Blog – Page 59 – Mark's Blog

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

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:

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

28 November 2018, A Cold day from Mark’s past

Status: Liquid ant bait works very well, we’ll have to wait and see about the roach hotels.

Theme: Keep sorting and putting away items that were brought back from Florida.

Narrative: The tubs, baskets and boxes that were used to haul things back n forth to Florida carry an unsorted array of stuff. It will take a couple days to resort them deciding what is worth keeping and what can be tossed. The next trip to Florida the car needs to be pretty empty to carry the materials left in Florida on this trip.

A friend of ours had an “Ole Brooklyn Lantern” that they bought off a TV commercial. I found several on mom’s farm in various forms of decay. I can get one new from EBAY and other sources for about $20. The good thing is that two D cell batteries carry a significant amount of power. Depending on how bright the variable attenuator is set to the batteries can last a really long time. The bad is that the switch on the brightness control seems to be the fail point of the lantern. (Other than leaving batteries to corrode the terminals.) I also am believing a reviewer that said the big brand “D” corrodes more often than the big brand “E” batteries.

Did it mention it was like 25 degrees outside this morning. For Atlanta, that’s COLD!

We did wake up to a pile of dead ants on the kitchen counter this morning, apparently the liquid ant bait works pretty well. It comes in four rather tall clear plastic containers with a wick material on the top for the ants to retrieve the poison from.

I put a camera on three 60W light bulbs that were being run from three batteries that were being checked for capacity. They should be able to run the 60W incandescent bulb for about an hour each. Looks

I checked the cameras at the farm, no water spraying that I could see, I did want to put a light on the big well so that I could tell if it was running. Never got to it.

Had to drive East on 78 past Tim’s house to get my water tank for my CPAP today. Boo! But, that was something on my list to get done today.

I’ve spent the last couple of hours working on the tubs/baskets on the living room floor. There’s about 50% more floor showing than there was yesterday.

Engineering: Traveling CPAP’s? We are getting our first resupply of CPAP consumables, of real importance is a spare mask. The Wife’s mask is unique and she has had no spare to fall back onto. When we get our supplies next week I plan to retire her current mask into a pair of “Traveling CPAPs” that will stay in the car. (I have two spare machines.) That way if we get stranded at our son’s house (As an example), we can safely sleep there without worrying about getting our CPAPs which are likely still at our bedside. We’ll also have a spare for every component of our two machines in case of accidental damage/failure while traveling. If we travel with our current machines I’ll carry just ONE of the traveling units as a spare. (Since we’ll have three machines with us.) The only other addition if we’re traveling by car may be some kind of backup power. (Batteries with an Inverter.) It didn’t make sense to me to buy two $80.00 DC power cables when an Inverter is roughly $40.00 that can drive both machines. (I did buy two spare AC power supplies since a power spike could take out both machine power supplies at the same time.)

TDL,
Repair the VPN between Ricky’s Fortigate and home.
Dental coverage for us. (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.
Find out about Dental coverage for Mom, Medicare “G”?
Find out about Eye coverage for mom.
Tomorrow: Dig up my “To Do” list and get organized. I need to gather numbers for a church budget for next year, by Wednesday if I can.

Tomorrow:

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

27 November 2018, A Cold day from Mark’s past

Status: It’s official, we’ve brought dem bugs to Georgia.

Narrative: I was tearing apart the battery backup units we brought from the farm and one of them had a live infant German roach in it. Kathy saw two more and we found a 1″ adult American roach on the ceiling this morning. I will have to buy some roach hotels in hopes of catching any strays. We brought so much stuff back n forth over the last year, I am a little surprised we’ve not run across more of them. All the stuff is in the middle of the living room floor in hopes of seeing them before they get to harborage. I didn’t bring the power backup equipment to Grandpa’s for just this reason. I’ll have to go through all the baskets, tubs and boxes and try and find all I can today. Then make a run to the dollar store for some preventative measures.

Haven’t had breakfast, but we’ve both had our coffee this morning. I bought a bottle of Irish Crème and it was a pretty good cup of coffee today. We were down to two bags of Dominican coffee and the supplier had a 20% discount yesterday, be bought a case (16 bags) to replenish our stores. (Too bad coffee doesn’t kill the bugs, that would make things easy.)

