Category Archives: Ham Radio

Posts that have something to do with our amateur (ham) radio hobby including the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) and the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club, our local ham radio group.

2014/09/20 (S) Bus Talk

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All days have the same number of hours.  How those hours are divided up between light and dark, awake and asleep, busy or at leisure, varies with each day.  Basically, our day went like this:

  • We went to our weekly SLAARC breakfast in South Lyon.
  • We returned home so Linda could get to work on the bakery software conversion project.  She did that all day except for a break to go for a walk.
  • I called D. R. Electric Appliance to check on the range.  As I had figured it did not arrive yesterday (they would have called if it did).  They supposedly ordered it on Tuesday and told me it would take three days to get.  They do not receive product on the weekend so maybe Monday.
  • I worked at my desk on editing and uploading blog posts until 11:30 AM.
  • I went to Recycle Livingston with our weekly load.
  • I stopped at Lowe’s for a 250VAC/15A circuit breaker, outlet, and box.
  • Lowe’s parking lot connects to Walmart’s parking lot, so I stopped there for ICE brand flavored sparkling water and picked up a couple of bottles of  Leelanau Cellars Witch’s Brew seasonal spiced wine.  We had this last fall and enjoyed it.
  • When I got back to the house we had a light lunch of sourdough pretzel nibblers and hummus and then resumed our work.
  • By mid-afternoon I was tired so I took a nap.  I often do better sleeping when I’m tired rather than when I am supposed to sleep.  I also wanted to be rested enough to enjoy dinner this evening.
  • We met Chuck at the Carrabba’s at West Oaks Mall at 7 PM.  He had arrived ahead of us so we only had to wait about 20 minutes to get a table.  Linda and I both had the Tag Pic Pac, one their two vegan options.  It was long, relaxed meal and a great conversation, some of which was about buses (Chuck and Barbara also own a Prevost H3-40 converted coach).  We pulled out of the parking lot a little before 10 PM.
  • Back home we watched season 5 episode 8 (final) of Doc Martin.

That was our day and did not include construction projects or taking photographs.

 

2014/09/19 (F) Renewed Acquaintance

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After I installed iOS8 on my iPad2 yesterday morning my Logitech Bluetooth keyboard seemed to change its behavior, giving me double letters in some cases and feeling a little sluggish in its response.  The keyboard itself has not changed, so I presume this has something to do with iOS8.  I also presume the keyboard batteries have not run down already, but I suppose that is a possibility.  If so, I will be replacing them once a week.  While creating an image gallery for the SLAARC WordPress website last night I noticed that the drag and drop feature of the gallery editor did not work.  I upgraded to WP Version 4.0 about a week ago but this was the first time I had tried to use the gallery feature.  If there is a problem with this feature there is no way that I am the first person to discover it and I presume WordPress is aware of it.  I find it strange, however, that they have not released a maintenance update fixing it since an improved and more visual editor was a major feature of the 4.0 release.

A few weeks back I re-established contact through Linked-In with a colleague from 10 years ago.  Jim was Director of General Education Services at Livingston Educational Service Agency at the time and we went through NCA Ambassador training together.  It turns out that he lives and works in the Brighton area, so we are now neighbors of sorts.  He suggested we meet up for coffee and I finally called him this morning to arrange that.  We both had time at 1:30 PM today and agreed to meet at the Panera on Grand River Avenue by I-96 at that time.

Linda got the new Global Bake bakery software installed on her laptop yesterday so this morning she was able to start working on the software conversion process in earnest.  Her work requires a lot of concentration, and she gets very focused when doing it, so I went to my office to continue working on editing blog posts and photos.

In checking my e-mail I noticed that I was still getting failed login attempts from foreign countries on this site and on the FMCA GLCC website, which is sub-domain of this site, in spite having installed the premium (paid) version of the Wordfence Security plug-in.  I looked at the installed plug-ins for the GLCC website and discovered that I had one named “Limit Login Attempts” that I did not have installed on our personal website or the other two sites I manage.  I surmised that this plug-in might be doing just what the name implied and in the process preempting Wordfence from ever doing its job.  I deactivated it and saw a reduction in failed attempts, with none from outside North America, suggesting that the country blocking feature of Wordfence was now working properly.  I saw a similar drop in failed login attempts on our personal website when I activated the country blocking feature for all countries except the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.  Only time will tell, however, if Wordfence is indeed blocking login attempts from outside North America.

We had hummus and apples for lunch after which I hung up one load of laundry and put another load in the washer.  I left at 1 PM to have time to stop at Best Buy to get something to clean our various touch screens and monitors.  Traffic was very heavy in the I-96 and Grand River Avenue shopping area, but Best Buy is in the same shopping complex as the Panera, so I made it there on time.  Jim and I talked for almost two hours and which covered the highlights of the last eight years.

Back home I kept my focus on getting the blog caught up.  Linda wrapped up her work for the day and we finished the bottle of Alpha Rose from Red Trail Vineyards while she fixed a simple but tasty dinner of vegan burgers and corn.  I got a call from Butch letting me know that the company in Nevada had arranged for a semi and taken all of the parts they plan to take.  Everything that is left is Butch and Fonda’s to do with as they please.  The important thing for us is that I can now take our bus down there at my convenience.  I would like to get all of the natural gas related work taken care of and put the finishing touches on the garage project before I move the bus, but I may go ahead and move it next week if the scheduling of contractors works out.

During the evening I had an exchange of TXT messages with Chuck.  He had ordered some miniature 24VDC light bulbs (1829s) that are used in our bus dashboards and the order had arrived.  Rather than go to his shop after breakfast tomorrow we arranged to meet him for dinner tomorrow night.  I also got a call from Michele Henry of Phoenix Paint.  She had a new customer who just bought a mid-1990’s Prevost XL converted coach and she gave him my name and phone numbers in case he had any questions about the rig.  We agreed that we would try to find time during the GLCC Surplus and Salvage a Rally to work on the article I started last year about the process she used to repair the body and roof of our coach, seal and coat the roof, and paint the body.  We capped off the evening with the second to last episode of Season 5 of Doc Martin. We need to return the DVDs to the Howell Library on Sunday, so we want to make sure we get through all of the episodes for Season 5.

 

2014/09/13 (S) Overnight Guest

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Linda’s sister, Sister Marilyn, called a couple of days ago to let us know she would be in the Detroit area on business this weekend.  She wanted to know if we could fetch her this afternoon and if she could spend the night at our house?  The answer was “of course,” of course.  Her flight out wasn’t until Sunday evening, so Linda put the gears in motion and arranged a brunch with the local family for 10 AM tomorrow.

Being Saturday, we went to our ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon.  Before leaving our neighborhood we drove to the other end of the street (dead end with turn-around) to see where the gas hookup crew left off yesterday.  We knew they were working down there today because we saw the trucks leave sometime between 5:30 and 6:00 PM last night.  There’s a chance they will be back today and we wanted to see how close they were to connecting our house to the main line.  It looked like they had quite a few houses to do ahead of ours, so we went to breakfast.

We got home around 10:30 AM to find a crew working in our yard trenching in the branch line to our house.  I was told yesterday they were going to bore it in, so something obviously did not get communicated.  Not only that, they were running a 5/8″ line, which was way too small for the 425 meter we are supposed to get.  I stopped the crew and the guy in charge pulled out his paperwork.  It had “425” written on it big letters, but the drawing showed a 5/8″ line.  He agreed that the 5/8″ line was way too small for that meter and that we should have 1.25″ line.  They pulled the little bit of line they had already run out of the ground, raked out some of the dirt they had already trenched, and moved their machine across the street to trench our neighbors yard.

We were lucky we got home when we did.  They had already cut through some tree roots that did not need to be disturbed and would have torn up a lot more of our yard unnecessarily if I had not interrupted their work.  They were nice about it, but I still found it troublesome that I had spoken to two different supervisors face-to-face about this, one as recently as yesterday, but this crew showed up and did something different than what I had been told, and agreed, would be done.

I was finally going to try to remove the fogged window from the bus today, but we had a lot of rain overnight and woke to overcast skies, temperatures in the upper 40’s, and a forecast high of 57 degrees F with a strong chance of rain through mid-afternoon.  That was not the sort of weather for removing a window from a vehicle parked outside.  Besides, with Marilyn arriving mid-late afternoon I did not want to work on anything messy and then have to get cleaned up.

Linda looked up the kitchen ranges we had been considering.  The GE 30″ 5-burner double-oven convention model (JGB870DEFWW) was on sale again at Lowe’s for $180 off MSRP and we would get another 5% off the sale price by using our Lowe’s credit card.  If we ordered it today delivery would be September 27, longer than I would like, but it is what it is.  We have to order this range because Linda wants a white one to match all of the other appliances in the kitchen and the appliance stores do not tend to stock white ranges with the features we want.  I called our local Lowe’s store and confirmed the free delivery and take away of our current range.  Installation is $20 plus a new flex gas line for $30.

I called TOMTEK HVAC and got hold of Tom.  He seemed put off by the fact that I have someone else doing HVAC work at the house and will have the natural gas already tied in when he comes to convert the main house furnace from propane to natural gas, but he said he would check with Weil-McLain on Monday about what parts he needs to do the conversion.  While on the phone with Tom he suggested that we try D. R. Electric Appliance Sales and Service in Howell for our new gas range.  We looked them up on the web and got their (incorrect) phone number and hours.  I got the correct number from 411 before I realized that it was also on their website.  They closed at 2 PM on Saturdays, so we didn’t make it there today, but I called and got an answering machine, left my name, number, and the reason for the call.  Curt called me back a short time later.  I gave him the model number and he said he would call G.E. on Monday.  He said he had been holding off ordering G.E. appliances waiting for Columbus Day sale pricing.  He figured he would have the range three days from ordering and could probably install it at the end of the week or early next.  They charge $25 for installation and haul away, and $25 for the new flex gas line if we need one, so it’s the same $50 as Lowe’s.  (Lowe’s assured me that they were REQUIRED to install a new flexible gas line.)  That all sounded good depending on the price of the range.  Getting it sooner has some dollar value to us, we’re just not sure how much.

I stayed home while Linda went to Meijer’s for groceries.  Finding the crew in our yard this morning doing work they were no supposed to be doing spooked me enough to not want to leave the house unattended the rest of the day.  As long as I was stuck at home, I called Bratcher Electric to give them a heads up that the gas connection to the house was imminent.  Being Saturday I got their answering machine and left a message.  I also called Darryll at DCM Heating & Cooling and left a message regarding the gas connection.  Once the meter is hung and connected everything else depends on Darryll getting his piece done first.

We checked the website for Country Squire Fireplace and Lighting in Howell and saw a 10% off coupon, so I printed that.  I wanted to go there today and buy a set of high-efficiency vent-free natural gas fire logs but it will probably be tomorrow afternoon instead.  These logs are more efficient than a typical kitchen range and are designed to be used with the fireplace flue closed, throwing most of the heat they produce into the room instead of up the chimney.  Darryll said he would hook it up for us and add a shutoff valve when he came back to tie in to the gas meter, so we need to have it here before he comes back next week.

Marilyn called and said their flights were running a little behind schedule and that Linda should pick her up around 3 PM rather than 2:30 PM as originally planned.  She called back again and said 3:15 PM would be better.  Linda got back from the grocery store and we had a quick lunch of leftover Sloppy Joe’s.

With overnight lows in the 40’s, highs only in the mid-50’s, and the connection of our natural gas somewhat imminent, we decided we could afford to use propane to heat the house.  We have been conscious of our propane use because we did not want to get in a position where we needed to have either of the tanks filled.  I turned the furnace on and set all the thermostats a few degrees above ambient to take the chill off.

While Linda drove over to Lake Orion, Michigan to fetch Marilyn I decided to work at my desk selecting photos for gallery posts on the garage/HVAC project and natural gas work, and worked a little bit on the websites for the FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches and Freethinkers chapters.  I really need to have the GLCC site usable in the next three weeks and the FTH site within a month of that. That sounds ambitious even as I write it down and I suspect it won’t happen.

Linda and Marilyn got to the house around 4:30 PM and after we got Marilyn settled in her bedroom we just sat and relaxed and talked for a while.  We thought she might appreciate a good home-cooked meal but we ended up taking her to LaMarsa for dinner.  She had the Koshary, which we had last night, and we split an order of garlic almond vegetable Ghallaba with green salad and crushed lentil soup.  We all ate way too much pita bread with garlic spread and were uncomfortably full by the time we finished our meal, but it was delicious and we did not have to prepare it or clean up afterwards.

These days twilight now comes around 7 PM and it was dark by the time we got home at 8 PM.  I made a pot of decaf coffee and we settled in the living room for a long chat.  I set the thermostats back before we turned in for the evening as all three of us prefer to sleep in a cool room.

 

20140911 (R) Rooted

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After a breakfast of zucchini muffins and a banana (soft foods) I tried playing with the new RVillage mobile site on my Samsung Galaxy S III phone but I was unable to log in so I read a few blog posts.  We had gusty winds overnight after the rain cleared out so I checked the weather to see what might be headed our way today.  There wasn’t any additional rain in the forecast, but it looked like we would stay shrouded from the sun all day.  The wild turkeys were not put off by the weather and spent some time foraging back by the fire pit.  There were there long enough that I was able to get my good telephoto zoom lens on the camera and get this shot from the basement walkout doorwall.

