Category Archives: WFPB

Posts related to our Whole-Foods Plant-Based approach to healthy eating. We became vegetarians in 2000 and transitioned to being vegans in 2011. We discovered the WFPB concept in 2012.

2014/09/28 (N) Oh Canada

Leave a reply

Today was all about company—getting ready for company and having company—and this time our company was from Ontario, Canada. Okay, they actually drove down from Frankenmuth, Michigan where they are staying at an RV Park, but they are Canadian citizens who reside in Canada when they are not traveling in their motorhomes. Bill and Karen are fellow converted bus owners and members of both the FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches chapter and the Converted Coach Owners group. Mike and Kathy have a purpose built class C motorhome and often travel with Bill and Karen. Kathy is Bill’s sister.

Linda spent the morning preparing vegan lasagna and apple/pear crisp for baking later in the day while I worked at my desk on secretarial and financial duties for our FMCA Freethinkers Associate Chapter.

Company arrived a little after 1 PM. Linda took the ladies on a tour of the house while I took the guys on a tour of the property and then showed them around the house. We had guys’ chat and gals’ chat for a while and then we all gathered around the table on the deck for some grapes and pretzels. Linda put the lasagna in the oven at 3 PM and prepared a salad. When the lasagna was done she put the apple/pear crisp in the oven to bake while we ate. We sat down at 4 PM for dinner and had a very nice meal that included Italian bread and olive oil seasoned with pepper. We opened a bottle of our 2009 Egri Merlot (it may have been our last one) and four of us had a small glass with dinner.

We continued our conversation on the deck after dinner and had our dessert out there. It was an absolutely perfect late September day. When the sun got low in the sky we moved inside as it cools off quickly and the mosquitos come out. We sat in the living room and talked until 9 PM. By then it was dark and they still had a one hour drive back to their RV Park. Kathy had rinsed off the dinner dishes, so Linda loaded the dishwasher and started it. Linda packed her computer and gathered up all of the things she needed for tomorrow so she could get an early start for the bakery. I will be home all day waiting for Bratcher Electric to show up and convert the whole house generator. They are supposed to be here between 1 and 3 PM. Karen took a few photos but I did take any, so I do not have any images to post from today.

2014/09/27 (S) Eat Cut Eat

Leave a reply

Today was VE testing day for our South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club so some of the members, who conduct the volunteer examinations, got to breakfast even earlier than usual. We had a good crowd and many simultaneous conversations. After breakfast we drove to Ann Arbor to return the charger for the baby monitor. It got left at our house yesterday when Linda took Madeline home. Madeline was dressed in her Michigan colors with a blue T-shirt and maize skirt. She gave me a tour of her backyard and toys and then we all went inside to visit for a while. Linda and I each got to read a book to her which is always a treat for us. We all had things to do, and we wanted to get out of town before the football game traffic clogged the streets, so we headed home before lunchtime.

Back at the house Linda straightened up and vacuumed, put together a grocery list, and then went to Meijer’s (grocery store) while I finished cutting the grass around the house. It took me a couple of more hours, but between yesterday and today I managed to cut all of the newly planted grass and some of the more mature grass close to the house.

It was another pleasantly warm late September day and I used that as an opportunity to start the main engine on the bus. I let it run for a while with the over-the-road air-conditioning turned on to put a load on it and bring it up to operating temperature, which helps drive off moisture. Linda got home with groceries while the bus was running and I helped her get those into the house.

I let the bus run on high idle for about 30 minutes with the over-the-road air-conditioning on, which brought the coolant temperature up to its normal operating level. The oil also warmed up, but not fully. Before shutting the engine off I backed the bus up about 5 feet to rotate the tires to a different spot. I turned the a-c off, dropped the idle to low, and let it run another 5 minutes, during which time I drained the auxiliary air tank. I then switched the suspension system from ride mode to Level Low mode and turned off the engine. As usual, I turned off the chassis batteries, shut off the auxiliary air to the air-powered engine accessories, and closed the shutoff valves for all of the air accessory circuits in the bay under the driver’s seat, except the circuit for the toilet. (Yes, the bus has an air-powered toilet.)

I put a load of laundry in the washer and then spent some time at my desk checking e-mail and websites. I had an e-mail from Gary regarding an article in the upcoming September 2014 issue of Bus Conversion Magazine. They decided to run my article on the Parker FPM-50 Fuel Polishing Module project and wanted me to proofread it and respond to a few suggested markups. I worked long enough for the washer to finish, moved the laundry to the dryer, and then shaved and took a shower. By the time Linda finished her shower my hair was dry enough to cut, which it really needed. We then got dressed to go out to dinner. I checked the dryer but it was taking longer than I expected and clearly would not be done before we had to leave for the restaurant.

We had arranged at breakfast to meet Bruce (W8RA) and Linda (NF8C) Whitney for dinner at LaMarsa in Brighton at 6:30 PM. Bruce and I both had mango smoothies (dairy free) and we got a veggie tray with hummus to share as an appetizer. Although two dishes would have been plenty of food for the four of us, Linda (NF8C) wanted to sample their offerings. There are basically four dishes on the menu we can eat so we ordered one of each. Each came with soup so we all had the crushed lentil soup. We had Koshary, Majadra, Ghallaba (garlic almond) and Mousaka (baked eggplant). (We did not get the spicy version of any of these.) It took the waitress a while to catch on to the fact that we were not going to order the whole meal at one time, but by ordering our courses one at a time we managed to spend a long time at dinner and had a great chat.

Back home I the set dryer on “Touch Up” and restarted it. I proof read my BCM article and e-mailed clarifications to the editor and publisher. I spent enough time on e-mail and websites for the dryer to finish, hung up the clothes, and played with my iPad for a little while. I was tired enough that I just turned in for the night and did not even work of the blog or play games. That’s pretty tired.

2014/09/26 (F) Hope Is Not A Strategy

Leave a reply

Linda was up at 7:00 AM, I was up at 7:15 AM, and Madeline was up at 7:45 AM. Marilyn got up later. Given a choice she’s not a morning/breakfast person. Linda got up first to prepare the batter for her fabulous vegan blueberry pancakes which she planned to serve with fresh fruit and real maple syrup.

I powered up my iPad2 and discovered that Apple had released iOS 8.0.2. Apparently I was not the only person having some issues with the release, like sluggish response and a Bluetooth keyboard that quit working properly and then quit working altogether. I tested the keyboard with my laptop computer last night and it worked fine, so I knew there wasn’t anything wrong with it. I downloaded the iOS update and everything was back to normal (once I figured out how to re-pair the keyboard). With any luck perhaps WordPress will also issue a maintenance release today and fix the completely broken drag-n-drop feature of the media gallery. As Deb Wahlstrom said once in a workshop, “hope is not a strategy,” but when things are completely beyond your control hope is sometimes all you have.

Linda tried to use the griddle that fits over the oblong center burner of the new G. E. kitchen range to cook the pancakes but forgot to turn it down from the preheat setting, which produces a LOT of heat. It burned the first pancakes firmly to the griddle. Madeline was already in her high chair waiting for her breakfast, so Linda grabbed a non-stick frying pan and cooked the pancakes in that. The fact that the griddle and the preheat feature are both new and that there was a certain pressure to get Madeline her breakfast was not an ideal combination for a first attempt at using the griddle. I doubt that she will make that mistake again, and the frying-pan-cakes were still very good. The fresh fruit turned out to be bananas, but that was OK; we all like bananas.

After breakfast I played with Madeline while Linda cleaned up from breakfast. Karen called from Bratcher Electric to let us know that Brandon had called in sick and she needed to reschedule our generator conversion and service for Monday between 1 and 3 PM if that would work for us. It was not ideal from my perspective as I was thinking about taking the bus to Butch and Fonda’s on Monday, but that could obviously wait until Tuesday or later. If necessary I could delay taking it until after the GLCC Surplus and Salvage Rally.

I waited until Marilyn got up at 9:15 AM to make the coffee; we all like our morning coffee. Linda was busy with Madeline by that point so Marilyn cooked her own breakfast. There was enough batter left for two pancakes. She’s always very helpful that way when she comes to visit. We often have to insist that she just sit, relax, be our guest, and let us take care of things. It’s really not a bother; we like having company and we do not expect them to work while they are here. Of course, if they insist on helping with the dishes, who are we to deny them the joy of being of service?

Marilyn started packing at 10:45 AM while Linda gathered up Madeline’s things. When it was time to load the car for the trip to Ann Arbor my job was to hold Madeline’s hand (actually, she held my finger) and get her out the front door, down the new steps/sidewalk, and over to the car. (Hey, grandpa-ing is serious work.) Although she understood that she was returning to her house where daddy and mommy would feed and play with her, she wasn’t quite ready to leave. She and I “marched” up and down the driveway several times before she was ready/willing to let Grandma Linda put her in her car seat. She is now big enough that the seat gets installed facing forward, which is a very big deal as she can now see where she’s going in life instead of where she has been. Marilyn rode in the back to keep her entertained on the drive down.

The weather this week has been spectacular; a classic late September in Michigan with lows around 50, highs around 75, clear blue skies and light breezes. I shut off the various thermostats and opened up the house. I spent the early afternoon editing blog posts from the last couple of weeks and then off-loaded photos from our Sony alpha 100 SLR, organized them, and backed them up. I stopped for a bite of lunch and then decided to have another go at the lawnmower. If I cannot get it started I will have to take it somewhere and have it repaired. 🙁

I had already installed the new spark plug last night and that did not fix the problem. I dumped the gas tank out into an open tub and put some of the fresh gas I bought last night into the tank. I took the tub to some of our woods a good distance from our drinking water well and spread it around on some leaves. Most of it will evaporate rather than soak in. Not the most environmentally sound thing to do, but a lot safer than an open tub of gasoline.

Before I tried to start the engine I checked the back discharge chute, out of habit, to make sure the mulching insert was in place. It was but there was a lot of dried grass as well and it had obviously not been cleaned out the last time it was used. There was also a lot of fuzzy material mixed in with the grass, a sure sign that a mouse had taken up residence there at one time. I removed the insert and shook it off into the tub and discovered that it still had a mouse in it. The mouse was quite dead and very stiff but did not have any obvious injuries and did not emit any odor. It was in surprisingly good conditions, so perhaps being encased in the dried grass and fuzz helped preserve it. It was not trapped so it is a mystery why it stayed in there and died. The mower was in our garage all winter, and although it got very cold (-20 F) the mouse would not have been trapped in the garage either; there are gaps around the doors that would easily allow a field mouse to come and go. (Now that we have the garage furnace, sealing the doors is on my project list.)

With the discharge chute cleaned up the mower started on the first pull !!! (This is something Honda has bragged about in the advertising in the past.) I let it run for a while on high throttle to warm it up and make sure it had fresh gas all the way through the fuel system. I then brought the throttle back to idle to let it cool off and stabilize and then shut it off. I did not think it was going to start so I was not wearing my safety goggles or gloves. I usually wear hearing protectors as well, but I could not find them. (I realized later they were probably in the construction equipment tub we took with us last summer. I will look there tomorrow.) I topped off the tank with fresh fuel and it started on the first pull again. The new spark plug is a more aggressive design that is supposed to spark more easily and that may have helped. Whatever the reason, I like how easily it now starts.

I spent an hour cutting the grass in the immediate vicinity of the house. I focused in particular on the areas that Keith does not get with his riding mower and areas that were disturbed (destroyed) and re-seeded as part of the landscaping work and re-seeded again by me (twice). The new grass is coming in fairly well at this point although there are still a few thin spots. And even though Keith mowed most of this new grass on his last visit it was getting tall again. I was surprised how moist much of the grass was, especially in areas that are now mostly shaded throughout the day, as we have not had any rain in the last week. Keith had mentioned the last time he was here that the grass was very moist; “…more like April/spring grass than September/fall grass.” I did not get everything mowed. I still have to do the two slopes by the retaining walls in the back, which are steep and physically demanding even with a self-propelled mower, and most of the west end of the house. It will take me at least another hour to finish but I had done enough for today and wanted to relax for a little while before Linda got home. Besides, it will be there tomorrow, and it should be a nice day to work outside.

Linda called around 4:35 PM and left messages letting me know that she had dropped Marilyn at the airport and was starting for home. That drive would take close to an hour in light traffic, so I figured I would not see her before 6 PM. She pulled in the driveway at 6:10 PM.

We had three left over salads for dinner: chickpea; Farro with cranberries, and; wild rice with apples and raisins. Easy and delightful. Marilyn texted Linda several times to let us know her travel status. Her flight was delayed almost an hour but eventually took off and got her safely back to St. Louis, Missouri. We were both tired and turned in early, but I got my second wind after I located a service manual online for a model of Aqua-Hot that is very similar to the one in our bus and started reading about how to diagnose what might be wrong with our unit. Based on the symptoms my current best guess is a stuck fuel valve or defective fuel valve solenoid.

2014/09/25 (R) Two M’s

Leave a reply

Linda made zucchini bread and muffins a week or so ago. We ate all of the muffins within a couple of days but she froze some of the bread. She took the bread out of the freezer last night to let it thaw so we could have it for breakfast this morning. She warmed it up and made a fruit salad to go with it, along with our usual fruit juice and coffee. Marilyn took advantage of her visitor status and slept in so we had breakfast without her and she ate when she finally got up.

Madeline in her sofa-bed with her Winnie-the-Poor sleep sack.

I was working on the electrical outlets in the garage when Brendan arrived at 9:45 AM with Madeline in tow. Meghan arrived around 10 AM, so Madeline had all the “buddies” here to admire her. I finished my electrical work, touched up some drywall compound, and then got cleaned up. I was once again the designated reader and got to read three books to Madeline. She had lunch at noon and her dad got her down for a nap around 12:30 PM. Meghan is still experimenting with foods, so she left to do her grocery shopping on the way home.

The “buddies” (L-2-R): Brendan, Marilyn, Meghan, and Linda. (Not shown: Bruce, taking the photo.)

Brendan stayed for lunch and a long chat. He was thinking about leaving when he decided to check out my old Toyo view camera. He figured the students in his history of photography class at the University of Michigan had probably never seen one and wanted to take it in for them to see. He also wanted to have it at his house to play with. We found it and checked that all the parts were there and he loaded it into his car along with the tripod and dolly (studio roller base). Madeline started to wake up so he made his exit. She doesn’t seem the least bit concerned if he’s not here when she wakes up, but is momentarily distressed if she sees him leave.

Flowers along the Mill Pond boardwalk (Brighton, MI).

Madeline is spending the night tonight so we will two M’s here the rest of the day and tomorrow morning. Linda and Marilyn will take Madeline back to Ann Arbor tomorrow in time for lunch and her 1 PM nap. Madeline has swimming on Fridays at 4 PM so Linda and Marilyn will leave before that and stop at Whole Foods Market before taking Marilyn to Detroit Metropolitan Airport for her evening flight back to St. Louis.

I took a few minutes to check e-mail while Madeline was napping. This morning I had tightened up the Wordfence parameters on the FMCA-GLCC site and switched the caching from the faster Falcon Engine to the Basic setting in order to fully activate country blocking. I only had a few failed login attempt e-mails so I think it made a difference, but only time will tell. I also white listed our own IP address to make sure we did not get locked out if we mis-typed our login credentials.

Madeline with Grandma Linda on the Brighton Mill Pond boardwalk.

I had an e-mail from my niece, Amanda, with a couple of pictures of her daughter, Lilly, a very pretty and sweet-tempered child about six weeks younger than Madeline. We saw them in late June and will like try to visit again en route to the southwest this winter, weather permitting. If not, we will certainly try to stop in the area on the way back in the spring.

When Madeline awoke from her nap we let he play long enough to fully wake up and then we all went to downtown Brighton. We walked the boardwalk along the east edge of the Mill Pond and saw a Painted Turtle, an egret, some fish, and lots of ducks and geese. We then took the pedestrian bridge to the west side of the pond where the playscape is located. The playscape is a wonderful place with structures built to suggest animals and Madeline explored it thoroughly with Grandma Linda’s help while I took pictures. It also has an area with chalk boards and a mailbox full of sidewalk chalk that the kids can use to draw. Madeline spent quite a while trying all the different colors.

Madeline with Grandma Linda at the playscape by the Brighton Mill Pond.

