I started gathering things for Sarasota, mostly electronic stuff. I also fixed my glasses which lost a screw a week ago. Need to complete all this before we go. IT's bitter cold today. Justin pointed out what I did wrong with the high notes. My ligature was too high and also my fingers were not flat against the keys. I listened to Hansel and Gretel while continuing to read about chart making in Node Red.

I went out this morning at 10 AM and got a haircut. There wasn't anybody there probably due to the ice and snow which was good.

I spent the day learning to graph data on Node-red. I got my crawl space humidity and temperature probe working again. It was a bad Huzzah. I don't know why.
I removed the fireplace logs and removed the thermocouple. It tested good with a flame. I put it back and still couldn't get the logs lit. I decided to trash the logs and went to Lowes Cary to get a new one. They had them in stock, Apex did not. I also bought an installation kit which was a flexible pipe, two connectors and some pipe thread grease. The whole thing went together well. I tested it and like it better than the old one. The remote has thermostatic control. Also, the pilot doesn't leak like the old one did.
We went out to Dance at 8. Most people were there but Robert closed the dance early at 9:15 so we went out to the Pub early. I had 1.5 Yuenglings and most of a plate of 10 chicken wings shared with Libbie. She only had 3 or so. When I came home there was a message from Justin confirming our 9 AM lesson. I responded from bed at 11:30.

My Weather station seems to be back on wunderground. Not sure what the problem was but it showed the importance of not relying on external sources for visualizing data. We went nowhere today because of the snow. I finished up the Eagle Cad schematic for NCID and sent it to OSHpark. I also ordered the missing connectors such as the USB and the 2x5 headers that plug to the NCID display.
Dinner tonight was steak, baked potato with sour cream and Cabernet. My clarinet playing has gone to shit. I'm having trouble with the high notes. Later today I tried to get the fireplace gas log going but had no luck. The pilot won't stay lit and in addition the pilot leaks and has a flame in the side of the tubing. This thing is 14 years old and was not a very good deal for us. We paid too much in Goles furniture. $400 for the unit and another $150 for the remote which failed after one year so we had to buy another.

I struggled with Eaglecad until I finally figured out how to get some routing done to a micro USB connector. Youtube once again has been my savior. Eagle is not great compared to Orcad but the support online is fantastic with tutorials and available parts libraries.

we went to our dance lesson at 3:30 and brought the 8 foot table we are giving to the studio. We had a wonderful chacha review of a few things we could not get straight before.

It's bitter cold outside and snow is expected at 9 PM tonight. On the way home from the studio we stopped at Kroger for wine. While there we found ribs on sale so we picked up a half rack which we had with baked beans and a bottle of Cabernet.

The snow started really coming down hard around 9. By the time I went to bed at 10:30 the sidewalk, driveway and road were covered. Bad news is that Wunderground seems to have dropped my weather station. I really need their graphical tools to track our weather.

This was a work day around here. I cleaned the Smoker from the last batch of ribs I then covered it for winter. Next was the Christmas tree. I helped Libbie take the tree down then carried all the boxes to the attic. The new attic stairs are fantastic. The back porch door was not latching so I got out a file and enlarged the striker plate hole so it fit better. The latch now securely closes the door. Libbie vacuumed and put the furniture back.
It's better cold outside today. The high is only in the twenties.
I spent some time this afternoon with Eaglecad trying to do a layout for the NCID display box. I upgraded to version 8.51 and can't get it to work as well as the old 7.6 I had been using. I finally found a micro USB footprint for Eagle. It was on a blog complete with Digikey part number. All I have to do is get this thing to route completely.
Dinner was the leftover taco salad mix over the last of our lettuce. We had this with a bottle of Cabernet. We're trying to work down the leftovers for when we travel. I'm having real problems with the high notes on my Clarinet. I tried going to a lower strength Reed and it was better. I'm not sure what that means.