These three adults and three young have been regular visitors to our yard of late.

These three adults and three young have been regular visitors to our yard of late.

My endodontics appointment was at 11:45 AM with Root Canal Specialty Associates in Brighton, Michigan.  Their offices are on Grand River Avenue just northwest of St. Joseph Mercy Hospital.  That’s only about five miles from our house; much more convenient than driving to Dearborn.  Although I have been having discomfort in both the upper and lower rear teeth on my right side, the bad tooth turned out to be one of the uppers.  Once they had determined that it needed a root canal I never even had to get out of the chair; they just seamlessly moved from diagnostic mode to repair mode.  Endodontic operations are very efficient.

They were done and I was on my way by 1:30 PM.  I stopped at Smead & Son just up the road to see if they could fabricate a rebar cage for our ham radio tower foundation.  They can, and they also sell Sonotubes if we decide to use one.  They stock diameters up to 36″ locally, and have tubes up to 48″ diameter at their Pontiac location.  They can bend the round horizontal sections, fold over the ends of the vertical sections, and supply the twist ties for tying the pieces of rebar together.  They even sell a special tool for twisting the twist ties.  The pieces would not be welded, but the assured me that twist tying them together is the standard way that rebar is held in place.  They can also supply the threaded steel anchor bolts if I decide to get them locally.

My next stop was Staples in Brighton for a new touch screen stylus/pen.  I ended up getting a Wacom Bamboo stylus with no pen, and a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard to pair with my iPad2.  I create the rough drafts of all of my blog posts on the iPad, and I should have gotten a keyboard a long time ago.  I also picked up a sympathy card for a friend and co-worker of Linda’s whose father just passed away.

I stopped at Dunkin Donuts on the way home and got some hot apple cider but could not drink it right away as the local anesthetic had not yet worn completely off and I dribbled every time I took a sip; not a pretty sight.  Back home I took my 3 PM dose of Tylenol.  I will be taking Ibuprofen every six hours for the next 24 hours and also taking Tylenol every six hours spaced halfway in-between the Ibuprofen doses.  Between the anesthetic wearing off and the apple cider cooling down I was finally able to drink it in small careful sips.  I unpacked the wireless keyboard and got it connected to my iPad2 and used it to finishing typing this post.  The keyboard comes with a case that turns into a stand that can hold my iPad2 at two different angles in each of portrait or landscape position.  All-in-all a very nice little package.  I have generally been very happy with Logitech products over the years.

I wanted to play with the RVillage mobile development site but still could not get logged in.  On a suggestion from Linda I figured out how to tell my Samsung Galaxy S III phone to NOT remember logins for websites and was finally able to login and navigate around.  The initial login was a 2-step process and my phone was automatically providing the username and password for step 1 even though I was manually entering the information for step 2.  Once I was in I joined a test group, replied to a topic post, created a new topic and made an initial post.  I also replied to a message, searched for two members of the development team, and sent messages to each of them with some site feedback.  Based on our limited testing of the site it appears that the development team has done a great job on the mobile version.

Linda made a barley, kale, white bean stew for dinner.  She has made it before and it is a wonderful blend of tastes and textures.  Besides the named ingredients, it included onions, garlic, mushrooms, and tomatoes.  For dessert she made apple crisp.  Apple cider and apple crisp in the same day; nothing says “fall” like apples.

Butch called to bring me up-to-date on their situation regarding the transfer of parts from their business in Indiana to the buyer in Nevada.  It looks like the 53′ trailer won’t be there to pick up material until the 29th of this month but I could take our bus there any time after the 18th, when their younger daughter (Brittani) is getting married.  And once our natural gas situation is resolved.  As of this writing we have no idea when they will run the line to our house and hang the meter.  The only date we have ever been given was project completion by September 26.

 

2014/09/07 (N) Findlay Hamfest

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I set alarms on my phone and iPad last night to make sure I got up at 5:00 AM.  My natural tendency is to stay up a little later each night, something I am now able to do as I do not usually have to get up by any certain time in the morning.  Usually.  Today, however, was the annual Hamfest put on by the Findlay, Ohio Amateur Radio Club and I needed to be at Mike’s (W8XH) QTH in time for a 6 AM departure.  We picked up Steve (N8AR) at the Park-n-Ride lot at Lee Road and US-23 around 6:15 AM and drove non-stop to Findlay, Ohio, arriving at the county fairground at 8:15 AM.  We had a good chat on the way down, which is as much of a reason for going as the bargain hunting once we got there.  I have included a couple of photos in this post.  For more photos, visit:

http://wp36test1.slaarc.com/gallery-2/hamfests/2014-09-findlay/

We each paid our $7 admission fee and got our ticket with a tear-off stub for the hourly and grand prize drawings.  We got parked and set our Kenwood TH-F6 handheld radios to 146.475 MHz (simplex).  We filled out our raffle ticket stubs, dropped them off, and started working our way up and down the rows of outside tables.  The outside sales area was essentially a flea market, sometimes referred to as “trunk sales” because people back their cars up to the road and sell stuff from their trunks.  The spots are cheaper to rent for the day, but you take a chance that the weather will be nice.

Outside vendors (trunk sales) at the Findaly ARC Hamfest in Findlay, OH.

Outside vendors (trunk sales) at the Findaly ARC Hamfest in Findlay, OH.

We worked the flea market first while the temperatures were cool and the sun wasn’t overhead but also because almost everything offered for sale was used equipment at negotiable prices.  These are often one-of-kind items and the bargains tend to disappear quickly.  By mid-morning I had purchased a good sized NEMA enclosure (steel box with weather tight gasketed door) and a Harris 22.2 telephone butt handset (tester).  I plan to use the NEMA box to create a cable entrance box with lightning protection for RF transmission lines, AC power lines, and control lines.  I got the telephone test set because it will allow me to hook up to the phone line the same way the AT&T technicians do, and because it is not the sort of thing most folks have in their home.

Bruce (W8RA) gave a short shopping list to Steve (N8AR) yesterday at breakfast.  Mike (W8XH) spotted a matched three-piece set of vintage Heathkit gear, one piece of which was on Bruce’s list.  Steve looked at it and they got Bruce on the phone.  Apparently it was close enough to what Bruce wanted that Steve bought the whole set for him as the seller was not willing to sell them separately.

We then moved to the inside vendors, most of whom were selling new merchandise at fixed prices.  There was some used equipment, however, and I bought an Icom CI-V interface set.  This device will allow me to interface our Icom IC-7000 and/or IC-706 to, and control them from, a computer using something like Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD) software.

I also got to meet and talk to Norm, from Norm’s Fabrication in Adrian, and his wife, who is president of the Adrian Amateur Radio Club.  Norm is a welder, and his side business is fabricating tower parts out of steel and aluminum for fellow hams.  If I cannot get what I need from Heights Tower Systems, Norm may hold the key to getting our used tower erected.

A very classy portable ham radio station (go box).

A very classy portable ham radio station (go box).

A number of other hams from the South Lyon, Novi, Livingston, and SEMDXA radio clubs were there.  I brought my camera and tried to get photos of our club members for the club website.  None of us won anything from the hourly drawings (must be present to win) and we left shortly after noon to meet up at the local Steak-n-Shake for lunch.  I had not eaten breakfast so I enjoyed my garden salad and French fries.  I had a good chat with Dave (K8ESQ), the current president of SEMDXA, and Don (N8CAK) from SLAARC.

We had a good chat on the drive back, stopping briefly at the Michigan Welcome Center on US-23 northbound shortly after entering Michigan from Ohio.  We dropped Steve off at the Lee Road Park-n-Ride and helped him unload the Heathkit equipment.  When we got back to Mike’s I moved my purchases and personal gear to my car and then spent some time examining his Heights tower, especially the fold-over mount.  After studying the parts and the geometry of the design I had a much better understanding of how it works and what we need to get our tower erected and fully operational.

On the way back to my house I got a call from Darryll letting me know he would be out in the morning as long as someone would be home.  Back home I unloaded everything and moved Linda’s car to the side parking pad to make space for Darryll’s truck in the morning.  It was nice to have a day away from our house and property projects.

I spent a little time checking e-mail and websites and off-loading digital photos until Linda called me to dinner.  We had leftover kale salad, quinoa with pineapple and nuts, fresh steamed broccoli, and corn-on-the-cob.  After dinner I recorded the events of the last few days in rough drafts of separate blog posts.  By 10:15 PM the early start and long day finally caught up with me and I turned the lights out and drifted off to sleep.

 

2014/09/06 (S) Deliveries

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We were up early and off to our SLAARC ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon.  There was a good turnout and good conversation, some of which had to do with our future tower project.  Mike (W8XH) was driving to the Findlay (Ohio) Hamfest tomorrow morning and had room for one more in his car so I decided to go.

Back home we broke down cardboard, loaded it into my car with the rest of our recyclables, and headed over to Recycle Livingston.  Afterwards we stopped at the Howell Bank of America branch so I could get some cash for the Findlay OH Amateur Radio Club Hamfest tomorrow.  A little farther up the road we stopped at Lowe’s for grass seed and bought three plastic tubs to replace the cardboard boxes we have been using on the floor of the kitchen pantry for recyclables.  Lowe’s is at Latson Road and Grand River Road so we hopped on I-96 East over to US-23 and headed south towards Ann Arbor to drop off the window air-conditioner and visit with our son, daughter-in-law, and grand-daughter.

When we exited US-23 at Washtenaw Avenue the traffic was worse than usual, and it is usually pretty bad.  Ann Arbor got hit a lot harder by the storms last night than we did and two of the three traffic signals between the highway and Stadium Boulevard were not working.  Drivers were being courteous, and everyone was taking turns, but the traffic volume through this stretch of road exceeds its capacity even when the signals are working.

We got the window air-conditioner unloaded and moved to the second floor of the garage.  We had a nice visit that included reading stories to Madeline.

Madeline and Grandma Linda read a favorite story.

Madeline and Grandma Linda read a favorite story.

We were going to stop at the Whole Foods Market on our way home but decided to avoid the traffic jam and worked our way through a subdivision up to Geddes Road and back to US-23.  Back home we had a light/late lunch of leftover rice seitan and mashed cauliflower and then worked for a couple of hours getting things out of the storage pod and organized in the garage.  We moved the shelves away from the northeast wall so Darryll could work on the gas pipe when he returns.  We knew when we put the shelves there that we were taking a small gamble that we might have to move them.  Fortunately they slid easily without being unloaded.  We must have the storage container empty by the time we go to bed on Thursday evening as it is scheduled for pickup on Friday.

For dinner we had a nice salad, roasted Brussels sprouts, and sautéed potatoes with onions, garlic, and bell peppers. We finished the no-bake (frozen) double-chocolate torte for dessert. After dinner Linda played Scrabble and Words With Friends while I researched Acme screws, nuts, and related components that we need to get the ham radio tower fold-over mount operational.

I turned in earlier than usual as I needed to be up at 5 AM in order to be at Mike’s (W8XH) QTH by 6 AM to leave for the Findlay Hamfest.

2014/09/04 (R) More Organized

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Darryll did not call last night so we knew he would not be here today. That gave us another day to work in the garage.  We moved things around, cleaned, sorted through stuff, decided what to re-store, and where, and what to add to various disposal collections.  We are pretty sure the old window A-C unit is going to our son’s house, so we loaded it in the Honda Element, which got it out of the garage.  Linda also loaded some old video and satellite TV electronics in the car to take to Recycle Livingston tomorrow.

We were making good progress and decided to stick with it and then have a slightly later lunch.  We removed all of the doors from some old kitchen cabinets, upper and lower, in the northwest corner of the garage.  We plan to eventually remove these cabinets, but not this year.  Without the doors we will be able to see what is stored in them, or at least that something is stored in them.  We moved a set of small parts bins and a bookcase which allowed us to reposition two work benches.  That, in turn, allowed us to move the radial arm saw and finally set the saw on the base and secure it.  It is now in a place where I could use it if needed, if it had power.  It requires a 240VAC/15A outlet.  I bought and installed a 30A double pole breaker in anticipation of this, so I will have to get a 15A breaker instead.

The weather forecast for today and tomorrow was for warm temperatures becoming hot with increasing humidity and chances for rain.  We closed the house up at lunch time and turned on the A-C.  We have hardly used it this summer, but have appreciated having in on those few sultry days.

We watched our current resident flock of wild turkeys—three adults and three young that have been in the area for a few weeks now—forage in our back yard while we ate lunch.  After lunch Linda decided to make banana bread as we had several bananas that did not get eaten fast enough.  She was researching dinner recipes when I went to my office to work on computer tasks.  Except for a dinner break, I worked late into the evening on the following:

  • Cleaning up (filing or deleting) e-mails
  • SLAARC Website user maintenance
  • Updating WordPress websites (ver 4.0 was just released)
  • Social media sites (RVillage, Facebook, Linked-In)
  • Editing daily blog posts
  • Off-loading digital photographs
  • Organizing photo storage

BTW:  Dinner was a new dish, a pineapple quinoa stir-fry with cashews, ginger, scallions, a little bit of hot peppers, and several spices/seasonings including fresh basil that Linda has been growing in the northwest corner of the kitchen where there is good light. It was excellent.

