It was another winner from Cooking Light and is now added to the recipe file. The hits keep coming.

I continued working on the garage door code then left for the airport and picked Libbie up at 9:45 AM. She left PVD at 5:40 AM. That's early.
Throughout the day I continued working the garage door code and got the sonar sensor working nicely. It was randomly sending out flukey values. My solution ended up being a filter that looked for 3 readings in a row if a dramatic change is noted. Once the reading has changed it has to do it 3 times in order to be accepted or else it will be rejected. In the trial run this really worked well. There were plenty of glitchy readings but the filtering did not let any of them through to the final readings. Yes!
I spent some time in the garden tieing the tomatoes, did some light pruning and a tille weeding. The tomatoes are coming great. I picked a cucumber and ate it with BBQ sauce. Yum.
I practiced the Clarinet a little. I'm concerned about my fingering. I'm not sure what the fix should be.
My Ebay Reeds and the eBay relays came this afternoon. I tried gluing the relay to the garage door board but my tube of epoxy is hardened. I tried some super glue but have my doubts. Need a good way to attach this thing.
Dinner was the waldorf chicken salad sandwiches. After having these for dinner we went to Brewsters and ice cream on waffle cones. This breaks the diet but I'll get right back on to it tomorrow.

I watched the morning programs then went out to Costco for blueberries and coffee. I also bought a shower massage with a flow control like the one they had in Juneau. It seems to cut the force of the water OK when I installed it and jumped into the shower for a few minutes. Next I finished mowing the lawn then worked on the hinges for the closet door. Once back inside I spent time learning about Over the Air programming of the ESP8266 using the ESPHelper library. This library seems to be useful. I'm going to switch my garage door code over to ESPhelper. It looks like it will greatly simplify my code which is the goal. I'm thinking that I could even use MQTT as a configuration control for the device. For dinner I had the leftover half of a chicken breast along with the free Uncle Ben's long grain flavored rice that was a Friday Freebie a long while back. This was the best dirty rice and it was DIY instead of Bojangles and was probably healthier too although it was so good I ate 3/4 of the box so in that respect it was worse for me calorie wise.

I finished the writeup for the Growing Tip Journal access for the AVSA membership group. I had to create a new view for editors to list all the documents that could be deleted or edited since there was no way to edit existing content in a view. The little editing snowflakes were not there. I had a great music lesson with Justin. The key points were to focus the sound, sit up straighter and still need to get better at 1/8th notes hitting the metronome tone. For lunch I had the leftover Waldorf salad from yesterday. My weight was still at 232. I wish it would get down to 230 this week which was the goal. After lunch I mowed the back yard. Did not do the rough section along the creek. Maybe I'll get to it tomorrow as well as out by the street. I played some more with the garage ESP with sonar. I used the NCID code as a base this time. It's still a little clunky. I was going to go out to Costco before they closed since I needed coffee in the next day or two. As I opened the garage door a thunderstorm kicked up. It dropped a large pine branch into the turnaround in the driveway in front of me. At that point I decided not to go. That little storm dumped 1.48 inches of rain on us. I stayed in and got lazy and had tuna sandwiches made with tuna, celery and mayonnaise on Pita bread. They were pretty good. I can't believe I'm out of celery again.

Cesar came out this morning with his sidekick. They replaced the furnace draft butterfly valve. It doesn't really draft much when the furnace is running. I doubt if that's going to control humidity. I'll leave the humidifier running for a month or so to let the wood dry out.. It's been sitting at 90% humidity practically forever. This should help big time. They also tightened the fitting on the sump pump that was leaking. After Clarinet practice I finished wiring the sonar to the Huzzah I think. Need to test it. The relay is not here yet, maybe some day next week. I also researched current sensing and ordered some magnetic current clamps and also an A/D converter breakout. With a little code I should be able to monitor the Sump pump on/off cycles, the dehumidifier on/off cycle and the furnace on/off cycle. For the furnace I can put the clamp inside the unit. Both the Sump pump and the dehumidifier will need the probe inside an electrical box. I took a walk around Seagroves Farm Lake today and home. I estimate it's around a mile. It's near 90 today the way I like it but I was surprisingly tired from the walk.