We stopped by Lowe’s on the way home to return the spark plug I bought last night and get the correct one. By the time we got back to the house Madeline was hungry so Linda got her dinner ready right away. For our meal Linda prepared a green salad with sunflower seeds and dried cranberries topped with Ken’s Sweet Vidalia Onion dressing (one of our favorites) and a one pot meal of quinoa with black beans, corn, and onions. Linda and I finished the Red Guitar Sangria with dinner (Marilyn does not drink alcoholic beverages).

Madline working with chalk at the Brighton Mill Pond playscape.

Madeline played quietly with Linda for a while as I chatted with Marilyn. Before we knew it, it was time for Madeline to go to bed. The time between dinner and bed always seem short compared to other intervals during the day. She is always very good about bedtime and went without a fuss. Linda spent about 30 minutes getting something ready to e-mail to the bakery software vendor while Marilyn played Words With Friends and I researched where we could buy more Red Guitar Sangria. It is available at the Meijer’s stores in our area and is very reasonably priced so we will probably get some more. We had apple crisp for dessert after which Linda and Marilyn played three-way online Scrabble with each other and their brother Ron in Pennsylvania.

“I think this color goes right here.”

Madeline is a very good-natured and relatively calm child but when she is awake she is full engaged with the world around her. We were all tired after a long but very satisfying day of visiting and turned in without watching any TV.

2014/09/24 (W) Marilyn Redux

Leave a reply

We were up a little before 8 AM and had a light breakfast of fruit and toast with our usual orange/grapefruit juice and coffee. Linda left at 8:30 AM to fetch Marilyn and I stayed home to work on some minor house projects.

Before I got started I got a call back from Darryll at DCM Heating and Cooling. He agreed that the thermostats should not allow the temperature to rise 5 degrees above the set point and offered to bring out new ones. I suggested that I keep an eye on them for a few days and let him know if they continue to work as described in yesterday’s blog post. He said he would check with his supplier to see if they have had any other reports of faulty units. I mentioned that the gas pipe coming through the floor for the kitchen range was too long and he offered to take care of that if/when he was out here to deal with the thermostats. I turned both the garage and library thermostats on and set the temperature up to take the chill off of those rooms since that was where I would be working this morning after checking in with the blogs I follow. I checked a little later and the units had shut off with the thermometers reading only 1 – 2 degrees above the set point; still not right but a lot better than 5 degrees or more.

Karen called from Bratcher Electric at 9:30 and said that they could come on Friday between 9 and 11 AM to convert the whole house generator and do the annual maintenance. That was good news as it will take care of our last propane to natural gas conversion. The new outdoor gas grill and the new gas fireplace logs are just that, new appliances that do not need to be converted. The fireplace logs have to be installed, of course, but we will have someone do that. I will have to attach the extension hose to the outdoor grill and perhaps replace the existing quick-disconnect with the one that comes with the extension hose if they turn out not to be compatible. With any luck both of those will arrive on Friday. If not, it will be another two weeks. We are also waiting on a cover for the outdoor grill.

When I finally got to work on my projects I started by installing the door latch/knob set for the utility closet. I then replaced a duplex outlet in the NNW wall of the garage with a GFCI outlet that would also protect all of the downstream outlets on that circuit. After completing the GFCI installation I discovered that I had installed it at the wrong point in the circuit. I turned off power to the circuit, removed the cover plates from all the outlets on the circuit, and disconnected all the wires to isolate each outlet. I turned the power back on and used my non-contact voltage sensor to find the supply wire. It was in a shallow single-gang box with three 12-2+g NM cables, so there was no way the GFCI was going to fit in there along with all the wires. I wired it up anyway and will get a box extender to create the needed space. The better solution would be to just install a GFCI circuit breaker for that circuit, and I may do that at some point, but I am trying to use up parts I have accumulated over many years of house projects rather than buy new ones.

Sister Marilyn and her sister Linda relaxing on the back deck and pretending to ignore the camera (and the photographer)..

Linda and Marilyn stopped at Meijer’s on the way back to the house and got home around 12:30 PM. We had lunch and then they worked in the kitchen using the new range to make a batch of granola and some apple crisp while I used that time to finish reassembling and testing the outlets in the garage. When I tested them the duplex outlet between the garage doors it did not have power. I thought it did when I checked earlier so perhaps the feed came loose from the upstream outlet. I think I know which outlet that is and recall having to attach one of the hot wires to the side terminal because the push-in connection wasn’t holding. Perhaps the other push-in slipped out. I will check that tomorrow.

When I was done with the outlets I took the cover off the sub-panel, removed the 240V/30A breaker I had previously installed for the radial arm saw, and replaced it with a 240V/15A breaker which is the correct size for that tool. I have the parts I need to install the outlet but I still need to pull the wire which was not on my project list for today. I put the birch plywood cover panel around the box and put the cover back on the box to hold it in place. My last electrical task for the day was to change the two fuses in the disconnect box for the new a-c compressor.

My next project was sanding drywall compound in several places and applying another coat, after which I cleaned up my tools and took a break. I started up my computer and had 1173 e-mails. 1100 of them were from 550 e-mail notifications to two different e-mail accounts resulting from failed login attempts against two of our websites. The brute force login attack has not succeeded, but this is starting to get annoying. I also had an e-mail from Bill confirming that he and Karen and two others would be coming to our house on Sunday for a visit and dinner. I suspected that the other two would be Mike and Kathy (Bill’s sister), which he confirmed later in the day.

Since I was in my work clothes I thought I would cut the grass but couldn’t get the lawnmower started. It’s been a year-and-a-half since we last used it so I was not surprised. I always use Sta-bil in my gasoline, but 18+ months is a long time. I added fuel to the tank but that didn’t help. It’s possible that the fuel I added had oil mixed in with it for small 2-cycle gas engine powered yard tools. If so, that only made matters worse. I put the mower away and will deal with it tomorrow, if I feel like it.

I turned my attention to the bus and removed the cover from the end of the Aqua-Hot to see if I could determine why the burner won’t ignite. I ran it through three start cycles but it would not fire. There appeared to be fuel flowing through the final filter but I had no way to know if it was an adequate flow and I could not see any other obvious reason why it would not start. I jiggled the spark ignition wires and made sure they were fully attached to the ignition coil, but that didn’t help. I also confirmed that there was no white smoke or diesel smell at the exhaust pipe, which really suggests that fuel is not getting sprayed through the nozzle. Stupid machine.

After the apple crisp was done baking Linda started working on dinner. She made a warm Farro pilaf with dried cranberries and roasted some Brussels sprouts. While the main meal cooked we had a kale-chard-spinach salad with sesame seeds, cranberries, and tomatoes and a raspberry vinaigrette dressing. I really like the way we eat, and Marilyn also enjoyed the meal. She has been trying to make healthier food choices after seeing the results we have gotten.

After dinner I made a run to Lowe’s for a spark plug (for the lawnmower), electrical extender box, and a single gang Decora-style outlet cover plate. I stopped at the Shell station for some fresh gasoline and then at Meijer’s for a small towel rack. I had a quick chat with Steve (N8AR) on the South Lyon 2m ham radio repeater while driving home. Linda and Marilyn were just finishing a game of Quadominoes when I arrived, after which we had the apple crisp they made earlier. Linda had warmed it up using the “warm” feature of the new oven. New tools are fun.

The sisters were both tired enough to turn in by 8:30 PM but decided to stay up a while longer. To stay awake they played Scrabble online with their brother in Pennsylvania. They called Ron to make sure he was online and then ganged up on him. Never underestimate the power of a nun and her sister.

2014/09/20 (S) Bus Talk

Leave a reply

All days have the same number of hours. How those hours are divided up between light and dark, awake and asleep, busy or at leisure, varies with each day. Basically, our day went like this:

We went to our weekly SLAARC breakfast in South Lyon.
We returned home so Linda could get to work on the bakery software conversion project. She did that all day except for a break to go for a walk.
I called D. R. Electric Appliance to check on the range. As I had figured it did not arrive yesterday (they would have called if it did). They supposedly ordered it on Tuesday and told me it would take three days to get. They do not receive product on the weekend so maybe Monday.
I worked at my desk on editing and uploading blog posts until 11:30 AM.
I went to Recycle Livingston with our weekly load.
I stopped at Lowe’s for a 250VAC/15A circuit breaker, outlet, and box.
Lowe’s parking lot connects to Walmart’s parking lot, so I stopped there for ICE brand flavored sparkling water and picked up a couple of bottles of Leelanau Cellars Witch’s Brew seasonal spiced wine. We had this last fall and enjoyed it.
When I got back to the house we had a light lunch of sourdough pretzel nibblers and hummus and then resumed our work.
By mid-afternoon I was tired so I took a nap. I often do better sleeping when I’m tired rather than when I am supposed to sleep. I also wanted to be rested enough to enjoy dinner this evening.
We met Chuck at the Carrabba’s at West Oaks Mall at 7 PM. He had arrived ahead of us so we only had to wait about 20 minutes to get a table. Linda and I both had the Tag Pic Pac, one their two vegan options. It was long, relaxed meal and a great conversation, some of which was about buses (Chuck and Barbara also own a Prevost H3-40 converted coach). We pulled out of the parking lot a little before 10 PM.
Back home we watched season 5 episode 8 (final) of Doc Martin.

That was our day and did not include construction projects or taking photographs.

2014/09/17 (W) Hooked Up

Leave a reply

I figured Darryll would be here on Friday but he called a little after 8 AM this morning to see if he could come today and finish up. I was going to check around to see what sort of price and delivery I could get on the boiler conversion, but with Darryll coming this morning I decided it was not worth trying to save a hundred bucks and risk an even longer delay in getting the furnace converted. I called TOMTEK back and left a message with the secretary, Virginia, to let Tom know that we were getting the gas hooked up to the house today and that we needed him to come convert the boiler at his earliest convenience. I also assured her that we would be fine without the boiler for a few days as we are not yet into freezing temperatures at night. The biggest inconvenience will be the lack of hot water for bathing and washing dishes. Linda can use our microwave oven, induction cooker from the bus, and our electric toaster oven to fix a wide range of meals. We also have a microwave oven on the bus as well as a Gaggenau 2-burner electric cooktop and we have a Jenn-Air electric range/oven/grill/fryer/etc. in the recreation room in the basement. We checked out the Jenn-Air when we moved in but have never cooked on it. Once I get the extension hose with quick disconnect for the new gas grill we will also be able to cook on that if we want or need to. We do most of our laundry with cold water, so that is not an issue.

Darryll must have called us from the road. We had just finished breakfast (re-heated homemade cinnamon rolls and fresh grapefruit) and I was headed outside to move the cars so he could back his truck up to the garage when he pulled into the other end of the pull-through driveway. Most of his work today involved completing the connections from the natural gas meter to the new 2″ black iron pipe and the old 1″ pipe that currently feeds propane to the house. All of that work was on the east end of the house so he parked his van there to be as close that location as possible. His dad came with him this time to help out.

We let our dishwasher finish its cycle and then turned off the boiler, closed the gas shut off valve, closed the shut off valve for the line feeding gas to the range, grill, and old breezeway heater (since removed). Darryll they shut off the propane to the house at the tank and disconnected the supply line and pressure regulator from the house. He disconnected the supply line on the other end from the pressure regulator at the tank and installed a plug in the outlet. I used short lengths of 10AWG electrical wire to secure the covers on both propane tanks. The wires are just twisted, and while easily undone, the covers cannot just be pulled up without untwisting them first.

The old pipe that carried propane into the house is below the gas meter to the left and the new 2″ pipe is at the level of the meter and to the right. The consumer connection outlet from the meter is a 1.25″ threaded nipple coming out of a shutoff valve below the right lower corner of the meter. Darryll came out of that nipple and installed an elbow going back towards the house, a short piece of pipe and then a T with the opposing ends horizontal. From there he was able to adapt down to 1″ i.d. pipe going to the left behind the meter and gas line and use various fittings to bring it around and connect it to the old pipe sticking out of the wall. He put a union in there to make it possible to assemble all of this. He went to the right out of the T and used an adapter to go up in size to 2″ i.d. and then elbowed up and over to line up with the 2″ pipe running along the side of the house. He extended the 2″ pipe and somewhere in there installed a 2″ union, again, to make it possible to assemble all of these pieces. The number of fittings and the geometry of their assembly was fairly impressive but it was a very neat installation when he was done.

This was a big project, and although Darryll is done with his part of the work the project is not finished. Rather than post photos as the work has gone along I will be creating a page on our website just for this project and posting several photo galleries illustrating the major steps.

We had a small bird of prey in the back yard this morning being badgered by four very large Blue jays. When sitting on the ground with its wings folded in it was about the same size as the Blue jays, definitely too small to be a Red Tailed Hawk, but I could not get a good enough look at its wings, tail, or underside markings to identify it. The Blue jays kept swooping down at it and then it would suddenly take flight and go after one of them. It appeared to be fast and very maneuverable, so I think the Blue jays were playing a dangerous game.

I called Country Squire Fireplace and Lighting and talked to Bob. We agreed on the 12 foot extension hose kit and Bob said he would get in on order today. Country Squire only gets deliveries from their American Hearth distributor every other Friday and the 26^th is their next scheduled delivery date. If our order does not arrive then it will be another two weeks before it gets here. Obviously we won’t be heating the living room before the furnace gets converted or cooking on the grill before we get the new range unless something goes very, very wrong with those items.

I got a call back from Valerie at TOMTEK to let us know they would hold a service appointment for us on Monday, assuming the part comes in by then. By definition, that has to be acceptable as there isn’t anything I can do to change it. I have been a bit annoyed with myself, however, for not checking on all of this sooner and contacting TOMTEK sooner so they had the part in hand when it was time.

While Darryll was working on the meter tie-in I unscrewed the brass flare fitting that connected the old propane fire logs to the 1/2″ i.d. black iron supply pipe. I then removed the fire log unit from the fireplace and moved it to the garage. There was already a plug sitting in the fireplace box for the end of the iron pipe, but I left that for Darryll to connect after he had spliced a shutoff valve into the pipe outside the house just before it enters the side of the brick chimney and goes into the firebox.

I noted that the dials on the gas meter had not moved since it was installed and pressurized on Monday. Darryll finished the iron pipe connections, opened the outlet valve, and put natural gas to the house and the new 2″ iron pipe. After the pipe filled with gas we noted the readings on the meter dials. He checked for leaks with his soapy water solution and did not find any. Darryll made a light pencil mark on the 1/2 cu. ft. per revolution (rotation) dial. He then opened the gas valve to the library furnace and checked for leaks downstream of the valve. He did not find any so he turned it on and set the thermostat up. It took a couple of tries to purge the remaining air out of the line and get the burner to light, but once it started it ran really nice. He then opened the gas valve to the garage furnace and checked for leaks downstream of the valve. Again, he did not find any so he turned the power on at the ceiling switch, turned the thermostat on, and turned the temperature up to start the unit. There was only a small amount of air left in the 1/2″ i.d. line and the unit lit right up and purred like a kitten. (OK, roared like a small lion.)

These are not dramatic moments but they are significant ones. After numerous visits spanning more than six weeks, and a myriad of steps integrating various technologies, you flip a switch and voila, you have a functioning furnace; or two, in our case. Darryll let both furnaces run long enough to burn off some manufacturing oils which sometimes produce smoke from the supply registers and cause homeowners to freak out. He shut the units off at the thermostats and waited to make sure they would actually cycle off. They did, so there wasn’t anything left to do except pack up and head for home, stopping to get some lunch for his dad on the way. He will mail us the final invoice once he has it figured out. It’s nice to do business we people that trust us.

I called D. R. Appliance to let them know we had natural gas to the house and to find out what they do with the old units they haul away. Curt said they would be able to bring the new unit and install it very quickly after they receive it. There’s a chance that will be on Friday or Saturday, which would be really nice. As I suspected (feared) they take the old unit to a dump. I asked if they would drop it at Salvation Army but they were reluctant to do that, even though I did not see where it would be inconvenient for them.

According to Curt the Salvation Army is very picky about what they will take. I figured they would go right past the donation center on their way back to the appliance store but Curt pointed out that their next delivery and installation might well be in the opposite direction and he clearly did not want his delivery/installer to go even a little bit out of their way to do this. Fair enough. What did not occur to me until later is that a company that sells new appliances might want to get old ones out of circulation. If so, I think that is shortsighted; folks looking for a used (inexpensive) appliance at a Salvation Army Thrift Store were not going to be customers for a new one.

