Week of 1 July 2024

Monday

Up at 7:30, listening to the Waterway Net on my HF radio. She’s catching the morning show for a few minutes before getting ready for the Gym. I am a little groggy haven taken Benadryl to get to sleep this morning. I may have to take a bit of a nap before I’m very useful today.

Bright sunny day this morning. (Old Camera)

Two Hard boiled eggs and breakfast sausages with juice for breakfast.

I think I will concentrate on sorting and cleaning. My projects involve bringing multiple supplies into an area that will construct the needed device. At the end of the construction the remainder of the supplies need to be returned to their respective places. (I am often negligent on this.)

Called Child Fund International three times this morning trying to get our sponsorships straightened out. Their website has been troublesome to deal with for more than a year. The associates seem to have access to the underlying database so that may clear up my issues.

It’s a beautiful day outside today. (Old Camera)

The day just got more complicated. The Internet is down where we hold church so they want to use my cellular hotspot for the service on Sunday. I have to make a long Ethernet cable to run to the hotspot router.

Tuesday

We normally get a weeks’ worth of groceries, but that takes planning and accurate inventories. We’re getting very close to just letting her get groceries every other day like she used to do. The constant turmoil of inaccurate information and laissez faire attitudes makes working together very difficult.

I had boiled eggs and breakfast sausages for breakfast with a couple cups of coffee. I checked in on the 2M net with the guys this morning. I send D a copy of the video but he didn’t respond with anything.

We had a tense discussion about last night and getting groceries this morning. It was 9:30 by the time I took a shower and 10AM by the time I was dressed and ready. The decision ended up getting our lunch first and then come home put the braces in and take a nap. Longhorn opens at 11AM and we arrived about 10 minutes early. After the nap around 2PM we’ll head out to Wally World and get groceries.

Not as hot as yesterday, but it was pretty warm out there mowing the lawn.

Lunch at Longhorn was really good, Hannah has been taking great care of us on every visit. We headed back home and took a quick nap before going to Wally World for groceries. That trip also went well and in good spirits when we got back. I worked on odd projects and mowed 1/3 of the back yard before heading to bed.

I did get up and face one of the new cameras at the sky to see if I could catch a falling star…

Wednesday

We’re up and starting our day, breakfast was boiled eggs, breakfast sausage and coffee. We washed her masks this morning, she has about eight masks that have to be changed out every other day. (About 2 weeks worth of CPAP masks) We get a new mask and three nose pieces every three months.

We soak them in soapy water and rinse thoroughly

Cloudy Day this morning, not raining though.

The seal underneath the garage door needs to be replaced

We had one of those days where she didn’t read the directions on the rice cooker and it took waay too long to arrive at a mutual agreement on embracing her handicap.

Dinner was cut up chicken tenders with carrots with mushroom sauce over rice, pretty good actually.

Thursday

Had my coffee while I worked on the attic temperature sensors. There are three attic fans and now there are four sensors to monitor what the air flow is doing. The attic was over 120 degrees the other day.

Marie sold the golf cart and all the solar stuff for $1400.00, the solar stuff was worth almost that much, so the new owner got the golf cart for free. (I assume that Marie just didn’t want the golf cart on mom’s property. There is also the possibility that she didn’t want anything with my name on it either.) She is also constrained by the fact Mom is on Medicaid and cannot make money. (Any profits from selling the golf cart are pulled back off of her benefits.)

Went to Longhorn for lunch with friends and had a great time on the 4th.

We shared a cheesecake for dessert.

Got home and took a huge nap.

Checked out our attic temperatures and how the fans are moving the heat out of the attic.

I changed the camera to be IR at night since it shows the cars better from Hillcrest.

Friday

Up a little late at 8AM and got a cup of coffee while I look over the data collected yesterday. With all the hot days I was wondering if there was a modification I could make to the attic fans to reduce the attic temperature.

Attic air flowing in the big fan about equals the air flowing out the two little fans.
(The eve vent is neither the attic nor the outside temp.)

When both fans are pulling air from the attic, it draws air from the living space.
(The compressor runs hard to cool the replacement air flowing into the home. The compressor never recovered from running both fans for one hour yesterday.)