Humidity in the crawl is holding at 48%. This is great news but it is relying on the dehumidifier to cycle. I would love to monitor the on/off cycle of the dehumidifier. I looked up current sensing so that I could monitor this thing. I started wiring up the garage door monitor. Still have a dozen or so wires to add, from the sonar sensor to the Huzzah and then the power leads. I'll wait for the relay to arrive before tackling wiring it.
Did a fun research project on Drupal. Joyce wanted a place to upload documents, not just a link to an article. I found something called a PDF Reader module which defines PDF as a field type in the content. It worked well for the few documents I put into the sample page for her. Barbara thought that was amazing.
Dinner was the Waldorf chicken salad which once again was delicious. I grilled a chicken breast to perfection, 8 minutes on each side. I used half of it for my salad with celery, grapes and walnuts. I cut back on the amount of mayo and mustard. IT was delicious. A side note: next day I discovered I had forgot to include the Apple in the salad.

I was happy that TER gave me a free 30 days for writing a fake review. It makes entertaining reading until I tire of it. I went under the house and now have the dehumidifier running on the humidistat which is set to 50%. I also propped open the furnace takeoff as recommended by Jason until Cesar can get it replaced. Took a Home Depot trip and bought a crawl space door handle as well as hinges for the garage closet doors. I'll use the old doors for the 3 foot wide closet but will have to buy 2 new 4 foot doors for the garden tool closet.
I have been on a serious weight reduction plan. I clocked in today at 232 which is lower than the 242 after New Orleans but not low enough. Would love to see another 15 pounds go away. Did a quick Kroger run for lettuce plus grapes and chicken for tomorrow's Waldorf Chicken salad. Dinner tonight was Greek chicken salad. It came out very good, same as last night. I was lazy and sliced the half turkey breast cold and put it on the salad. The baguette cubes toasted were once again delicious. I listened to Parsifal all the way through from 6 AM to 10:36 AM on all the Sonos speakers throughout the house.

Pretty happy with the dehumidifier under the house. I hooked it into the AC 3/4 inch drain pipe which allowed me to shorten the hose and remove it from the sump. Talked to Jason about the furnace tap. He will send Cesar out next week to replace the tap since the butterfly doors don't open. In the meantime the dehumidifier took the crawl space down into the high 40s percent humidity. Picked up a few items at Kroger and decided to make Greek chicken salad for dinner. I cooked a chicken breast on the grill using salt and peppercorn seasoning. It was delicious. I had it over lettuce with peppers, feta cheese and other ingredients. I'm beyond thrilled at how good this is. I have half a chicken breast left but will need to get more lettuce. Practiced the Clarinet after dinner.
Next agenda item is the garage door opener. I drilled some holes in an electrical box for the sonar sensor but have to order a relay for door activation since I don't have one.

Up this morning at 4:30. Got dressed and suitcase in the car, we were on the road by 5 AM. Got to PVD at 5:30 with no traffic. Southwest counter in the airport was empty as well as TSA. Saw the huge line at the crappy Dunkin Donuts and walked back to the terminal where I found a Starbucks with no line at all. Bought a medium coffee and went to gate 21 which is at the end of the concourse and waited. It was a very smooth flight to BWI. Picked up an egg McMuffin and coffee and ate it in the food court. Went to gate B02 and took a seat facing the main concourse where I could read my book and watch scantily clad women. It was nice to be back in the South with short shorts and tank tops. I'm really enjoying the Path between the Seas book about finding a path between the two oceans across Central America. Famous travel writers and explorers who have never been to Central America have more say in the path to take for a canal then cold scientific facts. Running the Panama Railroad was the first step since it revealed the vast amount of money available people and companies were willing to pay to cross the continent. The flight from BWI had some pretty rough bumps somewhere in VA then the whole descent into Raleigh was bumpy as we went through many layers of clouds. At the airport I was the only one in the Park N Relax van to the parking lot. I had to buy gas at Sheetz since my gas light was on. We dropped it off last week on empty. I stopped into Best Buy and got a price match on the Frigidaire Dehumidifier. When I got home I was a little disappointed there were no back issue of the WSJ on the driveway. Larry must have taken them. he did move the garbage cans which was a plus. I had to go out to home Depot to get a garden hose for the dehumidifier drain. I have it emptying into the sump which is where I found the first problem, the coupling on the Sump output was spraying water. This thing is not supposed to have more than 5 PSI. It was never meant for pressurized pipes. The humidity is doing a fabulous job in removing moisture. It dropped the humidity 20% in a few hours from 81 to 61. I'll leave it run on continuous for a few days. The next problem I found was the butterfly valve is damaged with caulk which is stopping the valve from opening and thus conditioned air is not going into the crawl space. Dinner and lunch today is the beginning of my reduced eating. I had a plum and some grapes for lunch. Dinner was the freebee Ramen noodles, a bag of Southwest peanuts and a bowl of shredded wheat with milk. I hope this can hold me until morning.

