I was up at 6:30 AM, having fallen asleep before 10:30 PM last night.  I rarely sleep more than eight hours.  Linda was up shortly thereafter.  We had breakfast a little after 7 AM and drank our coffee in the living room while we checked in on the world with our iPads.  It was a perfect morning to fire up the gas logs in the fireplace, but we did not.  The propane logs require the flue vent to be open and most of the heat they produce goes up the chimney, not into the room.  We will definitely replace these with 99.8% efficient vent-free natural gas logs that operate with the flue damper closed once we have natural gas to the house.

Linda went for a long walk, about 5.5 miles.  I was catching up on blogs I follow on Feedly when Darryll and Alec arrived around 10 AM.  With Alec along Darryll did not need my help fixing the leaks in the black iron pipe fittings.  To repair the leak behind the garage he decided to install a union in the 1″ pipe coming out of the T-fitting that will feed gas to the garage.  They still had to disassemble all of the fittings from there to end of the run and then reassemble them.  Ditto for the leak at the elbow in the 1/2″ line coming out of the utility closet to feed the garage furnace.

I had Darryll look at our old propane fireplace logs to see what would be required to replace them with high efficiency natural gas logs and add a shutoff valve.  Based on how the pipes are run the shutoff valve will have to be in the outside pipe just before it enters the side of the chimney.  That will place it at a comfortable height and keep it out even deep snow.

While Darryll and Alec worked on the black iron pipe I unloaded more stuff from the storage container.  I was dressed to work and with Linda away from the house I did not want to sequester myself in my basement office.  Besides, I am not very productive at desk work when contractors are here.

As they were finishing up Darryll turned the new air-conditioner on and let it run to check the air temperature it could produce.  It got the temp down to 58 degrees F in the main plenum.  He said anything below 60 is considered proper operation so he did not need to adjust the refrigerant charge.  They pressurized the pipes and checked every junction twice and did not find any leaks.  He said a lot of guys, including the gas company, attach a gauge and if it holds pressure for an hour they call it good.  Darryll wants to see it hold pressure a lot longer than that, which I appreciate.  They finished up around 1:30 PM.  After they left I set the pressure in the pipe as close to 15 PSI as I could.  I noted that most of the pipe was in the shade and the air temperature was 76 degrees F.

For lunch we had hummus with pita chips and sourdough pretzel nibblers, fresh apple slices, and leftover kale salad.  After lunch we worked in the garage for about 90 minutes and managed to get the storage container emptied out and all of the contents stored somewhere.  We still can’t get a car in the garage, but we have time to work on that.  What we need now is a dumpster, but I think that will have to wait until next spring.

I was supposed to have a FMCA Education Committee telephone meeting today at 4 PM but it was postponed yet again.  I did, however, get two phone calls today from the folks at AT&T who are following up on our MPSC complaint.  The phone was actually quiet enough today that I could carry on a normal phone conversation with them.

We had several other calls today that were also OK.  One of them was from Norma, a woman from New York City that we met last year on our second Holistic Holiday at Sea cruise.  Norma stopped by to visit us at Williston Crossings earlier this year along with her daughter and grandchildren.  Norma is the person who told us about the Vegetarian Summerfest that is held each July in Pennsylvania.  She is eager for us to go, and we are eager to attend; this summer just did not afford the opportunity.  Although we will likely be building a barn next year, we would like to take a week and go to this event.

Chuck called in the afternoon to let me know he had picked up his old tachometer from Matt at Bob’s Speedometer and after replacing a few simple parts (capacitors or diodes) it worked fine on the bench.  Chuck brought his “new” tachometer along and Matt tested it as well and it also worked, but not with the adaptor cable provided by Prevost.  It turned out that the cable was wired to provide DC power to the tachometer from the wire that supplies power to the dashboard lights.  Chuck doesn’t drive much at night, so the dash lights were rarely on.  Another factor is that the dash lights are on a dimmer (rheostat) that reduces the voltage in order to dim the lights.  The tachometer is not designed to work on that reduced voltage.

Once we were done working in the garage for the day I concentrated on deleting or filing old e-mails.  I also discovered that we had become the target of a (so far) unsuccessful brute force login attack.  I received about 360 system generated e-mails between 10 PM last night and 11 AM this morning notifying me of failed login attempts.  I notified Scott at QTH.com and then decided to upgrade the Wordfence plug-in from free to paid/premium on all four of the websites I support.

After purchasing the upgrades I installed one of the API Keys in each site and then activated several premium features including “country blocking.”  Wordfence claims to have access to several databases that allow them to identify the country associated with an IP address with 99.5% accuracy.  I chose to block China, Europe, Indonesia, and the Russian Federation.  If necessary I can “select all” and then deselect the United States and Canada.  If the problem stops I could then unblock other countries, such as Australia and New Zealand.  Not that I think anyone from there ever visits any of these websites, but with the web you never really know.