Monday 46 KWH
Mom had a few flickers, but otherwise no outage.
Windy is a good website for wind directions.
No letters from our sponsored children. She’s off to the gym stopping by Kroger and getting a bag of M+Ms for the sour taste in her mouth.
Hurricane Debby, made landfall in north Florida as CAT1.
I pulled the sensor on the blue attic fan out and wrapped the wires around the connector pins to give it a good solid connection. (That sensor has been erratic since I installed it weeks ago.) The purpose of the sensor was to log the air temperature either entering or leaving the attic.
It seems to be working all day today, but I’ll keep an eye on it..
Got a frantic call from the wife, she said that the keys are locked in the trunk. She was in the car so access to the trunk is pretty easy through the back seat. It took 20 minutes and two pictures for her to unlock the seat. The keys were not in the trunk or her purse that was in the trunk. I finally asked her to look on the top of the car and that’s where she had laid them. I totally forgot to put the clothes in the dryer because I got a phone call from a frantic wife just after the washer finished.
I did manage to pull a power wire from the garage into the attic. There are four possibilities for that wire, and I could really use one more. I also put the temp sensor back underneath the large vent that pulls outside air into the attic. That gives me the temperature of the air from the roof. I do have an issue where the air arriving is warmer and more humid because of the location of that vent.
I guess we’re back to Longhorn today. We desperately need to have meals that I can prepare on hand for these crazy days which are becoming more numerous. (And costly) I need a Margarita and we’ve been to Longhorn’s almost every other day since we got groceries last Tuesday.
Another almost disaster, we could not find my wallet anywhere. In desperation we called Longhorn to see if they had it. The manager said the cleaning crew found my wallet on the floor under the bar stools this morning. (18 hours after we left on Sunday.) The $100 was taken out of it, but everything else seems to be ok including my military ID. I checked the credit cards when I got home, and they didn’t have any extra charges on them. (I’ll keep an eye on it for a few days since the have all the key information on the card and my D License.)
Mowed the lawn, well at least part of it. I mow about a third of the back yard at a time. It is a comfortable amount of work, and the lawn mower doesn’t get clogged up to where it won’t cut the grass.
I checked in on the GARS 2M repeater net at 19:30 tonight, I often miss this net on Mondays. We watched our evening movie on the Hallmark Channel and went to bed.
Tuesday 40/313KWH
Busy day today, need to get a shower in and then lay down plans for the day.
Longhorn for lunch, we left at 12:15 and arrived Emory about 10 minutes early. Check-in was all done online so we’re in the waiting room already. After like 8 months of waiting for this appointment all they did was a 40-minute interview, no diagnostic testing was done today.
Back home, our home is a perfect temperature!
We might have found a solution tonight for Sundays. We either have to make the meal on Saturday OR have it in a Crock Pot waiting on us when we get home from Church. The crock pot idea is not perfect either since 8AM to 12:30 is only a little over four hours. But what we have done in the past is to bring the dinner up to temperature in a stove top Dutch oven and then transfer it to the Crock Pot before we leave for church. I also thought we might try the Insta-Pot, but that’s a little riskier for a fire at 800Watts. The stove top is all glass and is covered by a nonflammable hood if something failed.
Monday, Tuesday and Friday we are busy and there’s no time to have a difficult meal preparation on those three days. There’s a little more time but she doesn’t get home from the gym until 11:40. She needs to spend 15 minutes in the shower and getting dressed afterwards. (Noon is when we’re supposed to be eating every day driven by her Invisalign braces and her low sugar.) We tried pushing the gym earlier/later but there are significant issues traveling or at the gym during those times. We know she will be low sugar during her drive home, so she carries M+Ms to snack on.
Well, we’re headed to Wally World tomorrow morning to get groceries since we didn’t do it today. We have house church tonight at 6:15PM until 9PM.
Wednesday 38/312KWH
Off to UPS to drop off some returns then Longhorn for lunch and finally Wally World for Groceries. We had a good heart to heart conversation this morning about shuffling the responsibilities and setting a time (now 13:00) to have a daily meeting to fill out the daytime together. ❤ NAP after we put the perishables away after we get home. We have a reading assignment for tonight’s lesson that will take a bit of time. We have to leave for house church at 5:30PM so we’re a bit crowded this afternoon.