 

2014/09/01 (M) A Day To Labor

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One of the odd things about being “retired” is that holidays, like weekends, do not have the same significance they had when we were employed full time.  We no longer have “3-day weekends.”  We also do not have a tradition in our family of gathering on the summer holidays, so those days tend to blend into the days around them.  If not for our Saturday morning ham radio breakfast and the Sunday morning Howell Farmers Market we probably would not know what day of the week it was.

Knowing that today was Labor Day, Linda prepared vegan cinnamon rolls yesterday and baked them first thing this morning.  This was the first time she has made these and they were a real treat. Vegan, yes; whole plant-based food, not exactly.  These will be a rare treat for us.

As has been my pattern for the last few weeks, I sanded and touched up drywall first thing after breakfast.  Most of the drywall compound was finally smooth enough that I felt it was ready to prime.  I discovered that I was out of primer, so I went to Lowe’s to get some and picked up a few other things while I was there.  It was very humid today, which tends to slow the drying of paint, but primer is thinner than paint and gets absorbed into the paper drywall covering   I was hopeful that I might get a first coat of paint applied this evening.

Mike (W8XH) sent an e-mail Saturday evening to the members of the SLAARC announcing the availability of the new WordPress website and indicating that they would each be receiving a unique username and password from me in the next few days.  I wanted to wait at least 24 hours before I started creating users.  That waiting period had passed, so today I parked myself in front of my computer and registered users.

Part of the registration process required me to create a username.  That was easy for a ham radio club as (almost) everyone has an FCC call sign.  It also required a valid/unique e-mail address.  When I created an account an e-mail, with their username and a randomly generated password, got sent to the e-mail address I entered.  The e-mail also contained instructions on how to get to the website, how to login, and how to change their password.  I finished creating the last user account around 9 PM, but I did not work on this between 5 PM and 8 PM.

The vegan cinnamon rolls made for a filing and somewhat higher calorie breakfast, so we skipped lunch today and had an early dinner.  I had requested a picnic type of meal to celebrate the end of the summer tourist season, and Linda fixed a nice one.  We had vegan potato salad, corn-on-the-cob, and pan-grilled tofu slices with BBQ sauce and caramelized onions served open-faced on some of the Italian bread she made for dinner on Saturday.  Dessert was watermelon balls.  And the wonderful thing is that I am maintaining a good weight.  Eating well and eating healthy are not mutually exclusive.  However, like low-fat and fat-free foods, and then gluten-free foods, the processed food industry has discovered a “market” for foods that are free of animal products.  That, however, does not mean they are free of unpronounceable chemicals or excessive amounts of sugar and salt.  There is a growing amount of vegan junk food available in the marketplace.

We spent a little time after dinner on the back deck watching wildlife as a storm front approached from the west.  As the wind kicked up we lost our AT&T DSL connection and then our phone went out, exhibiting the same behavior we have had throughout most of August.  I shut down my computer and changed back into my work clothes to do some painting.  I put a coat of paint on the east wall of the garage and both the inside and outside of the utility closet.  It started raining really hard so I had to close the garage door, which cut down on my light, but eventually the rain let up and I was able to open the garage doors again.  The inside of the utility closet may need another coat, but I think that most of the outside of the closet, and the east wall of the garage, may be done.  That means I can finally mount the thermostat for the garage furnace and put cover plates back on switches and outlets.

I am still working on the outside of the south wall of the utility closet (with the door).  I am using drywall compound to create a smooth transition at the hinge edge of the door to correct for a carpentry error I made when installing the door much earlier in the project.  The transition will make it possible for me to install trim around the door, but I have to build up the transition in thin, tapered layers, allow it to dry, sand it smooth, and repeat the process over, and over, and over.  Ditto for the west wall of the library, which is the other side of the east wall of the garage, where I am building up a slightly recessed area where the opening was for the old window A-C unit so it will blend in with the surrounding wall surface.

2014/08/30 (S) By All Accounts

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We went to the weekly SLAARC breakfast this morning.  We stopped on the way back to the house to get a food processor.  I shut down my ASUS laptop PC, packed it for travel, and headed for Mike’s (W8XH) QTH; the first time it has been out of the house since I bought it at the end of April.

I worked with Mike on the new SLAARC WordPress website, walking him back through the process of creating photo galleries.  He then uploaded pictures from the 2014 Field Day event, added captions to some of them, and created photo galleries.

I was going to create user accounts, but that turned out to still be a bit premature.  In showing Mike around the site we discovered that the home page login widget for the WP-Members plug-in was not working correctly.  It was last night, but that was before I installed the Global Hide Admin Toolbar plug-in.  Suspecting a minor incompatibility (although the site did not crash, thank goodness) I had to engineer a work-around.  The problem and solution turned out to be multifaceted.

One aspect of the problem was that we needed to remove the WP-Members widget from the Home screen, but it was the only place where a logged in user could log out.  Another aspect of the problem was the realization that users would have to click on one of the pages in the Member Only Area to get a login screen that would actually log them into the site and allow them to navigate wherever they wanted.

One facet of the solution was to create a new page that would appear at the right hand end of the main menu bar and place the WP-Members widget on that page.  It was not immediately obvious to me how to do this, or if we even could, but I eventually figured it out.  That provided something on the main menu bar, which remains visible at all times, where users can go to logout.  (They should also be able to log in there, but it’s the same widget that didn’t work correctly on the Home page.)

The other facets of the solution involved editing the e-mail that gets sent to a new user when their account is created and editing the User’s Guide, both of which describe the login and logout procedure.  As long as I had to create and upload a new version of the User’s a Guide, I decided to put the link on its own page so it would show up in the menu structure and be easier for members to find.  I did the same thing with the links to the official club roster documents.  Adding those two page then required me to edit two pages to remove the old links.  As the saying goes “it’s a process.”

Mike was still creating photo galleries so I drafted a notification e-mail for him to send to the members and sent it to him.  He had to leave to run an errand right after I left and planned to deal with sending the e-mail later that evening.  I will wait at least 24 hours after he sends it before I start creating user accounts.

I was back home in time to relax and work on this post before John and Diane arrived around 5 PM to visit and have dinner.  They brought a salad that Diane made and two bottles of wine; a sweet Shiraz that was unusual but delightful, and a more traditional Cabernet Sauvignon.  Linda made a penne pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and mushrooms, and made Italian bread from scratch.  She also made the chilled no-bake double chocolate torte for dessert.  It was so good everyone had a second piece.

Diane now has an iPad Mini and Linda spent time with her after dinner helping her configure some things.  They also managed to get connected through the iMessage feature.  Storms rolled in around 9 PM and we had brief periods of heavy rain and diffuse lightning all around.  There was a lull in the weather just before 11 PM so they gathered up their things and hit the road.  I cleared the table and Linda loaded the dishwasher.  She started it and then we were off to bed, tired from a long but very satisfying day.

 

2014/08/29 (F) Sand Mud Press

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Before breakfast this morning I tried to start the Aqua-Hot (hydronic heating system) in our converted coach, but the burner would not ignite.  We had the same problem back on June 9th when Darin Hathaway of Hydronic Heating Specialists serviced the unit while we were at Elkhart Campground waiting to go to the GLAMARAMA rally in Goshen.  Darin suspected a bad coil but managed to jiggle a few wires and got it to work.  It started several times in a row, so we decided not to spend the money for a new coil at that time.  I hoped then the decision wasn’t a mistake, but it looks like perhaps it was.  I will try to find some time over the next few days to jiggle some more wires and see if anything comes of it.  I recall Darin saying the ignition coils were expensive, so I don’t want to replace ours if it is not actually broken.

For breakfast we had some of the vegan muffins that Linda made yesterday.  They were yummy.  We took a little time to revisit our options for a white, free-standing, double oven, 5-burner, gas range with a convection feature in at least one of the ovens but did not come to any decision regarding purchasing a new one.  Linda made a grocery list and then went to the Howell library to see what Consumer’s Reports had to say about gas ranges before stopping at Meijer’s.

While Linda was gone I placed follow-up calls to Heights Tower Systems and Bratcher Electric to check on the status of their pending quotes and then e-mailed Darin about the Aqua-Hot.  I then got to work in the garage and library working on the drywall.  I sanded all the drywall compound (mud) I had applied yesterday and added the next layer to the places that needed it.  Patching the library side of the opening where the window A-C was installed has proven to be particularly challenging, or at least tedious.  The new piece of drywall is recessed slightly compared to the original wall surface surrounding it, so I have been building up layers of drywall compound to “fill the hole.”  It has taken many passes so far and it is going to take quite a few more before it’s done.

I finished up for the day, cleaned up the tools, and changed out of my work clothes.  Rather than spend a lot of time at the library, Linda photographed the relevant pages of recent issues of Consumer’s Reports with her iPad so we could study them at home.  What we got from the reviews was that LG, GE, Electrolux, and Samsung are making good gas ranges while Kitchen Aide, and Jenn-Air are best avoided.  Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Best Buy all carry LG, GE, and Samsung appliances, so we have a choice of local dealers.  While we were pondering all of this over lunch a group of wild turkeys came through the back yard several times foraging for food.  There were three large adults and three much smaller birds, obviously this year’s brood.

I spent most of the rest of the day working at my desk getting the SLAARC WordPress website to the point where I was comfortable creating user accounts.  I had hoped to have user accounts set up by August 13th, but that did not happen.  One reason for the delay was that I was trying to find a way to automatically e-mail each user as I created their account.  It took me a while, but I figured out how to do this with the WP-Members plug-in.  I also found a plug-in that hides the WordPress Toolbar from users based on their WordPress user role.  In this case I was only concerned about users with the Subscriber role but the plug-in allows me to control all defined user roles.  I did a final edit of the User’s Guide, uploaded it to the private Members Only Area of the website, and e-mailed Mike (W8XH) and Larry (K8UT) that the site was ready to go.  Our DSL connection was pretty good most of the day but got flaky for a while during the evening.  The phone continued to be unusable with loud noise masking weak audio.  So far AT&T’s response to our MPSC complaint has been a phone call and e-mail from someone in the “Office of the President.”  Impressed?  I’m not.

 

2014/08/25 (M) AT&T and the MPSC

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I was scheduled to participate in a meeting of the FMCA Education Committee at 4 PM today but it got rescheduled to Monday, September 8, same time.  That was a welcomed change of plans which allowed me to concentrate on our construction project.

Roese Construction, the contractor for Consumer’s Energy, is still working along our street.  The main gas lines are run.  They are now digging the connection trenches, fusing the sections of pipe together, and filling the trenches back in.  We heard them working at the west end of our property and walked down to see what they were doing and take a few photographs.  A large backhoe was just starting to fill a trench at the northwest corner of our yard where two pieces of main line were joined with a branch line going to the cul-du-sac to the west.  There was a lot of water in that trench and it looked like a (muddy) lap pool.  The surface of the water was only about two feet below the surface of the ground.  I asked the backhoe operator if that was ground water and he said it was.  The northwest corner of our property is a low spot that forms small ponds around many of the trees when it rains, and stays wet for a very long time even after the surface water disappears.

We spent the morning and afternoon sanding drywall compound and touching up a few spots.  While the compound was drying I worked on electrical tasks and Linda worked in the kitchen and did some weeding in the beds around the house.  Somewhere in the middle of all that we put all of the sections of the ham radio tower back on the middle deck, had lunch, and made a trip to Lowe’s for a light switch and various cover plates.  I also picked up an 18″ x 28″ sheet of 1/4″ thick Plexiglas to use as a temporary replacement for the fogged window in the bus when I finally get around to removing it to have it repaired.

Our AT&T phone and DSL service is worse than useless at the moment.  After three un-returned phone calls to both the technician (who gave us his number and said to call him directly if the problem re-occurred within 30 days) and the infrastructure manager for this area (whose name and number we got from the technician) we were fed up, so we filed a complaint with the Michigan Public Service Commission.  About four hours later we got a call from a women who claimed to be from the Office of the President of AT&T letting me know that she was in receipt of our commission filing and that she would be coordinating the “investigation and service repair process.”  The audio level was low and the noise on the line was high, so I could barely hear her and said so.  Apparently she heard the noise too, so at least she knew we were not making this up.  She e-mailed us shortly thereafter with her name and contact information.  That’s a start, but what we really want is the clean, reliable signal that we pay for.

There are things I can do, and need to do, at my computer that do not require me to be online, such as editing the rough drafts of blog posts and selecting/post-processing photographs.  The last post I uploaded to our blog was for August 1st, so I am once again almost four weeks behind.  I needed to finish processing the tree photos from last Thursday, put them in a Dropbox folder, and e-mail the link to Paul at Detroit Tree Recycling, but I did not get that done either.  When I wasn’t eating or driving back and forth to Lowe’s I was working in the garage.

Speaking of food, Linda made stuffed mushrooms for dinner and served them with a side of grilled asparagus.  Both were very tasty.  After dinner I gave the east wall of the garage a final sanding and then worked on the utility closet wall while Linda vacuumed up the dust.  I wiped down the wall with a barely damp sponge and applied a coat of Zinzer primer.  It should be dry enough to paint in the morning.

I drove back to Lowe’s to return a couple of incorrect cover plates I had purchased earlier in the day and get the correct ones.  I picked up another gallon of paint while I was there to make sure I had enough on hand for tomorrow.  On the way home I had a nice QSO (ham radio contact or chat) with Mike (W8XH).  Ham radio is fun and we have yet to get involved in making long distance (DX) contacts with folks all over the world on the HF (high frequency) bands.  Getting our tower up with some HF antennas on it will help a lot.

