A slow day today. I dropped joe at the Enterprise place where he rented a car to drive to TN. After this I went to the Library and watched the Bach to Rock Story Hour. It was enjoyable. Joe came over and joined Paige and Libbie sitting on the floor. We then had lunch then Joe left at 12:30. In the meantime Libbie and Paige raked the driveway and also decorated the Christmas Tree. Paige was a little homesick tonight and had her bath right after we had cheese and crackers. We watched some movies via Plex from my server then Paige napped on the couch. For my part I got the Harmony Hub set up with a watch movies activity where it switches the Android box to on and also tunes the TV to the HDMI2 input. Clarinet playing using the sound tracks I uploaded on Google Music continues. Dinner tonight was the rest of the rotisserie chicken and baked beans.
I spent some time on the AVSA website updating the current magazine with the materials sent by Sue Hoffmann. I would like to use her teasers on a full page of indices for 2017 where each cover would be a thumbnail and the thumbnail would be link to the teaser for that issue.

I tried playing Clarinet along with the background tracks i uploaded to Google Music. This worked well showing me how bad my playing really is.
I moved the file cabinet into my Office. I'm leaving the drawers open because the paint is still tacky.
We left for the airport at 5:15 and got into some pretty heavy traffic in Morrisville. We parked in the parking garage near terminal 2 and walked into the terminal just as Joe and Paige were going down the escalator to baggage claim. We came back in rush hour traffic taking Evans Road which cleared up once we got on the Cary Parkway.
At home Libbie made 4 pizzas with pepperoni for dinner which we had with a 12 pack of Yuengling that we bought on Tuesday. Paige is an energetic and busy little girl. We were all tired at 9:30 but she still wanted to play games.

Today was a quick trip to Lowes for more paint and some felt feet for the file cabinet I am painting. I picked up our groceries today as well since it was Kroger Seniors day. This time I used a roller to apply paint to the metal cabinet and it looks much better. Tomorrow I'll put it all back together. We used the leftover rotisserie chicken from yesterday and had a Waldorf chicken salad in Pieta pockets for dinner.
I'm still having some trouble with the messages for login with the new membership passwords. One of the messages is correct but I don't know where the other message is coming from.

I put two coats of paint on the 2 drawer file cabinet that will go back into my office. The brush did not do a good job. I need to get more paint and roller it on. I continued to work on the password program testing the inactive members vs deleted members. This thing is almost ready to fly!
Dinner tonight was chicken bacon rollup sandwiches on the last of the flatbread.

I continued the password program and now can successfully write to custom fields programmatically. I also worked on the renaming of the file so that it won't be read into the system again. The only thing remaining is to put the membership file into another directory away from root. The php file will remain in root because that's where cron is located and the recommended placement of the file is the cron directory. I would really like this to go in the scripts directory. I'll try it both ways.
I enjoyed watching Carol Burnett reviewing her show for the 50th anniversary. In addition we watched 60 Minutes which was a review of 50 years of 60 Minutes. It was a pretty good show. During both shows, Carol Burnett and 60 Minutes, I worked on php file renaming and successfully figured that out. Dinner was Libbie's fabulous pizza which gets better and better. Fresh tomato pieces and a very thin crust made for a very nice pizza, one of her best to date.

Lesson with Justin this morning was very insightful. I learned about placement of the pad on the Clarinet and holding it for good playing. I continued to try expression with the instrument. Came home and worked on the AVSA user password problem. I'm making quite a bit of headway with my PHP script. I'm learning by trial and error and I'm happy with the result although the pace of change is slow.
Dinner tonight was the last of the Delmonico steaks we bought in Kroger last month as well as a romaine salad with carrots and sweet potato. A bottle of Rodney Strong Cabernet completed the meal.. Later on we went out to Brewsters for ice cream cones. I had Chocolate Raspberry Truffle. My favorite girl was serving. She's a high school junior and has the prettiest smile and is super friendly. Lucky 16 year old boys in her class!

Most of the day was spent learning PHP for the membership database on AVSA. I'm learning a lot about this language starting with how to execute programs and printing to the screen for debugging. I have it reading a CSV file which was difficult in itself since I originally had the file with an extension. i found that the CSV extension was preventing the file from being read. Once I deleted the extension it was all a go. I now have all the pieces to read a file line by line, extract the relevant data, insert it into a record as required by the Drupal API. I tested this on a subset of the AVSA database with some success. I also need a way to submit a list of member IDs and roles to the website for inclusion into the database. I may have to write an app to do this which would call a PHP program under the covers. Lots to do and think about. I think it's all fun.
Dinner tonight was spaghetti with cheese and tomato sauce. Libbie is getting better but still has a bad cough.