We got a call from Emory while we were at Longhorn which left a message about getting her test results and next steps. Now we’re playing phone tag… (We have call screening trying to defend against all these calls about buying our home.) The number that called and the number they gave us to call back are both entered into her phone. (So it should ring.) Not taking any chances we’ve temporarily turned off call screening. We’re both pretty tired, shower and a nap are the plan of the hour.
Emory called back on the house phone. She agreed to meet in person next Tuesday to discuss the test and next steps at Emory. We’ll have to rearrange our day since the time conflicts with our meal schedule. We’ll turn the call screening back on her cell phone.
We got a call from Zach with Georgia Home Buyers and her phone rang just once even with call screening off! Sounds like the phone companies are taking our complaints and stopping the thousands of Robo/Telemarketing calls in real time. Zach’s call was labeled as a home buying SCAM. There was an article on Google Foo that said one company has to pay $40M for their robo calls.
Services tonight went well, we had Zaxby’s salads for dinner and then came home about 9PM. My cell phone went completely dead taking notes. Boo.
Made a TON of FT8 contacts on my HF radio tonight, they were calling me for the QSO.
Thursday 40/296KWH
Checked-In on the Waterway net, my throat got stuck and I couldn’t say my suffix very fast. The NCC dramatized my error by repeating it LOL. We both got dressed and headed out to Wally World for Groceries.
We went to Longhorn for lunch for the fourth time this week and we’ve been in good spirits since. Went to get groceries at Wally World after we left Longhorn’s and then unloaded the car at home to put them away.
We took a good long nap and we need to get a plan together for tomorrow. We need to do a meat inventory so we can choose the one that expires first. She started removing items we still had in the refrigerator without confirming the removal with me. She then said that we didn’t have any ham steaks which we had two of them. I had to abandon doing the inventory with her.
I did the inventory and finished posting the inventory on the cupboard.
We had to spend about 30 minutes juggling these Post-It Notes to determine our meal schedule. The gym on Friday and the Sunday service means those meals have to be simple to make. (It was considerably easier to move these notes around than keep erasing the meal off a calendar.)
Her 2nd Doctor is insisting that she complete a “Swab” saliva test, or he will not prescribe any more drugs. We’ve sent a message back that we’d like to have it done by a professional lab. (We’ve had to submit to drug tests most of our lives using these labs.) It also prevents the doctor from using the swab for DNA sample. (All the tests will be identified on the order to the lab.)
The plan for tomorrow is to include a bottle of “Boost” after her workout and before her drive home.
To keep the Boost cool, the plan is to put it in an insulated mug with a little bit of ice. It only has to last a couple hours.
Friday 47/293KWH
Slept in this morning, checked-in on the WW net after the position report section of the net. (There’s not much time left after 8:30.) Had to move the neighbor’s garbage cans, they have two of them and they cannot be side by side. She thought that she needed gas today and when we checked that decision, she had 84 miles of gas to go 18 miles to the gym. Lunch today is Pork Chops with carrots, celery and potatoes. All three of them need a little preparation in advance.
I cut up the vegetables for the pork chop meal today.
We’re getting a letter from the IRS. I checked the PO box, and it wasn’t there yet. It almost has to be from the Estate. I’ve been trying to collect their refund check for several years. Patricia filed “Their” income tax properly the year my dad passed in 2018. I don’t know why she didn’t get/cash the refund. (It likely would have required Fred’s signature.) She did not put the check in the 2018 tax folder, which I’ve misplaced somewhere. We got letters in 2020 from the IRS to my brother, but I had no authority to represent Fred even after I was named. Michael did not request the refund so it’s a mystery how they got his name. The instruction from the IRS says to file two forms to get their refund. (If they’ve both been deceased, Fred’s form was ambiguous, and I had to ask the IRS for advice.)
I am sort of waiting until she gets home before taking any action today. I have quite a pile of Electonics that need to be recycled. I’ve copied three Hard Drives to a flash drive, and I need to recycle those too.
Upgraded my Two Raspberry Pi desktops now that I’ve moved all the files from the hard drives. (I used them to prevent getting a virus from these old hard drives.)
She’s home, shower then make dinner. The IRS letter was not in the PO box when she picked up the mail this morning. It is odd that the image did not have the address label on it.
Our electric bill was 1291 for July, that’s 322KWH/Week. Raised our house temperature by one-degree last week. 9 Aug our consumption dropped to 251KWH last 7 days, 324KWH 14 Days, 314KWH 21 Days, 293KWH 28 Days. It seems to have knocked off 50KWH/Week off our bill which is about $20 / month. I’ve also taken aim at the garage Dehumidifier.