This morning Libbie was still pretty sad from yesterday. We went to Brookdale and Libbie put George's laundry in the washer then we drove to the Kitchenworks restaurant where we had breakfast. I ordered a western omelet which came with toast and coffee. We went back to Brookdale to put the clothes in the dryer then back to our apartment. Met at Brookdale for a Father's Day lunch which was very nice and consisted of wings as an appetizer, Beef Tenderloins with potato for the entree and Boston Creme pie for desert. Present were Sue and Bruce, Mary and John, David, Libbie and George. It was a nice special Father's Day meal. We went over to Barbs a while. The only ones left were Katy as well as Corrie & Shane with all the little ones. We stayed for a while there then back to Brookdale for dinner which was Chili, Corn Bread, tossed tomatoes and strawberry shortcake for desert. This was nice. After dinner we went back to the room and watched PBS which first featured Johnny Mathis then George switched to Lawrence Welk at super high volume. I needed earplugs.

After breakfast in the apartment we went early to the Memorial service for Bill. We got there at 9:30 for the 10:00 service. The tributes by his kids, siblings and friends was emotional, heart wrenching and beautiful. Mary wrote a poem, John talked about what a great friend he was, Libbie read the poem from Arlene's Mass card. After the service we went to Barbs for some sandwiches and drinks. There was a Champagne toast to Bill because he always started each vacation with his kids with a champagne toast. I talked some with Cort and Jacques. They were going back this evening. We had a 5PM dinner with George at the condo. At the table were Holly and Darryl, Steven and Lib and I. I had a salad, marinated pork with potatoes and Blueberry Cobbler. We stayed and chatted a while then took Steven over to his AirBnB which was a beautiful large carriage house. Our place is an apartment in a basement and smells a little musty when we enter it each time but then we get used to it. I won't be back in August if I don't have to.

We left home at 430 AM for our flight to RI today. The Park N Relax lot was pretty full which was surprising but this was just the tip of the iceberg. The line at Southwest went from the ticket counters to the escalators. We stood in line almost 30 minutes to check in. My bag was tagged late check in but it made it to RI. The flight was mostly smooth with a few moments of choppiness. At the Baltimore stop to change planes we picked up coffee and biscuits at mcDonalds in the one hour between flights. Baltimore has a very nice airport. In RI we had a long wait at the Enterprise counter. I think RI has the dumpiest of the airports.
We had lunch with George and Sue and Bruce at Brookdale. I had a turkey, avocado and bacon sandwich with corn chowder soup and chips. It was a lot of food. We went down and saw Barbara and the kids at Barb's house. They made some very nice poster boards for the funeral home.
We went to calling hours at 4 in a steady rain. The line to greet Barbara was long. Bil had many, many friends. We met the Naragansett chorus director, Bill's photo teacher, the Munks from Annapolis as well as Bill's partner Ken Rix and a host of other people. We left shortly before 6 to join Mary and John as well as Sue and Bruce and George in the private dining room at Brookdale for Pizza and beer. It was a nice party. After the party we drove down to Barbs to sit and chat for a while. It was a crazy place with all the grand children running around. We left there in a light rain and back to our apartment. I noticed that our home in Apex received over an inch of rain at 8 PM this evening. The crawl humidity is holding at 79%.

The sonar sensor started acting up on the Open Garage mounted in the garage. I tried taking it apart to replace the sensor but when I mounted the new sensor it went into a restart loop. I don't know what's going on. I may have to abandon this and go for an Adafruit Huzzah. Dinner tonight was the Waldorf Chicken salad again. The Town of Apex inspector came out this afternoon and looked over the job. It passed inspection. I was a little worried about using the upstairs air for makeup combustion air but he passed it. I packed a suitcase tonight to fly to RI in the morning for Bill's funeral.