I started looking at writing a Drupal database with php and was successful at adding a user with a role of member. In the process I learned how roles are stored in the database. I used this info to store a user with a role. This is great news for me but still a long way to go for a membership database.
In my office I tried to get a Pi 3 running. Eventually I got it working when I changed power supplies to one i took from the stereo in the plant room.
Libbie is still suffering the effects of her cold and spent the whole day sleeping. Dinner tonight was the leftover roasted chicken along with Bushs's Baked beans. I listened to the Magic Flute live from the met this evening. It was quite enjoyable.

We put 2 strands of warm white LEDs on the corn plant today and removed the strand of cool white leds. I went over to Lowes and picked up another smart things outlet. We now have three outlets on the back porch. I was able to make a smart things group by making a virtual switch inside smart things which Alexa recognized. The group of 3 trees can now be turned on and off via voice. "Alexa turn on the porch trees", etc. I evaluated Imperihome today for home automation but instead decided on using Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi.
I went to Home Depot and used my 10% off coupon and bought a battery operated impact wrench to help with the trailer hitch. Unfortunately it didn't work out. I don't have enough 1/2 inch extensions for my impact sockets. I also do not have any metric sockets, only a set of standard ones. I used the manual ratchet to remove the bolts and then used a hydraulic jack to jack up the hitch assembly so I could bolt it in place. The job went well. Later in the evening I ordered a keyless chuck adapter for a half inch drive so i can use the impact wrench as a drill or driver. Drill bits or driver bits for deck screws could be used in the chuck giving me two tools for the deck next year instead of changing back and froth from drill bit to driver bit. Dinner was the bacon and chicken wrap sandwich wrap again from Cooking Light. Libbie is still under the weather with a bad cough and cold.

Did the grocery run today and picked up the ingredients for a chicken and bacon wrap sandwich for dinner tonight. I hooked up the heater and controller for real today and then started moving back the stuff in the shop. This pretty much concludes the backup heater project. Dinner tonight was a bacon chicken wrap sandwich wrap from cooking light. The Mayo had lemon juice and fresh chopped tarragon in it. I served it with the recommended sweet potato chips. Libbie didn't like the chips but she wanted her other half of the sandwich that she only thought she could eat half of.

Today is Cyber Monday. I bought a $9 voucher for a photo book. We finally visited the Western Wake Crisis Center when they were open. On the way home we visited Publix where Libbie got her cough syrup and lozenges. We went the long way around down Kelly and stopped in Lowes for a Smart Things socket and a can of spray foam. I sealed the hole where the cables enter the wall below the electrical box. I did this to thwart rodents from building a nest in there. This morning I made the booking for our Road Scholar trip to London and Amsterdam. The price was an attractive $2000 for all the flights. Great deal!
We put the lights on the tree on the porch and I hooked up a Smart things hub to a device named Christmas Tree for Alexa to turn off and on. Dinner was warmed up turkey slices with stuffing and cranberry sauce and a sweet potato. We had a glass of Cabernet with the meal.
I tried browsing AirBnB listings but the site was pretty slow. After an hour or two I gave up. I'm looking for an apartment for the week in London for our trip there in the Spring.

I was up early but Sue and Bruce didn't get up till 8. Sue is unbelievably tired looking in the morning. She looks like death warmed over. I don't get the issue. They left at 9:30 and then we watched CBS Sunday Morning before I brought the heater into the greenhouse and live tested it with 240 VAC. I had a few minor changes to make before I mounted it overhead and ran the control cable and spliced the thermostat cable to also go into my shop.
Libbie made her excellent pizza again. She is having trouble with a cold with all night long coughing spells. Dinner was her fabulous pizza from scratch. Our lunch today was the ham and turkey sandwiches with the Dijon and mayo and tomato grilled. Quite good!!!

I did not have a Clarinet lesson today. Justin is on vacation, he said he is going to bring a camper to Pennsylvania to visit relatives. I powered up the controller card and could not program it. I found a wiring error that stopped the device from being programmed. Once I repaired that it was a go. I found quite a few mistakes in the code. MQTT was not working, there were some logic errors in timing and handling of if statements. Later in the evening I found the optocoupler wired worng. I think I now have it all straightened out. I drilled a hole between the house and greenhouse and installed a conduit. My control cable will pass through the conduit as well as the thermostat leads. I may also mount a camera in the greenhouse up by the heater using this conduit to pass the cable to ethernet. I finished up the garage part of the heater wiring including labeling the new breaker. All day long we have been following the travels of Sue and Bruce who are coming to stay tonight. They didn't get going until around 8:30.
They arrived at 7:45 PM, 11 hours of driving, a much longer trip than it would have taken us even with stops. We had wine and cheese before dinner then for dinner we had grilled turkey and ham from cooking light along with tomato soup.