I called the Salvation Army Thrift Store and Donation Center in Brighton, Michigan, which is actually on Grand River Avenue as you go towards Howell from our house. They said they would accept the old range as long as it was working. I told them it was in reasonably good shape, looked OK, and worked fine except for the spark igniters for the stove top burners. That was fine with them. They just asked that we mention the spark igniters when we drop it off. They also had a truck that could come get it if we were unable to get it into our personal vehicle and gave me the phone number to schedule a pickup. Cool. That means we don’t have to try and convince D. R. Appliance to deal with it and it does not end up in a scrap yard.

Although I did not do anything particularly physical today I was very tired by 4 PM and took a 2-hour nap. Linda woke me up at 6 PM to have a dinner of green salad, leftover lentil stew with sweet potatoes and apples, and homemade biscuits with honey.

After dinner we opened a bottle of Alpha Rose wine that we bought in August 2013 at Red Trail Vineyard in Buffalo, North Dakota. They are part of the Harvest Host network and it was the first place we used our membership to spend the night at a winery for free. I posted about the place at the time. The Alpha Rose was absolutely delightful with a very floral nose that carried over into the mouth. Made from King of the North grapes, it was light but crisp and very pleasant in the finish. I wish we had bought a case. The King of the North vines were the first ones planted at Red Trail Vineyard back in 2003 and have done well in the North Dakota climate. The Alpha Rose is only available at the winery and two other locations in the Fargo, North Dakota area, so I guess we will have to plan our travels to take us back that way.

Tonight was Season 5, Episode 6 of Doc Martin; at least it was for us. I think Season 5 originally aired in 2010. I really liked watching it on the TV monitor from a DVD compared to watching it on an iPad.

2014/09/16 (T) Boiled Over

Leave a reply

Our son (Brendan) texted Linda early this morning to see if we would like to have grand-daughter Madeline spend the night while Marilyn is here next week. It turns out that next week Thursday and Friday are Jewish holidays, and Madeline attends a Jewish run day care facility. Of course we said “yes.”

Linda worked at her desk on our personal finances in the morning, worked on her counted cross-stitch project for a while in the afternoon, went on a couple of long walks, and managed to get breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the table. But as days go, it was fairly low key even for her.

I called Country Squire Fireplace and Lighting in Howell and asked for Bob as I had been instructed to do. It was Bob’s day off but I got to talk to Mark. Mark told me that they can get a 12′ hose with a 3/8″ flare fitting on one end and quick disconnect on the other end. The QD includes the male fitting attached to the hose and the female fitting that gets threaded onto the supply pipe. We already have a female QD fitting (Marshall Brass BC0102-0600) but it may not be compatible. I had measured before I called and knew that we needed at least an 8′ hose, so 12′ will work just fine, especially since two feet of it has to go up through the base from the back and then out the top of the base and attach to the grill. Mark asked me to call back tomorrow and talk to Bob to order it, so that is what I will do.

I double checked online that the range we had ordered was indeed a natural gas model. It was, so there was no need to call the appliance store to confirm that. I had a call back from Darryll at DCM Heating & Cooling. He thought he would be able to come back on Friday or Saturday to hook up the gas from the meter to the house and the new black iron pipe and start up the two new furnaces. All of the other gas conversion work we need done is dependent on Darryll getting his piece done first and I asked him if it would be possible to come on Wednesday. He said he would check his schedule and see what he could do. Darryll has been great to work with, and I try not to be demanding, but I cannot schedule other contractors until there is gas to the house.

I checked the label on our Weil-McLain “boiler” that provides heat for our hot-water baseboard heating system and domestic hot water. It’s a GV-5, Series 1. That allowed me to hone in on the right manuals on the W-M website from which I was able to identify the part number for the LP –> NG conversion kit. It’s a 510-811-630 and consists of an orifice plate and an adhesive label that has to go on the unit. The unit is a discontinued model, but service parts appear to still be available. I found the conversion kit at the first online supplier I checked for under $31 (plus S&H) but delivery looked to be 2 – 3 weeks. Ugh. I placed a call to TOMTEK HVAC in Howell to see if Tom had checked on this yet. He hadn’t so I gave him the model and serial number of our unit and mentioned that I had found the orifice plate online.

I worked at my desk for a while uploading blog posts from the last third of August, but it was such a beautiful day that I decided to work upstairs on my iPad2. I called Bratcher Electric around 4 PM just to give them a “heads up” that we had a meter with natural gas. Karen gave me Mike’s cell phone number and a time window during which I would likely be able to reach him. He has been very busy doing estimates for storm damage repairs and has not been in the shop much the last month. I got hold of him to let him know that we might be ready for them as early as next Monday, but anytime in the next couple of weeks after that would be OK. Again, I try not to be unreasonably demanding, and I try to be truthful with folks. Sometimes, however, that just results in us being put at the back of a long line of people who are unreasonably demanding.

Linda made maple baked lentils with sweet potato and apple for dinner. It really hit the spot on a cool evening. After dinner I continued working on selecting and editing photos for a gallery post on the natural gas pipeline work. My cell phone cannot receive calls in the basement but it can receive txt messages and notifications. Tom had called back from TOMTEK regarding the boiler conversion. He can get the parts locally in about four days and wants $250 to do the conversion plus $59 for the service call. A total bill of $310 to install a $30 part (retail) sounded excessive to me, so I may make a few inquiries first thing in the morning before I call him back.

We watched Season 5 Episode 5 of Doc Martin. It was nice to see it on the TV rather than the iPad with a large screen, better sound, a DVD quality image, and no buffering.

2014/09/14 (N) Family Ham

Leave a reply

No, we did not serve ham for brunch. We are vegans, after all, and we don’t serve animal products in our house regardless of who is coming to visit. We’ve got some folks in the family who are pretty funny, including Marilyn, but this is not a reference to the family joker. No, today was about family and ham radio, but not mixed together.

Linda was up at 7 AM to finish preparing the various brunch dishes. She made:

mini crustless tofu quiches;
rice and raisin breakfast pudding;
soft and chewy baked granola bars;
mixed fresh berries, and;
sliced fresh melon.

She also bought some gluten-free cinnamon raisin bread. Our daughter is still experimenting carefully with foods trying to figure out what upsets her system and gluten is currently a no-no along with soy, dairy, and corn.

Shawna (mom), Madeline (center of attention), Grandma Linda, Great Aunt Marilyn, and Uncle Chris.

Brendan, Shawna, and Madeline arrived around 10 AM followed soon after by Meghan and Chris. Everyone had a good visit and enjoyed the brunch. Madeline was naturally the center of attention, but there were enough adults to keep her engaged and still have adult conversations. Madeline normally naps from 1 – 3 PM, so her parents took her home a little past noon. Meghan and Chris left shortly thereafter. They are very big into sports, especially fantasy football, and the fall sports season is in full swing.

Aunt Meghan and Brendan (dad) looking towards Madeline (center of attention).

It had shaped up to be a very nice day so we drove to downtown Howell and parked near the Farmers Market area. The Market was still open so we wandered through and bought some locally made apple cider to take home. We then walked to Country Squire Fireplace and Lighting where we bought a natural gas outdoor grill and ordered a natural gas fireplace log set. We drove back to the house and then I drove back to Country Squire to pick up the grill. I did not realize when we bought the grill that we were buying the display model, but it was in perfect condition and I do not have to assemble it. The store employees partially disassembled it and helped me carefully load it in the Honda Element. We also bought a cover and quick disconnect for it, neither of which they had in stock. The cover had to be ordered and they needed to check with another employee about the quick disconnect before ordering it, so I will pick those parts up later.

The fireplace logs also had to be ordered and will take two to four weeks to arrive. Unfortunately that means they will not be here in time for Darryll to install them. Country Squire has a subcontracted installer who will install them for $125. That seemed excessive to me, but I did know how involved the installation might be. If it involves unpacking, assembling, connecting, and adjusting the unit then it might be worth it.

We spent what remained of the afternoon visiting with Marilyn and just giving her the space to relax and recover from her new and very demanding job as the executive director of the St. Louis Province of the Congregation of St. Joseph – Carondelet (CSJ or Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet). She assumed this role on July 1st and has been going non-stop since. It’s a 5-year commitment.

The job involves a lot of meetings and a lot of travel as the St. Louis Province has sisters all across the United States as well as in Peru and currently has a couple of sisters doing mission work in Gulu (Africa). Although Marilyn has been a dedicated member of this community for almost 50 years she is still very close to Linda and her brother Ron, and values being able to relax and spend time with them and their families. Our homes have often been a holiday haven where she could escape from the very demanding jobs she has held over the years.

We had leftovers for dinner and then printed Marilyn’s boarding pass. She had a 7:45 PM flight back to St. Louis, Missouri, so she and Linda left around 5 PM for Detroit Metropolitan Airport which is about an hour’s drive from our house. I left around 5:45 PM for the monthly meeting of the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club, which started at 6:30 PM. Our program this evening was a presentation by Gary (WA8TJA) on the technology and process he uses to make his own printed circuit boards.

Gary (WA8TJA) explains to the members of SLAARC the process and technology he uses to design and make his own printed circuit boards.

I got a call during the meeting from Joe Cannarozzi, the mechanic who has serviced our bus for the last four years, and called him back on my drive home. He has relocated to the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina area and is working as an RV technician and mechanic for an established business that currently services towables. He is still servicing buses, Prevost units specifically, but the business would like to expand to servicing diesel pushers. They are also opening a dealership for KZ RVs and he will be selling those in addition to his tech work. He called me from Shipshewana, Indiana where he will spend the week at KZ getting dealer orientation and training.

It was a busy weekend and as much as I enjoyed all of the activity and company it was nice to come home to a quiet house. I had been pondering the $125 installation fee for the natural gas fireplace logs so Linda Googled the model and found the Installation and Owner’s Manual on the American Hearth website. I went there and downloaded it to my iPad2. (This is one of the things I love about having a tablet; the ability to have lots of manuals, product spec sheets, instructions, and other documents at my fingertips.) Although it covered several versions of our model it was none-the-less 36 pages long. I looked through it enough to determine that $125 was probably a fair installation fee IF the installer started with a factory sealed box and then did everything that is specified in the manual. We purchased a “millivolt” model and I saw some reference to wiring. I was momentarily concerned that we needed to supply AC power to the unit, but more careful reading confirmed that this was not the case.

We had eaten dinner early and as I was reading and typing I realized I was a little hungry. I should have gone to bed but instead had a couple pieces of toasted gluten-free bread with vegan margarine and a cup of hot apple cider. I’m glad I did; toast is simple but satisfying food, and there’s nothing better than a warm beverage on a cool evening just before bedtime.

2014/09/13 (S) Overnight Guest

Leave a reply

Linda’s sister, Sister Marilyn, called a couple of days ago to let us know she would be in the Detroit area on business this weekend. She wanted to know if we could fetch her this afternoon and if she could spend the night at our house? The answer was “of course,” of course. Her flight out wasn’t until Sunday evening, so Linda put the gears in motion and arranged a brunch with the local family for 10 AM tomorrow.

Being Saturday, we went to our ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon. Before leaving our neighborhood we drove to the other end of the street (dead end with turn-around) to see where the gas hookup crew left off yesterday. We knew they were working down there today because we saw the trucks leave sometime between 5:30 and 6:00 PM last night. There’s a chance they will be back today and we wanted to see how close they were to connecting our house to the main line. It looked like they had quite a few houses to do ahead of ours, so we went to breakfast.

We got home around 10:30 AM to find a crew working in our yard trenching in the branch line to our house. I was told yesterday they were going to bore it in, so something obviously did not get communicated. Not only that, they were running a 5/8″ line, which was way too small for the 425 meter we are supposed to get. I stopped the crew and the guy in charge pulled out his paperwork. It had “425” written on it big letters, but the drawing showed a 5/8″ line. He agreed that the 5/8″ line was way too small for that meter and that we should have 1.25″ line. They pulled the little bit of line they had already run out of the ground, raked out some of the dirt they had already trenched, and moved their machine across the street to trench our neighbors yard.

We were lucky we got home when we did. They had already cut through some tree roots that did not need to be disturbed and would have torn up a lot more of our yard unnecessarily if I had not interrupted their work. They were nice about it, but I still found it troublesome that I had spoken to two different supervisors face-to-face about this, one as recently as yesterday, but this crew showed up and did something different than what I had been told, and agreed, would be done.

I was finally going to try to remove the fogged window from the bus today, but we had a lot of rain overnight and woke to overcast skies, temperatures in the upper 40’s, and a forecast high of 57 degrees F with a strong chance of rain through mid-afternoon. That was not the sort of weather for removing a window from a vehicle parked outside. Besides, with Marilyn arriving mid-late afternoon I did not want to work on anything messy and then have to get cleaned up.

Linda looked up the kitchen ranges we had been considering. The GE 30″ 5-burner double-oven convention model (JGB870DEFWW) was on sale again at Lowe’s for $180 off MSRP and we would get another 5% off the sale price by using our Lowe’s credit card. If we ordered it today delivery would be September 27, longer than I would like, but it is what it is. We have to order this range because Linda wants a white one to match all of the other appliances in the kitchen and the appliance stores do not tend to stock white ranges with the features we want. I called our local Lowe’s store and confirmed the free delivery and take away of our current range. Installation is $20 plus a new flex gas line for $30.

I called TOMTEK HVAC and got hold of Tom. He seemed put off by the fact that I have someone else doing HVAC work at the house and will have the natural gas already tied in when he comes to convert the main house furnace from propane to natural gas, but he said he would check with Weil-McLain on Monday about what parts he needs to do the conversion. While on the phone with Tom he suggested that we try D. R. Electric Appliance Sales and Service in Howell for our new gas range. We looked them up on the web and got their (incorrect) phone number and hours. I got the correct number from 411 before I realized that it was also on their website. They closed at 2 PM on Saturdays, so we didn’t make it there today, but I called and got an answering machine, left my name, number, and the reason for the call. Curt called me back a short time later. I gave him the model number and he said he would call G.E. on Monday. He said he had been holding off ordering G.E. appliances waiting for Columbus Day sale pricing. He figured he would have the range three days from ordering and could probably install it at the end of the week or early next. They charge $25 for installation and haul away, and $25 for the new flex gas line if we need one, so it’s the same $50 as Lowe’s. (Lowe’s assured me that they were REQUIRED to install a new flexible gas line.) That all sounded good depending on the price of the range. Getting it sooner has some dollar value to us, we’re just not sure how much.

I stayed home while Linda went to Meijer’s for groceries. Finding the crew in our yard this morning doing work they were no supposed to be doing spooked me enough to not want to leave the house unattended the rest of the day. As long as I was stuck at home, I called Bratcher Electric to give them a heads up that the gas connection to the house was imminent. Being Saturday I got their answering machine and left a message. I also called Darryll at DCM Heating & Cooling and left a message regarding the gas connection. Once the meter is hung and connected everything else depends on Darryll getting his piece done first.

We checked the website for Country Squire Fireplace and Lighting in Howell and saw a 10% off coupon, so I printed that. I wanted to go there today and buy a set of high-efficiency vent-free natural gas fire logs but it will probably be tomorrow afternoon instead. These logs are more efficient than a typical kitchen range and are designed to be used with the fireplace flue closed, throwing most of the heat they produce into the room instead of up the chimney. Darryll said he would hook it up for us and add a shutoff valve when he came back to tie in to the gas meter, so we need to have it here before he comes back next week.

Marilyn called and said their flights were running a little behind schedule and that Linda should pick her up around 3 PM rather than 2:30 PM as originally planned. She called back again and said 3:15 PM would be better. Linda got back from the grocery store and we had a quick lunch of leftover Sloppy Joe’s.

With overnight lows in the 40’s, highs only in the mid-50’s, and the connection of our natural gas somewhat imminent, we decided we could afford to use propane to heat the house. We have been conscious of our propane use because we did not want to get in a position where we needed to have either of the tanks filled. I turned the furnace on and set all the thermostats a few degrees above ambient to take the chill off.

While Linda drove over to Lake Orion, Michigan to fetch Marilyn I decided to work at my desk selecting photos for gallery posts on the garage/HVAC project and natural gas work, and worked a little bit on the websites for the FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches and Freethinkers chapters. I really need to have the GLCC site usable in the next three weeks and the FTH site within a month of that. That sounds ambitious even as I write it down and I suspect it won’t happen.

