Pete's Log: How is it almost May already?
Entry #1923, (Life in General)(posted when I was 42 years old.)
Saturday the Brookfield Zoo hosted a recycling event. I used the opportunity to drop off a box of old electronics. It was nicely organized, you drive into the parking lot, somebody tells you where to go, volunteers unload your car for you. The only drawback was that the person who told me where to go handed me a little swag item and I took it before I could think to say no. So the amount of junk in the house was reduced by slightly less than hoped for.
I'm also not positive I know what the item is supposed to be. It came with two copies of the same information card about Atlantic Acropora Coral, which at least means I can capture both sides in one photo:
My first thought was maybe one of those things to strap sunglasses to your head but it doesn't seem quite right. Jamie guessed maybe a reusable straw, and I found the pieces do fit together into a straw-like shape:
Anyway, I wish I had been quick-minded enough to say no to this thing.
JB spent Saturday night with her grandparents and the weather was pleasant so Jamie and I made an evening of it. Dinner at Irish Times and a night cap at Little Owl. We were briefly worried when we couldn't find our wedding koozie among the decor behind the Little Owl bar (we still don't know who left it there, but it's always fun to see it there), but upon closer inspection we found it was still there, just moved.
Sunday afternoon we did some grilling with a group of vaccinated friends. I think it overwhelmed my socially-atrophied brain a bit. JB enjoyed meeting some cats and playing on a trampoline among other things.
It's been windy here today, and the power kept going out. During the course of the afternoon, it went out probably seven or eight times. Each time only for a minute or so. The laundry room UPS did its job, and since my work laptop has a battery it was able to remain up as well. For the Zoom calls I had this afternoon I was clever enough to think to unplug the laptop from Ethernet so it would remain connected to WiFi. Since the Ethernet switch on my desk is not on UPS (nothing currently is). So it did feel nice when the power went out and I could continue in my meetings like nothing happened.
This evening after dinner we had a longer outage, probably about 90 minutes. I think the earlier outages had maybe worn on the UPS battery just enough that it only lasted about 10 minutes and not the 30 I had optimistically calculated earlier.
When things did finally come back up, I had some fresh Home Assistant woes. The Philips WiFi smart bulb in the garage didn't reconnect to the network and the Z-Wave network yet again failed to start. I couldn't figure out why and after looking back at that entry, I wondered if maybe the Z-Wave integration is sensitive to other things not working? So I disabled the HA configuration for the garage bulb, restarted HA, and sure enough Z-Wave came up fine. Since this Z-Wave integration is deprecated I'll just wait until I migrate to the replacement before worrying about this any further.
The WiFi bulb was an accidental purchase, we thought it would integrate with our Hue hub, but it does not. It is apparently based on the ESP8266 platform and the firmware apparently isn't hard to overwrite. While the bulb does seem to have no issue doing its thing and being controlled by HA while being denied internet access, this isn't the first time it was unable to reconnect to the network after losing power. So maybe I can make a new firmware that just defaults to my SSID instead of its normal behavior. Maybe.