We watched the Rose Bowl parade this morning starting at 11. There seemed to be a nice array of creative floats and flowers in this version. I wish we were there for the day after party to see all the floats lined up along Sierra Madre Blvd. I spent a lot of time making a schematic of the NCID interface electronics with Huzzah. Part of this time was learning Eagle.
Dinner tonight was Pizza, an unusual meal for a Monday but because we went out yesterday on Sunday for New Years so we did not have our traditional pizza on Sunday.

I want to take it easy today in order to dance tonight at the New Years Eve party. i added one more hanger to the drip watering line then used mason jars on each dripper to measure their output for 1 minute. One dripper on the ficus was low so I opened it up another half turn and ran the test again. Each dripper should be opened one full turn to get 20 oz of water in a one minute period. I then put the drippers back into their respective plants. After a lunch of leftover ham buns we ran the water live and looked at the saucers. All seems to be well.
I rigged up a second projector as a take up reel for the Wolverine so i could digitize rolls that are larger than 5 inch. My results are mixed. I gave up 3/4 of the way through and cut the film at a splice. I'll digitize the rest of the roll onto a 5 inch take up spool.
It was freezing cold when we left for the Matthews house party. I wore Dad's overcoat which fit perfectly and was quite heavy and warm. I don't know why I did not wear this until now. We sat with the Kretchmans, Art & Nancy, the Rumleys and the Cains There were some very nice hand passed snacks going around including shrimp, crab cakes and chicken. there also was a small buffet of snacks and an open bar. The poor bar tenders were outside in the freezing cold. The music turned loud and club like in the final hours so we bailed out and went over to the studio to see if the party was still going on there. only Mitzi, Robert and another couple were there which was shocking. Brian and Jennifer ended up at the studio as well, leaving the Matthews house behind. We had a nice quiet pay at the studio from 11:30 until midnight. It was perfect.

I made a morning run to Home Depot to get foam boards and a drill bit and more pipe hangers and a package of drippers. I came home and installed the last of the hangers which involved drilling another hole in the mortar. i tested the system with one dripper and quickly found a leak where the 2 pipes join together. The insert was too small of a diameter. I repaired this and got the dripper working then discovered the end of the tubing which is crimped is leaking. Libbie needed to go to Home Depot to get another plastic saucer so I took advantage of the trip to get a pipe plug for the leaking end and also to return the foam board. I only needed one foam board cut into 2 pieces to block the hatch to the crawl space and I bought two. The board cut up should work well. To assist with filling the voids i also sprayed some foam around the pipes and wires. I did another test of the water pipes and all seems better. We put one dripper into the corn plant on one run and two drippers into the ficus tree. One minute of time should put 5 cups of water out of each dripper. On the way back from Home Depot we stopped into Kroger and bought the ingredients for the Quick Taco Salad. Dinner was Taco Salad with Cabernet. I'm satisfied tonight that the waterers are done on the back porch and that the pain in my side has subsided. I was really worried by the pain but it was great to see that after 2 days of severe pain it has gotten down to a dull soreness. Good deal!

I got to work on the rest of the scan for the graduation video of Dads. It's broken in a few spots but I managed to digitize all the pieces. It was 16 degrees this morning outside. I turned the porch heater on ad began working outside at 11. I have a painful pain in my right side which is impacted me. I managed to get the solenoid wired all the way to the control box then vacuumed up the space so Libbie coud sort through the bottles under the sink. After a lunch of a delicious 16 bean soup I resumed working on the other side, the run behind the big Ficus tree, This got harder and harder to drill holes into into the mortar. I think the bit is shot. I have one more to do but I was too exhausted to continue. I'll add the last clamp tomorrow with a new drill bit or at least a different one. I monitored I-95 and I-75 all day today and it was really stopped. Today is a Friday which makes the Holiday traffic worse anyway. I'll be happy when we get to Florida. We were both exhausted so decided to do chinese takeout instead of cooking some leftovers. I picked up a bottle of Prophecy Red Blend at Kroger while Libbie picked up the food which was a 3 meat Szechuan with 2 eggrolls. I used the self check but had to get approval for my wine. It took a while because a totally stupid old lady needed help with her Freebie. These kind of people need to use the non self check lanes.