Now that the Wife’s project is done we’re cleaning and putting things away. It’s a pretty big haul of stuff we’ve taken back n forth to Florida. I don’t have time to run around so I’ve brought the kitchen sink when I go down there. I am hesitant to bring anything back unless it’s been cleaned and we’re past the 6 months infestation period. I also have to assess the life left in all the batteries. (most were used when I brought them down there.)

I reordered CPAP supplies before I left and they didn’t send a tank for the humidifier. The tank is too little cost to send by itself so they told me to go to the local center (Winder Ga.) to get one. Boo!

Wife is also having issues with a prescription for Restasis, I don’t think Express Scripts will refill that anymore. (Like they did with my Nexium) It’s $100/month to get it at a local pharmacy.

Engineering: I did do some research on two OLD 700VA UPS units that were in the small bedroom. They would work well to replace the unit in the Bumpkin next time I’m down there. I designed the Bumpkin power supply so that it could be run over with rodents without affecting the performance. The power supply in the Morton barn just has a plastic tub over it and that has survived so far. I’ve removed the annoying beeper! (It’s tolerable when it beeps every 10 seconds for 2-5 minutes, not so much at 2-1/2 hours!)

The first of the two LS700 UPS units did well in several hours of testing and was within the parameters expected from the chart below. The second unit failed within 15 seconds, trying to resurrect the unit caused permanent damage (Crashed and burned) and it will have to be scrapped.

Had leftovers for dinner with black eyed peas and salad with “Western” dressing on it.

This afternoon while testing the UPS I’ve been clearing the kitchen table. For us it’s the “Catch All” for anything loose in our hands. It’s also the sorting place for our mail from the mailbox and the Post Office box. The table is now clear cept the few pieces of fruit in the fruit basket.

I put out roach hotels and liquid ant bait tonight, that should take care of the sugar ants we gained while in Florida. The roach hotels also worked pretty good at mom’s house.

We’re roughly $30,000 in credit card debt and there’s maybe $2,000 left in our checking. We’ll have to tighten our finances a bit more to keep enough cash on hand to send $200-$400 to mom’s account every month. I was going to try and get these teeth pulled, i’ll have to think about that since there’s only about $2K worth of credit left.

It’s going to get down to 26 in the city tonight, should be about 4 degrees colder here at the house. 22 degrees is awfully cold for the outside faucets, I wraped a sock around the faucet until I can get those foam things and cover them. (I should have done this earlier, but the weather predictions were not that cold yesterday. Boo! There is a power supply that heats the only water line in the attic (Icemaker line for fridge) and it has a pretty large battery backup. It’s under some insulation, but it can freeze if not warmed just a little. (About 5W is enough to keep it from freezing.) The garage will be above freezing and I’ve checked the radiators last year, they’re good for serious cold.

I’ve recharged the batteries I used for testing earlier today, they can run the heater if I loose power tonight. Well, I guess it’s time to call it a night. See ya tomorrow.

Tomorrow:

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

Farm Sale

Service providers

Clay Electric is the power company and there are three meters on the property. (House, Trailer and Bumpkin.)
The power for the trailer has been turned off.

The Internet service is Windstream, which also provides their own telephone service. (Service lands in the house)

AT&T traditional phone service is also available on the property.

None of the inside cameras record video/audio, they are still photo’s only.

26 November 2018, A day from Mark’s past

Status: House is a shambles and we’re not done with Kathy’s project for school.

Theme: Stay loose and provide help to the Wife as needed.

Narrative: Didn’t sleep well again last night, overall ache’s and pain were also a distraction. Had my morning coffee and had eggs for breakfast. Got a haircut to trim my curls today. Took a pretty good nap and woke up with a dry mouth as usual. (Haven’t figured all the aspects of that one out yet.) We finally finished the school project and had a wonderful dinner to wrap up the day. I looked for a “To Do” list and couldn’t find anything relevant to Atlanta going back two weeks. I am sure I was working something?

TDL,
Repair the VPN between Ricky’s Fortigate and home.
Dental coverage for us. (Eye coverage?)
Card for the drama department.
Lighting support for the Christmas play.
Repair the two small UPS units. (60W x 4 is 240WH)
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.
Find out about Dental coverage for Mom, Medicare “G”?
Find out about Eye coverage for mom.
Tomorrow: Dig up my “To Do” list and get organized. I need to gather numbers for a church budget for next year, by Wednesday if I can.

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