Blog – Page 58 – Mark's Blog

8 December 2018, a day from Mark’s past

Status: There is a pile of stuff in the living room and somewhat less on the porch in the house. There are so many nook and crannies in that house, it took a minute to bag everything yesterday.

Plans: Two teams, one cleaning one moving. The stuff in the living room we’ll just load all of it up and move to Grandpa’s in box trailer first thing. Second is a the stuff in front of the Bumpkin, again we’re down to four hours. Just move it to Grandpa’s. Inside the Bumkin had been compressed considerably with the collapsing of the dog crates. We should be able to get all of the dog stuff moved in one shot. R can mop the floors while I am moving the stuff, she should be on the farm by 8AM. I might be able to unload the tac shed, but that’s a stretch. M might be able to help, but we’d have to go get her with child in tow.

Tough Stuff: The square platforms that the puppies were on are too big to carry in the trailer. (They are also covered in dog feces.) We should be easily out of the house by Noon, we’re not likely to be finished with everything by noon.

Narrative: Ate breakfast at the hotel and made it to the farm shortly after 8AM. Moved all the loose stuff in the living room and the porch into the trailer. Loaded the bags of trash onto the PU truck. 09:00 left for the recycling center while Auntie mopped the floors. Dropped off the bagged trash and headed for grandpa’s to empty the trailer of house stuff into grandpa’s shed. Emptied the PU truck bed that was full of wood onto Grandpa’s burn pile and headed back to mom’s farm.

10:00, time is running by so quickly… Loaded all the big wood stuff into the trailer and the metal cages we crushed last night into the PU truck and parked it near the gate. We left for lunch for the showing at noon. We overslept just a little and Auntie called wondering where we were. I asked her to meet us at grandpa’s to save time. We drove to mom’s farm and I drove the PU truck back to grandpa’s farm and unloaded the large pieces of wood from the bumpkin lawn onto Aunties burn pile.

I had bought mom a new and familiar battery charger and a pile of rechargeable batteries for her landline cordless phone. The batteries are also for their 6 or more cute LED lanterns that I bought them in case of power failure.

We called it a day and went to Chili’s for Din Din and a Margarita to relax. In the hotel typing on the blog by 7PM. Wife is watching NCIS reruns with commercials. YUK

Tomorrow: It’s unlikely that a Blog entry will be made tomorrow morning.

7 December 2018, a day from Mark’s past

Status: The editor for this Blog has changed and I don’t have time to figure it out this morning so I am keeping this simple.

Planned:Wife didn’t sleep at all and of course I didn’t sleep much either with all the drama. All I can do now is run until I get to tired and will have to lay down for a nap. (There is still one bed at the farm.) I plan on getting breakfast here at the hotel at 6AM. Drive to the farm with the car and drive the PU truck to grandpa’s. Empty the box trailer and haul it back to mom’s farm and start loading up. I don’t know what R has planned.

Narrative:Very busy day, sheesh. Ate breakfast at 06:00, drove to Mom’s farm to get PU truck. Loaded PU truck and drove it to grandpa’s. Unloaded PU truck and unloaded box trailer. Attached box trailer and headed back to mom’s farm. Auntie showed up and she took a load of trash to the recycling center while I loaded the box trailer by rolling the heavy furniture into the trailer. She found out that the recycling center near her accepts furniture, so we both drove there and unloaded two recliners, two dressers, mom’s old mattress and a large headboard. Auntie was glad they all didn’t end up at her place. Our second load was about 10 bags of trash and the couch from the living room. We broke for lunch and started cleaning the house with a box of large trash bags. I grabbed Auntie and we brought another 16 bags of trash to the recycling center. We’re working on the stuff we brought into the living room and the stuff on the porch. (There’s nothing on the lawn)

M and D came to help later in the day and we broke down about 10 wire cages for transport to the recycling center tomorrow. We also packed up a heavy table saw in D’s truck for recycling. There is still quite a pile in front of the Bumpkin. 1st priority is to clear out the living room, then the porch. Then the lawn on the Bumpkin, then the Bumpkin itself. We have visitors at 12 Noon when work will cease for the day.