She put in a new set of braces today and is off to the Gym. I was really sore this morning from having worked in the attic yesterday. I may have to stretch before taking these trips to the attic. A good warm bath really helped my aching body.

I missed 20 calls from her because she lost her credit card in her purse. She finally found it after agonizing about it for an hour and cancelled her Gym day. She got some condiments for tonight’s dinner and came home exhausted. I decided to just go to Longhorn’s for lunch to reconcile the day. I changed the primary phone number in her phone to be the house phone that always rings.

We took a good long nap and I had to do some remedial work on the new cameras. I configured them to be accessible from the DVR, but then they would not respond to a call from the network. I checked it later tonight and the problem has been fixed.

I worked on the IR illuminators while we watched Hallmark movies. I have four 96 LED illuminators (2W & 2B). I cut one of the internal constant current power supplies and wired the two banks of 48 together to cut the output power in half. (The LEDs burn out if run at full power.)

Back side of modified 96 IR Led board.

I modified the power cable on the first two illuminators, the second two I’ll just use the 2.5 mm power cable that came with it.

Saturday

Intermittent sleep last night, we’ll get through the day with a couple of naps. Checked the radio, it’s all set for the WW net this morning. I got my cup of coffee with me, and I am trying to get my morning assembled. Just found out that the frozen turkey ended up in the refrigerator on Tuesday. Assuming that it took two days to thaw, it needs to be eaten by tomorrow. I also found a package of chicken that was not in a protective bag. *The store packaging tends to leak and spoiling the refrigerator surfaces.

Completely changed her medications process. We put each type of medication in separate zip lock bag with the medication name on it and wrote the expiration dates on the cap. Now she doesn’t have to go through 20 bottles and read the fine print during her inventory. And since they’re in separate bags she just has to add any new medications to the appropriate bag. (No accounting needed.)

Had a frozen turkey breast cooked in the Insta Pot for dinner today. Had peas and cream corn for veggies. It was pretty good.

Spent a good part of the day repairing an old IR Illuminator that had failed and I sort of repaired it with about 20 failed LEDs still in it. I parallelled the 10 working six LED strings to keep the unit functional. Now I really need a little more power to get it done.

This is the picture with the OLD illuminator.
Mostly Just a spot on the lawn halfway to the drain.

This is the picture with the new IR board put into the old fixture. It now points at the drain in the lawn and gives good coverage of the lawn in the tree. I did remove the filter to protect the sensor from the sunlight to make it a little more sensitive.

There are now three IR Illuminators running at only 2.5W lighting up my lawn. (I took it apart and cut their power in HALF.) You can easily see how much more sensitive the new cameras are in the trees. The illuminators are almost invisible at night with 96 very dim LEDs each, but they light up the entire lawn.

There are now 5 high-definition cameras looking at the street capturing no less than 15FPS at 4K resolution. If they shoot at our house again, I’ll have a lot to share with the police. I am hoping that they see all the IR and NOT do any more shooting. I had looked at getting a trophy movie camera to put in my front yard. LOL

Sunday

Woke up about 7 this morning and gathered the equipment I needed to use a cellular hotspot for the Internet. It turned out that I didn’t need it, so I came back home. She had a UTI yesterday evening and the doctor prescribed a medication but the pharmacy was closed by the time we got it. They called us around 11 and we abandoned going to church to get it. We also decided to go to Longhorn for lunch today with all the Chaos.

Back home and the sermon was properly loaded on the website and we both listened to the sermon. I submitted my review of our meal today to Longhorn corporate. No letters from our sponsored children in Christian Children’s Fund.

I think I need to move the illuminators just a little for better coverage. It’s actually harder than it seems to point them. I need to turn them on one at a time too!

Don’t know how much I’ll get done tonight I have a skin abrasion that I don’t have a good handle on how it got it. It was a total Suprise when I changed my clothes. Best guess so far is a washcloth that I used earlier was just a little rough. Baring that it feels possible that a cleaning agent was a residue on the washcloth. I’ve put Vaseline Intensive Care on the skin after rinsing it completely with alcohol diluted with water.

Could not get to sleep last night, I ended up taking a bath to calm my body down. I finally nodded off around 4 AM. I managed to sleep another hour at 7AM but I am waay tired.