I started constructing the board for the heater controller and got it all done today. It was not bad wiring it up. I took a break in the middle and installed the piece of painted plywood to cover up the hole below the electrical panel Libbie and I went out to Western Wake Food pantry to donate the leftover depends diapers from her Mother. They were closed on Fridays. Two days ago we tried this and found they were closed the day before Thanksgiving. While there we went to Publix and got bread for our turkey sandwiches and a bottle of wine for tonight. The Publix looks similar to the one in Florida. The Macintosh APples i bought there by the bag were excellent. The best of the season so far. The store is a little pricey. Dinner was leftover turkey with mashed potato, cranberry sauce and the bottle of Mondavi Pinot we picked up in Publix. The Pinot was very smooth as Pinots go. I started reading Artemis, the Andy Weir book. It's quite good. I really like the Apollo 11 visitor center on the moon. Tourists can go by on the train or can go out on an EVA and get a guided tour,

Today is Thanksgiving. Traditionally I go get the Black Friday paper which is published today with all the ads but I chose to skip that this year. Instead I worked on the controller program for the heater. I pretty much know what i want to do. I watched the Macy's Thanksgiving parade which was pretty good as usual. Libbie had a few crises throughout the morning as she tried to make fruit cake. First she lost a piece of plastic in the mix. I helped her look for it but we didn't find anything. Next she needed some help putting the turkey in the bag. This was not a problem. i held the bag open and she put the bird inside. We had a very nice traditional Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, stuffing, potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, gravy and Cabernet Sauvignon. I had to run out an hour before Kroger closed (they close at 5 PM today) because there were not enough eggs to make the pumpkin pie which was our dessert with a whipped cream topping. The heater is going to take some time before everything is gathered together to make this thing work.

Today I installed the relays and an optoisolator in the heater then wired it all up to an ethernet cable repurposed as a control cable. The ethernet has 8 conductors of which I'm only using 6. I'm thinking of adding a DS18B20 temperature sensor to the other 2 leads although it's unclear if the ESP82266 has the timing resolution to do one wire measurements.
In the garage I cut the remaining plywood for below the electrical panel and put a coat of white paint on it. It may need another coat of paint since the wood seems to be showing through.
Libbie made chicken parmesan ala cooking light for dinner. We had this with a side of spaghetti and mushroom pasta sauce. Accompanying the meal was a bottle of Woodbridge Cabernet Sauvignon.

I did our Thanksgiving grocery purchases including a very expensive butterball turkey for 2.99 per pound. I also went to Walmart for toilet paper and paper towels. I had to go back later for a shower curtain and progresso soup, things I had forgotten. Libbie is under the weather today with chills and a headache.
I modeled the optoisolator and found that I can detect the relay activation -12V signal. I'll package this up and mount it inside the heater. I'm going to have a 6 conductor cable going to the controller box. The 2 relays and opto will be inside the heater. Dinner tonight was the cauliflower curry from last night with a squash substituted for the Yam. It was different but good. We had this with cabernet sauvignon. Once again, before dinner we had cheddar cheese with triscuits and wine.
Today I ripped the stack of CDs that Libbie brought back from Sakonnet.

Up early. I have a lot of stuff to do today. Put my clothes from yesterday into the dryer after breakfast and was able to pull them out before I went to pick up Libbie. Her plane was on time as i picked her up at 10:30. I resumed on the heater, fixturing it with some wires to see how it operated. Great to see that it does cycle down when the thermostat and power are off. The fan does it's one minute timeout before turning off. This means i can remotely activate the power switch when heat is needed and turn it off when done. The surprise was the turn on relay signal is -12 VDC. An optoisolator can still detect that. I'll model that and hook it up. We did a grocery run for dinner tonight. We made the Cooking Light curry fall veggies which has tomato, sweet potato, cauliflower and curry in a veggie broth. Wow, yummy. We had this with Cabernet. We also had cheese and triscuits with wine before dinner. The Kroger cheese guy told us this cheddar was well aged. We bought it for 7.99 for a small brick. It really was good. I did some research about SSL certificates responding to a query from Richard via a members concerns. I can get a website from namecheap for under $10 including an SSL and xxx.website name. I'll choose glembocki.website.

I studied the heater and discovered the thermostat wire which carries 240 VAC was pinched to ground which caused the flash bang explosion. i cut the bad part of the wire away and hooked it up so I could remotely activate the heater. First time I powered the unit up it displayed a "P" and the fan ran without heat. Closing the leads with a jumper turned the heater on. I pressed the power to off. The "P" went away and the fan stopped running. I then jumpered the thermostat leads and nothing or so i thought. While doing a few other things in the greenhouse i noticed the overheat light came on. It looks like the fan doesn't turn on but the heating elements do. This is wrong. I took the heater down and started tracing out the controller board so i could add some enhancements to make this perform like a conventional furnace.
Dinner tonight was two mini pizzas that i made using Kroger crusts and some tomato, pizza cheese, frozen onions and tomato mushroom sauce. I did not taste the mushrooms.