 

2014/08/23 (S) Square Waves

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We have so much to do at home and on the bus that we might have skipped the SLAARC (ham radio club) breakfast in South Lyon this morning, but I had agreed to meet Chuck at his shop (bus garage) at 10 AM in Novi and to bring Mike (W8XH) along with his oscilloscope to look at the tachometer signal, or lack thereof.  We had a nice chat with our ham radio friends, discussed having dinner in a week or so with Bruce and Linda, and then headed to Chuck’s shop.

We had two different opinions as to what signal we might find, if any, at the end of the wires that connect to Chuck’s tachometer.  Matt, from Bob’s Speedometer, told me that the signal to both the VDO tachometer and speedometer were variable frequency square waves at 3 to 5 volts peak and that the electronics in the gauge moved the needle in proportion to the frequency.  Mike (W8XH) had talked to Jim (N8KUE), who works in the research lab at Ford Motor Company, and Jim was of the opinion that the input to these gauges was a pulse width modulated signal.  With pulse-width modulation the frequency and amplitude of the waveform are constant but the width of the “pulse” (the “on time” of non-zero voltage) varies from zero to some maximum percentage of the half cycle, up to 100%.  If it is on for the entire half cycle it becomes a square wave.  The longer the pulse (on time percentage) the more energy is transmitted.  The gauge electronics can convert that to a needle position or run a motor faster or slower, such as might drive an odometer.

So which was it?  Well…neither.  What we saw was an alternating current signal that appeared to simply be an impulse (sudden spike in the voltage), one positive and one negative per cycle, with the frequency responding in direct proportion to the engine RPM.  The impulse had a rapid but noticeable decay time that appeared to me to exponential, but we did not have the wires connected to a load and that may have affected the signal. The voltage we were seeing appeared to be in 300 mV range, a far cry from the 3 – 5 volts we expected.

We loaded the cardboard in my car before going to breakfast, so when we were done at Chuck’s we headed directly to Recycle Livingston.  From there we went to pet Supplies Plus for some cat litter and then to Lowe’s for four more sheets of drywall (Sheetrock) and a large tub of better drywall compound.  After fighting with the back wall of the garage recently and having trouble with using the patching and repair compound yesterday, I wanted a drywall compound that would go on easier and smoother.  It could just be my technique, of course; I wasn’t that good at dry-walling 32 years ago, and feel like I have lost what little technique I once had.

Back home we unloaded everything, changed into our work clothes, and had lunch; grilled “cheese” sandwiches with tomatoes and dark leafy greens and fresh peaches, ripened to perfection.

While Linda sanded the drywall compound I applied yesterday I removed the panel from the library side of the opening for the old window A-C unit.  I insulated the cavity, cut and installed a new piece of drywall, and re-taped the seams.  I helped Linda finish the sanding, wiped off the dust with a wrung out sponge, and then applied another coat of drywall compound.  I then applied a first cost of “mud,” as drywall compound is commonly called, to the filler panel in the library.

In preparation for dry-walling the new utility closet we had to do some carpentry to box around the flue and gas pipe where they pass through the west wall.  We also had to box around the supply air duct where it passes above the utility closet door.  Finally, we added some backer boards along the edge of the platform by the west wall.  The purpose of all of this carpentry was to provide backing along all drywall edges so it will be supported and can be secured.  Our final task for the day was to trim a piece of 2×4 to block off the top of the wall cavity where the return air duct is connected next to the door between the library and the garage.

For dinner we had leftovers from Thursday:  Koshary and pita bread with vegan garlic “butter.”  Linda read somewhere recently that drier white wines are generally considered (by someone) to go better with Middle Eastern food, but we thought our 2009 Egri Merlot went quite well with dinner.  Of course, Koshary is an Egyptian dish, and so perhaps more Mediterranean than Middle Eastern.  All of that reminded me that there really are no rules about these things; drink what you like and enjoy life.

 

20140821 (R) Words With Friends

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With a dry morning on tap I took care of chores after breakfast while Linda worked on preparations for dinner.  First I photographed trees around our entire property that were dead or obviously distressed and not doing well.  Next I took all of the sections of our Heights aluminum tower off of the back deck, where they have been stored since we bought it in May, and laid them out in the yard in the order in which they go together.  I then photographed all of the pieces, including details of how they interconnect, along with the fold-over assembly, fold-over motor, and bearing plate.

Thrust bearing plate for ham radio tower.

Thrust bearing plate for ham radio tower.

I transferred the photos to my computer and then processed a selection of the tower photos, resizing and sharpening them.  I put them in a folder in my Dropbox and e-mailed the link to Heights Tower Systems along with a description of what we have, what we intend to do, and what we think we need to do it.  I also gave them the name of the amateur radio operator we bought the tower from.  He was the original owner.

20140821-07952

The gear-motor for the fold-over mount. Mast rotor in the plastic bag to the right.

Fold-over mount standing up on hinge end.

Fold-over mount standing up on hinge end.

 

 

One meaning of having “words with friends” suggests that they might not be your friends anymore, but in this case it’s the name of an online game from Hasbro that Linda plays with Karen Limkemann.  Karen and Steve came to visit this today and arrived around 3:30 PM.  We all talked for an hour and then Steve and I went to my office to look at our Linux computer while Linda started pulling dinner together.

 

 

 

Ham radio tower sections laid out in the yard end-to-end.

Ham radio tower sections laid out in the yard end-to-end.

Linda spent much of yesterday and this morning preparing this meal.  She made a salad dressing from scratch, crushed red lentil soup from scratch, pita bread from scratch, mixed up a small batch of garlic butter, and made Koshary from scratch.  We had a semi-dry white wine from Leelanau Cellars with the meal, and red grapes for dessert.  The meal was truly outstanding.

Heights Tower Systems aluminum tower sections laid out in the yard.

Heights Tower Systems aluminum tower sections laid out in the yard.

After dinner we took a stroll around the property and showed them the landscaping work, the (disassembled) ham tower, the proposed location of the barn, and the natural gas and HVAC projects.  Back at the house we discussed past travels and future plans at some length before they needed to head for home.

 

2014/08/20 (W) Like A Well-Oiled Clock

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Darryll and Alec (DCM Heating & Cooling) were back today to continue working on the garage and library HVAC project.  I was talking to them as they unloaded tools and materials when I got a call back from Paul Keech.

Paul has changed the name of his company from Paul’s Tree Service to Detroit Tree Recycling and is also running American Mulch.  As I was told yesterday he is trying to focus on tree removal, especially wood lots with multiple trees, rather than tree trimming.  Among other reasons, the trees he removes provides the raw material for his mulch business.  Also, the guy who did most of his climbing the last ten years has moved on to another job and it’s hard for Paul to run a business when he’s up in a tree, even with a cell phone.  I tried to describe the trimming and removal work we need done but in the end we agreed that I would take some photos, put them in a Dropbox folder, and e-mail him the link.  He also encouraged me to get a couple of quotes from some companies more local to our new location.

While I was talking to Paul, Darryll found a small leak in the reducer at the T-fitting behind the garage and tightened it.  The pipe out of this reducer will bring gas into the garage and was the last piece of pipe they worked on the last time they were here.  Alec reset the pressure to 12 PSI and it appears to be holding better than it has up to this point.

In the course of the day, they…

  • …finished setting the Library furnace/air-conditioner and connected the parts together.
  • …cut the hole for the return air register and installed the return air duct.
  • …ran the supply air ducting from the top of the unit along top of the ceiling, over the top of the utility closet door, and then angled it to run along east wall at the ceiling.  All of the duct outside the closet is insulated.  Two flexible ducts will come off the top and run through the attic to supply air through ceiling registers on the east end of the library.
  • …marked the location for the two registers that will be at the bottom of two rigid ducts running down the east garage wall to supply air to the library just above the baseboard heat radiators.
  • …removed the old library window A-C unit and covered the hole with cardboard.  We will have to patch the opening on both sides with drywall and paint it.
  • …shut off the propane to the old library wall-hung space heater, removed the unit, capped the line (iron pipe), turned the gas back on and checked for leaks.
  • …connected the double-walled flue pipe for the library furnace.
  • …connected the double-walled flue pipe for the garage furnace.
  • …ran the 1/2″ iron pipe for the gas supply to the garage furnace.

They will take care of the air-conditioner condenser/compressor installation on a subsequent visit.  In the meantime I need to install electrical junction boxes for the two furnaces, which must have switches located within three feet of each unit.  I also need to run new 12 AWG 2+g NM cable for old A-C condenser/compressor and repurpose the existing A-C condenser/compressor wiring as an outside 120 VAC / 15 Amp outlet.

We still needed to repair drywall in the library and upper east garage wall and install new drywall on the lower east wall of the garage and on the new utility closet walls.  The lower half of the east garage wall is the next thing I have to do as I need to have it done before he comes back to finish the duct work.

I got a call from Chuck Spera just before noon letting me know that he was headed to his shop to pick up his old VDO bus tachometer and take it to Bob’s Speedometer Service on Bergin Road.  Bergin is an east-west road about one mile north of our house.  Bob’s was over at Old US-23, less than five minutes away.  I met Chuck there at 12:30 PM and we met with Matt who handles their VDO instrument repairs.  He tested Chuck’s tach and pronounced it broken but probably repairable, so Chuck decided to leave it there.

Matt did confirm for us that both the tachometer and the speedometer take a square wave input signal in the 3 – 5 volt range with deflection of the needle proportional to the frequency of the waveform.  Presumably this same signal regulates the speed of a motor that drives the gears of the odometer.  I had discussed this very situation with Mike (W8XH) just last night and he is willing to bring his 100MHz 2-channel storage oscilloscope and help us look for and trace these signals if needed.  Once we have known good gauges installed knowing what waveform to look for will help greatly with troubleshooting should they still fail to indicate the appropriate information.

After we were done at Bob’s I headed over to the Meijer’s northeast of M-59 and US-23 to get a few things for Linda.  By the time I got home, Glen Williams of Tenor Clocks LLC had arrived to service our grandfather clock.  I “broke” it about a month ago by trying to wind it at just the wrong time and it has not chimed since then.  It has also never been oiled in the 11 years since we bought it and Glen told us on Saturday that it should be cleaned and oiled every 5 – 7 years.  (We saw Glen at the GLCC/CCO rally in Clio, Michigan this past Saturday when we were there.)  Glen took the mechanism out and examined it and said that nothing was broken.  Apparently it finally bound up the last time I wound it from lack of proper oiling.  He cleaned it, oiled it, and checked it for wear but did not see any.  He reassembled it, checked the operation and timing, and said it was running smoothly and keeping very accurate time “…like a well-oiled clock.”

Although my time on the computer today was limited, I managed to post my blog entry for August 1st and started selecting photos for other posts.  I updated the Technical page on the SLAARC website with a document on low band antennas for Field Day use, and added a link to an online Smith Chart Tutorial.  I then updated the online roster.  I am at the point where I need to generate WordPress user accounts for the club members so I looked more carefully at the WP-Members plug-in documentation to see if there was a way to have the website e-mail each member as I create their account.  It appears that there is, but it will take a little more work on my part to get that set up and working correctly.  As I was working on this our AT&T DSL line started dropping out; again.

Linda spent part of the day preparing food ahead in advance of having company tomorrow.  She held back some of the crushed red lentil soup for our dinner and served it alongside sandwiches.  While we were eating we noticed that the phone said “Line In Use.”  We knew we were not using it, but I picked up one of the handsets, pushed “Talk”, and got a very loud, very noisy busy signal.  We checked all of the phones to make sure there wasn’t a problem with one of them.  There wasn’t.  When I checked again the message said “Check Tel Line.”  That usually means we won’t have a dial tone when we push “Talk” and that was, indeed, the case.

Ken is the service technician that has been out twice to try to resolve the problem and he left his AT&T cell phone number in case we had recurring problems.  He also left his manager’s name and phone number.  I called and left a message for Ken and then called and left a message for his manager, making it very clear that Ken has been working hard to resolve our problem and we are happy with the service he is providing.  I also tried to convey that the service disruptions are interfering with our ability to do things online, like edit websites.  It’s bad enough that the data rate is so slow, but we depend on our “always on” DSL service to always be on.

We went to Lowe’s after dinner to buy a couple sheets of drywall.  We looked for special cover plates with a switch opening in one half and a round hole in the other, but did not find anything like that.  We stopped at Teeko’s on the way back and had Jeff roast two more pounds of half-caff blends for us; one Ethiopian Yirgacheffe and the other Seattle Blend.  He was still out of the Sweet Dreams decaf blend, which we have him mix 50-50 with the regular Seattle Blend to make Sweet Seattle Dreams, but he is supposed to be getting some in his shipment tomorrow.

Back home we unloaded the drywall, had some fresh strawberries for dessert, and read quietly for a while.  I’ve been reading the PDF version of the 2nd edition of The Mobile Internet Handbook and am done except for the glossary and the appendices.  It is over twice as many pages as the 1st edition and is the definitive resource on connectivity for RVers in particular.

 

2014/08/18 (M) Tasks Menagerie

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I woke up early, before 5 AM, so I got up, showered, shaved (not a daily occurrence), got dressed, and sat in the living room to read.  I started making coffee around 7 AM, which provided Linda the clue (incentive?) to get up and get dressed.  Ahhh, breakfast (homemade granola).

No more limbs hanging over the bus.