The garage Dehumidifier was set to 55% from 10PM to 8AM and ran every 10 minutes without making a major impact on the garage humidity after an hour or so. The self-contained water evaporates from the bucket at 80 degrees and causes it to run more often than necessary. I changed the timer to be three one-hour segments 10-11PM, 2-3 AM, 7-8AM and see how that goes.
The dehumidifier does not appear to have run at all after the changes. That will save a significant amount of money.
In Vegas we learned to embellish the house’s mass to be comfortable and save energy. The red arrows are the thermostat raising the temperature by ONE degree reducing the load on the grid. The blue arrows are lowering the temperature by one degree pulling the heat back out of the home after the heat of the day. The air conditioner can coast for about an hour with each degree increase, and it takes about 40 minutes to pull the heat out of the home for every one-degree change.
The cold air in the evenings, cool the rooms we’re occupying significantly.
We wrote two letters to our sponsored children today, time to take a break and watch a little TV. After I got dressed I mowed 1/3 of the back yard that hadn’t been mowed in weeks. (Impossible to mow it with an electric mower when it is wet.)
Saturday 39/42KWH
Tuned into the Water Way Net and I can’t hear anyone. Grabbed some clothes and headed to the post office to get the IRS letter. All it said was that they need time to process the previous request. I put the letter with all the others in the estate travel folder when I got home.
Had two hard boiled eggs and breakfast sausage for breakfast. No letters on Child Fund International from our sponsored children. Checked our bank statements, there’s no malfeasance on either of our accounts from the loss of my wallet.
We’ve both picked up a cough since I changed the air filter to a lower grade. I guess that there’s enough evidence to purchase good air filters from now on. Lowes had a washable MERV 10 filter, but it had to be ordered. (It’ll be here next Friday.)
Bidenomics 101, restaurants are making ends meet by raising their drink prices to the ceiling. A fountain drink at Longhorns is $3.39 for a 12 Oz glass full of ice, that’s maybe ok since they keep refilling it. But charging $10 for a shot of Burbon and then charge another $3.39 for a coke to go with it is a bit over the top.
We took a good long nap and then worked on my presentation for our midweek service most of the afternoon.
Hopefully we’ve seen the last of the nighttime shootings on our street. The last shooting fired only one shot, and the thought is that they may have seen the high-powered IR security lights on the front of our home for the first time.
The IR lights show up pretty good on a live video.
Even better if you take a still picture.
The current thought is that they were making a video of these shootings thinking that no one would see them. They may have seen the security lights and stopped shooting video. The investigators noticed the lights and said that they looked like high power lights. I told them opened them up and cut their power in half. I don’t think they believed me. They are correct if you compare them to the self-contained lights in the cameras that have maybe half a dozen LEDs.
This picture clearly shows the whole front lawn lit up at night like its daytime. Pointing the lights was counter intuitive, the left light faces right of center and the right light faces left of center.
Sunday 41/42KWH
I forgot to take my medicine yesterday, my stomach is unhappy.
Our next appointment at Emory Brain Health is Tuesday, we will learn the results of the interview/testing that was done last week. She was asked to put numbers on a clock face and that request could not be completed by herself. She cannot drive on highways, nor can she drive at night with her cataracts. We always drive to where she needs to go beforehand, or I drive her to new places even if they are close by. We’ve started sharing somewhat complicated decision making like groceries/meals etc.
Planning meals is much easier with Post-It Notes
Got onto Waterway this morning, I messed up but Steve was generous. Our car policy paid out at over $2000 premium every 6 months. I may have to look at that since we’re not driving to work anymore, and they are “Lesure” vehicles. Fixed the timer in the garage dehumidifier, apparently, I pushed the “Random” button.
I’ve figured out a way to show the set temperature and the actual temp.
Air conditioner runs a lot more than I thought it would.
We went to church service and that went well. We pulled out dinner out of the Crock Pot when we got home, it turned out pretty good. We took a huge nap and then my stomach got really upset. When I looked at the timer on the pill bottle it said 40 hours, which means I didn’t take them yesterday. The one pill that reminds me is the Omeprazole for my Gerd, the acid in my stomach starts getting intolerable in the afternoon if I forgot it. Looks like juice and crackers are the snack of the day until my stomach settles down.
It’s HOT outside today!
Washed eight CPAP hoses today, that will get us through the month.
I found out the waterproof outdoor lights I bought are NOT waterproof! The seals are missing from the fixture.