Status:The PU truck is full of wood components and the box trailer is empty tonight.

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT set clear goals for the day? No
Did I DMBT make progress to those goals? No
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT fix something today? Yes
Did I DMBT improve something today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
Did I DMBT be fully engaged? Yes
*Did My Best To
Injuries: Arguments: Exercise: Feeling words: Travel: Noteworthy: Accomplishments: Purchases: Engineering: Project: Theme: Engineering: Repairs: Pi News:

6 December 2018, a day from Mark’s past

Status: Packed for a trip to Florida today.

Narrative: We had our morning coffee until 8AM when the house turned off the TV as it will for the duration of our trip. We spent the next two hours packing and cleaning up for the trip. We got on the road at a reasonable 10AM and made good time. We sent D a message informing him of our expected arrival time. D on his own, got off 2 hours early at 4PM and called me from the gate while we were eating dinner. I offered a compromise of letting him get dinner while I drove to Aunties house for the keys. We all ended up at the house around 6PM, dusk. M stayed in the truck as instructed while D and I walked the buildings and worked up a plan for tomorrow. Their Cousins arrived sometime later and spent a good amount of time on the farm D and M. Auntie did a bang up job cleaning the kitchen and left maybe 10 garbage bags in the living room floor. I couldn’t tell from the contents whether they were going to the dump or to Grandpa’s. The night was falling apart with everyone and the baby so I decided to call it a night. D was quite willing to work, I was just done for the day and the were too many distractions. Everyone went their separate ways and we are at the hotel unwinding and getting some badly needed rest.

Tomorrow: Clean up the inside of the buildings and take trash to the recycling center.

Project: We are planning on hitting the ground early tomorrow as best we can and bag the house trash until the recycling center opens. Then we’ll start hauling trash pickup load by pickup load. (They only take bagged trash so the furniture will take another path.) The metal should have a separate recycling bin, we should be good with all the wire cages in the bumpkin. I will ask them if the bundled bags are paper and can be recycled without being bagged.

We still have a significant amount of stuff that is more than a pickup truck full going to grandpa’s, Baseline land fill and the recycling center. We’re planning clearing a room, cleaning it without taking more than an hour and moving on to the next room. My best guess is that we’ll be 80% on the house by noon except for the porch and the office. If R is helping us we might be done with the office a little after lunch. Hopefully the shop-VAC in the shed works good enough to use on the office closet. (Feces and dust)

I plan on emptying the box trailer before D gets off work. When D gets there we’ll load all that’s headed for the baseline land fill into the box trailer. (Probably furniture only.) The second option is to drop it all off onto grandpa’s burn pile, it would be quicker and get the stuff off the farm by tomorrow night. Not sure we want to drive the box trailer at night, but we might get it to Grandpa’s in one load.

Hopefully this comes together by early morning, if it does we might be done tomorrow.

https://www.verywellfamily.com/feelings-words-from-a-to-z-2086647

5 December 2018, a day from Mark’s past

Status: Land contract still not signed, tubs still on living room floor.

Narrative: Didn’t sleep well, but that’s about normal these days. Had a nice couple cups of coffee while I talked to my sister about our plans for today. We got word about lunch that the contract was signed, closing is Wednesday. We are making plans to do a quick cleanup of the property. Sent a list of items to be picked up by the Auction people tomorrow to my Auntie. I am bringing a new type battery charger and I’ve bought batteries and a new charger that should arrive next week at Grandpa’s.

Purchases: Got a great deal on six Patriot Fuel USB charging Lithium batteries at Fry’s.

Tomorrow: Drive to Florida and stay in a hotel this time until Sunday.

https://www.verywellfamily.com/feelings-words-from-a-to-z-2086647

4 December 2018, a day from Mark’s past

Status: Land is still up for sale, living room still has tubs to be sorted.

Narrative: Not planning on doing much until After 11AM. Cleaned out another tub and put a lot of stuff away today. Tested the backup power source for the TV and the computers in the “Cave”, each have a pure sinewave inverter with a takeover relay. It also appears that the three isolation diodes are going to work out between the three banks of batteries. The network came to our rescue today at the 11th hour no less. I was able to print a document in Florida from Atlanta, have them sign it, then scan it back to Atlanta across the network. (I was pretty proud how well it worked.)

