July 6th

I mostly just tidied up the bathroom and the van after the excitement of the last few days.

We went out and got some supplies and stuff, so I picked up a little roller to get between windows and walls in the bedroom, then masked and painted those parts.

In the evening, I went over to Lincoln and went out in the plane for about an hour and ten minutes.  I've been thinking about doing a cross country flight, so I measured about 40 miles in that time, on about 3 gallons of gas.  An 80 mile cross country should be easily do-able with a 10 gallon tank, but I'd probably look at taking an extra 5 gallons in a can, and my little hand pump to transfer it to the main tank at a stop somewhere.

July 5th

We went out and got lunch, and the sky's filthy with smoke from a couple of fires near us.

I touched up the paint behind the dresser in the bedroom, then re-hung the mirror and pushed the dresser back to the wall.  Egads, the bedroom's big now.  There's still a lot of painting to be done, but now I have the space to move things to get to the unpainted bits.  Joy.

In the evening I went to Lincoln and took the Flightstar out for what turned out to be an hour and three quarters.  It was weird - we're ringed in smoke from the fires, but the air's clear over us, as it's been a bit windy.  2 landings in a 70 degree, 5 mph crosswind, and I put everything away and headed home.  I stopped to put some gas in the van, and it wouldn't start - the engine coughed over and then everything went dark.  I checked with the built in voltmeter, and it didn't even light up.  Uh oh... I thought the battery had shorted out internally or something, so I turned the passenger seat round and popped the battery cover to find the earth lead wasn't on very tight.  I tightened that up with a pair of pliers and the van started and drove home just fine.  Once home, I tightened the clamp with a proper spanner.  I wonder how long that's been going on?

July 4th

Today is Independence Day, when Americans celebrate their country's birthday by going shopping.  Me?  I threw paint in the bedroom, then in the evening we watched "Watchmen", which we haven't watched for ages.  Part of the reason was there are a lot of whooshes and bangs, and it distracts Tilly from the fireworks outside.

July 3rd

I installed a new (DOCSIS 3.0) cable modem/router, to take advantage of a 50Mb/s cable upgrade.  I'll be honest, I didn't really think it out very well, so I just plugged it in and got it working with Comcast.  Then I remembered the port forwarding, reserved DHCP addresses and suchlike I'd had set up.  I started the old router, so I could copy down the old configuration and reconfigure the weather station to use the new router.  I couldn't get the TED5000 to work, so there was a lot of testing things, trying other things and so on until I discovered that the CAT-5e cable was the problem.  Unfortunately I only had 6' cables (other than this one 10' cable), so I ended up moving the router closer so I could plug in the old cable, and everything now works.  The only thing I miss is the ability to have my own DNS configuration, for when Comcast's is playing up - I like to have one of the servers configured to an OpenDNS server as a backup, but meh.

July 2nd

I went to Lincoln for the EAA board of director's meeting.  The guy who's running the Young Eagles event on the 19th got stuck in traffic in Wheatland, so we're hoping he's got everything in hand :o|

July 1st

A new month...

Power paid for

Power generated

We got a cracked sprinkler pipe all fixed up, so that hopefully that part of the garden won't flood, and other parts of the garden'll get water.  I even remembered to turn that segment back on at the controller.

June 29th

Other than throwing a bit more paint (from atop a ladder), I did pretty much nothing all day.  Just as it should be.