No more limbs hanging over the bus.

Linda was on tap to babysit in Ann Arbor today and left around 8:15 AM.  I got the Little Giant ladder out of the front bay of the bus and set it up as 14′ extension ladder.  This is the only ladder we own that will get me onto the roof of the bus.  I took a brush to clean off the roof of bus and a pole saw/pruner to trim tree branches encroaching on the bus.  When I was done on the roof I collapsed the ladder and put it back in the front bay as this ladder goes wherever the bus goes.  I trimmed lots of other trees from the ground and then gathered up the limbs into a pile to get them out of Keith’s way so he could cut the grass.  (Monday is grass cutting day this year.)

I wanted to run the Aqua-Hot but discovered we had left the electric heating element on so the coolant was hot enough the diesel burner would not come on.  We have been told by Aqua-Hot service technicians in seminars that the unit should be run at least once a month to keep it in peak operating condition.  I turned the electric heating element off and checked to see what else might be on that wasn’t needed.

I looked at replacing the overflow reservoir with the larger Oasis one I got from Butch, but it would require stand-offs or brackets to clear existing water lines (at least until I rebuild the water bay) and I did not feel like getting involved in that today.  Besides, the overflow reservoir was just below the full/hot mark from having left the electric heating element turned on, so I needed to let the system cool down before I could do anything anyway.

No limbs hanging out into the pull-through driveway.

No limbs hanging out into the pull-through driveway.

I chatted with Keith for a little while after he finished cutting the grass and then had lunch, after which I settled in to work at my desk on the SLAARC WordPress website.  I took a break mid-afternoon and made several phone calls.  My first call was to Heights Tower Systems in Pensacola, Florida to start finding out what I need to get our used Heights tower erected, how to order it, and what it’s going to cost.  My chat with Katie made it sound like they might not be all that helpful.  They need measurements, photos, and the name of the previous (original) owner as a starting point and I said I would send her that information as soon as I could.

I called Paul’s Tree service next to see if Paul Keech might come out and trim our trees.  The gal who answered the phone said Paul was trying to get out of the tree-trimming business but wanted to know if we needed trees trimmed or felled?  We need both, but I was primarily looking for trimming.  I guess that was the wrong answer.  I left my name and phone numbers and asked that he at least give me a call.  I suspect we will have to find someone else to trim several trees in places I cannot reach.

My last call was to EZ-Connector in Tulare, California.  I talked to Joe and was ready to order until he suggested I double check a couple of things first, specifically the number of circuits (wires) I need and the length of connecting cable.  I need to get these parts ordered, but I’m not sure when I will find time to verify these things.

Linda stopped at the Whole Foods Market in Ann Arbor but still got home ahead of the afternoon traffic.  She bought an Amy’s roasted vegetable pizza for dinner which we enjoyed with red grapes and sweet Bing cherries.  I worked some more on the SLAARC website creating pages for business meeting documents and uploading them.  I also uploaded my blog posts for the last five days of July to our personal blog.  I added more projects to my bus project list, got discouraged at its growing length, and went to bed.

 

2014/08/16 (S) Bus People

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We enjoy the company of our fellow “hams” (amateur radio operators) and so our first destination this morning was the Senate Coney Island in South Lyon for the weekly SLAARC breakfast.  It was a much smaller turnout than last week, but that often leads to better conversation for the lower noise level if no other reason.

Converted bus people are also our kind of people, so our second destination today was the Fireman’s Park in Clio, Michigan where the joint CCO/GLCC “Back-to-the-Bricks” rally was taking place.  There were 22 rigs in attendance, 19 of which were converted buses.  We got there around 11AM and spent the afternoon visiting with whomever was around, starting with Pat and Vickie Lintner.  Light rain moved in during the early afternoon and we had a nice visit with our friends from Ontario, Bill and Karen, in their bus.

With a few exceptions we knew all of the attendees and they all knew us, so this was a comfortable reunion with old and new friends.  We had a chance to talk to Glen Williams, who runs a clock repair business named Tenor Clocks, about our broken grandfather clock and made an appointment for him to come work on it on Wednesday at noon.  (Glen is also part of a four man singing group named “Three Men and a Tenor”.  Glen is the Tenor.)  We were most cordially invited to stay for dinner but we had not paid to attend the rally and there was very little food we could (would) eat so we left around 6 PM as the group was assembling for the evening meal.

We stopped at the Panera in Fenton on the way home and enjoyed their black bean soup and Mediterranean veggie sandwich, hold the feta cheese.  Once home we enjoyed a small glass of Late Harvest Vignoles wine from Acres of Land winery in Kentucky while we worked on our iPads a bit before bed.

 

2014/08/15 (F) On The Level

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I got dressed this morning for physical work, but ended up doing very little.  I worked at my desk most of the morning, including working through the first chapter of the Intro to Linux course on edX.  I came up from the basement to have lunch at 12:30 PM after which I moved my car out of the pull-through driveway.  I then started the bus and, with Linda’s assistance, backed it out of the pull-through driveway, drove it the short distance to our straight driveway (which ties into the other end of the pull-through driveway), pulled it up onto the concrete driveway as far as it could go, and parked it.  The concrete driveway runs uphill from the road to the garage and, not knowing how long it might be there, I lowered the front end and raised the back end; not enough to level it but enough to make it better.  Linda chocked the drive tires while I hooked up the electrical shore-power.  The front bay had gotten water in it from the recent rains so we opened all of the bays to let them air out while Linda soaked up as much water as she could with a couple of old towels.

Spreading 21AA road gravel to fix the driveway.

Spreading 21AA road gravel to fix the driveway.

I got out our 8′ step ladder and pole saw/lopper to prune some large (1 – 2 inch) dead branches that were hanging over the pull-through driveway where the rear end of the bus normally sits.  I no sooner started this work when Phil from Precision Grading showed up right on time with his dump truck, tracked front-loader, and rolling compactor attachment to repair the damage done to the pull-through driveway by the recent landscaping work.

Phil off-loaded the front-loader from the trailer and then disconnected the trailer from the dump truck.  He had a small load of 21AA road gravel (with lots of fines) that he dumped in two different spots in the pull-through driveway.  He then put the truck back in the street and set up his laser level to see just what he needed to do.  He used the front loader to move the gravel around and distribute it evenly and finished by back blading it with the bucket to level it.

Rolling and compacting the driveway.

Rolling and compacting the driveway.

Once he had the gravel the way he wanted it, he removed the bucket and attached the vibrating roller/compactor.  He went over the driveway several times, always making his final pass going backwards while pulling the roller to smooth out the tracks created by the machine’s drive treads.  The roller/compactor worked the fines down into the base and by the time he was done the driveway looked and felt tight; even better than last year when Phil did not yet have this attachment.  The machine also shook the entire house, especially the rear deck which is mostly supported by tall 6×6 and 4×4 posts.  He indicated that we did not need to wait for rain, or anything else, before putting the bus back in its spot, so after he left that is what we did.

But before Phil left, he used his laser level to check the grade in the back.  Although it does not appear to the naked eye to drop very much in the first 70 feet, the laser level indicated that there was a steady down slope over that distance with a total drop of over 1 foot.  He checked all the way to the edge of the cattails marsh, at which point the ground was down 4-5 feet from the deck.  The surface of the neighbor’s pond looks to be at least two feet lower from there.

The compacting roller really makes a difference.

The compacting roller really makes a difference.

There are several implications to this.  For one, it means the surface of the pond is well below our basement slab (6 – 7 feet) and at least 2 feet below the bottom of the footings for our house, so it is probably not the source of the water that runs into our sump.  It also means there is adequate grade to allow surface water to run off once the grass grows in (although it would be better if there was more grade than there currently is in the first 50 feet).  Equally important, the grade is more than adequate for a very effective French drain should we decide to have Phil pull up the existing drain lines and replace them.  Finally, having a hole dug at least 8 feet deep for the ham radio tower base should not pose a problem as the starting elevation is at least 6 feet above the basement slab.

With regards to the tower base, Phil suggested that I have the rebar cage, mounting bolts, and alignment structure built ahead of time and ready to go.  He could dig the hole first thing in the morning with his mini-excavator (up to 8’ deep) and figured it would only take an hour at most.  The assembled rebar could be positioned, plumbed, and secured in an hour or so, and the concrete could be delivered and poured in the late morning.  He indicated that spreading the work out over more time than that, especially letting the hole sit overnight, was not a good idea

Close up of the compacting roller attachment. This thing shook the whole house!

Close up of the compacting roller attachment. This thing shook the whole house!

We discussed how to get the concrete into the hole given its location about 40 feet northeast of the northeast corner of the house.  Our two options appear to be the little dump carts or a pumper.  The carts would have to drive up the east side of the house between the house and the septic tanks, but Phil thought that would be OK as long as they put down plywood to drive on.  He said a pumper truck would be very expensive but that a separate pump is available that can be towed to the job site.  With that equipment the concrete mixer truck would simply unload the concrete into the pumper, which would then pump it to the hole.  Both the truck and the pumper would be in the east end of our pull-through driveway.  Phil suggested that I call Carl Russell in Byron, Michigan as he is a good concrete guy and probably has a concrete pump.

After Phil left we reversed our earlier steps and moved the bus back into the pull-through driveway.  It rolled right up onto the level pad area and did not leave any noticeable tire tracks.  Nice.  We hooked up the “50 Amp” shorepower cable, turned off the chassis batteries, checked that all of the battery chargers were working, and shut/locked everything.

While Phil was working, Linda went to the Howell Library to return children’s books and came back with a card for the Howell Melon Festival.  The Festival started today and runs through Sunday.  She wanted to go walk around so we skipped dinner and headed out around 5 PM.  At the first turn in our road we encountered two workers from Roese Construction.  They were working on installing the natural gas main line down the street and said another crew would be coming along behind them in 1 – 2 weeks doing the branch runs up to the meters on the houses.

The Howell Melon Festival was just getting started when we got there but parking was already at a premium.  We parked a few blocks away in an empty church parking lot.  Some of the smaller side streets were already blocked off but Grand River Avenue and Michigan Avenue were both still open to traffic.  They will be closed tomorrow and Sunday and filled with vendor booths.

The weather was perfect and all of the downtown restaurants were very busy with lots of outside seating.  In the 16 months we have lived in the new house we have never really visited most of the downtown Howell merchants.  We went into Country Squire, a business that sells fireplace logs and inserts as well as outdoor cooking grills.  They had a couple of natural gas fireplace logs that were 99%+ efficient and did not require the flue to be open.  We thought they were a bit pricey but they were actually capable of heating a room.  We don’t use our existing propane logs because they are mostly decorative and require the flue damper to be open, which just wastes fuel and money.  The Country Squire also had a couple of natural gas grills that would mount to our deck and attach to our existing quick disconnect.

We walked through the food vendor area but did not see anything that interested us.  After walking past the starting gate for the Howell Melon Run we ended up at Uptown Coffee, on the northeast corner of Grand River and Main, where we had some brew and Sabra hummus with pretzel chips.  We started back towards our car and paused at the Old Courthouse long enough to hear the first number by the band.  They sounded good and not too loud.  We had our folding camp chairs in the car but decided to pass on the concert.

We stopped at Walmart on the way home to buy a microwave popcorn popper bowl and stock up on flavors of ICE brand sparkling flavored water.  Meijer’s sells a few flavors but Walmart has the broadest selection, including my two favorites (pineapple-coconut and blueberry-pomegranate).  Our final stop was at Lowe’s for a 100-pack of bright orange marker flags.  I will use these to mark the powerline that runs under the driveway to feed the RV outlet, the propane line to the house, the drain pipe from the corner of the house into the first septic tank, and the drain pipe that connects the outlet of the second septic tank to the beginning of the drain field.

It was a long day but a good one.  We watched another episode of Doc Martin and then called it a night.

 

2014/08/14 (R) All Computer All Day

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From the time I got up (before 8 AM) until I went to bed (after midnight) I pretty much worked at my desk, specifically at my computer.  Much of my time was spent on revising the pages of the new SLAARC WordPress website and making most of them publicly viewable.  I also revised the User’s Guide and sent it off to be reviewed.  Mixed in with that work I uploaded three more blog posts.

Another chunk of my time was spent dealing with the financial and membership records of our FMCA Freethinkers Chapter and a little time was spent with e-mail and social media, although I really limit the amount of time that goes towards the later.  Later in the evening I finally logged in to the Intro to Linux course on edX and went through a short Intro to edX demo course.  When I went to shut down my laptop it had 28 updates to install and when it restarted, the Outlook 2013 icon had disappeared from my taskbar.  The program was still there on the Apps screen and it still worked, but that was momentarily un-nerving.  I also had a Linux update to install.

It was a beautiful day today with cool, dry northwest breezes, more like early fall than the dog days of summer.  It was the perfect day for working outside and I wish I could have.  We had oatmeal for breakfast, tofu hotdogs for lunch, and lentil loaf with baked potatoes and roasted Brussels sprouts for dinner.  It was all simple but very tasty fare.  Coffee and juice went with breakfast, green tea with lunch and during the day, and sparkling water with dinner.  After lunch I checked the air pressure in the black iron pipe and it was down to 9 PSI.  Darryll set it at 12 PSI yesterday afternoon and I doubt that the pressure would move that much just from the change in ambient temperature.  I just hope the leak is someplace easy for him to find and fix.

