I went with Libbie to Nancy's to deliver the fruit cake and then to the Kitchen store where I bought a nice $50 pepper mill. It has a stainless and ceramic griner which I like. It's also adjustable for 3 different size grindings. We got back and had ham sandwiches for lunch before I went outside and worked on moving the heavier logs down to the wood pile. The big logs were too big for the wheelbarrow so I rolled them down the hill. I stopped when I got tired. The rest of the logs need some chain saw work. I looked up the chain saw blade for the new saw and it's an S57 which I don't have. May order one or two from eBay.
Dinner tonight was ham, sweet potato, apple sauce and for the first time in a while, Cabernet Sauvignon. Libbie was very sad tonight reading Cort's Xmas card. He talked about a great trip to Portugal in May with Bill then Bill died in June. So sad. We skippe dance tonight since both of us have not really recovered from our colds.

When I found out imperihome went to a subscription service instead of a buy once app I revisited Node-Red once again. This potentially can be all I need. I configured an eMail alert for the electric heat. I probably need a better alert system, one that will only send an alert once or maybe once every few hours.
I went down the breakers one by one in the garage until I found the one controlling the back porch. It's the same one as the outlets in my office. While Libbie went to her Quilt Christmas party I worked all day on the thermostat and finally got it running just as she came home around 4 PM. It works with Alexa and is a 4 times a day scheduling system. y
Dinner tonight was ham with sweet potato. I stayed inside most of the day with my cold. I tried practicing Clarinet but it was hard with my poor breathing due to the cold. Dinner once again was ham with apple sauce and sweet potato.

It's an all day rain today so I worked out on the back porch figuring out the Wifi thermostat. I spent a lot of time locating tools and materials but did not finish the job since i needed to kill the power and Libbie was watching something on TV. We had Ham, apple sauce and sweet potato for dinner. It was a horrible night for me. My legs were twitching severely keeping me up most of the night. I finally wrapped my leg tightly with stretch bandages. This may have helped since I did fall asleep.

I did the grocery thing today and bought a Christmas Ham. Dinner was the ham with a baked sweet potato. I have a full on cold. In the evening my nose was running so I took some meds that kept me up almost all night. It dried ny sinuses but bad news for getting through the night. In the morning I worked on the Poplar i dropped and got most of the crown cleaned up. The big job is going to be the huge and heavy logs. While playing with Node-Red I found I can get it to be an endpoint for Alexa. i used Alexa to turn the landscape lights on and off by voice.

I mailed my christmas cards and bought more stamps at Kroger. Then before lunch I went out with Libbie to AC Moore where she bought more cards and I bought a picture frame for the Butterfly poster in my office. I hooked up the come-along and cut down the large poplar in our front yard. It was right on in the direction of the notch. I used a wedge to prevent it from tilting backwards and the come-along cable as insurance in the front. Dinner was spaghetti with meatballs and cheese. Temp is in the 60s which is not bad for December. Tomorrow it's supposed to be near 70 as I move the logs to the brush pile.

I managed to move the server over onto the new shelves and remove the table from the office to give me more floorspace. Today I also wrote all the Christmas Cards to my side of the family. I used all the stamps we had so will have to go out tomorrow for more.
I got the chains hooked up to the tree out front that is coming down to make room for my cage for the grow boxes. I also finished planting the Spring bulbs by planting a bag of 25 Tete A Tete daffodils. The drill chuck I bought for the impact tool got stripped since the hex socket was only biting the very end of the chuck hex. I need a deep set socket that is 11/32 to fit the chuck.
Libbie made her epic pizza for dinner tonight. Yum.