I went outside this morning to mix up some Malathion to spray aphids that Libbie said we had on the Oleander. I didn't see any. While I was outside Jason from Crawl Space Tech came up the driveway to drop off the building permit sign off card. I spoke with him about the high humidity in the crawl space, 78%. He said the downstairs air is not running enough. I don't think so. Can't see how blowing cold air into the space is going to help anything. Will investigate a dehumidifier. Spent the morning assembling the garage door monitor froom Open Door. I broke the sonar sensor so I soldered in one I got from eBay. It works well. I mounted it on the ceiling and tried it but bricked the thing when I tried to update it with MQTT. Took it down and brought it into my office where I used the online tool to upload a boot loader and then upload the MQTT code.
It correctly sends out door status packets but does not respond to the button command to activate the door. I noticed there is no MQTT subscribe in the code so the callback never gets called.
We had an excellent Tango lesson with Robert. Our routine is quite fancy. He gave us the music and spent most of our lesson doing choreography. On the way home we stopped at Kroger and picked up the ingredients for Waldorf Chicken salad. It was delicious and was today's cooking light recipe.

I struggled with programming the Open Garage Hardware and finally achieved something working but I bricked the thing trying to do an over the air update. I finished painting the shelves this morning, now I'll put them into the garage cabinet for all my plastic tubs. We had hamburgers on buns tonight with Baked Beans, I also picked up 4 ears of pre shucked corn at Kroger. It was pretty good stuff. We had this with half a bottle of Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon.

I went to Lowes and bought 3 shelf boards for $52. Thy were better quality then I wanted but I don't know where to get less than prime. I cut them up and painted one side with the Blue paint. Dinner tonight was Chinese takeout, the three meat food We had it with a bottle of Mondavi Cabernet.

It was a slow day. I worked on the OLED display pulling MQTT packets from the weather station and displaying them on the display. Dinner was Libbie's delicious pizza, a Sunday night tradition.

Good Clarinet lesson with Justin this morning. I still do not have the 1/8 notes correct. He said I'm making them too short. I need to practice harder. In addition, he had me try some improv on the scale of G. I tried it but did not know all the notes in the scale, i only know them in order.
When I came back I dragged out the power washer and put in fresh gas as well as 35 PSI in the tires. Dragged out all the hoses and got it running on the front walk. Libbie power washed the front porch, the steps, walk, garage door and driveway. The original purpose was to wash the mud from the construction
After lunch we went to Kroger and picked up steak, potatoes, green beans and Ravenwood Zinfindel wine for a nice dinner.

Cesar came this morning to clean up the last of the crawl job. He pointed out a pipe to me that's leaking under the kitchen sink. He also said that the outlet needs to be moved over the sump pump since the cord couldn't reach. The electrical is not a problem for me, the water pipe will be an issue since it's right against the foam. I would love to replace it with CPVC but I'll just put more copper in it's place.
i spent a few hours moving the outlet. I replaced the outlet with a junction box then put a new outlet in over the sump pump. The job was easy, a little long, but physically demanding because of the contortions for my body. i also hooked up a new DHT humidity sensor in the crawl. The old one was really bad. I bench tested it. I put the ESP2866 into a plastic electrical box and put the plastic cover on that I found for sale in Lowes. The crawl humidity is high around 75% but no higher than the outside air. It will be interesting to see what it will be when the outside humidity goes up.
I'm pretty happy with the job. For dinner we decided to get Chinese takeout which is the three meat szechuan along with an eggroll. We picked up a bottle of Mondavi Woodbridge Cabernet Sauvignon to have with dinner.

The insulation guys came at 9. I opened the downstairs bedroom window and also the front living room and put a fan in the window to draw air through the downstairs. While they sprayed the foam in the crawl space I loaded up my car with a surf board and the misc photo equipment and hauled it all to the dump to get it out of the garage. Next step is to build the garage shelves and patch up the hole in the sheetrock where the foundation vents were added by me. On the way back I stopped at Walmart for soup and cereal. When I got home the job was done and the guys were packing up the hoses and equipment. The house does not have an odor. i took advantage of both cars out of the garage and blew the garage out and then blew off the driveway. We got the funeral arrangements for Bill this morning. Two funerals on June 16 and June 17. I booked an Air BnB and also booked some plane tickets. Still need a rental car.
Dinner was the quick Taco recipe which is ground beef and salsa with green pepper over a bed of lettuce and covered with cheese and taco chips. We had this on the back porch with a bottle of wine. After dinner we released the package of 300 live lady bugs that came in the mail today. There are Lady Bugs everywhere.
The iPad cover also came today. It fits perfectly! I'm pretty happy with it so far. I put it on the iPad and used it to start reading "The Path Between the Seas".