 

2014/08/11 (M) SLAARC/WordPress

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Some of the members of SLAARC are former Detroit Edison employees (now DTE Energy) and one of them (Bruce, W8RA) currently works for Intercontinental Transmission Company (ITC).  Bruce was curious what size transformer we had and said that there were likely numbers on it that I could read with a pair of binoculars.  I went out this morning to check, but the only info on the transformer can is a metal plate that is too small and illegible to read from the ground even with our fairly good binoculars.

Darryll (DCM Heating & Cooling) had not shown up or called by 10:30 AM.  His work doesn’t make a mess of our yard or house, at least it hasn’t yet, so it is less of a concern that he is not here working today than it was with the landscaping.  When he left Thursday he had a short list of parts he needed to get and perhaps could not do that until this morning.  Or he may have gotten emergency service requests, which take priority over new installations.  Still, we would like to have the new HVAC work completed in the next week or so to make sure it is done ahead of the natural gas hookup.

As part of that work I have to complete some of the electrical pieces, finish dry-walling the utility closet, and continue cleaning, repairing, and organizing the garage while we have the storage pod.  I then need to get to work on a long list of bus projects.  I also have a lot of desk/computer work to do and I prefer to do that when I know I can settle in for a long stretch.  I tend not to be in the right frame of mind for desk work when I do not know if/when contractors are going to show up.  It’s turned out to be a busy, and in some ways complicated, summer that way.  Darryll called late morning to say they would be back first thing Wednesday morning.  That information allowed me to adjust my expectations and settle in for a long day and evening at my computer.

My main focus was working on the page content for the new SLAARC WordPress website, which occupied me until dinnertime with some e-mail mixed in.  After dinner I started uploading blog posts beginning with the one for July 7th.  I decided that I would not select and upload photos for most of the posts in July and early August and instead create more extensive gallery posts for the landscaping work and the garage/HVAC project.

One of the things I have noticed in the past week is that our Internet connection seems to be faster, or at least my e-mail processes much quicker than it used to.  That could be the result of the AT&T repair on the 4th, which ended up moving us to entirely new wire pairs, or a change that AT&T made to our DSL service back on the 3rd (when it kept going off temporarily), or it could be that QTH upgraded their e-mail server system, or some combination of these.  Whatever the case, it seems to be an improvement.

Phil from Precision Grading called at noon to see if he could stop by sometime after 3 PM today.  It was raining gently at the time but when he called back a little after 3 PM the rain had finally opened up into a sustained downpour.  He had an 8 AM appointment in Hell (Michigan) and we agreed that tomorrow morning after his appointment would probably be a much better time for him to stop by.

We ordered a “cat tent” the other day and it showed up this afternoon.  We opened it and set up in the living room with the “door” tied open so the cats could explore the inside.  They were wary, but did go in briefly.  It’s kind of like a back-packing tent but all the fabric, including the floor, is mesh.  We thought the floor would be a solid material, but it’s not.  It will be OK for use on our deck at home, but seems less suitable for use on the ground when we are RVing.  We intended to use it for both so we are not sure if we are going to keep it.

For dinner Linda made a tomato-onion-mushroom ragu and served it over a three rice blend with a dark mixed greens salad on the side.  Later she served fresh strawberries with Lotus brand cookies and dark chocolate with bits of almond and sea salt.  Seriously, what’s not to like about that?

 

2014/08/10 (N) Kathi Comes To Visit

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Kathi Slater is a long-time friend, the mother of three girls who went through middle and high school at the same time as our children.  Her oldest daughter, Emily (who is now an MD) was one of our son’s best friends in high school.  Kathi ended up working at Metropolitan Bakery with Linda and is still there.  We have been trying to find a mutually agreeable time for her to come see our new house and today was finally the day.

Kathi arrived around 10:30 AM.  As with all first time guests we gave her a tour of the house and then, being another gorgeous summer day, we walked the property.  After the tours we settled in at the table on the deck under the shade of the umbrella and had a nice long chat.  Linda made her wonderful chickpea salad and served it sandwich style for lunch with sourdough pretzel nibblers, fresh grapes, and sweet cherries.  She left to return home around 2 PM.

I worked at my desk on website usernames and passwords until 5:30 PM.  For dinner Linda made sautéed green beans and a dish with whole grain macaroni, cannellini beans, kale, other ingredients, and spices.  Both dishes had a hint of garlic and red pepper flakes; just enough to elevate the dish but not so much as to dominate or overwhelm the primary flavors.

We finished eating a little after 6 PM and I had to leave for the 6:30 PM meeting of our ham radio club.  The meeting was well attended with several of our newest club members there.  After a short business meeting we had a brief introduction by Mike (W8XH) to ham radio projects that can be done with the Arduino (and similar) micro-controllers.  Mike and Steve (N8AR) then led a discussion on the subject of antennas; specifically simple ones that can be built fairly easily.

I got home rafter 9 PM and had a piece of watermelon.  We stayed up a little later than usual and decided to turn in without watching an episode any of the TV programs we are currently following.

 

2014/08/09 (S) WP User Accounts

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We went to our ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon for the first time in several weeks after which we visited with Chuck Spera at his shop in Novi.  A while back I helped him retrieve an RV sofa/bed that he purchased from Pat and Vickie Lintner in Osceola, Indiana (near Elkhart).  He had removed the old couch from his Liberty bus conversion and installed this new (to them) one.  He wanted to show us the result and we wanted to see it.  We sat and chatted for a while about bus conversions and then left him to work on his race car while we finished a morning errand.

We loaded our weeks’ worth of recyclables in the car before we went to breakfast and headed to Recycle Livingston from Chuck’s before returning home and having a bite of lunch (we do not eat much for breakfast at the restaurant in South Lyon).

I worked the rest of the day on cleaning up the SLAARC portion of the spreadsheet I created for generating usernames and passwords for WordPress websites.  I had just received an updated roster from the treasurer, Paul (N8BHT), and had to bring my spreadsheet up-to-date before creating WordPress users.  A portion of each of the organization websites I am creating will be restricted to current members and require a username and password to gain access.  Each user account, in turn, must be tied to a unique e-mail account.  It’s been a bit of work to set up and I am far from done at this point.  While I was working on the SLAARC info I realized that I had not finished the same work for the other two organizations so I worked on that as well.

The last few weeks have been physically and mentally demanding and we both needed and enjoyed the easier days we had yesterday and today and the one we plan to have tomorrow when a long-time friend and co-worker of Linda’s is coming to the new house for her first visit.  We watched another episode of Peroit on our Apple TV before turning in for the night.

 

2014/07/19 (S) A Busy Day

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At 7:30 AM we were about to leave for our usual Ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon when we realized some of the landscaping crew was already in the back yard.  I talked briefly with Steve to see if he had any questions for us and to let him know we would be gone for the morning.  We arrived at the Senate Coney Island a little later than usual to find a big group, some of whom were not regular attendees.  We would normally have lingered and enjoyed conversation over coffee, but we needed to get to Ann Arbor for a quick visit and to pick up my socket wrench toolbox from our son.

When we arrived at Brendan and Shawna’s house Madeline was outside pushing her push toy around the front yard.  As soon as she saw us she took off down the sidewalk towards the park.  Shawna retrieved her and got her stroller ready while Brendan and I transferred things out of and in to my car.  We then walked to Burn’s Park where Madeline played for about 45 minutes before we headed back to their house.  We had hugs all around and left.  We stopped at the Whole Foods Market in our way back to US-23 and then headed for home.

Back at the house, four landscapers were working, including Steve, and lots was getting done.  Hurray!  I got busy working on the electrical sub-panel in the garage while Linda made a run to the recycling center.  When she got back she did a load of laundry, which is normally my job, while she cleaned the lower level of the house.

I had to make a trip to Lowe’s for electrical parts and Linda had to make one in the evening to buy some 15 Amp single-pole circuit breakers, but I managed to get the old sub-panel removed, the wires labeled, the new panel hung, and all but one wire reconnected.  That wire needs to be replaced and I will do that first thing in the morning.  We turned the breaker on in the basement that feeds power to the sub-panel in the garage, turned on the main breaker in the sub-panel, and then turned each branch circuit breaker and checked to see that it was working correctly.

The reason Linda had to go get 15 Amp circuit breakers is that I discovered the old sub-panel had 14 gauge (AWG) wires “protected” by 20 Amp circuit breakers.  14 AWG wires are only rated to carry 15 Amps.  If allowed to carry more than that for any length of time they will overheat which could melt the wire insulation and lead to a short or worse, arcing, which can start a fire.  I will be placing those circuits on 15 Amp breakers in the morning.

 

2014/07/10 (R) Home And Garden

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On Tuesday I agreed to demonstrate the new SLAARC WordPress website at our ham radio club meeting this coming Sunday.  I would like to spend some time working on the site between now and then but it is well enough along at this point to give folks a preview at the meeting, time permitting.  My current goal is to unlock the public portions of the website by the August meeting and then supply each of the members with their username and password shortly thereafter.  My “stretch goal” is to have the site set up so a member’s username and password also allows them to edit their roster record in the Participant’s Database.  It’s a stretch goal because it is unlikely I will meet it unless I really stretch myself, which is to say, I put aside a lot of other tasks to concentrate on this on, or I work more/harder and sleep less.  Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

In fact, it was a nice enough day today that we both decided to work in the yard.  I concentrated on pruning branches, mostly dead, from two fir trees and cutting them up into manageable size pieces for the fire pit.  Linda took some time to weed the plant beds on the east end of the house and the juniper beds behind the garage.  By mid-afternoon I’d had enough of this work for the day and turned my attention towards reorganizing our RV-related computer files.

Steve (Village Landscape Development) showed up mid-afternoon with the excavator and re-positioned several large boulders on the west retaining wall so one of his crews could continue working on the walls first thing tomorrow morning.  He also brought samples of three different color bricks so I could select one for the front sidewalk.  The one I selected is slightly darker than the pre-cast steps and similar to the reddish color mortar used on the main house bricks.  The pavers will be solid, rectangular, and installed flat in a herringbone pattern on a 45 degree bias.  We also discussed placing one or two medium size boulders on either side of the upper steps to keep folks from stepping off of the porch or the side of the stairs.

For dinner we had a large salad with lots of “extras” and then opened a bottle of NV Cesar Florido Moscatel Dorado.  This is a sherry from Jerez (Spain) that our son and daughter-in-law got me for Father’s Day.  It was recommended by their friend, Jorge Lopez-Chavez, who manages the wine department at The Produce Station in Ann Arbor, MI.  We each had a small glass (it is 17.5% alcohol by volume) served at ~50 degrees F and agreed that was very good.

After dinner I finished re-organizing our RV-related computer files, backed them up to our NAS units, and the copied them to my Windows 8.1 laptop.  We watched the last episode of season four of Doc Martin using our Amazon Video account.

 

2014/07/03 (R) First Overnight Visit

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I awoke this morning to the sound of light rain which had started sometime during the overnight.  The landscapers were supposed to be back first thing this morning to continue working on the retaining walls in the back, but the rain had made the work site muddy enough that I figured they would not be here today, which turned out to be the case.  The clouds cleared off by mid-morning and by early afternoon the site had dried out enough that they could have continued with the hand work.  With tomorrow being a holiday, however, I did not expect them to begin their workday at 1 PM.

After we had breakfast I left around 10 AM to drive to Adams Distributing in Novi to return a pair of battery chargers.  I visited with Scotty (AC8IL) for a while discussing his ham radio setup.  Since getting back into the hobby after many years he has done very well making DX (long distance) contacts all over the world.

I got back around 11:30 AM and our son and grand-daughter showed up shortly thereafter.  Today was Brendan and Shawna’s third wedding anniversary and we all agreed it was an opportune time for Madeline to have her first sleepover at our house, allowing her parents some much needed adult only time.  Brendan brought the porta-crib and portable stroller, and transferred the car seat to Linda’s car.  Brendan visited until it was time for Madeline’s nap and left once she was asleep.

Madeline had a good long nap and woke up refreshed and ready to go.  And go she did; we played with toys, read books, explored the main floor of the house, and went for an explore in the yard.  We have a five acre parcel, so it was an extended exploration.

For dinner, Linda cooked some Dr. Praeger’s vegan burgers and served them with sliced parsnips with sautéed in a small amount of water and quinoa with dried cranberries.  Madeline enjoyed all of it, along with some peas and strawberries.  I have not had parsnips very many times in my life.  When sautéed they taste like slightly peppery cooked carrots, which tend to be sweet.

We had more play time after dinner until 7:30 PM when Linda got her ready for bed and she had her evening bottle.  She was tucked in her porta-crib at 7:45 PM and quickly drifted gently off to sleep.  Brendan also brought their baby monitor and set it up, so we were able to keep an eye on her without opening the door to the bedroom and possibly disturbing her.

We stayed up a little while longer and then turned in around 9:30 PM to watch another episode of Doc Martin.  At 10:12 PM we lost power for a few seconds and a minute later it happened again.  We received a couple of e-mail notifications from our standby generator regarding the loss of utility power but never got one indicating that the generator had started.  Apparently the outages were too short to trigger the start sequence.