Tomorrow: Too Early to call.

https://www.verywellfamily.com/feelings-words-from-a-to-z-2086647

3 December 2018, a day from Mark’s past

Status: We have baby German Roaches in the bathroom, so apparently we brought some egg sacks from Florida.

Narrative: I had planned on spending a little time keeping the roaches from gaining a foothold in our homestead. We’re currently counting on roach hotels with pheromones to attract them and borax powder under the fridge. Having only seen a few and we’ve killed the ones we’ve seen I’ll call that even. Seeing the baby today doesn’t make me happy, but it’s only one so far. If they start appearing in larger numbers we can get an exterminator service for a year for roughly $250.00 where they spray every three months.

I am still playing with the tunnel configurations to grandpa’s house. I was able to stop the ping to mom’s farm and the link stayed up. I am trying the same configuration for the Atlanta link. Both the Tampa links are down. The two links are still up this evening, so that appears to be the fix. (We’ll really need the tunnels tomorrow!)

I’ve been a secretary all day doing follow-ups and writing documents. The wife is getting bored now that her class is over with. (It didn’t help I was so busy.) She did go to the pool and got groceries. Updated mom’s monthly budget and sent them a copy. Transferred the monthly allotment into the Expense account so Ricky can pay her bills.

I did sort through two more baskets of stuff from Florida today, we’re almost to a point that I can put up the Christmas tree.

Engineering: I worked on the house power distribution today and repaired the backup battery power for the Television. (The TV has it’s own power source if the power is off more than about 7 hours.) The solar panels charge three banks of batteries, TV battery backup, Refrigerator Battery backup and CPAP battery backup. The CPAP battery backup is currently located in a closet where it’s not much use. I don’t want to move it to the garage (Too Hot) and there’s not enough room in the bedroom for it. The “Other” option is to locate the batteries in my cave and run the wires through the wall to the inverters. Undecided whether that’s the direction for all the batteries in the garage. The heat in the summertime is very detremental to the length of service for the 2,000.00 worth of batteries in there.

Tomorrow: Sign the offer letter!

https://www.verywellfamily.com/feelings-words-from-a-to-z-2086647

2 December 2018, a day from Mark’s past

Status: Living room still has a few tubs left, a family of four made an offer on the land that’s almost palatable.

Narrative: It’s Sunday morning and I’ve checked the tunnels I worked on yesterday only to find out that the two tunnels to Todd are also restored. Yea! There are at least two Raspberry Pi’s on each of the three locations, most of them are configured as a “Pi-Hole” DNS filter. All of them can be remoted into using an VNC graphic interface or an SSH session. I setup a ping to each endpoint to maintain the links, I know it’s crude. But it’ll work until I can find a way to keep the tunnels up. (Maybe a keep alive?)

The printer on the farm has a bad printhead, but it can scan documents. The printer at grandpa’s farm is fully capable of scanning/printing remotely. After we sell mom’s farm we can discuss any cameras that mom/Auntie want on their farm. It would make sense to have a camera in grandpa’s shed since it is fairly remote from the house. It would also make sense to have a camera on the horse barn and or Tack room. There are 12 cameras on mom’s farm that can be repurposed after the land sells.

Church services was hard today, I was tired and it was a long day with the Christmas Play dress rehearsal. (Which wasn’t because everyone wasn’t in costume today.) I did have a script, what I didn’t have was how many people speaking, light cues and other details. She said that she’d provide someone in the sound booth with us next week. Audio cue was easy, One song. One graphic on the screen. Light cues also are pretty easy, one scene with a spotlight otherwise a simple lit stage.

Sis sent me a 12 page document that I’ve got to read by 7PM. Daughter is bringing a laptop to repair tonight after work.

Engineering: The primary UPS on the house is only designed to keep things running for a couple hours with two 100AH batteries. The secondary “Pure Sinewave” UPS has a significantly lower load and should last about 7 hours at which time my Internet and landline phone die. It doesn’t make sense to try and extend the secondary UPS to provide power for the two CPAP machines in the bedroom. If I locate the CPAP UPS in the garage then the summer heat will reduce the life of the batteries. If I locate them in the bedroom it takes up considerable space and I need to run a wire from the solar panels to charge the batteries. The space is the tall pole in the tent today.