The crawl is done except for the insulation. Cesar came this morning to remove the tool trailer. There may be an issue with the In-Forcer using conditioned air to supply combustion air. Jason said the inspector may not approve this. I told him I will argue with the inspector about this. It's a continued day of sadness around here over Bill's death. Vicki called so we spent some time on the phone with her talking about Bill. We postponed our dance lesson for today since Libbie is not in a mood for upbeat music. Maybe Friday. I bricked up the wall where the foundation Fan was located and instead installed a brick curtain wall with mortar I picked up in home Depot. The job came out pretty good, at least it's all covered instead of just foam to the outdoors. I also cleaned up some of the rocks tossed outside of the crawl. While making a spacer frame for the PVC vent I also cut up the supports for the shelves. Now i need to deal with the two holes in the sheetrock wall in the garage. I'm pretty happy with the progress so far. Dinner tonight was the Pork Torta sandwiches again. The baguette was older this time, i liked the fresher one two days ago. I spent the rest of the evening watching nonsense on YouTube which was a waste.

The work began today promptly at 7. They started shoveling gravel into the wheel barrows and putting down pipes into the trenches dug along the foundation walls. Libbie is pretty sad this morning. She got a text from Mary that Bill is a lot worse than they originally thought. We don't know what any of that means yet but she is pretty down. The gravel trailer is blocking the driveway so we're not going anywhere this morning. I got the account statement for NC Quick Pass. Libbie took Anne on a wild goose chase to the orlando airport last week and had to use the toll road which cost $1.09 twice. This is a discount over the $1.25 charge.
I went out to RE Michel and picked up the Fan capacitor for the outdoor AC upstairs unit. After I installed it I fired the system up and it happily worked . We don't need it though since the outdoor temp is in the 70s.
It's been a down and sad day, neither of us wanted to fix dinner so we went over to Ruckus Pizza near Costco for dinner around 7 PM. The place was surprisingly crowded. Libbie left her cell phone at home intentionally since she didn't want any bad news while we were having dinner. I had the chicken Parmesan with whole wheat penne, Marinara sauce and a Red Oak beer. Around 9:30 while in the Family Room we got the word that Bill had died. What a sad day. This is even sadder than when a parent dies since parents are much older and expected to die first. Bill was 71. I'm thinking that the last I saw him was shortly after Valentines Day when I brought the security bits back from our Apex trip to disassemble his battery charger. We lent him Libbie's charger and said we could look inside his charger to see if there's a fuse.

Cesar arrived at our door at 7:15 AM ready to begin the crawl space work. It was great that they are prompt and ready to begin working. They started by moving their giant tool trailer into place. The guys donned hazmat suits and masks and began pulling insulation down and bagging it into plastic garbage bags. These guys came ready to work. They next began washing mold off the joists. They worked like this all day until 4. In the late morning i disassembled the outside compressor unit for the upstairs air. I pulled the fan motor starting cap and went to RE Michel on Tryon Rd. They were out of stock but ordered it for me. It will be here tomorrow morning. I did some website updating during the afternoon then picked up some groceries at Kroger. For dinner we made a cooking light recipe of Pork Torta sandwiches. They were yummy and consisted of pork cutlets on a baguette with crushed beans and salasa, jack cheese and avocado with slices of tomato.

We got up early and left the hotel by 7 AM. We went next door to the WaWa and got a tank of gas. Next stop was across the street to the McDonald's drive through for coffee and a Bacon Egg and Cheese biscuit. The drive up I-95 was uneventful. We had a bathroom break at the GA visitor's center then got gas up in SC around exit 50 where we filled up at a Marathon and had snack wraps inside at a McDonalds. Our next stop was to top off the tank in Florence at the Pilot at exit 170. Wow was it jam packed. There was no parking space free so i had to leave my car at the pump. We got home around 4:30 PM in time for the rain to start. Lucky!!! Libbie had time to thaw a pizza crust for dinner while i went out to Kroger to pick up milk for our cereal tomorrow. After our dinner of Pizza and a Dos Equus I went upstairs to lay down and instantly fell asleep. I slept and slept and did not wake up until morning.