Even though most of the critical electronics in the house are connected to uninterruptible power supplies, I got up and shut down all of the computers, NAS units, and the laser printer.  The power flickered a couple more times but we never lost our Internet and were able to watch the last 10 minutes of Doc Martin.  Our last message from the generator indicated that it would stop notifying us of the situation until the fault had cleared for 24 hours.  The generator ran a successful self test at noon today, as it does every Thursday, so I was confident that it would start if needed.  We had a power outage while we were away this past winter during which the generator started and the automatic transfer switch transferred the house to the generator, so I was also confident that all if this would work if needed.

The worst part of this kind of momentary power outage is that the UPS units all start beeping (an alarm) as soon as they lose AC power.  It’s kind of like a smoke detector or other alarm going off; it tends to jolt you awake and once up it is hard to go back to sleep as you lie there anticipating the next alarm.

 

2014/06/27 (F) Family Finances

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Linda H. was up very early to go to work.  We would not have heard her get up and leave if not for the three dogs, which make quite a ruckus anytime someone comes or goes from the house.  Marilyn, Linda, and I got up a few hours later and had toast and coffee for breakfast.  I worked at my computer until 9:30 AM when we had to get ready to leave for an 11 AM appointment with our financial advisor.

We have worked with John Christensen for at least a decade.  We first met John at A. G. Edwards when my parents’ stockbroker decided to leave and John was assigned to handle their accounts.  We liked him right away and ended up moving all of accounts there, including accounts for our children.  My sister and Marilyn eventually opened accounts with John as well.  A. G. Edwards was an excellent local brokerage that unfortunately got absorbed by Wachovia.  Wachovia ultimately failed and the remnants were acquired by Wells Fargo Advisors.  John and his administrative assistant, Maggie Smith, had an opportunity to move to a new office being opened by Stifel-Nicholas in O’Fallon, Missouri and our family moved all of our business to S-N along with them.

We usually manage to make at least one trip to the St. Louis area each year, often around this time, and we always try to arrange a meeting with John if our schedules permit.  We arrived at 11AM, talked for an hour and then walked to Bristol’s for lunch.  Maggie joined us, which was great.  We have interacted with her for as long as we have worked with John, but do not know her as well on a personal level.  We got to know her a little better today.  Linda and I both had a grilled vegetable platter with asparagus, mushrooms, red and green bell peppers, and sliced green tomatoes.  They were some of the best restaurant vegetables we have ever had.

We returned to John’s office around 1:00 PM and spent another couple hours going over reports, plans, and projections before finely making a few decisions about our portfolio.  All told we were there for four hours.  I don’t know if that’s typical for financial advisors, but we appreciate that John has extensive reports prepared when we arrive, has already developed recommendations, and takes the time to go over everything with us.  Most of our financial interactions are easily handled by phone and secure e-mail during the year so having our financial advisor three states away is not a problem, especially as John and Maggie are real people with whom we have a real, face-to-face, relationship.

By the time we left the afternoon rush hour was well under way.  St. Louis is a midwest city with east coast ties.  Normal business hours here are 8 AM to 4 PM which corresponds to 9 AM to 5 PM in New York.  Kansas City, Missouri, only 240 miles west of St. Louis on the Kansas border, is a decidedly more western city, and the southern part of the state, which borders Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, is decidedly southern.  We fought our way back to Illinois through stop-and-go traffic and by the time we got back to Glen Carbon Ron and Mary had arrived from Pennsylvania.  Linda H. got home from work not long after we arrived and Mike and Clayton arrived not long after that.  They live and work in St. Louis area.  Linda, Marilyn, and Ron are siblings and Mike is their nephew.  Their other nephew, Rick, was unable to attend.  Marilyn had spent the afternoon making vegan Sloppy Joe’s.  For dinner we had a nice summer meal of green salad, Sloppy Joe’s, and chips, followed by Linda’s vegan double chocolate torte, accompanied by white and red wines.

By the time we finished dinner, wine, and conversation we had all had a long day.  For us it was a day of family finances and family.  When we finally went to bed we did not even watch an episode of Doc Martin.  As an aside, today was the SLAARC pre-setup for the ARRL Field Day event.  The main setup will be tomorrow morning and the operating event begins at 2 PM EDT.  It is the single largest, and most public, amateur (ham) radio event of the year.  We are missing it for the second year in a row because family comes first.

 

2014/06/26 (R) Westward Ho

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We were up by 6 AM and started loading the car for our trip to St. Louis, Missouri.  Breakfast consisted of a banana and orange/grapefruit juice to wash down a pill and a vitamin.  We had planned to leave at 8 AM (EDT) in order to arrive in Glen Carbon, Illinois around 4 PM (CDT). We had the car loaded and the house secured by 7 AM and decided to hit the road.  We took Golf Club Road over to Latson Road and stopped at Teeko’s to pick up coffee and a couple of bagels.  A short distance south from there put us at the new Latson Road interchange on I-96 where we headed west towards Lansing.

We picked up I-69 at the southwest corner of Lansing and headed south-southwest towards Indiana.  About half way to the border we crossed I-94.  From that point on our route was one we have driven many times in the car over the last 38 years.  We stayed on I-69 to the northeast corner of Indianapolis and then continued down the east side of the metropolitan area until we got to I-70.  We took I-70 through the heart of the city and out the southwest corner.  From there we continued on I-70 westbound all the way to the Glen Carbon/ Edwardsville, Illinois exit.  In spite of our morning coffee stop, several stops at rest areas, and a stop for food and gasoline, we arrived in Glen Carbon at 3:35 PM CDT.  As we did not expect anyone to be home until 4 PM we drove into Edwardsville and stopped at Walgreen’s ad Walmart.

Linda eventually exchanged text messages with her sister, Marilyn, who let us know that she was home from work.  We were there not long after 4 PM and had our welcome greetings with Marilyn and the three dogs.  We unloaded our car, got everything situated in our room, and settled in for a chat while we waited for Linda H., who owns the house, to get home from work.  She eventually did and we had more greetings and more talk.  By 6:30 PM everyone realized they were hungry and we went out to dinner at the Pasta House restaurant in Edwardsville.  Linda and I had a veggie pizza without cheese.  The crust was thin and a bit crispy, the way we like it, and the pizza was loaded with lots of good vegetables but not too much sauce, also the way we like it.  We both had a small garden salad to go with the pizza and it was all very good.

When we got back from dinner we got the wireless networking turned on and our various devices connected and working.  We settled in for more conversation in the kitchen while Linda made her vegan double chocolate torte which we will have for dessert with dinner tomorrow night.  Eventually everyone was tired and retreated to their respective bedrooms.  We watched another episode of Doc Martin before turning off the lights.

 

2014/06/25 (W) Summer Start

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I am normally aware of the two equinoxes and the two solstices each year and take note of their passing.  I just realized today that the summer solstice happened four days ago (on June 21st).  I checked several online sources and discovered that it occurred at 6:51 AM in the Eastern Time Zone, although it wasn’t clear if that was standard or daylight savings time.  Since that time the hours of daylight have been declining slightly each day.  Perhaps that is why I am not getting as much accomplished as I need to.  Although the summer vacation season begins Memorial Day weekend and runs through the Labor Day weekend, and climatologically “summer” corresponds to this, solar summer runs from the summer solstice to the autumnal equinox.

Linda went to the bakery today while I sat at home and waited to see if the landscape contractor would show up.  I left a message for him at 9 AM and had not heard anything by 9:30, so I headed to South Lyon to help move the SLAARC Field Day equipment out of the water tower and into Steve’s (N8AR) trailer.  We were done by 11:15 and I was about to head to Scotty’s (AC8IL) shop to return a couple of chargers when the landscaper called to let me know they would be at the house around noon.

Steve, who owns Village Landscape Development, showed up with four young men who looked up to the initial tasks that needed to be accomplished.  Three of them were not long out of high school, but the forth one, Lucas, was a few years older and more experienced.  He was the crew chief.  I indicated that we wanted to save four hosta plants, a large group of day lilies, and a large decorative grass plant, and had to show Steve where I wanted them re-planted.  I also had to indicate where I wanted the blocks from the existing retaining walls stacked.  Once that was sorted out I went inside and left them alone to do their work.

Mid-afternoon I heard the sound of Keith’s riding lawn mower and went out to check on his progress as well as the landscaping crew.  I had loaned our string trimmer and wheel barrow to the landscaping crew to clear the two slopes above the retaining walls and move the plants they were transplanting, but they needed Keith to mow the flat grass areas where they be working.  I flagged Keith down and got that sorted out with him and then went back inside and left everyone to their work.

I was not as productive during the afternoon as I would have liked to be.  I worked at my desk dealing with e-mails, RVillage groups, and computer apps, but having people at the house working is always somewhat distracting.  Linda eventually got home from the bakery and we settled into conversation about our days that took my mind off of the landscape work and other projects, at least for a while.

Steve had indicated earlier in the day that he would be back in the evening to check on the progress of the work.  His original target was 7 PM but he called around then to say that it would be around 9 PM.  He typically has 3 or 4 crews working, weather permitting.  The persistent rains this spring have carried over into summer and created big challenges for builders and landscapers.  To catch up, he puts in 14 -16 hour days.  When he got to our house at 9:20 PM there was just enough light to see and we made a quick inspection of what had been accomplished during the day.  Considering that the work did not really get underway until 1 PM, he seemed satisfied that the crew had put in a good effort and followed the directions he gave them.  That was good enough for us too.

 

2014/06/21 (S) Happy Birthday

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Today was my dad’s 89th birthday and I called to wish him a happy one.  He was 18 years old on D-Day when he landed at Omaha Beach on the Normandy coast of France; June 6th, 1944.  His unit suffered 90% casualties during the invasion, but he survived to celebrate his 19th birthday in a foxhole in France.  Not long after that he was wounded during the push inland and spent 6 months recovering in a hospital in England before returning to duty.  He was awarded a Purple Heart for is injuries.  Only a few years ago his unit also received medals of commendation, most of them posthumously.

For all of my youth and most of my adulthood he has not discussed the events of June, 1944.  He tried to see Saving Private Ryan but had to leave the theater.  He said the invasion scene was the most realistic he had ever seen in a movie, too close to the truth for him to watch, but that the real thing was far more horrible than any film could capture.  He still doesn’t talk about his combat experiences, but in his later years he has found a great sense of pride in his former military service.

He was recalled to active duty during the Korean Conflict, but did not serve in the Korean theater.  He had finished his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and was assigned to an Army Corps of Engineers unit where he taught soldiers how to construct various kinds of bridges and other structures in the field.

When I talked to him today he said he had come across some interesting statistics recently regarding World War II.  During the course of the war, which I took to mean from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the global end of hostilities, 16 million American men and women served on active duty.  Of those 16 million, slightly less than one (1) million are still alive today, and the youngest of them, like my dad, are in their late 80’s.  Millions more worked on the civilian side of the war effort, and I suspect the statistics for that group are very similar.

———-

We went to breakfast in South Lyon with our ham radio club friends as we do most Saturday’s.  The group varies in size from week to week; sometimes it’s as small as eight and sometimes, like today, over 20.  Our club was holding a volunteer examiner (VE) testing session at 9 AM, as we do on the 4th Saturday of most months, so a few folks had to leave early to run the session.  After breakfast five of us went to the Field Day site at the Lyon Township Atchison Memorial Park.  We helped Steve (N8AR) unload his riding lawn mower and four of us moved heavy metal picnic tables out of the way so he could mow the field where the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC) will set up on Friday for the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) Field Day event.

Field Day is a 24 hour operating event to showcase the capabilities of amateur (ham) radio nationwide.  It starts at 2 PM EDT on the last Saturday in June and ends at 2 PM EDT the next day.  This is the second year in a row that we will miss Field Day, so we wanted to at least help with some of the site preparations

We finally had a day without rain and decided to work in the yard.  We have a lot of trees and bushes on our property that are in need of serious trimming, including the removal of dead limbs and branches.  We also have a lot of organic debris from previous trimmings lying around the yard in various places.

While Linda made a run to the recycling center I started trimming a red honeysuckle bush in front of our living room that was badly overgrown and blocked our view of the driveway from one of the windows.  When she got back from the recycling center we worked on a tree that had grown out into our pull-through driveway and down towards the ground, making it difficult-to-impossible for Keith to mow the lawn under and around the tree.

While we were working on this tree Linda found a Painted Turtle resting in the shade under one of the branches that almost reached the ground.  We wondered if it was the same one we had rescued a month ago as it tried to cross the road in front of our house.  I had relocated that turtle to the northeast corner of our yard near our neighbor’s pond.  We worked around the turtle for a while and enjoyed observing it, but once I was done with the trimming I relocated it to the northeast corner of the yard by the pond.  I then worked on another, smaller tree near the driveway that had a lot of dead branches.  We had several other trees on that same side of the house that had low hanging branches so I trimmed those as well.  I then moved to the area just northwest of the house and did the same for a couple of trees there.

We gathered up all of the trimmings and separated them by green (with leaves) and dead (dry and able to burn).  We hauled the dry trimmings back to our recently constructed fire pit where Linda made a pile of kindling from the smallest/driest material and started the fire.  I kept trimming trees and cutting up larger limbs into smaller pieces for the burn pile while Linda hauled them to the fire pit.  It was almost 5 PM by the time we quit working.  We were tired and a bit sore, but it felt good to have accomplished tasks that needed to be done.  There is a lot more to do, of course; we are learning just how much land five acres really is, especially with as many trees as we have.  It will take more than one summer to fully prune our arbor, but that’s OK, we have time.