Tomorrow: Make a counter offer for the land if we can get through the paperwork.

https://www.verywellfamily.com/feelings-words-from-a-to-z-2086647

1 December 2018, a day from Mark’s past

Status: Going to be a rainy day, good for getting organized.

Narrative: Sent a link to my network using GMail to mom in Florida. Called her and had her click on the link I sent her. (Raspberry Pi) When she clicked on the link her firewall in Florida dialed into mine here in Atlanta. Once the tunnel to Atlanta was established I could build a link to the farm (As a backup link.) That link came up without any problems.
I then added her printer to my laptop so I can scan and print to grandpa’s house from Atlanta. (Like I can with the farm printer.) I’ve reconfigured the Grandpa-Atlanta link using the Farm-Grandpa link. What I don’t know is if the links will reestablish themselves upon a power failure. We’ll have to wait on that one, right now I’m enjoying everything talking like it should. I successfully logged into the 2nd Raspberry Pi and configured it to be a Pi Hole to protect the DNS entries. I also configured the firewall to use the two Pi-Holes as DNS servers. The only remaining thing to work on is the firewall time configuration.

I had a really good day today, weird since it’s been raining all day.

Tomorrow: Church services and Christmas Play rehearsal.

https://www.verywellfamily.com/feelings-words-from-a-to-z-2086647

30 November 2018, a day from Mark’s past

Status: Two very full fruit crates from Florida are left to be sorted and put away.

Narrative: I’ve had a problem for a while that the calluses of my feet crack and get infected. The first thing I do is to saw open the crack so that it can breathe and I can get medicine in the wound. Softening the callus is next on the list using a lotion of some kind. The hard part about that is I generally don’t wear shoes in the house. I wear socks to keep my feet clean, the socks in turn absorb the lotion reducing the healing affect I wanted. So, I came up with putting plastic bags on my feet under my socks?

Our 32 bags of Coffee arrived today.

I worked on the living room tubs and reintegrating the larger 18AH batteries back into the house electrical system. The first recipient was the DC supply for some of the smaller lights in the house it has a primary and secondary power supply with battery backup. I pulled the batteries off the secondary supply in March to supplement the farm’s network. I also put ferrite beads on the wires at the lights to reduce the Electro Magnetic Interference (EMI) generated by the lights.

It turns out that the 12V DC lights from Amazon are very noisy electrically and we occasionally loose our TV reception because of the low voltage lights in the house. (I need to start looking for UL on the bulbs.) I saw an automotive bayonet to E-26 Edison adapter for $15 on Amazon, but that’s outrageous.

I am going all out tonight to get a good nights sleep. I’ve put a “Breathe Rite” strip on my nose and cleared my sinus with saline. I’ve put eye drops in my eyes and kept them closed for more than 5 minutes to give the solution time to work. I’ve taken 2+2 “Advil” tablets to reduce the pain in my shoulder and arm muscle.

Engineering: I need to sit down and work up a flowchart for power produced by the two solar panels on the roof. I have three desirable recipients for the 700WH/Day of electricity. It’s NOT enough power to keep the refrigerator running much longer than 36 hours. (Depends on what time of day the power fails.) Our CPAP power supply needs to be replenished with 560WH during the day of Day-2 of the outage. (That will take president over the refrigerator.) Another issue is weather, if it’s cloudy I may be lucky to get 50WH from the panels. That means I need to have enough battery to power them for four nights. (Roughly 2000WH.) That works out to be a 100AH 24V battery bank which in my case it is 10 portable Deep cycle 12V 20AH batteries that are in padded cases with handles. (Only had a picture of four of the 16Lb batteries we bring with us when we travel for one night’s sleep.) I have a octopus cable to connect eight batteries to the UPS. We also have to bring a battery charger since the UPS will only replace ~16AH/Day using it’s internal charger if there’s power.
That’s a lot of hardware to be located in our bedroom along with our CPAPs.

Tomorrow: Saturday, it’s going to rain with some strong winds. (Good planning weather.)

