Author: Mark Vogt

13 Jul 2021, a day in progress

This is about all I have left of my parents.

Narrative: I was awake very early and I’ve had this itchy spot next to my eye for a bit. Normally when I’ve gotten Basil Cell Carcinoma it’s surface is flaky like dandruff. These are itchy, but not scaly on the surface. (At least not yet.) Now that I know what to look for, they don’t get very big before I see a doc. Now that I am on Medicare I don’t have to have a referral, just make an appointment!

They are still quite small, but I have an appointment tomorrow with the skin doc. I’ve had cancer cut out of my nose and a very tiny one cut out of my ear lobe. (The Doc didn’t see that one for a whole year, I had to point it out to him.) The rest of the time they’ve frozen the lesion and I was good to go. We get a full body scan once a year.

We installed six systems in Nevada, Hours of backup power, Fortigate Firewall with VPN remote network access, Eight D-Link wireless cameras, Six VeSync outlets to turn appliances On/Off, Eight Hue Light Bulbs with Hue Hub, Home Assistant (Automation) to log the house humidity and temp.

The only anomaly at present is the camera for the front door has moved significantly from it’s original position. But luckily we can still see the entire ramp! Hopefully the systems will hold together until we return.

I saw in the news that Coffee prices are skyrocketing so we put in an order for 16 bags of our Favorite Coffee.

We got CPAP supplies yesterday from Aerocare and they shipped a mismatched mask and supplies for an older mask. We called them and now they are shipping the correct supplies and we have to send the supplies we got yesterday back to them.

If we have a power outage in Nevada this alarm will go off waking us up.

Then we can use the house network UPS to power our units overnight. (Not sure how we’d charge the batteries, solar would be a good option?)

The Air conditioning is keeping up with the extreme 115 Degree temperatures pretty well. (I’ll get worried if it doesn’t cycle in the middle of the day.) The thermostat is set to 78 degrees, i’ll put a NEST on the house next trip out so that I can manage/control the temp remotely. The short cycling from the bathroom vent is helping keep the humidity up during the heat of the day.

Laid out some Weed+Feed to knock down the Creeping Charlie that has taken over our lawn.

12 Aug 2021, a day in progress

This is about all I have left of my parents.

Narrative: Sipped my coffee while I worked on the wiring for next Sunday’s service. I checked the audio we recorded and it all looks good. At least all 16 channels were recorded! I copied the files to my NAS and boxed up the SD card for the trip to TH’s house.

I found one movie on the NAS that was corrupted over the last few days, i’ll have to copy it again from a backup.

I put some weed+Feed on the Creeping Charlie on my lawn as a test. I looked it up online too and that’s the recommended way of dealing with them.

Put the battery chargers on two of the 48V battery banks that I tested yesterday.

Dinner was awsome, we made Bisquick Biscuits for dinner!

Checked Nevada, everything looks good. Time for bed.

11 July 2021, a day in progress

This is about all I have left of my parents.

Narrative: Got up really early, like 7 AM to get ready to do an inside service today. Drove to the school at 7:30 and D.E.’s son was waiting on me. We were totally rushed for the entire service, but it went well overall. Packing went ok and we went out with J+J afterwards for some Mexican food.

Had a LONG 4 hour nap before wasting away the evening making plans for Next Sunday. I bought some cables and made some design documents before retiring for the evening.

Nevada is in good shape, the cameras and Home Automation are working very well so far. The pump house door is still closed.

I charged my 48V battery banks a couple days ago and let them rest a couple days before testing them. I connected one of the two Eaton 1500W UPS units and put a 500W load on them (10A) and the batteries are fine. The internal batteries are disconnected on these units so I connected the charging cables to top them off over night. There are two circuits that run all of the electronics in our home. The two Eaton UPS units can take over each of them from the 3KW Tripp Lite Powerverter. There are a total of four 48V 35AH battery banks in case of a long duration power failure. The Tripp Lite Powerverter has the responsibility for a short term outage. Once it’s depleted I can bring up the Eaten units an charge the batteries with a tiny generator.

Nevada has two UPS units, the house UPS is 840WH of battery and the garage UPS has 200 WH of battery with a 2.5 hour limited run time to protect the batteries.

10 July 2021, a day in progress

This is about all I have left of my parents.

Narrative: We had a huge victory today.

The garbage can is no longer on the curb at my dad’s house. Someone came to the rescue and hauled the trash can to the side of the garage for us today.

The pump house door has also stayed closed, we still do not know why it was open every time when we returned to my dad’s house.

Spent most of the day preparing for tomorrow’s service. At the end of the day it looks like an outside service on the inside. Generated and distributed the drawings to the team for the first inside service in a year!

8AM tomorrow, the show goes on!