I continued working on the water line and got the new solenoid installed and the water line run along the hot tub. The water line is fastened to the brick wall by drilling some 3/16 holes and using a masonry fastener and conduit clamp every few feet. The run to the other side of the porch was trickier. I used a tee at the pressure reducer just past the solenoid and sent a roll of tubing down through the hole in the floor hooked to the tee. The crappy job was crawling on hands and knees to the roll under the porch. Just as I got to the other end Libbie called and said Christa was on the phone. I continued unrolling the tubing and fastening it to the existing water line along the length of the porch. I pushed the tubing up through the other hole in the floor then came in to talk to Christa. She agreed to shift the vacation dates back one day to accommodate our host. After the phone conversation I booked the penthouse condo with the new dates. On the porch I'm pretty happy with the construction work so far but I still have more to do. Dinner was spaghetti with meatballs and cheese.
Before dinner i started digitizing another of Dad's films. This time it was graduations. I did not finish this roll, will continue tomorrow.

I started working on the back porch watering at 10 this morning and made it pretty far. I got the line tied into the main water line. The solenoid apparently is open all the time so I need to address that issue. I picked up a new solenoid at Home Depot this afternoon along with some fittings. I was too tired to continue on this today. We're having some trouble booking the Honolulu condo. It's not available starting the Tuesday instead of Monday. Dinner was a fantastic 16 bean soup with ham bone. Libbie made fresh corn bread to accompany the meal.

Today I purchased a larger spotlight for the magnolia tree and hooked it up. In the evening I was disappointed because all it did was flash. Possibly this is too much power for the power run. I also bought the materials to start the watering project on the back porch. We are going to have computer remote control programming of our back porch watering. I moved 3 of the 4 remaining logs down to the brush pile. Now there is just one left. Dinner tonight was the last of the ham with sweet potato and apple sauce. I spent some time today getting a nodered sqlite database implemented on external storage. I was persistent and finally got it working on a USB stick.Now for some charting of the saved data.

We had a quiet Christmas with no presents except for some shirts from Joe and Christa. We took a walk to Seagroves in the back but it as freezing cold at 38 degrees. i spent more time on node-red. I tried getting the alert working for the electric heat in the greenhouse. It sends both texts and emails to Libbie and I when the electric heater comes on. It took a little debug but I got it working. I really like node-red. I used the Scargill script to build a new installation and then transferred my old flows over to the new installation. now I need a USB drive of some type to handle the multitude of writes to the database. The fear is an SD card may fail due to the number of writes. Dinner was ham, Apple Sauce, Sweet Potato and Cabernet Sauvignon. We talked to Christa today. Joe is sick with some kind of bug, she was driving to her brother's for Christmas dinner. She sent the proposed Hawaiian villa. The two choices look excellent, about $3,000 each for a 3 bedroom for 1 week.

After the Sunday programs I went out and moved quite a few logs. Stopped when I was down to 4 logs left. It was only 50 today. I had very good luck getting sensor readings into an SQLite database on node-red. I'm unsure about how hard I want to hammer the SD card. Will probably go with some kind of USB stick instead if the database could be located on it. I did some reading about how it has to be at the Pi root level.
Talked with Vicki today and her plans for Christmas. Libbie made some of her excellent pizza from scratch today which I had with a Yuengling.

I used the saw and cut up the logs that were too big to move. I got the saw stuck in a maple tree I was trimming and the clutch froze. I found there is a safety mechanism that locks the blade when tripped. Thanks to YouTube I unlocked the blade but not before doing some disassembly to examine the clutch. Thank goodness I found the online troubleshooter.
Picked up a couple of LED accent lights in Home Depot and added them to the end of the driveway string. Went out with Libbie after dark and looked at the two new lights and was not happy with how dim they were on the magnolia. Needs re-aiming.
Dinner was Sirloin steak with baked potato, sour cream and Cabernet. Afterward we had some peanut brittle sent by Darrel and Holly.

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.