We left home at 5:15 for RDU with Paige and Joe. The airport is amazingly busy at this time of the morning. It's also a cold 28 degrees outside which I guess is seasonal for December. Libbie went back to bed while i gathered my things and went to my Clarinet lesson at 9. Justin said i have finished Book 1 and should either get book 2 or another book of my choosing. I didn't accomplish much today. I listened to Norma which was the start of the season of afternoon broadcasts from the Met. Later in the PM I went out to Music & Arts in Crossroads which is an excellent music store I found via Google. Christmas shoppers have made Crossroads a crowded place to be but I came via Tryon which was an easy way to get there. I picked up 3 books because it was 30% off when you buy 3. I got a book of Christmas Carols, an "I used to Play Clarinet" book and a book called Advancement Series. I ended up ordering a used Essential Elements Book 2.
Libbie was really out of it. I made her a Chicken noodle soup for dinner while I had ribs, a salad and a glass of "14 Hands" wine. I tweaked the login screens in the AVSA sandbox and sent the URL to Barbara for testing.

The roll of Aunt Helen's film turned out to be a duplicate of the film labeled "grandas" but in much better condition. It was with extreme sadness that I opened one of Dad's reels of my early childhood and found the film was completely disintegrated. I'm not sure if i can recover anything from it. I'm am extremely sad over this. Libbie is down and out but Paige is as busy as ever. We chose to let her watch TV almost all day. I took her out for a home Depot trip where I bought a sanding pad and some minwax but it wasn't good enough to sand down the rough surface on the shelves. I may just go with it as is.
Joe arrived around 3:30. Paige was happy. They went out to a park on Kelly Rd then i met Joe at Enterprise rent a car on 55 in Apex and picked he and Paige up when they dropped the car off. I started smoking ribs today at 12:30. When Joe arrived he informed us that Cole and Emily were also coming for inner. I went to Kroger and got some Italian Sausage and more baby back ribs. We had more than enough ribs and sausage. Cole made some awful Farfala "bricks" which had chick peas and other stuff. We tried making Hush Puppies but they didn't come out very good. It was a nice evening anyway.

I continued digitizing the 8mm films. i was especially interested in the one labeled "'grandmas" film. It was scenes from the 40s as neat as i could tell. Also included was a lot of scenes of the Petroski home. That place used to be so beautiful with gardens and formal hedges. Future generations were more interested in hanging out at bars than gardening at home which is a shame. Of course this is coming from one who prefers gardens over bars. I tried several types of video editing, each time with failure. Corel Studio which I purchased 5 years ago did not do the job I needed. I then tried an Open Source product but it did not have contrast and color correction. i ended up with the standard of them all, Adobe Premiere Elements. I;m on a 7 day free trial but will probably end up buying it. Libbie is really sick. i went with Paige to the grocery store and then she helped take the garbage to the street. She is a little helper with energy, animation and a very strong will. Dinner was steak and baked potato with a glass of Cabernet. For the first time in a long time i did not practice Clarinet today.

I put another coat of polyurethane on the office shelves today. After it dried it's still a little rough. I'm thinking of putting some rubbing compound on it. i'll research this online. We went to the studio this afternoon. We were surprised there were others in there. Melanie was with Butch and Robert had a student. Paige accompanied us which i didn't think was going to work out but it was fine. She patiently sat and watched while holding Moana. After a nice lesson where we reviewed Rhumba and cha cha we went to the Cary Post Office on Wrenn Drive off Kildaire Farm and mailed three of Paige's home made Christmas cards to Craig, Debbie, Grannie and possibly Christa. Dinner tonight was leftover meatballs with slice and baked potatoes accompanied by Cabernet Sauvignon.
When we got home the Lavender from Los Poblanos was waiting in our mailbox. Also on the front porch was the Wolverine Movie digitizer and also a 32 Gig SD card for the digitizer. I ordered this from BH Photo on Sunday and it was surprising that they arrived Wednesday via UPS because it was free shipping and $50 holiday savings. I tried the digitizer on one of Dad's movies which was labeled Barbara Petroski wedding. It was pretty awful. Next I digitized a 1964 Worlds Fair and a 1964 Beach movie which were better but not spectacular. The bonus was a rell labeled "Grandmas". It's an old black and white film of my grandmothers which has pics of my Mom and her sister Helen walking along. Because it is Black and white the images are preserved nicely. It was 11 PM at night so I didn't didgitize it completely and went to bed. I'll clean this one tomorrow and digitize it.