Linda and Marilyn got to the house around 4:30 PM and after we got Marilyn settled in her bedroom we just sat and relaxed and talked for a while. We thought she might appreciate a good home-cooked meal but we ended up taking her to LaMarsa for dinner. She had the Koshary, which we had last night, and we split an order of garlic almond vegetable Ghallaba with green salad and crushed lentil soup. We all ate way too much pita bread with garlic spread and were uncomfortably full by the time we finished our meal, but it was delicious and we did not have to prepare it or clean up afterwards.

These days twilight now comes around 7 PM and it was dark by the time we got home at 8 PM. I made a pot of decaf coffee and we settled in the living room for a long chat. I set the thermostats back before we turned in for the evening as all three of us prefer to sleep in a cool room.

2014/09/12 (F) Posted

Leave a reply

Linda was up very early to try and beat the morning rush inbound to Detroit from the northwest. I took an Ibuprofen and went back to bed, finally getting up at 7 AM. 1-800-PACK-RAT was scheduled to pick up the 16 foot long storage container we have had in our driveway for the last two months and I wanted to be up and dressed when they arrived. I did not have any problems with my teeth overnight. They felt OK this morning but the upper right was still a bit sensitive to biting pressure. I had a nice soft banana for breakfast and decided to keep taking the Ibuprofen and Tylenol.

I put a load of laundry in the washer and then ran out to take care of errands. I stopped at Dunkin Donuts for coffee, Lowe’s for solar salt for the water softener, and then Teeko’s for coffee beans. Jeff still did not have the Sweet Dreams decaf blend even though he orders it every week. I got a pound of the Seattle Blend 50/50 regular/decaffeinated, and a pound of regular Brazilian Serra Negra to blend with the decaffeinated beans we already had at home.

Heather, from Root Canal Specialty Associates, called around 9 AM to check on me. I mentioned the sensitivity and she said that was normal and to keep taking the Ibuprofen/Tylenol through the weekend to counteract any inflammation and/or discomfort. She wanted to know if I thought the temporary filing was high and making contact before the other teeth. I wasn’t sure, but she said if it was to call them Monday morning and they would get me in to adjust my bite.

Since I was on the phone anyway I called Bratcher Electric to see about the quote/estimate for the generator service / fuel changeover and the service entrance feed from the transfer switch to the sub-panel to change it into a main panel. They have been very busy with repairing damage caused by the storms of the last few weeks. We did not suffer any damage beyond some dead branches breaking off from trees, but south of us folks were hit much harder. That kind of work always takes priority.

The day was overcast and dreary with morning temps in the mid-40’s and a high of 54, but that was OK; it was a perfect day for sitting at a desk and working on a computer, undistracted by either bad or gorgeous weather. I did, however, bring my computer upstairs and work at Linda’s desk. My office is very nice but it is in the basement and it is a bit of a cave. Sometimes I like that, and sometimes I don’t. I worked on our blog until early-midafternoon and finally uploaded posts from Aug 2 through Aug 20.

My only interruption was a visit from one of Roese Construction’s field supervisors who was checking on where the runs will go to connect the houses in our neighborhood to the natural gas main. After looking at our situation he agreed with me and Mel who had looked at this a few weeks ago, that staying to the east of the east entrance to our pull-through driveway made the most sense even through it required them to bore at an angle relative to the main line. That conversation confirmed that they will be horizontal boring the branch line rather than trenching it in. He did not give me a firm date, but it sounded like it could be as early as tomorrow (Saturday) and likely by Tuesday next week.

My computer battery was down to under 1 hour of charge remaining, so I took it downstairs and plugged it back in to its power supply. While I was down there I put another load of laundry in the washing machine. Back upstairs I made a PB&J sandwich for lunch, along with some green tea. I got back on the RVillage Mobile development site, played with a few more features, and provided some additional feedback to the development team. I then worked on this post using my new Logitech Bluetooth keyboard. The Wacom Bamboo stylus is nice, but the keyboard is the way to go when creating extended text.

Juniper, our female cat, was getting into something in the library so I went to investigate. She had cornered a yellow jacket and was trying to figure out what to do with it. I solved the problem for her by capturing it and putting it outside. I don’t think she was pleased with my solution, but not 20 minutes later she was at it again, and it was another yellow jacket. We have a nest in the soffit near the library that we need to get rid of, but we have not had a problem with them getting into the house until very recently. Hopefully that has not changed but I will have to investigate the situation. It may be that with the onset of cooler temperatures they are finding their way into the library through the recessed ceiling downlight cans. If so, there’s really no good way to seal those. Fortunately we can close of the house from the library with a kitchen door and a living room doorwall that includes a screen door.

It started raining very lightly around 4 PM, but never developed into anything. Linda got home from the bakery at 5:30 PM. The storage container had not been picked up yet so we called the 1-800 number and left a message with our callback number. I got a call around 6 PM from the local (Plymouth, MI) office verifying the pickup and address. The driver arrived around 7:20 PM and had the unit loaded by 7:30 PM. After he left we headed to dinner at LaMarsa where we had crushed lentil soup and split an order of Koshary and salad. Even splitting the dish we both ate too much, aided by the fresh-baked pocket bread and garlic spread. The food and service were both excellent, as always, and the garlic spread was “…the gift that keeps on giving.”

We got back from dinner a little before 9 PM, too late to start any in-depth computer work, but early enough for me to finish this post and for Linda to do some recipe research for Sunday’s brunch. It seems like only yesterday it was still light at 10 PM at night, but we are approaching the autumnal equinox, and there are noticeably fewer hours of daylight now.

20140911 (R) Rooted

Leave a reply

After a breakfast of zucchini muffins and a banana (soft foods) I tried playing with the new RVillage mobile site on my Samsung Galaxy S III phone but I was unable to log in so I read a few blog posts. We had gusty winds overnight after the rain cleared out so I checked the weather to see what might be headed our way today. There wasn’t any additional rain in the forecast, but it looked like we would stay shrouded from the sun all day. The wild turkeys were not put off by the weather and spent some time foraging back by the fire pit. There were there long enough that I was able to get my good telephoto zoom lens on the camera and get this shot from the basement walkout doorwall.

These three adults and three young have been regular visitors to our yard of late.

My endodontics appointment was at 11:45 AM with Root Canal Specialty Associates in Brighton, Michigan. Their offices are on Grand River Avenue just northwest of St. Joseph Mercy Hospital. That’s only about five miles from our house; much more convenient than driving to Dearborn. Although I have been having discomfort in both the upper and lower rear teeth on my right side, the bad tooth turned out to be one of the uppers. Once they had determined that it needed a root canal I never even had to get out of the chair; they just seamlessly moved from diagnostic mode to repair mode. Endodontic operations are very efficient.

They were done and I was on my way by 1:30 PM. I stopped at Smead & Son just up the road to see if they could fabricate a rebar cage for our ham radio tower foundation. They can, and they also sell Sonotubes if we decide to use one. They stock diameters up to 36″ locally, and have tubes up to 48″ diameter at their Pontiac location. They can bend the round horizontal sections, fold over the ends of the vertical sections, and supply the twist ties for tying the pieces of rebar together. They even sell a special tool for twisting the twist ties. The pieces would not be welded, but the assured me that twist tying them together is the standard way that rebar is held in place. They can also supply the threaded steel anchor bolts if I decide to get them locally.

My next stop was Staples in Brighton for a new touch screen stylus/pen. I ended up getting a Wacom Bamboo stylus with no pen, and a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard to pair with my iPad2. I create the rough drafts of all of my blog posts on the iPad, and I should have gotten a keyboard a long time ago. I also picked up a sympathy card for a friend and co-worker of Linda’s whose father just passed away.

I stopped at Dunkin Donuts on the way home and got some hot apple cider but could not drink it right away as the local anesthetic had not yet worn completely off and I dribbled every time I took a sip; not a pretty sight. Back home I took my 3 PM dose of Tylenol. I will be taking Ibuprofen every six hours for the next 24 hours and also taking Tylenol every six hours spaced halfway in-between the Ibuprofen doses. Between the anesthetic wearing off and the apple cider cooling down I was finally able to drink it in small careful sips. I unpacked the wireless keyboard and got it connected to my iPad2 and used it to finishing typing this post. The keyboard comes with a case that turns into a stand that can hold my iPad2 at two different angles in each of portrait or landscape position. All-in-all a very nice little package. I have generally been very happy with Logitech products over the years.

I wanted to play with the RVillage mobile development site but still could not get logged in. On a suggestion from Linda I figured out how to tell my Samsung Galaxy S III phone to NOT remember logins for websites and was finally able to login and navigate around. The initial login was a 2-step process and my phone was automatically providing the username and password for step 1 even though I was manually entering the information for step 2. Once I was in I joined a test group, replied to a topic post, created a new topic and made an initial post. I also replied to a message, searched for two members of the development team, and sent messages to each of them with some site feedback. Based on our limited testing of the site it appears that the development team has done a great job on the mobile version.

Linda made a barley, kale, white bean stew for dinner. She has made it before and it is a wonderful blend of tastes and textures. Besides the named ingredients, it included onions, garlic, mushrooms, and tomatoes. For dessert she made apple crisp. Apple cider and apple crisp in the same day; nothing says “fall” like apples.

Butch called to bring me up-to-date on their situation regarding the transfer of parts from their business in Indiana to the buyer in Nevada. It looks like the 53′ trailer won’t be there to pick up material until the 29th of this month but I could take our bus there any time after the 18th, when their younger daughter (Brittani) is getting married. And once our natural gas situation is resolved. As of this writing we have no idea when they will run the line to our house and hang the meter. The only date we have ever been given was project completion by September 26.

2014/09/10 (W) A Functioning Landline

Leave a reply

The Ibuprofen/Tylenol mix did the trick and I slept comfortably through the night. Twinges were just starting as we were waking up, so breakfast was two zucchini muffins, half of a banana, and 800 mg of Ibuprofen, washed down with orange/grapefruit juice. Linda went for a walk after breakfast as it was supposed to be rainy most of the day.

I spent part of the morning selecting and re-sizing photographs from the Arcadia Bus Rally 2014, uploaded them to a folder in our Dropbox, and e-mailed the link to Brenda Phelan who runs the rally with her husband Bill. She had put out a request on Facebook for photos if anyone had them. I did an article for Bus Conversions Magazine on that rally shot over 700 photos, so yeah, I had a few.

I registered us for an RVillage Ambassador webinar later today on the new mobile app, and then came upstairs to have lunch. We enjoyed the vegan Sloppy Joe’s Linda had made, along with some vegan baked beans (canned) and store bought apple sauce. It had been raining lightly for a while and the intensity increased while we ate, but it fell straight down with little to no wind. The radar loop on Wundermap (Weather Underground) showed that we were in the leading edge of a large fetch of moisture that would likely train over our location for several hours and that is, in fact, what happened.

I took a short nap. I rarely do that, but I always enjoy it when I do. I worked the rest of the afternoon at my computer editing blog posts and finally getting around to selecting and processing photos to go with some of them. I had called Kerry Fear this morning regarding snowplowing this winter and he stopped by the house around 3:45 PM to meet with us. He lives nearby and plows our neighbor’s driveway, which is how we got his name. We agreed to hire him for the season on a handshake; no contract or pre-payment. He will send us a bill every now and then and we will pay it.

Linda made creamed corn for dinner and served it alongside vegan Sloppy Joe sandwiches and fresh strawberries. Again, a soft, easy on the teeth, meal that was very tasty.

The RVillage webinar started at 7 PM EDT and lasted 45 minutes. They wanted feedback on this latest development by Friday so they can finalize it for general release. I continued working on photographs for the blog and installed a set of updates on our Linux box before calling it quits for the evening. Linda had started watching the first episode of Sherlock from last year so I watched most of it with her. Much to our disappointment Doc Martin has disappeared from Amazon Instant Video as part of our Amazon Prime account. We can still get it, but we would now have to pay extra. As much as we like the series we are not going to pay extra to watch it.

It spite of the rain today, we made and received a number of phone calls on our AT&T landline and were online through our DSL connection quite a bit, including streaming the episode of Sherlock, all without noise or service interruptions to the best of our knowledge. We are hopeful that our AT&T service is finally restored and will continue to operate reliably.

One of the calls was from Chuck letting me know that Matt at Bob’s Speedometer Service had tested his VDO bus speedometer and found it to be broken and not repairable. Chuck ordered a new one through Matt, who will take care of programming the odometer with the current mileage. Once it comes in and Chuck verifies that it works I will likely be ordering one for our bus since ours has failed in the same way as Chuck’s. I could go ahead and remove ours and take it in, but I have lots of other things to work on a figured it made sense to wait and see how this works out for Chuck.

2014/09/09 (T) Squashed

Leave a reply

We got up this morning around 7 AM to temperatures in the upper 50’s and thinly overcast skies. I hooked up the garden hose and watered part of the back yard where we have been spot seeding the grass. Breakfast was our usual yummy homemade granola and a fresh grapefruit but I had to eat the cereal carefully.

I woke up this morning with minor pain in my lower right rear teeth. The upper teeth on that side have been bothering me for a little while and the coffee bothered one of them this morning. Not a good sign, as we learned a few weeks ago when Linda developed severe pain overnight. Sensitivity to heat and lack of sensitivity to cold is one of the tests for a nerve gone bad, and that usually means a root canal procedure. I called our dentist’s office at 9:15 AM and they booked me in at 2 PM. When I was there a couple of weeks ago to have an abfraction redone Dr. Steve did not see anything wrong with the upper tooth and speculated that I might be clenching my teeth while I sleep, which can aggravate the nerves. He may want me to try a mouth guard first. We’ll see.

After catching up on blogs I finished watering the back yard and moved around to the front. Being on a well, we cannot just run the water indefinitely; once the pressure tank runs down we need to let it recharge. The tank is large and we never notice this with normal household water usage, but watering the lawn can take a lot of water.

With the watering done I had planned to work on the drywall in the library, something I have not done for the last week, but I decided instead to re-grade a small area of the yard just east of the east driveway culvert. Roese Construction brought two pieces of plastic gas line above the surface in that area, dug a big hole to connect them straight together, and then back filled the hole and buried them. In the process of filling and grading the disturbed area they blocked the lower half of our culvert. Unfortunately the water flows out of that end of the culvert, so their grading was blocking the natural flow of the water.

While I was digging and raking Bill showed up from AT&T. Linda let me know that about 20 minutes before he arrived we had gotten two calls that just identified as “Incoming.” Bill said that coincided with the time he was dispatched and that an automatic line test is run whenever a technician is dispatched. He was able to pull up a screen on his diagnostic tablet of the recent use of the line pairs by 30 minute intervals and could see that our DSL had dropped out shortly after the diagnostic calls were made. This matched what Linda had seen in the house. He repeated the test sitting in our driveway and the telephone test call caused our DSL to disconnect again. He disconnected the line from the service entrance box and went in search of the problem while I continued working on the drainage issue.

I had the drainage problem fixed by 11:45 AM and got cleaned up and dressed appropriately for my dental appointment. We had hummus sandwiches with onion and olive oil, leftover butternut squash from last night’s dinner, and fresh, perfectly ripe pears; all soft foods so as not aggregate my dental situation. I was just getting ready to leave for my appointment when Bill returned. He said it was not a circuit board but appeared to be a cable problem that they refer to as a “swinging line,” referring to a marginal section of cable that develops problems when it moves, such as with storm winds. We had problems on Friday evening as a storm front approached and the winds kicked up, so this diagnosis did not surprise me.

Bill said he moved us to yet another line pair much farther away from our original ones and then repeated the tests he had done earlier. He had not gotten any failures but was not completely confident that he had solved the problem. The weather forecast for tomorrow is for a 100% chance of storms, some strong to severe, and Bill thought that would be a good test. I let Bill know that while I was digging and raking by the road I found an old underground AT&T line that had been cut in half with ends left above ground. He said it was no longer being used but they ask the other utility crews to leave the ends exposed when they snag them so AT&T can find them.

My teeth hurt on the drive down to the dentist, did not hurt while I was there, and hurt on the drive home. Direct examination, hot/cold sensitivity testing, and X-rays did not provide a definitive diagnosis. Dr. Steve was still of the opinion that it could be nerve irritation from clenching my teeth at night, but thought I should have the situation evaluated by an endodontist. Linda saw an endodontist just down the street from our dental clinic, but she needed same day service and they were able to get her in and do the root canal. They referred me to a clinic in Brighton about five miles from our house and made an appointment for me for Thursday late morning. With any luck my teeth won’t go critical in between now and then.