Ran the thermostat cable along the upper conduit in the greenhouse and wired it into the hanging unit. I did not install a thermostat yet but i picked one up in home Depot. I flipped the breaker and nothing so i climbed the ladder and pressed the power on switch and there was a huge flame with a bang that blackened the siding in the greenhouse. I decided to let this go for the day. Obviously some more debug is needed. Dinner tonight was some St Louis ribs precooked in BBQ sauce that I heated and ate. I treated myself to some Cabernet with the wine. I did not drink the good wine I picked up in Costco, saving that for hopefully when Sue and Bruce visit after Thanksgiving.

Inside the garage I Fastened down the armored cable from the panel to where it goes into the duct leading to the upstairs workshop. I need to cut a piece of plywood for under the panel but have not done that yet. I had 2 clarinet practice sessions today since it's been a while since I've seen Justin and I want to be in top shape. In the afternoon I mounted the heater inside the greenhouse. This involved moving the ladder inside the greenhouse then locating a stud and drilling 2 holes for the bolts. I decided to use the wall mount since it seemed simple. I had to run out to Lowes to get 2 4 inch galvanized lag bolts which I screwed into the wall stud. The bracket seems sturdy. Mounting was easy and consisted of lifting the heater onto the bracket then placing the bolts in to hold it in place. While in Lowes I picked up some fittings to fasten the BX cable to the unit. Also in Lowes I found a woman who was doing similar, hooking up BX cable with #8 conductors to a new oven. For dinner I went to Chipotle and got a Chipotle bowl with carnitas and all the fixings such as rice, beans, lettuce, salsa, etc. Yum.

I spent the whole day working on the sheathed 8/2 going to the greenhouse. I almost had a disaster when I drilled into the sheathing for a live cable. I nicked the neutral with the drill. It could have been worse. I had to take apart the entire plywood where the cables go into the electrical box. I'll have to cut a new one to replace it. I did a lot of running around up and down the stairs pulling the cable a few inches ata time. Eventually I got it where i could hook it up but discovered the circuit breaker was too wide. I exchanged it at Lowes for a thin 50 amp breaker. Dinner was loaded potato soup which was a freebie a while back. it wasn't too bad. I got the new breaker installed. Now I need to nail down the cable before drilling the greenhouse wall. The heater came in so I went to Northern Tool to pick it up. I also bought an LED shop light to work on projects. This was badly needed.

I left at 8:15 and took the Cary Pkwy to drop Libbie off for her 10:10 flight to PVD. Once back home I got the equipment out and took down a Sourwood tree in the front yard. The Poplar is next, it's a much bigger tree. I'm clearing a spot for the tomato garden in a cage. Inside the house I cleared the path in my workshop for the cable to run inside the closet for the greenhouse heater. This involved moving a lot of stuff. I'll start the wiring tomorrow. Dinner tonight was BBQ chicken from Kroger along with a Lemon Meringue pie. I wwent to bed early watching youtube videos. A new Sonos speaker arrived. To my delight it was a Sonos One which has Alexa built in. It's still pretty buggy.

Today Libbie checked into Southwest for her flight. i went out for groceries then came back and installed the piece of metal under the stair wooden footer to stop moisture from wicking from the ground into the wood. I also installed the bottom two steps but not the top one. I need to find what to do about the riser before installing the last one. i came inside and studied some pages of BP and wrote a fake review for TER to get access. I also did some more genealogy research using the newspaper.com I created. Dinner tonight was a side of spaghetti wth Cooking Light style chicken Parmesan. We had the leftover Cabernet from yesterday which was half a glass each.

I went to the DMV in Cary around 10 and they would not title the car because the Bill of Sale showed I financed the car which i did for 3 days but paid it off. I drove to Carmax on Glenwood to see what i could do and they said to have the bill reprinted by Naples with a zero balance. I called Naples an got a person who said they couldn't do that and instead sent me a pretty stupidly worded piece of paper that said i was going to pay the loan off someday. I already did! I called back and got a person named Haley who helped me by doing what the first one should have done which was print me a new bill of sale showing no balance. They finally sent it and after lunch Libbie and i went to the holly Springs DMV and got the car titled and registered. Hooray! We had a very nice looking young lady who took care of us including not charging sales tax for $500 a second time after we already paid Florida $589. Next we went hunting for Lemon fruit for the fruit cake. We tried both Lowes foods and Kroger as well as Foodlion on Old Raleigh Rd on the way back home. No luck. I got out my electric drill and remmoved the cardboard temp Florida license and installed my own plate. Dinner was sweet potato, steak and Fetzer Cabernet. A successful day.