Libbie took Paige to the Natural Science Museum. This gave me a little break which meant some quiet time. I painted the first coat of urethane on the new shelves for my office then spent a lot of time figuring out Fancy Login. I finally got it mastered to the point where it's usable. Later in the day I went outside and planted the 10 Hyacinth bulbs next to the garbage can. That's another bag of bulbs completed. Two more bags to go I think. For dinner we made meatloaf muffins which we had with leftover baked beans and Cabernet Sauvignon. They were yummy as usual. After dinner I continued on the login work. I'm happy with it so far.

I went outside today, first for a walk to the Seagrove Park with Paige and then out front with the drill to drill holes for bulbs. We planted a whole package of 40 daffodil bulbs. Yesterday we planted a bag of 20 Allium bulbs in front of the dogwood and cedar trees. I spent some time updating the AVSA website. I had one instance of the site not working after I installed the panels update and the site souldn't work until I updated the ctools as well. This was an easy fix since Ctools updated easily.
Dinner tonight was meatballs and spaghetti which seems to be a Paige favorite. Paige is such a delight but she is very high maintenance. Today Libbie took her to Bach to Rock which she said was not worthwhile. They had a young teacher who was unqualified at handling this age. Libbie was really disappointed. I watched some more reviews of the Wolverine that is in transit from BH Photo in NY. I know it's not professional and the reviews are either high at what it does or low because it is not of professional quality. Ideally i would like to modify it with a new camera and optics as well as firmware that lets you access the individual frames.

I crashed the AVSA website in a failed update. Fortunately when I restored some modules it came back. We need to update the site totally. I had good Clarinet practice today. I focused on making a good sound and also on playing a difficult section from the "On the Housetop" music with some back to back eigth notes I wasn't playing as eigths. I practiced this many times until it registered. I found a synchronized lighting house in Cary that we went to tonight and parked on the street then walked over to the mailbox where there was a speaker. There was also FM on 90.3. Surprisingly the signal continued from Waldoo Roo Rd and Davis Drive all the way over to Davis Drive School. Nice!
I did a lot of online reading and viewing of blogs with the telecine subject, specifically concerning the Wolverine MovieMaker. I looked on eBay but found it at BH Photo for $244 as a Holiday Special.. This was low enough that I though it worthwhile to get one. Most of the reviewers realize this is not commercial quality but for the price is more than worth the investment. I'm sure the optics and image sensor can be upgraded but first I'll try it as is. Libbie made pizza from scratch and thanks to Paige we had her favorite topping, Pepperoni. We each had a Yuengling Black and Tan with the pizza.

Off to practice this morning. Justin is keen on the idea of online tutoring. I spent the day looking for the power supply for my Chromebook. No luck. It's in this house somewhere. I spent a lot of time with the AVSA website trying to do updates that will be needed for the new password system. I need to do more. We watched some Pixar movies on the Android TV box. This is really working well. I ended up downloading some more Pixar material. There is a sound issue when content is recorded in Dolby AC4 5.1, we don't get sound on the Android Box but the media player on the PC plays them well. It's been raining all day yesterday and today. Paige was house bound. Dinner was Salmon with Sweet Potato and Shiraz.

I did a lot of practice today using the musical accompaniment tracks to my lesson book. This was great! I have improved my playing quite a bit. We watched Moana using Android TV and the Samsung. This works very well streaming movies off my server. I'm happy with the combo. Dinner was spaghetti and meatballs with a glass of Shiraz. Paige really likes this meal. I downloaded some more Pixar movies for this week and also played some more with the password system on the AVSA website. While I was at it I also updated the magazine section of the AVSA website with Sue's teaser for the november issue. Ken sent the MAAVS Memo. The minutes said they are discussing what to do with MAAVS. Attendance is down, volunteers are tired and there are no new members.

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.