I did get an interesting recommendation on how to manage any ongoing discomfort. Motrin (Ibuprofen), up to 800 mg every six hours, and Extra Strength Tylenol, every six hours, taken half way between the Motrin. Apparently it works nearly as well as narcotics, at least on dental pain, without any of the unpleasant side effects or habit forming properties.

I did not feel like changing back into work clothes when I got home so I enjoyed some quiet time on the deck with Linda, who was working on her counted cross-stitch project, under partly cloudy skies with pleasant temperatures in the mid-70’s and a light breeze. Ahhhh.

With the phone and DSL currently functioning properly I worked in my office for a while before dinner. The login attack on our two WordPress sites hosted by QTH.com had continued, but not to the same extent as before. I set the country blocking to “all” in Wordfence and then deselected the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. I did not have a reply from Scott at QTH.com which surprised me a bit but was not a big deal.

Linda made a nice salad for dinner and then served the leftover baked squash and squash/pasta dish from the other night; a lot of squash for one meal, but very tasty. We had a glass of the Leelanau Cellars Winter White, a very drinkable semi-sweet white table wine blend that must contain a fair amount of Riesling, although the label does not specify the grapes used to make it.

My bottom tooth was really acting up so I took 800 mg of Motrin (Ibuprofen) around 6 PM. We were out of Extra Strength Tylenol so Linda went to the store and got a bottle. I took some of that around 9 PM and then went to bed. I will be taking a pass on wine and coffee until I get the problems with my teeth resolved.

2014/09/08 (M) No More Leaks

Leave a reply

I was up at 6:30 AM, having fallen asleep before 10:30 PM last night. I rarely sleep more than eight hours. Linda was up shortly thereafter. We had breakfast a little after 7 AM and drank our coffee in the living room while we checked in on the world with our iPads. It was a perfect morning to fire up the gas logs in the fireplace, but we did not. The propane logs require the flue vent to be open and most of the heat they produce goes up the chimney, not into the room. We will definitely replace these with 99.8% efficient vent-free natural gas logs that operate with the flue damper closed once we have natural gas to the house.

Linda went for a long walk, about 5.5 miles. I was catching up on blogs I follow on Feedly when Darryll and Alec arrived around 10 AM. With Alec along Darryll did not need my help fixing the leaks in the black iron pipe fittings. To repair the leak behind the garage he decided to install a union in the 1″ pipe coming out of the T-fitting that will feed gas to the garage. They still had to disassemble all of the fittings from there to end of the run and then reassemble them. Ditto for the leak at the elbow in the 1/2″ line coming out of the utility closet to feed the garage furnace.

I had Darryll look at our old propane fireplace logs to see what would be required to replace them with high efficiency natural gas logs and add a shutoff valve. Based on how the pipes are run the shutoff valve will have to be in the outside pipe just before it enters the side of the chimney. That will place it at a comfortable height and keep it out even deep snow.

While Darryll and Alec worked on the black iron pipe I unloaded more stuff from the storage container. I was dressed to work and with Linda away from the house I did not want to sequester myself in my basement office. Besides, I am not very productive at desk work when contractors are here.

As they were finishing up Darryll turned the new air-conditioner on and let it run to check the air temperature it could produce. It got the temp down to 58 degrees F in the main plenum. He said anything below 60 is considered proper operation so he did not need to adjust the refrigerant charge. They pressurized the pipes and checked every junction twice and did not find any leaks. He said a lot of guys, including the gas company, attach a gauge and if it holds pressure for an hour they call it good. Darryll wants to see it hold pressure a lot longer than that, which I appreciate. They finished up around 1:30 PM. After they left I set the pressure in the pipe as close to 15 PSI as I could. I noted that most of the pipe was in the shade and the air temperature was 76 degrees F.

For lunch we had hummus with pita chips and sourdough pretzel nibblers, fresh apple slices, and leftover kale salad. After lunch we worked in the garage for about 90 minutes and managed to get the storage container emptied out and all of the contents stored somewhere. We still can’t get a car in the garage, but we have time to work on that. What we need now is a dumpster, but I think that will have to wait until next spring.

I was supposed to have a FMCA Education Committee telephone meeting today at 4 PM but it was postponed yet again. I did, however, get two phone calls today from the folks at AT&T who are following up on our MPSC complaint. The phone was actually quiet enough today that I could carry on a normal phone conversation with them.

We had several other calls today that were also OK. One of them was from Norma, a woman from New York City that we met last year on our second Holistic Holiday at Sea cruise. Norma stopped by to visit us at Williston Crossings earlier this year along with her daughter and grandchildren. Norma is the person who told us about the Vegetarian Summerfest that is held each July in Pennsylvania. She is eager for us to go, and we are eager to attend; this summer just did not afford the opportunity. Although we will likely be building a barn next year, we would like to take a week and go to this event.

Chuck called in the afternoon to let me know he had picked up his old tachometer from Matt at Bob’s Speedometer and after replacing a few simple parts (capacitors or diodes) it worked fine on the bench. Chuck brought his “new” tachometer along and Matt tested it as well and it also worked, but not with the adaptor cable provided by Prevost. It turned out that the cable was wired to provide DC power to the tachometer from the wire that supplies power to the dashboard lights. Chuck doesn’t drive much at night, so the dash lights were rarely on. Another factor is that the dash lights are on a dimmer (rheostat) that reduces the voltage in order to dim the lights. The tachometer is not designed to work on that reduced voltage.

Once we were done working in the garage for the day I concentrated on deleting or filing old e-mails. I also discovered that we had become the target of a (so far) unsuccessful brute force login attack. I received about 360 system generated e-mails between 10 PM last night and 11 AM this morning notifying me of failed login attempts. I notified Scott at QTH.com and then decided to upgrade the Wordfence plug-in from free to paid/premium on all four of the websites I support.

After purchasing the upgrades I installed one of the API Keys in each site and then activated several premium features including “country blocking.” Wordfence claims to have access to several databases that allow them to identify the country associated with an IP address with 99.5% accuracy. I chose to block China, Europe, Indonesia, and the Russian Federation. If necessary I can “select all” and then deselect the United States and Canada. If the problem stops I could then unblock other countries, such as Australia and New Zealand. Not that I think anyone from there ever visits any of these websites, but with the web you never really know.

2014/09/07 (N) Findlay Hamfest

Leave a reply

I set alarms on my phone and iPad last night to make sure I got up at 5:00 AM. My natural tendency is to stay up a little later each night, something I am now able to do as I do not usually have to get up by any certain time in the morning. Usually. Today, however, was the annual Hamfest put on by the Findlay, Ohio Amateur Radio Club and I needed to be at Mike’s (W8XH) QTH in time for a 6 AM departure. We picked up Steve (N8AR) at the Park-n-Ride lot at Lee Road and US-23 around 6:15 AM and drove non-stop to Findlay, Ohio, arriving at the county fairground at 8:15 AM. We had a good chat on the way down, which is as much of a reason for going as the bargain hunting once we got there. I have included a couple of photos in this post. For more photos, visit:

http://wp36test1.slaarc.com/gallery-2/hamfests/2014-09-findlay/

We each paid our $7 admission fee and got our ticket with a tear-off stub for the hourly and grand prize drawings. We got parked and set our Kenwood TH-F6 handheld radios to 146.475 MHz (simplex). We filled out our raffle ticket stubs, dropped them off, and started working our way up and down the rows of outside tables. The outside sales area was essentially a flea market, sometimes referred to as “trunk sales” because people back their cars up to the road and sell stuff from their trunks. The spots are cheaper to rent for the day, but you take a chance that the weather will be nice.

Outside vendors (trunk sales) at the Findaly ARC Hamfest in Findlay, OH.

We worked the flea market first while the temperatures were cool and the sun wasn’t overhead but also because almost everything offered for sale was used equipment at negotiable prices. These are often one-of-kind items and the bargains tend to disappear quickly. By mid-morning I had purchased a good sized NEMA enclosure (steel box with weather tight gasketed door) and a Harris 22.2 telephone butt handset (tester). I plan to use the NEMA box to create a cable entrance box with lightning protection for RF transmission lines, AC power lines, and control lines. I got the telephone test set because it will allow me to hook up to the phone line the same way the AT&T technicians do, and because it is not the sort of thing most folks have in their home.

Bruce (W8RA) gave a short shopping list to Steve (N8AR) yesterday at breakfast. Mike (W8XH) spotted a matched three-piece set of vintage Heathkit gear, one piece of which was on Bruce’s list. Steve looked at it and they got Bruce on the phone. Apparently it was close enough to what Bruce wanted that Steve bought the whole set for him as the seller was not willing to sell them separately.

We then moved to the inside vendors, most of whom were selling new merchandise at fixed prices. There was some used equipment, however, and I bought an Icom CI-V interface set. This device will allow me to interface our Icom IC-7000 and/or IC-706 to, and control them from, a computer using something like Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD) software.

I also got to meet and talk to Norm, from Norm’s Fabrication in Adrian, and his wife, who is president of the Adrian Amateur Radio Club. Norm is a welder, and his side business is fabricating tower parts out of steel and aluminum for fellow hams. If I cannot get what I need from Heights Tower Systems, Norm may hold the key to getting our used tower erected.

A very classy portable ham radio station (go box).

A number of other hams from the South Lyon, Novi, Livingston, and SEMDXA radio clubs were there. I brought my camera and tried to get photos of our club members for the club website. None of us won anything from the hourly drawings (must be present to win) and we left shortly after noon to meet up at the local Steak-n-Shake for lunch. I had not eaten breakfast so I enjoyed my garden salad and French fries. I had a good chat with Dave (K8ESQ), the current president of SEMDXA, and Don (N8CAK) from SLAARC.

We had a good chat on the drive back, stopping briefly at the Michigan Welcome Center on US-23 northbound shortly after entering Michigan from Ohio. We dropped Steve off at the Lee Road Park-n-Ride and helped him unload the Heathkit equipment. When we got back to Mike’s I moved my purchases and personal gear to my car and then spent some time examining his Heights tower, especially the fold-over mount. After studying the parts and the geometry of the design I had a much better understanding of how it works and what we need to get our tower erected and fully operational.

On the way back to my house I got a call from Darryll letting me know he would be out in the morning as long as someone would be home. Back home I unloaded everything and moved Linda’s car to the side parking pad to make space for Darryll’s truck in the morning. It was nice to have a day away from our house and property projects.

I spent a little time checking e-mail and websites and off-loading digital photos until Linda called me to dinner. We had leftover kale salad, quinoa with pineapple and nuts, fresh steamed broccoli, and corn-on-the-cob. After dinner I recorded the events of the last few days in rough drafts of separate blog posts. By 10:15 PM the early start and long day finally caught up with me and I turned the lights out and drifted off to sleep.

2014/09/06 (S) Deliveries

Leave a reply

We were up early and off to our SLAARC ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon. There was a good turnout and good conversation, some of which had to do with our future tower project. Mike (W8XH) was driving to the Findlay (Ohio) Hamfest tomorrow morning and had room for one more in his car so I decided to go.

Back home we broke down cardboard, loaded it into my car with the rest of our recyclables, and headed over to Recycle Livingston. Afterwards we stopped at the Howell Bank of America branch so I could get some cash for the Findlay OH Amateur Radio Club Hamfest tomorrow. A little farther up the road we stopped at Lowe’s for grass seed and bought three plastic tubs to replace the cardboard boxes we have been using on the floor of the kitchen pantry for recyclables. Lowe’s is at Latson Road and Grand River Road so we hopped on I-96 East over to US-23 and headed south towards Ann Arbor to drop off the window air-conditioner and visit with our son, daughter-in-law, and grand-daughter.

When we exited US-23 at Washtenaw Avenue the traffic was worse than usual, and it is usually pretty bad. Ann Arbor got hit a lot harder by the storms last night than we did and two of the three traffic signals between the highway and Stadium Boulevard were not working. Drivers were being courteous, and everyone was taking turns, but the traffic volume through this stretch of road exceeds its capacity even when the signals are working.

We got the window air-conditioner unloaded and moved to the second floor of the garage. We had a nice visit that included reading stories to Madeline.

Madeline and Grandma Linda read a favorite story.

We were going to stop at the Whole Foods Market on our way home but decided to avoid the traffic jam and worked our way through a subdivision up to Geddes Road and back to US-23. Back home we had a light/late lunch of leftover rice seitan and mashed cauliflower and then worked for a couple of hours getting things out of the storage pod and organized in the garage. We moved the shelves away from the northeast wall so Darryll could work on the gas pipe when he returns. We knew when we put the shelves there that we were taking a small gamble that we might have to move them. Fortunately they slid easily without being unloaded. We must have the storage container empty by the time we go to bed on Thursday evening as it is scheduled for pickup on Friday.

For dinner we had a nice salad, roasted Brussels sprouts, and sautéed potatoes with onions, garlic, and bell peppers. We finished the no-bake (frozen) double-chocolate torte for dessert. After dinner Linda played Scrabble and Words With Friends while I researched Acme screws, nuts, and related components that we need to get the ham radio tower fold-over mount operational.

I turned in earlier than usual as I needed to be up at 5 AM in order to be at Mike’s (W8XH) QTH by 6 AM to leave for the Findlay Hamfest.

2014/09/05 (F) WordPress 4.0

Leave a reply

We awoke to temperatures in the low 70’s this morning and by noon it was forecast to be 85 degrees F with rapidly rising humidity. We turned our A-C on yesterday and left in on overnight and through the day today.

WordPress 4.0 was released yesterday and just before midnight I updated the four websites I manage, including this one. I was looking forward to working with the new version today, but first things first. Darryll called at 8:15 AM to make sure it was OK to come over. We finished breakfast and then opened the garage and moved a few things that might be in his way. Although we would have liked to continue working in the garage during the morning, before it got really hot and humid, we were glad to have Darryll here working on the HVAC installation.

Instead of working on organizing the garage Linda worked at her desk and baked a loaf of bread while I assisted Darryll. He wired up the library thermostat and showed me how the wires were connected. He installed the return air grill, which required some minor drywall trimming, and installed a 6″ combustion air duct in the ceiling of the utility closet. The duct had a screen on one end with a hood, like a dryer vent, and was open on the other end. He installed it from the attic side with the hood in the attic and the open end sticking down through the ceiling into the closet. I may decide to caulk or apply drywall compound to fill that gap between the duct and the hole Darryll made in the ceiling.

Darryll’s main focus, however, was hooking up the four pieces of duct, two rigid and two flexible, that will carry conditioned air into the library and installing the two ceiling registers. That involved working in the attic which was very hot. The flexible duct for the two ceiling registers was the same kind of product that was used in the main house; a pre-insulated flexible accordion tubing with an 8″ inside diameter that comes in 25′ lengths compressed to about 3′ for shipping. To feed the two registers on the lower part of the west wall of the library he cut lengths of 8″ diameter (circular cross section) metal duct and assembled them. He attached them to the supply air duct (plenum) with flange connectors. He then slide insulation blankets (tubes) around them and connected the bottom ends of the duct into the back of the register ducts using several elbows to bring the duct around and close to the wall. Finally, he slid the insulation down and secured it.

While Darryll was doing all of that I finished connecting the AC power to the condenser/compressor. That involved the following:

removing the terminal cover panel from the inside of the fused disconnect box
knocking out access holes on the right side and bottom
mounting the fused disconnect box to the side if the house
cutting a piece of 3/4″ plastic conduit for the cable from the soffit to the box
running the NM cable through the conduit
installing a watertight 90 degree elbow into the conduit
attaching the elbow to the side of the box
cutting, stripping, and connecting the line wires
cutting the plastic armor on the hookup cable to the right length
installing a straight screw-in watertight connector on the box end of the armor
installing a screw-in 90 degree elbow watertight connector on the condenser end
cutting, stripping, and connecting the load wires in the box
cutting, stripping, and connecting the load wires in the compressor.

I had Darryll check my work and then installed the fuses in the pull-out disconnect but was not able to get it to plug all the way in. Darryll bent the blades slightly and got it to seat fully. (I need to get two different fuses. All he had were 30A fuses but 20A would be sufficient. Also, the fuses he had in his truck were notched on one end. I think fuses with full barrels on both ends would be better as they would have more contact surface than the notched ones.) I reinstalled the terminal cover panel and closed the box. I then re-installed the cover panel on the A-C compressor that Darryll had removed earlier.