TO DO:
Pay the Post Office Box bill.
Repair the VPN between Ricky’s Fortigate and home.
Dental coverage for us is in “Open Season”, we need to enroll soon. (Eye coverage?)
Card for the drama department.
Lighting and Audio support for the Christmas play.
Get two teeth pulled and one post put in.
Call the doctor about the anti inflammatory that I seem to be allergic to.
Call Fl Blue, Lisa Rhodes 352-854-2100 about part D.
Read the book “Men and Women in conversation”

Finances M730, R813, V7135

https://www.verywellfamily.com/feelings-words-from-a-to-z-2086647

29 November 2018, Another Cold day from Mark’s past

Status: Making good progress on sorting the pile on the living room floor from all the trips to Florida.
Theme: We are switching gears and putting things away in hopes that Florida won’t need significant effort in the future.

Narrative: We’re finally taking a minute and looking back over what we’ve done/not done over the last 10 months. We’ve been running so hard that much of our lives got terribly disheveled or put on hold. We’ve also gained a commitment that our home is not a warehouse of stuff. We’re seriously looking at what we have and do we really want it living with us 10 years from now. We usually put up a tree after Thanksgiving, but bringing 7 tubs of supplies out of the car dampened that effort just a little. (I’m working on it.) I normally work up a “To Do” list, mostly because I easily forget things I have to do. I had to go back almost a month to find the last list about stuff in Atlanta that was posted on this blog. It will probably take me a week to scrub the list and bring it up to date.

I’ve tested the seven small 7AH batteries, only ONE is worth keeping and it’s pretty OLD. The newer Power Sonic ones have all failed at about 3-4 years. There are a couple brands that seem to last longer like BB, however is not a brand that I am familiar with. I have switched up from buying “Power Sonic” to Interstate batteries (They have several brand names of their own.) last year because they’re local. (No shipping charges which can be significant with a 18Lb battery.) Today I am testing the bigger 18AH Power Sonic batteries (1/2 Group U1 if you’re a geek.) I’ve connected the batteries to a UPS and then to three 60W incandescent bulbs. The tests finished with both banks of Power Sonic 18AH batteries being about 15AH, quite reasonable. I had thought of combining the two banks of batteries into a four battery box, but they are terribly heavy at 60Lbs. (2 batteries 30Lbs is quite manageable.) I borrowed these batteries from my house systems earlier this year to make sure mom made it through hurricane season. The decision is to put them back onto the house electrical system where they came from. (They are worth $100 ish) The first two went back onto the 2nd of two redundant power supplies that power the critical DC loads of the house. (They’ve been solo for most of the year, now that it’s winter I need to reduce the risk by repairing the 2nd supply.)

Two UPS units (One with Internal batteries, one with external batteries) are installed in grandpa’s house. One provides backup power for the “Hopper”, the other (Larger one) provides backup power for their house phone and Internet. I may deploy more of them, but I want their buy in. (They want them.) They cost about $200.00 to put together and money has gotten rather short.

We watched the “Christmas Cottage”, well most of it until we got too tired to stay up. Read a little of the Wife’s book, it’s interesting she wrote the book because so many people were asking about a single chapter in her previous book.

No roaches, just ants today. Batteries are charging, headed to bed.

One of my difficulties of sleeping through the night is breathing through my nose and I just thought of those silly “breath rite” strips advertised on TV. I’ve tried them when I was much younger, but now I may actually need them. That and a saline spray for the sinus I may yet be able to sleep better!

TO DO:
Repair the VPN between Ricky’s Fortigate and home.
Dental coverage for us is in “Open Season”, we need to enroll soon. (Eye coverage?)
Card for the drama department.
Lighting and Audio support for the Christmas play.
Get two teeth pulled and one post put in.
Call the doctor about the anti inflammatory that I seem to be allergic to.
Call Fl Blue, Lisa Rhodes 352-854-2100 about part D.
Read the book “Men and Women in conversation”

Tomorrow: Friday, take out the garbage/recycling. Rain is forecast, but it is also much warmer.

https://www.verywellfamily.com/feelings-words-from-a-to-z-2086647