If the weather holds we will likely work in the yard again tomorrow.  Keith will probably be here on Monday to mow the grass and we need to make sure all of the larger trimmings have been picked up before he arrives.  I also want to prune our pear tree and apple tree before we get any deeper into summer.  They both produced abundant and usable fruit last fall, but we were unable to reach most of it because the trees are badly shaped with too much tall, vertical growth in the center.  But that is for another day; tonight we finished season 2 of Doc Martin and started season 3.

 

2014/06/07 (S) D-Day Plus 70

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Today was the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy; D-Day.  The youngest soldiers in that invasion, if they are still alive like my father, are now in their late 80’s.  The event is quickly slipping into history; in another decade, more or less, there will not be anyone left with a firsthand knowledge of the events of that day, or indeed of the whole of WW II.

As we do most Saturdays when we are home we went to our ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon.  We meet at a local Coney Island restaurant and we go for the company and conversation, not the food.  The service is excellent, however, as we have the same server every week and she knows everyone’s usual order and keeps the coffee flowing.  Linda’s standard breakfast is coffee and toasted rye bread with orange marmalade, although occasionally she has oatmeal.  My standard breakfast is coffee and a toasted English muffin with strawberry jam, but today I had a toasted bagel.  Sometimes you just have break with tradition.  On rare occasion I have the oatmeal, but it’s not really cooked the way I like.  When I want to splurge I have hash browned potatoes, cooked until a bit crispy, which I smother in ketchup laced with Tabasco sauce.  That dish is as much about the spicy ketchup as it is about the potatoes.

When we got back to the house Linda headed off to the grocery store while I put a load of laundry in the washing machine and got busy prepping the bus for travel.  The temperature had risen into the 70’s but all of the bus tires were in the shade, a good situation for checking and adjusting the tire pressures.  I removed the Pressure Pro sensors from all of the bus and car tires, checked and adjusted the cold pressures, and put the sensors back on, re-establishing the baseline settings for alarm purposes.

We had quite a bit of rain on our last outing and the bays were a bit musty so I opened all of them to let them air out.  I also opened all of my tool boxes for the same reason.  The inverter bay door has screened openings with shields on the inside that are open on the bottom.  The large shield by the GenSet radiator is secured with three screws across the top, none of which were holding.  I looked around in the garage for some suitable drywall anchors to put in the holes but I did not have (or could not find) any the right size.  A quick trip to Lowe’s, with stops at Walmart and Meijer’s for grocery items, and I had some viable options.  I had to fuss with it for a while, but I got it secured.  It was a small project to be sure but one that had been bugging me for quite some time and it felt good to put it in the done column.

Linda spent the early afternoon working on the accounting records for our GLCC chapter and then turned her attention to cooking meals for the upcoming week.  For rally situations, where we are away from our coach much more than we are there, it is easier for her to prepare dishes in advance that can be quickly and easily re-heated rather than cook from scratch.  I called Elkhart Campground and made a reservation for Sunday and Monday evenings.  Over the course of the afternoon and evening we selected clothes for the week, gathered up various items that travel with us, and loaded everything on board.  I positioned the Honda Element behind the motorcoach and connected them together for towing.  We will have a few last minute things to put on board in the morning but the final loading should be quick and easy.  It was a relaxed loading process and as we sat on the rear deck enjoying a glass of wine we reflected on how glad we were to have found this house and decided to move.  We had some of the vegetable chili for dinner and then watched Season 2, Episode 2 of Doc Martin before turning in for the evening.

 

2014/05/08(R) Toad Lights

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The spring peepers are in full voice this time of year, but they do not wear headlamps.  In fact, they are frogs, not toads.  In the world of RV’s a car that is towed behind a motorhome is often referred to as a “towed” (noun) or “toad.”  Like anything being towed, the car has to have functioning tail lights, brake lights, and turn signals.  The existing lights on the car are often used for this, but there can be issues with arrangement, especially on newer vehicles.

Our Honda Element came equipped with a second set of rear bulbs that are not tied into the cars lighting circuits.  On the way home from Florida they quit working.  Visual inspect had revealed that the 6-pin connector on the bus had a couple of damaged pins.  As soon as we got home I picked up a new connector from a local RV store.  With a forecast high temperature of 81 degrees F, and no rain, today was the day to install it; but not until I had taken care of another important chore.

Steve (N8AR) arrived a little after 10 AM pulling Bruce’s (W8RA) enclosed trailer.  We took a few minutes to look at my proposed site for the communications tower and then headed over to Wayne’s (KD8H) place to pick up the tower sections and related components I had purchased on Monday.  We got there right at 11AM.  Wayne greeted us in the driveway and directed us around behind the house.  We loaded the steel fold over mount, motor, rotator, and bearing plate in the front if the trailer and then drove back to where the tower sections were stored and loaded those in.  The trailer had about 10 feet inside, front-to-rear, and we were able to get everything in and close/latch the doors.  We were on our way back to my QTH by noon.  By 1 PM we had unloaded everything, stacked the tower sections on the rear/lower deck, and stored the other components in the garage.  I walked Steve through the proposed pole barn site and then he headed home to hang drywall.

I gathered up the tools I needed for the connector project and arrayed them at the rear of the bus.  Simple projects never are, and this was no exception.  I removed the two screws that hold the connector into the bumped fascia and the discovered that I could not pull it out more than a 1/4 inch.  The connector housing has an insert with the pins on one side (facing out) and the wire connections on the side (facing in).  The insert is retained by a small screw on the top of the housing.  To work on this assembly you have to be able to pull the housing out far enough to remove the retaining screw.  You then need to have enough loose wire behind the connector to allow the insert to come out the front of the housing far enough that you can get to the small machine screws that that hold the wires.

The problem was that I did not have the necessary amount of loose wire.  There was plenty of wire, it just wasn’t loose.  I had to clip about a half dozen zip ties in the engine compartment and along the underside of the rear bumper, and remove a cable clamp, but I eventually freed up enough wire to pull the connector housing out far enough to work on it.

The wire connections on the insert were not done in a standard way per the directions that came with the new connector, so I made a diagram of how they were done.  (I should have rewired both the bus connector and the cable end to be standard, but I plan to replace this whole setup with an EZ*Connector system this summer.)  I disconnected the wires, which freed the insert, and slid the old housing off the end of the wire bundle.  I cleaned up the ends of the four wires, stripping away 1/4 inch of insulation and trimming off frayed strands.  I slipped the new housing over the wires, made the connections to the back of the insert, slid the insert into the housing, and secured up it with the retaining screw.  I slid the housing back into the bumper fascia and secured it with the two screws.

Before dressing all the wires I pulled the car behind the bus and connected the electrical cable between them to test the lights.  I connected the bus chassis batteries (there are two switches for this) and turned on the left turn signal.  All the lights on the bus were fine, but I still did not have lights on the car.  🙁  I had also had problems previously with the plug and socket on the car so I jiggled the connector and the lights started working.  I verified that I had tail and turn lights but could not test the brake lights as that takes two people.  (I could have turned the ignition on and that would have caused the brake lights to come on since the emergency/parking brakes were set.)

I suspected the problem was in the connector on the end of the cable, but it was sufficiently corroded that I could not get it apart.  I decided to spray all of the old connectors (3) with De-Ox-It, including inside the cable ends.  I then sprayed all if the connectors, including the new ones, with De-Ox-It Gold.  I plugged the cable back in to the bus and the car and retested the lights.  Everything was working, so I secured the wiring on the bus with new zip ties, put my tools away, and closed everything up.

Sometime during the afternoon I got a call from Bruce (W8RA) and took a break from the electrical work.  He had a friend who had purchased a used full-size tractor to pull a large 5th wheel.  The tractor had a KVH Trac-Vision R5 in-motion satellite dish and the owner wanted Bruce to help him get it working.  Bruce knew we had a motorhome and thought I might have some insight into how to do this.  The only advice I could offer was based on the satellite dish and electronics that were on our bus when we bought it.  In addition to the dish on the roof and the receiver in the coach there was a third box that went in-between the two.  I suspected that the KVH had something similar, but I wasn’t sure.

Linda had been babysitting all day so we had an Amy’s Indian dish with a nice salad for dinner.  It had been a warm, physical day so I started a load of laundry and we just relaxed after dinner.

 

2014/05/07 (W) Plumbing

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After breakfast Linda headed to Ann Arbor to babysit our younger grand-daughter.  I had a long list of things to do at my computer today, and planned to spend the day inside at home doing them.  I did not manage to do most of them as I ended up doing other things instead; so much for plans.

Wednesday is trash day (sorry, Prince Spaghetti), so I got the trash to the curb.  (I know, I know, how have I managed to arrange such an interesting life?)  A box of Bus Conversion Magazines arrived yesterday, so I opened it to check the contents and then e-mailed the publisher that all was well.

We do not have curbside recycling at the house the way we did in the previous one, so we have to take our recyclables to a drop-off center run by Recycle Livingston.  The center is open Wednesdays and Saturdays.  On her way out the door Linda reminded me that I had to take the recyclables to the center.  We keep a set of cardboard boxes on the floor in the pantry and sort our recyclables as they become available.  I loaded them in the car for later.

At some point in the past the shower diverter in the bathtub quit working, so that had been on my “to do” list for a while.  Coincidentally, while we were in Florida I had seen an episode of “Ask This Old House” that dealt with this exact repair!  I had to use a large pipe wrench to unscrew the old bathtub spout/diverter as the threads were corroded.  With the old diverter off I now had a fairly good idea of what I needed in the way of a replacement part.

I had been putting off fixing the leaky dishwasher fresh water connection but today was finally the day to tackle that project.  As I was thinking about heading to the recycle center, and then to Lowe’s for plumbing parts, I got a call from Steve at Village Landscape Development (VLD).  He wanted to swing by and go over the front stairs and rear retaining wall projects again and get us on his schedule.  We agreed on 1 PM.  It was 11:30 AM, so I had just enough time to drop off the recyclables and get a new diverter from Lowe’s.

Steve (VLD) came by and we walked through the two projects.  We were on the same page and settled on tentative start and completion dates, so we signed an agreement and I gave him a deposit.  After he left, I called Wayne (KD8H), set up to get the tower tomorrow at 11:00 AM, and then e-mailed Steve (N8AR) to let him know the date/time.  He had permission to use Bruce’s (W8RA) closed trailer to help me with the tower.

Back at the dishwasher I turned the water supply on and the connection didn’t just drip, it spurted.  I redid the connection with pipe thread compound instead of Teflon tape but it did not help at all.  I tried tightening it and it got worse.  It was clearly time to rethink my approach.

I find that a good way to rethink my approach to a problem is to do something else, so I installed the new diverter for the bathtub/shower in the hall bathroom.  It only needed to be threaded on hand tight as it is not a pressurized fitting.  Water either flows out the spout into the tub or gets blocked and forced (diverted) up to the shower head; a pretty simple device, really.  It was not quite the right length and left a 1/2 inch gap between the base and the wall tile.  At least this way I could see if any water was leaking out the back end.  🙂  It wasn’t, so I let it go for now.

I returned to the dishwasher problem and took another look.  It appeared that the rubber seal (O-ring) in the end of the hose may have gotten nicked or mis-shapen, perhaps from over tightening.  There was no indication of a leak between the 90 degree elbow and the dishwasher inlet.

I headed back to Lowe’s for a new 8’ dishwasher connection hose.  I could not purchase just the hose; it only came as a kit with the 90 degree elbow and another adapter, which turned out to be fortuitous.  I noticed that the instructions did not call for Teflon tape or pipe thread compound and I verified that with the associate in plumbing.  I also picked up a decorative filler plate for the diverter.

The flexible water line connects to the lower left front corner of the dishwasher, loops underneath the unit, goes through a hole in the adjacent cabinet at the lower left rear, goes through the other side of that cabinet into the space under the corner sink cabinet bottom, and finally emerges through a hole in the floor of the cabinet along with a water pipe.  The only way to run the new flexible line, without removing the dishwasher and disassembling cabinets, was to attach one end of the new line to the dishwasher end of the old line and use the old line to pull it through.  Zip ties have lots of uses, and this is one of them.

Before making any connections I read the instructions again.  The connections at the end of the hose were to be “finger tight plus 1/4 turn.”  Although “finger tight” is an incredibly imprecise term–some number of inch-pounds would be precise–these directions clearly indicated that over tightening was a bad thing to do.  I connected the line at both ends following the directions as best I could and opened the supply valve a little.  No more spurting but I still had a drip leak and shut off the water supply.  I knew the hose was OK so it had to be the elbow.  I had to pull the dishwasher part way out to get to the 90 degree elbow.  (This why I installed an 8 foot hose.)  After I got it out I examined it and did not see any obvious thread damage or cracks, but there was some pitting and one pit in particular looked like it might be a through pinhole.  No matter, it was trash.

I installed the new elbow using pipe thread compound on the male NPT pipe threads that go into the female NPT fitting on the dishwasher.  These kinds of fittings are always a bit tricky.  They have to be tight enough to not leak, without overdoing it, and they have to be oriented a certain way to allow something else to connect to them; in this case the supply hose.  I reattached the flexible hose, turned on the water supply, and voilà, no leaks!  As long as I was on a roll I unscrewed the bathtub diverter, slipped the decorative spacer over the pipe, and screwed the diverter back on, lining it up carefully with the spacer and getting it snug but properly aligned.  Even though it took most of the afternoon I had successfully completed two plumbing jobs in one day.