With the power connected and most of the ducts run, we turned on the 120VAC/15A circuit breaker (for the unit in the utility closet) and the 240VAC/20A circuit breaker (for the compressor/condenser). Darryll turned the thermostat mode switch to “cool” and the fan switch to auto and the A-C came to life. Hooray! I love it when that happens.

While Darryll finished installing the ducts and the registers I connected and mounted the thermostat for the garage furnace and then connected the wires on the other end of the cable to the terminals on the back of the unit according to Darryll’s instructions. I removed the end panel from the Reznor ceiling-mounted garage furnace, removed the documentation packet from the inside, checked that the gas valve was in the “on” position, and put the end panel back on. I also removed the protective plastic film from the bottom of the unit.

Darryll gathered up his tools, extra parts, and unused materials and loaded them in his truck. He then pressurized his portable air compressor and used it to pressurize the black iron gas pipe. It has not been holding pressure, so he pumped it up to 15 PSI and we went in search of leaks with a spray bottle of soapy water. We used my inspection mirror to see behind and under connections and found three leaks. One was in a 2″ pipe fitting behind the garage, one was in a 2″ pipe fitting near the end of the run by the generator, and one was at an elbow in the 1/2″ pipe where it exits the utility closet on its way to the garage furnace.

Darryll was checking air temperature readings at the registers and in the main plenum of the library HVAC unit. The library was 89 degrees F when he first turned the A-C on, and the attic was a lot hotter than that. He connected his gauges to the compressor/condenser and said the readings were close enough to correct that he did not want to add or remove any refrigerant until the room had cooled down and stabilized at the requested temperature.

I was hoping he would get the job finished today but he needed some equipment, which he did not have with him, to work on the iron pipe and he was obviously tired from a long day working in the high heat and humidity. He may be back tomorrow; if not, Monday or Tuesday. Whenever he returns, I have complete confidence that he will get it done before the gas meter is hung and that it will all work correctly for many years with very little attention other than changing a filter once or twice a year.

We deferred lunch until Darryll left. We had chickpea salad on a slice of the bread Linda had baked earlier, corn-on-the-cob, and the last of some fresh pineapple. Nothing says “summer” like organic, non-GMO corn-on-the-cob.

After lunch I called Bratcher Electric to check on the status of the estimate/quote that Mike was putting together to service our generator, convert it to natural gas, and run a 100A Service Entrance Cable from the transfer switch to the garage panel, converting it from a sub-panel to a main panel. Karen said they have been really busy but he would work on it over the weekend.

I also called 1-800-Pack-Rat to arrange pickup of the storage container on Friday September 12th. Steven was not able to schedule the pick-up during the call and said he would contact the local office and get back to me. I made it clear that we did not want to roll over into another billing cycle and I was calling one week ahead of time as we had been instructed. He assured me that it would not be a problem. About an hour later we got a return call and follow up e-mail confirming pickup for Friday, September 12.

Late afternoon I checked on the library A-C to make sure it was not freezing up. Everything looked OK. The thermostat was set to 76 degrees F and the temperature was down to 77, so I bumped the setting up to 78 to let it cycle off and on. Although Darryll did all of the heavy lifting on this project (literally) I spent my fair share of time in the attic on warm days installing the pull-down folding ladder and working on electrical wiring and attic lights. It was very gratifying to see that all of this work—his, mine, and Linda’s—finally result in something that operated correctly.

We were relaxing and reading when severe weather watches and warnings for our area started arriving on our iPads. Naturally we went outside to see what was going on. We were both born and raised in the Midwest, the St. Louis, Missouri area, to be exact, and as kids in the 1950’s, threatening weather was a form of summertime entertainment. Not that we were stupid; we learned from the adults around us when the show was over and it was time to head to the basement. When I was about 5 years old we lost a plum tree in our backyard to a close encounter with a tornado.

The gathering storm. The clouds were very dramatic in all directions.

The clouds were very dramatic but eventually gave way to a formless mass of gray with swirling winds and a few raindrops. We checked the Weather Channel app and the Weather Underground Wundermap app on our iPads. The radar returns showed that we were likely in for some rain, and we got some, but as often happens the worst of it passed north and south of us. The rain we did get was very welcomed. We had heavy rain on Monday (Labor Day), Keith mowed the grass on Tuesday, I spread grass seed around on Tuesday and Wednesday, and a flock of six wild turkeys feasted on the grass seed on Wednesday and Thursday. We needed a nice light rain to help the seeds germinate and take root rather than be eaten or washed away in a thunderstorm.

Storm clouds looking east.

Around 7:30 PM our power flickered several times and we received e-mail messages from our generator letting us know that utility power had been lost and then quickly regained. We decided to check the Kohler OnCue software to see what the generator was doing. We thought sure we had installed the software on Linda’s computer, so we could monitor it from her desk in the kitchen/dining area, but it wasn’t there. After much searching and head scratching we checked my old laptop and there it was! When we thought about it we realized that the generator had been installed about a week before Linda started configuring her new Samsung laptop, so there was no way we had put the software on her machine. We’ve been very, very busy the last 20 months, so it was not surprising to us that we had forgotten the exact sequence of events.

Approaching from the southwest the clouds got more ominous.

The severe warnings expired at 8 PM and the severe watches at 9 PM, but that did not mean the rain was done. A big fetch of moisture was located south of Chicago, Illinois and moving through southwest Michigan in our general direction. The rain was forecast to continue into the early hours of tomorrow but be done before sunrise. When the rains finally came it rained hard for a while. Tomorrow is forecast to be a perfect Michigan day and I plan to buy another bag of grass seed to spot seed the areas that got washed away, again.

2014/09/03 (W) Pine Cone Midden

Leave a reply

After breakfast Linda downloaded the Hanks Writer to her iPad2 while I downloaded three app updates to mine. After checking in on the blogs that I follow, I spread some grass seed around the bare and thin spots in the back and west side of the yard by the house. I wanted to take care of that while it was cool and the ground was still damp with dew from the overnight lows in the upper 50’s.

Darryll did not call last night, so I did not expect him to be here today. Our son might be interested in the old window air-conditioner so we moved it to the southeast corner of the garage and plugged it in to make sure it worked. It did, so I sent him a text message to that effect.

We cleared off the table we have been using to cut drywall and got the 1/4″ birch plywood panel that will be the front of the box that encloses the electrical sub-panel and cables. We measured carefully, twice, laid out the cut lines, and checked the measurements again. We got the center cutout very close to correct on the first try and only had to trim it a little bit in one corner to get it to fit around the panel box. We did not secure it place as we still need to feed the thermostat cable through the wall and put some insulation in the wall cavity to the left of the panel as this is an outside wall.

With the carpentry work done we started cleaning and reorganizing the garage, making sure that Darryll will still have access to things he needs to work on. We plan to have the storage pod picked up on the 12th or 13th, so even though Darryll is not quite finished, we were anxious to start working on the rest of the garage.

We moved the tools and supplies we’ve been using to the three new shelving units on the east wall of the garage. We then unloaded two shorter units and two tall units on the west wall and spread everything out on the floor. We moved the units to the northeast wall, the shorter ones fitting nicely under the low end of the flue where it exits the utility closet wall. We went through the stuff on the floor and put some of it in the trash, set some of it aside to recycle, designated a few things to go to the Salvation Army, collected RV parts in boxes to take to the GLCC Surplus and Salvage rally next month, and put the rest back on the shelves.

We took a break for lunch and then finished up in the garage for the day. Linda worked at her desk and I changed out of my construction clothes into something more suitable for working at my desk. She made marinated baked tofu cubes for dinner, with sautéed green beans and corn-on-the-cob (organic and non-GMO, of course). We sat on the deck and watched our resident American Red Squirrel gather pine cones and move them under the cluster of three big fir trees where we presume it has a nest and pine cone midden. These trees have never been trimmed and the lower branches are sizable and long and the ends rest on the ground. I peeked in there the other day but did not see pine cones piled around any of the trunks like I expected, so I’m not sure where the midden is located.

I was up later than I should have been but I finished reading Big Lake Scandal. The fifth book in Nick Russell’s Big Lake murder mystery series, it was a good read. Nick has created an interesting place with interesting characters and reveals a little more about them with each volume. He is particularly good at capturing the way people might actually talk to one another on a daily basis in a small western town. He should know; he has spent a lot of time in such places over the years.

2014/09/02 (T) No More Painting

Leave a reply

After breakfast Linda worked on the financial and membership records for our GLCC RV chapter and I took care of a couple of e-mails. Keith showed up to cut the grass, which he managed to do in spite of the wet conditions from yesterday’s heavy rains. After chatting with Keith for a few minutes I started to resume work on “the project” but decided to look for the tub of grass seed and fertilizer we brought from the old house. I found it rather quickly and we still had a partial bag of grass seed, so I spread it around the front yard by hand filling in the bare and thin spots, of which there were plenty. Our flock of wild turkeys was back today. I think they like the grass seed I put out for them.

Wild turkeys gather in and around the fire pit. No...we do plan to cook them.

Wild turkeys gather in and around the fire pit. No…we do not plan to cook them.

I sanded the drywall compound in the library and applied another thin layer. I’ve been applying non-overlapping horizontal strips of mud, letting them dry, sanding them smooth while feathering the edges, then repeating the process for the areas in-between, or outside, the previous strips. I will eventually turn this 90 degrees and apply the strips vertically. The last set of steps will be to fill around the outside of the opening, feathering everything back to the existing wall surface and sanding it smooth with the central part of the patch. We don’t want it to be obvious that there was ever a hole in the wall. Once the drywall patching is done I have to prime the new compound and then paint the entire wall.

The paint on the east wall of the garage and the outside of the utility closet looked good and the paint on the inside of the utility closet looked good enough; it is, after all, the inside of a furnace closet. I was done painting, at least for now, which should have felt like a big deal, but it just meant I could wrap up a couple of things and move on to the next thing.

The first thing was to mount the electrical box on the wall to the left of the library HVAC unit, make all the wiring connections, screw the switch into the box, and put on the cover plate. I routed the thermostat wire alongside, and zip-tied it to, the armored AC power cable. The second thing was preparing the mounting holes for the garage furnace thermostat on the outside of the utility closet wall. I then cut the thermostat cable to the correct length beyond the wall, removed the outer sheath, stripped the ends of the wires, and secured the cable with a zip tie to prevent it from slipping back into the wall. I did not actually mount the thermostat, however, since I was going to wait for Darryll to connect the wires.

Three adults and three young. They are large and impressive birds.

By then it was time for lunch, after which Linda left for her dentist appointment in Dearborn. I wanted something easy to do, so I assembled the three plastic shelving units I bought at Lowe’s yesterday. They went together easily, but one was missing the feet, top caps, and wall brackets and another one had a defective top cap. I put them against the east wall of the garage and the floor was flat enough that they lined up well, so I don’t necessarily need the feet. But the top caps are important, and it bugs me that I did not get everything I paid for.

The next thing I decided to tackle was the wood box in the utility closet that will enclose the electrical sub-panel and make it appear to be recessed and hide all of the electrical cables. I cleared off the table we have been using to work on sheets of drywall and stood the scrap pieces of drywall against the back wall. I got the two 8-foot 1×10’s I bought yesterday, put them on the table, made careful measurements and then marked them. The two side pieces needed to be 52″ long x 7-1/4″ wide, with notches to create clearance for the top plate, horizontal blocking, and electrical cables passing through holes in studs. I cut them to length with the Rockwell circular saw, and then ripped them to width using the Craftsman band saw. The band saw had not been used in years but it had no problem ripping each board. The notches were made with our Porter-Cable saber saw. This kind of work is a pleasure when you have the right tools.

I screwed the two side pieces into place and then measured and cut a bottom cross member, and a trim strip to go below it, and installed those with screws. I then cut a top cross member and a backing strip to go behind it between the two side pieces. When I was done I had a box that would support a 48″ high by 33″ wide 1/4″ thick plywood panel with the outside face flush with the front edge of the sub-panel once I cut a rectangular opening in the plywood to allow it to fit around the box. The plywood panel will be secured around the edges with a few screws and the sub-panel cover plate will overlap and cover any gap between the panel box and the opening in the plywood. I will finish the plywood panel tomorrow or Thursday depending on when Darryll returns and how much I have to work with him to get the power connected to the new A-C compressor.

Jasper the cat in the kitty tent on the deck. He spends a lot time looking around and sniffing the air when he is out here.

That was the end of my project work for the day so I took a shower and put on some clean clothes. Linda poured a couple glasses of wine and we sat on the deck and enjoyed an absolutely beautiful late summer Michigan evening. We brought the kitty tent out so Jasper could sit outside with us. Linda threw a green salad together, followed by the leftovers of the penne pasta dish and Italian bread she made for dinner on Saturday. As twilight set in we moved inside and I decided to go to Lowe’s for some grass seed. I figured if the soil was still moist first thing tomorrow morning I would spread it around the bare and thin areas in the back and on the west side of the garage, of which there are plenty. Otherwise I will wait until just after the next rain.

I started reading Big Lake Scandal last night and continued with it this evening. It’s the 5th and latest book in the Big Lake murder mystery series by full-time RVer Nick Russell. Nick is a good writer, but he and his wife, Terry, are personal acquaintances, which makes reading his books that much more fun.

2014/09/01 (M) A Day To Labor

Leave a reply

One of the odd things about being “retired” is that holidays, like weekends, do not have the same significance they had when we were employed full time. We no longer have “3-day weekends.” We also do not have a tradition in our family of gathering on the summer holidays, so those days tend to blend into the days around them. If not for our Saturday morning ham radio breakfast and the Sunday morning Howell Farmers Market we probably would not know what day of the week it was.

Knowing that today was Labor Day, Linda prepared vegan cinnamon rolls yesterday and baked them first thing this morning. This was the first time she has made these and they were a real treat. Vegan, yes; whole plant-based food, not exactly. These will be a rare treat for us.

As has been my pattern for the last few weeks, I sanded and touched up drywall first thing after breakfast. Most of the drywall compound was finally smooth enough that I felt it was ready to prime. I discovered that I was out of primer, so I went to Lowe’s to get some and picked up a few other things while I was there. It was very humid today, which tends to slow the drying of paint, but primer is thinner than paint and gets absorbed into the paper drywall covering I was hopeful that I might get a first coat of paint applied this evening.

Mike (W8XH) sent an e-mail Saturday evening to the members of the SLAARC announcing the availability of the new WordPress website and indicating that they would each be receiving a unique username and password from me in the next few days. I wanted to wait at least 24 hours before I started creating users. That waiting period had passed, so today I parked myself in front of my computer and registered users.

Part of the registration process required me to create a username. That was easy for a ham radio club as (almost) everyone has an FCC call sign. It also required a valid/unique e-mail address. When I created an account an e-mail, with their username and a randomly generated password, got sent to the e-mail address I entered. The e-mail also contained instructions on how to get to the website, how to login, and how to change their password. I finished creating the last user account around 9 PM, but I did not work on this between 5 PM and 8 PM.

The vegan cinnamon rolls made for a filing and somewhat higher calorie breakfast, so we skipped lunch today and had an early dinner. I had requested a picnic type of meal to celebrate the end of the summer tourist season, and Linda fixed a nice one. We had vegan potato salad, corn-on-the-cob, and pan-grilled tofu slices with BBQ sauce and caramelized onions served open-faced on some of the Italian bread she made for dinner on Saturday. Dessert was watermelon balls. And the wonderful thing is that I am maintaining a good weight. Eating well and eating healthy are not mutually exclusive. However, like low-fat and fat-free foods, and then gluten-free foods, the processed food industry has discovered a “market” for foods that are free of animal products. That, however, does not mean they are free of unpronounceable chemicals or excessive amounts of sugar and salt. There is a growing amount of vegan junk food available in the marketplace.

We spent a little time after dinner on the back deck watching wildlife as a storm front approached from the west. As the wind kicked up we lost our AT&T DSL connection and then our phone went out, exhibiting the same behavior we have had throughout most of August. I shut down my computer and changed back into my work clothes to do some painting. I put a coat of paint on the east wall of the garage and both the inside and outside of the utility closet. It started raining really hard so I had to close the garage door, which cut down on my light, but eventually the rain let up and I was able to open the garage doors again. The inside of the utility closet may need another coat, but I think that most of the outside of the closet, and the east wall of the garage, may be done. That means I can finally mount the thermostat for the garage furnace and put cover plates back on switches and outlets.

I am still working on the outside of the south wall of the utility closet (with the door). I am using drywall compound to create a smooth transition at the hinge edge of the door to correct for a carpentry error I made when installing the door much earlier in the project. The transition will make it possible for me to install trim around the door, but I have to build up the transition in thin, tapered layers, allow it to dry, sand it smooth, and repeat the process over, and over, and over. Ditto for the west wall of the library, which is the other side of the east wall of the garage, where I am building up a slightly recessed area where the opening was for the old window A-C unit so it will blend in with the surrounding wall surface.

2014/08/30 (S) By All Accounts

Leave a reply

We went to the weekly SLAARC breakfast this morning. We stopped on the way back to the house to get a food processor. I shut down my ASUS laptop PC, packed it for travel, and headed for Mike’s (W8XH) QTH; the first time it has been out of the house since I bought it at the end of April.

I worked with Mike on the new SLAARC WordPress website, walking him back through the process of creating photo galleries. He then uploaded pictures from the 2014 Field Day event, added captions to some of them, and created photo galleries.

I was going to create user accounts, but that turned out to still be a bit premature. In showing Mike around the site we discovered that the home page login widget for the WP-Members plug-in was not working correctly. It was last night, but that was before I installed the Global Hide Admin Toolbar plug-in. Suspecting a minor incompatibility (although the site did not crash, thank goodness) I had to engineer a work-around. The problem and solution turned out to be multifaceted.

One aspect of the problem was that we needed to remove the WP-Members widget from the Home screen, but it was the only place where a logged in user could log out. Another aspect of the problem was the realization that users would have to click on one of the pages in the Member Only Area to get a login screen that would actually log them into the site and allow them to navigate wherever they wanted.

One facet of the solution was to create a new page that would appear at the right hand end of the main menu bar and place the WP-Members widget on that page. It was not immediately obvious to me how to do this, or if we even could, but I eventually figured it out. That provided something on the main menu bar, which remains visible at all times, where users can go to logout. (They should also be able to log in there, but it’s the same widget that didn’t work correctly on the Home page.)

The other facets of the solution involved editing the e-mail that gets sent to a new user when their account is created and editing the User’s Guide, both of which describe the login and logout procedure. As long as I had to create and upload a new version of the User’s a Guide, I decided to put the link on its own page so it would show up in the menu structure and be easier for members to find. I did the same thing with the links to the official club roster documents. Adding those two page then required me to edit two pages to remove the old links. As the saying goes “it’s a process.”

Mike was still creating photo galleries so I drafted a notification e-mail for him to send to the members and sent it to him. He had to leave to run an errand right after I left and planned to deal with sending the e-mail later that evening. I will wait at least 24 hours after he sends it before I start creating user accounts.

I was back home in time to relax and work on this post before John and Diane arrived around 5 PM to visit and have dinner. They brought a salad that Diane made and two bottles of wine; a sweet Shiraz that was unusual but delightful, and a more traditional Cabernet Sauvignon. Linda made a penne pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and mushrooms, and made Italian bread from scratch. She also made the chilled no-bake double chocolate torte for dessert. It was so good everyone had a second piece.

Diane now has an iPad Mini and Linda spent time with her after dinner helping her configure some things. They also managed to get connected through the iMessage feature. Storms rolled in around 9 PM and we had brief periods of heavy rain and diffuse lightning all around. There was a lull in the weather just before 11 PM so they gathered up their things and hit the road. I cleared the table and Linda loaded the dishwasher. She started it and then we were off to bed, tired from a long but very satisfying day.

2014/08/28 (R) This And That

Leave a reply

I put in a full day working on our garage project while Linda put in a full day working on this and that. She baked vegan muffins, made vegan rice pudding, worked at her computer on bills, banking, and RV club financial records, and helped me in the garage with drywall installation.

My first task was sanding down drywall compound from yesterday and then adding more in certain places. I then measured, marked, and cut the drywall for the inside of the new utility closet. Linda helped me install it. We had to cut one piece in half lengthwise in order to get it into position. I also had to drill a hole for the garage furnace thermostat cable and push it out through the utility closet wall. Once all of the pieces were secured with drywall screws I applied self-adhesive fiberglass tape to the seams and then applied drywall compound to the seams and screw dimples.

Jasper doing his cat thing.

Since I could not sand, prime, or paint until the drywall compound was dry I worked on some loose electrical ends. I installed a saddle connector in the side of the library HVAC for the armored AC power cable and a cable strain relief for the thermostat cable and A-C compressor control wires. Darryll had already installed these cables through the gas pipe hole, so I made a diagram of how they were connected, uninstalled them, re-routed them through the strain relief, and reconnected them. I prepped the AC power cable, partially installed the switch in the surface mount electrical box, and connected the armored cable to the saddle connector. The final AC power connections for the library HVAC unit will have to wait until the drywall is finished and the surface mount junction/switch box is installed.

I mounted the library thermostat on the wall above the air return but did not connect the wires. The color coding of the wires in the thermostat cable does not exactly match the labeling of the terminals and the instructions were less than clear, so I thought it best to leave this for Darryll. I removed the side panel from the Reznor garage furnace and made the AC power connections. I did not, however, connect the thermostat wires and I left the documentation packet inside the unit.

After dinner I checked e-mail and edited a half dozen blog pages before turning in for the night.

2014/08/26 (T) Dinner With Kate

2 Replies

Darryll planned to be back on Wednesday morning. He figures two more days to finish everything except the hookups to the gas meter. I figured I needed to have at least one coat of paint on the east garage wall today to stay ahead of him, so my first task after breakfast was to paint the wall.

Madeline being read to by Aunt Meghan with Grandma Linda.

Madeline goes for a ride on her new Radio Flyer tricycle.

When I was done with the morning painting I did a light sanding of the drywall compound on the outside of the utility closet walls. After a cursory inspection, I decided it was good enough and went ahead and painted it and then cleaned up the paint tools. I took care of a couple of minor electrical tasks and then sanded the library side of the former window A-C opening and applied some more drywall compound. I cleaned up my drywall tools and by 11:30 AM was done with construction projects for the day.

I got cleaned up just in time for lunch. We had left over Koshary, after which we sat outside and read. Linda is reading an e-book titled “Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat.” The book is about the intertwined evolution of cooking technique, cookware, and utensils. I started reading the September-October 2014 issue of The Gypsy Journal, which I had downloaded on Sunday and e-mailed to our iPads yesterday.

MEF3 steers the Radio Flyer with a little help from her dad.

We left around 2 PM for our son’s house in Ann Arbor, making a stop at the Whole Foods Market for some dry ingredients. The reason for our visit was to deliver Madeline’s new Radio Flyer convertible tricycle and visit until time to meet Kate for dinner. Madeline started day care yesterday, which is a really big deal. We were curious how the first two days went, and just wanted to see everyone; I think it’s only been a couple of weeks, but it feels much longer. Today was my lucky day as Madeline decided I was the designated book reader. She has let me read to her occasionally in the past, but usually goes to her mom, dad, aunt, or Grandma Linda, all of whom she has spent more time with than she has with me. It made for a very special afternoon for Grandpa Bruce.

The Radio Flyer tricycle even has a sunshade!

We left Brenda and Shawna’s house around 5:45 PM and found ourselves in the middle of the evening traffic jam on eastbound Washtenaw Avenue. We slowly worked our way east towards US-23 and then turned into a strip mall to pick up some disposable paint tray liners at an ACE Hardware store. We got back into the traffic flow using a street at the end of the strip mall that had a traffic signal. Once we were back on Washtenaw Avenue we had more reasonable traffic flow the rest of the way in to Ypsilanti.

After weighing several options, Kate chose the Wurst Bar in Ypsilanti for dinner. Linda had been their once before with Kate but it was my first visit. It was well rated on Yelp and the menu had several vegan options. They also had one of my favorite beers, the Lindeman Framboise, a raspberry lambic ale brewed in Vlezenbeek, Belgium. They were out of the Lindeman but had another lambic from a different producer. It came in something that looked like a large sparkling wine bottle and cost $15, so Linda and I split it. Long before hops were used in beers they were seasoned with fruits and vegetables. I’m not a big fan of hops, but I like fruit. The substitute was OK, but not what I recalled from the last time I had this at a restaurant in Frankenmuth, Michigan.

Grandma Linda’s turn to “drive” the Radio Flyer.

Kate had recently been to Paris, France and to both Venice and Padua in Italy with one of her nieces and nephews. She had printed about 40 photos (8×10) for us to see. While these are inherently beautiful places her photography was, as usual, superb. The Wurst Bar serves “tots” instead of French fries. Linda and I had some as an appetizer with vegan sausage crumbles, vegan cheese, and sliced jalapeños. Not health food, to be sure, but at least no animal products. For dinner Linda had the vegan wurst and I had the Asian tofu burger. Kate had a regular wurst and a dark beer on tap that she had not had before. She really liked it, but I did not catch the name.

It’s finally Grandpa Bruce’s turn to drive the tricycle.

By the time we were done eating the lights had been turned down and the music volume had been turned up, so we moved to Sweetwater Coffee and Tea a couple doors down the street. We all had coffee and to our delight they had a piece of vegan apple pie, which Linda took, and a piece of vegan mixed berry pie, which I took. I really like fruit pies but they have always been a rare treat; all the more so now that we eschew animal products. So tonight I had fruit beer and fruit pie.

I had planned to put a second coat of paint on the garage walls when we got home but the lateness of the hour disabused me of that idea and I went to bed instead.

Madeline shows her new tricycle to he mommy. It’s not a Subaru, but it’s pretty cool.

2014/08/25 (M) AT&T and the MPSC

Leave a reply

I was scheduled to participate in a meeting of the FMCA Education Committee at 4 PM today but it got rescheduled to Monday, September 8, same time. That was a welcomed change of plans which allowed me to concentrate on our construction project.

Roese Construction, the contractor for Consumer’s Energy, is still working along our street. The main gas lines are run. They are now digging the connection trenches, fusing the sections of pipe together, and filling the trenches back in. We heard them working at the west end of our property and walked down to see what they were doing and take a few photographs. A large backhoe was just starting to fill a trench at the northwest corner of our yard where two pieces of main line were joined with a branch line going to the cul-du-sac to the west. There was a lot of water in that trench and it looked like a (muddy) lap pool. The surface of the water was only about two feet below the surface of the ground. I asked the backhoe operator if that was ground water and he said it was. The northwest corner of our property is a low spot that forms small ponds around many of the trees when it rains, and stays wet for a very long time even after the surface water disappears.

We spent the morning and afternoon sanding drywall compound and touching up a few spots. While the compound was drying I worked on electrical tasks and Linda worked in the kitchen and did some weeding in the beds around the house. Somewhere in the middle of all that we put all of the sections of the ham radio tower back on the middle deck, had lunch, and made a trip to Lowe’s for a light switch and various cover plates. I also picked up an 18″ x 28″ sheet of 1/4″ thick Plexiglas to use as a temporary replacement for the fogged window in the bus when I finally get around to removing it to have it repaired.

Our AT&T phone and DSL service is worse than useless at the moment. After three un-returned phone calls to both the technician (who gave us his number and said to call him directly if the problem re-occurred within 30 days) and the infrastructure manager for this area (whose name and number we got from the technician) we were fed up, so we filed a complaint with the Michigan Public Service Commission. About four hours later we got a call from a women who claimed to be from the Office of the President of AT&T letting me know that she was in receipt of our commission filing and that she would be coordinating the “investigation and service repair process.” The audio level was low and the noise on the line was high, so I could barely hear her and said so. Apparently she heard the noise too, so at least she knew we were not making this up. She e-mailed us shortly thereafter with her name and contact information. That’s a start, but what we really want is the clean, reliable signal that we pay for.

There are things I can do, and need to do, at my computer that do not require me to be online, such as editing the rough drafts of blog posts and selecting/post-processing photographs. The last post I uploaded to our blog was for August 1st, so I am once again almost four weeks behind. I needed to finish processing the tree photos from last Thursday, put them in a Dropbox folder, and e-mail the link to Paul at Detroit Tree Recycling, but I did not get that done either. When I wasn’t eating or driving back and forth to Lowe’s I was working in the garage.

Speaking of food, Linda made stuffed mushrooms for dinner and served them with a side of grilled asparagus. Both were very tasty. After dinner I gave the east wall of the garage a final sanding and then worked on the utility closet wall while Linda vacuumed up the dust. I wiped down the wall with a barely damp sponge and applied a coat of Zinzer primer. It should be dry enough to paint in the morning.

I drove back to Lowe’s to return a couple of incorrect cover plates I had purchased earlier in the day and get the correct ones. I picked up another gallon of paint while I was there to make sure I had enough on hand for tomorrow. On the way home I had a nice QSO (ham radio contact or chat) with Mike (W8XH). Ham radio is fun and we have yet to get involved in making long distance (DX) contacts with folks all over the world on the HF (high frequency) bands. Getting our tower up with some HF antennas on it will help a lot.

2014/08/24 (N) The Critical Path

Leave a reply

The current “critical path” on the garage/HVAC project is the east wall of the garage which has to be finished before Darryll returns. Although not as pressing as the drywall work, our first task after breakfast was to (finally) connect the separate ground wire from the garage sub-panel to the house main electrical panel and remove the bonding screw that tied the grounds and neutrals together in the sub-panel. That took about an hour, but that was because it was work that had to be done carefully as the main panel was energized while I was working on it.

With the ground wire taken care of we sanded drywall compound on the east garage wall. We wiped the dust off with a slightly damp sponge and I applied the next coat of drywall compound.

We then worked on wiring. I finally decided on the locations for the two furnace switches, each of which had to be within three feet of their respective units. I decided to locate the switch for the library HVAC unit on the new wall opposite (20″) and above (16″) the cable entry hole in the side of the furnace. The switch will be in an outdoor rated surface mount junction box with the supply cable entering from the rear. I had already run the cable into the middle wall cavity and had to drill a hole through one of the studs to get the cable where I needed it to be.

I decided to locate the on/off switch for the ceiling mounted garage furnace on the ceiling about a foot to the right of the right rear corner, again using an outdoor rated surface mount junction box. The dedicated 15A cable was already routed to that general area so we just had to move it to the new location.

We also had to install the wiring for the thermostats. Darryll brought a large reel of 4-conductor, 18 AWG thermostat cable, so we had the material we needed. I was studying the installation instructions for the thermostats and it appeared that they needed 24 VAC to operate. I called Darryll and left a message regarding this. He called back fairly quickly and told me we did not need transformers as they were already in each of the furnaces. He also left me know he would be back on Wednesday morning.

With the transformer question answered we were able to proceed with the cable installation. The thermostat for the garage furnace will mount on the outside of the west wall of the new utility closet, so we had to run thermostat wire from that location through the attic to the ceiling mounted switch box. The thermostat for the library HVAC unit will mount on the wall to the right of the door into the garage and above the return air register/duct, so we also had to run thermostat wire from there through the garage attic and over to the location of the on/off switch in the utility closet. I worked in the attic while Linda worked in the garage.

We took a break for lunch and then started installing insulation in the utility closet walls. We got one staple installed and discovered that we were out of staples. That meant a trip to Lowe’s. Lowes’s is about six miles driving distance and we prefer not to go for just one small thing, so we made a list. The Arrow staple gun takes T50 staples. The surface mount junction boxes have several threaded holes into which you can screw different clamps depending on how the cable is connected. I planned to use flexible armored cable, sometimes referred to as “greenfield”, to bring 120VAC power to the furnaces. Lowe’s had 6′ lengths of armored cable with an extra foot of wire on each end. I needed a little more than 36″ for the library furnace and a little less than 36″ for the garage furnace, so that worked out nicely. The guy in the electrical department got me set up with the right clamps for the ends called saddle connectors.

When I got home, I discovered that I had bought brads rather than staples, so Linda headed back to Lowe’s to return the brads and buy the staples. While she was gone I pulled the wires out of the armored cable and cut the armor into two pieces. I fed the wires back through the shorter piece and connected it between the garage furnace and the switch box. Linda got back before I could complete the cable for the other furnace, so I set it aside to finish later.

With a good supply of staples we insulated the west wall of the utility closet and the space above the door on the south wall. We then installed drywall over those same areas. We had to notch around the flue pipe and the black iron gas pipe, but we measured carefully (and twice) and the panel fit just right. We applied fiberglass tape to the one vertical seam, and prepared a length of corner bead for the outside corner at the junction of the two walls. Linda prepared dinner while I applied joint compound to the seam and screw dimples. I mudded the corner, pressed the corner bead in place, and then mudded over it lightly. I then did some touch up sanding on the east garage wall and applied what I hoped would be a final coat of drywall compound.

I finished just in time to clean up and have dinner; vegan Pad Thai made from scratch. A small glass of the 2009 Egri Merlot and some lemon melon later for dessert put a nice cap on a very productive day.

2014/08/23 (S) Square Waves

Leave a reply

We have so much to do at home and on the bus that we might have skipped the SLAARC (ham radio club) breakfast in South Lyon this morning, but I had agreed to meet Chuck at his shop (bus garage) at 10 AM in Novi and to bring Mike (W8XH) along with his oscilloscope to look at the tachometer signal, or lack thereof. We had a nice chat with our ham radio friends, discussed having dinner in a week or so with Bruce and Linda, and then headed to Chuck’s shop.

We had two different opinions as to what signal we might find, if any, at the end of the wires that connect to Chuck’s tachometer. Matt, from Bob’s Speedometer, told me that the signal to both the VDO tachometer and speedometer were variable frequency square waves at 3 to 5 volts peak and that the electronics in the gauge moved the needle in proportion to the frequency. Mike (W8XH) had talked to Jim (N8KUE), who works in the research lab at Ford Motor Company, and Jim was of the opinion that the input to these gauges was a pulse width modulated signal. With pulse-width modulation the frequency and amplitude of the waveform are constant but the width of the “pulse” (the “on time” of non-zero voltage) varies from zero to some maximum percentage of the half cycle, up to 100%. If it is on for the entire half cycle it becomes a square wave. The longer the pulse (on time percentage) the more energy is transmitted. The gauge electronics can convert that to a needle position or run a motor faster or slower, such as might drive an odometer.

So which was it? Well…neither. What we saw was an alternating current signal that appeared to simply be an impulse (sudden spike in the voltage), one positive and one negative per cycle, with the frequency responding in direct proportion to the engine RPM. The impulse had a rapid but noticeable decay time that appeared to me to exponential, but we did not have the wires connected to a load and that may have affected the signal. The voltage we were seeing appeared to be in 300 mV range, a far cry from the 3 – 5 volts we expected.

We loaded the cardboard in my car before going to breakfast, so when we were done at Chuck’s we headed directly to Recycle Livingston. From there we went to pet Supplies Plus for some cat litter and then to Lowe’s for four more sheets of drywall (Sheetrock) and a large tub of better drywall compound. After fighting with the back wall of the garage recently and having trouble with using the patching and repair compound yesterday, I wanted a drywall compound that would go on easier and smoother. It could just be my technique, of course; I wasn’t that good at dry-walling 32 years ago, and feel like I have lost what little technique I once had.

Back home we unloaded everything, changed into our work clothes, and had lunch; grilled “cheese” sandwiches with tomatoes and dark leafy greens and fresh peaches, ripened to perfection.

While Linda sanded the drywall compound I applied yesterday I removed the panel from the library side of the opening for the old window A-C unit. I insulated the cavity, cut and installed a new piece of drywall, and re-taped the seams. I helped Linda finish the sanding, wiped off the dust with a wrung out sponge, and then applied another coat of drywall compound. I then applied a first cost of “mud,” as drywall compound is commonly called, to the filler panel in the library.

In preparation for dry-walling the new utility closet we had to do some carpentry to box around the flue and gas pipe where they pass through the west wall. We also had to box around the supply air duct where it passes above the utility closet door. Finally, we added some backer boards along the edge of the platform by the west wall. The purpose of all of this carpentry was to provide backing along all drywall edges so it will be supported and can be secured. Our final task for the day was to trim a piece of 2×4 to block off the top of the wall cavity where the return air duct is connected next to the door between the library and the garage.

For dinner we had leftovers from Thursday: Koshary and pita bread with vegan garlic “butter.” Linda read somewhere recently that drier white wines are generally considered (by someone) to go better with Middle Eastern food, but we thought our 2009 Egri Merlot went quite well with dinner. Of course, Koshary is an Egyptian dish, and so perhaps more Mediterranean than Middle Eastern. All of that reminded me that there really are no rules about these things; drink what you like and enjoy life.

20140821 (R) Words With Friends

Leave a reply

With a dry morning on tap I took care of chores after breakfast while Linda worked on preparations for dinner. First I photographed trees around our entire property that were dead or obviously distressed and not doing well. Next I took all of the sections of our Heights aluminum tower off of the back deck, where they have been stored since we bought it in May, and laid them out in the yard in the order in which they go together. I then photographed all of the pieces, including details of how they interconnect, along with the fold-over assembly, fold-over motor, and bearing plate.

Thrust bearing plate for ham radio tower.

I transferred the photos to my computer and then processed a selection of the tower photos, resizing and sharpening them. I put them in a folder in my Dropbox and e-mailed the link to Heights Tower Systems along with a description of what we have, what we intend to do, and what we think we need to do it. I also gave them the name of the amateur radio operator we bought the tower from. He was the original owner.

The gear-motor for the fold-over mount. Mast rotor in the plastic bag to the right.

Fold-over mount standing up on hinge end.

One meaning of having “words with friends” suggests that they might not be your friends anymore, but in this case it’s the name of an online game from Hasbro that Linda plays with Karen Limkemann. Karen and Steve came to visit this today and arrived around 3:30 PM. We all talked for an hour and then Steve and I went to my office to look at our Linux computer while Linda started pulling dinner together.

Ham radio tower sections laid out in the yard end-to-end.

Linda spent much of yesterday and this morning preparing this meal. She made a salad dressing from scratch, crushed red lentil soup from scratch, pita bread from scratch, mixed up a small batch of garlic butter, and made Koshary from scratch. We had a semi-dry white wine from Leelanau Cellars with the meal, and red grapes for dessert. The meal was truly outstanding.

Heights Tower Systems aluminum tower sections laid out in the yard.

After dinner we took a stroll around the property and showed them the landscaping work, the (disassembled) ham tower, the proposed location of the barn, and the natural gas and HVAC projects. Back at the house we discussed past travels and future plans at some length before they needed to head for home.

2014/08/20 (W) Like A Well-Oiled Clock

Leave a reply

Darryll and Alec (DCM Heating & Cooling) were back today to continue working on the garage and library HVAC project. I was talking to them as they unloaded tools and materials when I got a call back from Paul Keech.

Paul has changed the name of his company from Paul’s Tree Service to Detroit Tree Recycling and is also running American Mulch. As I was told yesterday he is trying to focus on tree removal, especially wood lots with multiple trees, rather than tree trimming. Among other reasons, the trees he removes provides the raw material for his mulch business. Also, the guy who did most of his climbing the last ten years has moved on to another job and it’s hard for Paul to run a business when he’s up in a tree, even with a cell phone. I tried to describe the trimming and removal work we need done but in the end we agreed that I would take some photos, put them in a Dropbox folder, and e-mail him the link. He also encouraged me to get a couple of quotes from some companies more local to our new location.

While I was talking to Paul, Darryll found a small leak in the reducer at the T-fitting behind the garage and tightened it. The pipe out of this reducer will bring gas into the garage and was the last piece of pipe they worked on the last time they were here. Alec reset the pressure to 12 PSI and it appears to be holding better than it has up to this point.

In the course of the day, they…

…finished setting the Library furnace/air-conditioner and connected the parts together.
…cut the hole for the return air register and installed the return air duct.
…ran the supply air ducting from the top of the unit along top of the ceiling, over the top of the utility closet door, and then angled it to run along east wall at the ceiling. All of the duct outside the closet is insulated. Two flexible ducts will come off the top and run through the attic to supply air through ceiling registers on the east end of the library.
…marked the location for the two registers that will be at the bottom of two rigid ducts running down the east garage wall to supply air to the library just above the baseboard heat radiators.
…removed the old library window A-C unit and covered the hole with cardboard. We will have to patch the opening on both sides with drywall and paint it.
…shut off the propane to the old library wall-hung space heater, removed the unit, capped the line (iron pipe), turned the gas back on and checked for leaks.
…connected the double-walled flue pipe for the library furnace.
…connected the double-walled flue pipe for the garage furnace.
…ran the 1/2″ iron pipe for the gas supply to the garage furnace.

They will take care of the air-conditioner condenser/compressor installation on a subsequent visit. In the meantime I need to install electrical junction boxes for the two furnaces, which must have switches located within three feet of each unit. I also need to run new 12 AWG 2+g NM cable for old A-C condenser/compressor and repurpose the existing A-C condenser/compressor wiring as an outside 120 VAC / 15 Amp outlet.

We still needed to repair drywall in the library and upper east garage wall and install new drywall on the lower east wall of the garage and on the new utility closet walls. The lower half of the east garage wall is the next thing I have to do as I need to have it done before he comes back to finish the duct work.

I got a call from Chuck Spera just before noon letting me know that he was headed to his shop to pick up his old VDO bus tachometer and take it to Bob’s Speedometer Service on Bergin Road. Bergin is an east-west road about one mile north of our house. Bob’s was over at Old US-23, less than five minutes away. I met Chuck there at 12:30 PM and we met with Matt who handles their VDO instrument repairs. He tested Chuck’s tach and pronounced it broken but probably repairable, so Chuck decided to leave it there.

Matt did confirm for us that both the tachometer and the speedometer take a square wave input signal in the 3 – 5 volt range with deflection of the needle proportional to the frequency of the waveform. Presumably this same signal regulates the speed of a motor that drives the gears of the odometer. I had discussed this very situation with Mike (W8XH) just last night and he is willing to bring his 100MHz 2-channel storage oscilloscope and help us look for and trace these signals if needed. Once we have known good gauges installed knowing what waveform to look for will help greatly with troubleshooting should they still fail to indicate the appropriate information.

After we were done at Bob’s I headed over to the Meijer’s northeast of M-59 and US-23 to get a few things for Linda. By the time I got home, Glen Williams of Tenor Clocks LLC had arrived to service our grandfather clock. I “broke” it about a month ago by trying to wind it at just the wrong time and it has not chimed since then. It has also never been oiled in the 11 years since we bought it and Glen told us on Saturday that it should be cleaned and oiled every 5 – 7 years. (We saw Glen at the GLCC/CCO rally in Clio, Michigan this past Saturday when we were there.) Glen took the mechanism out and examined it and said that nothing was broken. Apparently it finally bound up the last time I wound it from lack of proper oiling. He cleaned it, oiled it, and checked it for wear but did not see any. He reassembled it, checked the operation and timing, and said it was running smoothly and keeping very accurate time “…like a well-oiled clock.”

Although my time on the computer today was limited, I managed to post my blog entry for August 1st and started selecting photos for other posts. I updated the Technical page on the SLAARC website with a document on low band antennas for Field Day use, and added a link to an online Smith Chart Tutorial. I then updated the online roster. I am at the point where I need to generate WordPress user accounts for the club members so I looked more carefully at the WP-Members plug-in documentation to see if there was a way to have the website e-mail each member as I create their account. It appears that there is, but it will take a little more work on my part to get that set up and working correctly. As I was working on this our AT&T DSL line started dropping out; again.

Linda spent part of the day preparing food ahead in advance of having company tomorrow. She held back some of the crushed red lentil soup for our dinner and served it alongside sandwiches. While we were eating we noticed that the phone said “Line In Use.” We knew we were not using it, but I picked up one of the handsets, pushed “Talk”, and got a very loud, very noisy busy signal. We checked all of the phones to make sure there wasn’t a problem with one of them. There wasn’t. When I checked again the message said “Check Tel Line.” That usually means we won’t have a dial tone when we push “Talk” and that was, indeed, the case.

Ken is the service technician that has been out twice to try to resolve the problem and he left his AT&T cell phone number in case we had recurring problems. He also left his manager’s name and phone number. I called and left a message for Ken and then called and left a message for his manager, making it very clear that Ken has been working hard to resolve our problem and we are happy with the service he is providing. I also tried to convey that the service disruptions are interfering with our ability to do things online, like edit websites. It’s bad enough that the data rate is so slow, but we depend on our “always on” DSL service to always be on.

We went to Lowe’s after dinner to buy a couple sheets of drywall. We looked for special cover plates with a switch opening in one half and a round hole in the other, but did not find anything like that. We stopped at Teeko’s on the way back and had Jeff roast two more pounds of half-caff blends for us; one Ethiopian Yirgacheffe and the other Seattle Blend. He was still out of the Sweet Dreams decaf blend, which we have him mix 50-50 with the regular Seattle Blend to make Sweet Seattle Dreams, but he is supposed to be getting some in his shipment tomorrow.

Back home we unloaded the drywall, had some fresh strawberries for dessert, and read quietly for a while. I’ve been reading the PDF version of the 2nd edition of The Mobile Internet Handbook and am done except for the glossary and the appendices. It is over twice as many pages as the 1st edition and is the definitive resource on connectivity for RVers in particular.

2014/08/17 (N) Do Nothing Day

Leave a reply

Today was kind of a do nothing day. We slept in, had waffles (vegan) for breakfast, skipped lunch, both took naps, and had dinner. I did a load of laundry in the morning and Linda worked on her counted cross stitch project for part of the day. We both spent a little time reading. I had planned to put in a long day at my desk, and tried looking up some information on Heights Tower Systems, but our telephone and DSL connections were acting up again and I did not feel like dealing with an on again, off again Internet connection. While trying to find a PDF file on my iPad I got distracted and spent some time deleting documents from Adobe Reader that I no longer needed. Even the cats took the day off and spent most of it sleeping. We don’t have a lot of days like this, but I enjoy them when we do.

2014/08/14 (R) All Computer All Day

Leave a reply

From the time I got up (before 8 AM) until I went to bed (after midnight) I pretty much worked at my desk, specifically at my computer. Much of my time was spent on revising the pages of the new SLAARC WordPress website and making most of them publicly viewable. I also revised the User’s Guide and sent it off to be reviewed. Mixed in with that work I uploaded three more blog posts.

Another chunk of my time was spent dealing with the financial and membership records of our FMCA Freethinkers Chapter and a little time was spent with e-mail and social media, although I really limit the amount of time that goes towards the later. Later in the evening I finally logged in to the Intro to Linux course on edX and went through a short Intro to edX demo course. When I went to shut down my laptop it had 28 updates to install and when it restarted, the Outlook 2013 icon had disappeared from my taskbar. The program was still there on the Apps screen and it still worked, but that was momentarily un-nerving. I also had a Linux update to install.

It was a beautiful day today with cool, dry northwest breezes, more like early fall than the dog days of summer. It was the perfect day for working outside and I wish I could have. We had oatmeal for breakfast, tofu hotdogs for lunch, and lentil loaf with baked potatoes and roasted Brussels sprouts for dinner. It was all simple but very tasty fare. Coffee and juice went with breakfast, green tea with lunch and during the day, and sparkling water with dinner. After lunch I checked the air pressure in the black iron pipe and it was down to 9 PSI. Darryll set it at 12 PSI yesterday afternoon and I doubt that the pressure would move that much just from the change in ambient temperature. I just hope the leak is someplace easy for him to find and fix.

The Phase Place

Welcome to the next phase (hosted by QTH.com)

Category Archives: WFPB

2014/09/28 (N) Oh Canada

2014/09/27 (S) Eat Cut Eat

2014/09/26 (F) Hope Is Not A Strategy

2014/09/25 (R) Two M’s

2014/09/20 (S) Bus Talk

2014/09/17 (W) Hooked Up

2014/09/16 (T) Boiled Over

2014/09/14 (N) Family Ham

2014/09/13 (S) Overnight Guest

2014/09/12 (F) Posted

20140911 (R) Rooted

2014/09/10 (W) A Functioning Landline

2014/09/07 (N) Findlay Hamfest

2014/09/06 (S) Deliveries

2014/09/05 (F) WordPress 4.0

2014/09/03 (W) Pine Cone Midden

2014/09/02 (T) No More Painting

2014/09/01 (M) A Day To Labor

2014/08/28 (R) This And That

2014/08/26 (T) Dinner With Kate

2014/08/25 (M) AT&T and the MPSC

2014/08/24 (N) The Critical Path

2014/08/23 (S) Square Waves

20140821 (R) Words With Friends

2014/08/20 (W) Like A Well-Oiled Clock

2014/08/17 (N) Do Nothing Day

2014/08/14 (R) All Computer All Day