I had two vacations--the kind where I travel somewhere hundreds of miles away and come back--in June and July of this year. They went very well, and I had the time of my life each time. After my second vacation in July I got sick twice, saw doctors, gave my car state inspection, and so on, endless errands to do, not to mention concerts, museum visits, and political rallies.
So there's been less attention to the Estate than in previous 4 month period. But I have most certainly mowed the front lawn many times, including two weekends ago, and edged the front at least twice, mowed the back several times, and for a brief period had the back all mowed and cleaned up (well, mostly). It's partly back into disarray now.
Some of the shortcomings of this "cleaning up" became clear last weekend when I removed the solar spot light from the oak tree so I could finally clear up the weeds around it. Some of those weeds included ivy, which had been climbing up and all over the little oak for the last year or so. I pulled much of that ivy down but will need to bring out a ladder to finish the job. The vines seem to stain the oak bark and I worry about that.
I need to do similar weeding around the crepe myrtle near the gate, and the two trees following it. The Crepe Myrtle and the first tree next to it have been "shielded" by aging solar light parts, which I will need to remove to complete the cleaning up. These solar lights are proving to be more trouble than they are worth.
I found the gate needing fixing again. I removed the moving part and cut away metal and replaced it, applying new locktite to the screw. I had deferred from removing all the metal in the way as it moves last time, and it just barely cleared enough to close. But now the ground has shifted enough that I needed to remove all the metal. Now I can't imagine what kind of change would be required next time.
A week after I returned from my July vacation, I found the kitchen UPS constantly starting and stopping its fan. I knew immediately (from previous experience with same unit in Living Room) that this means the battery has failed. I felt the unit and it was getting pretty hot also.
The repair for this was a large project which took most of a weekend to finish. (And more if you could all the cleaning that had to be done afterwards). I decided to take this opportunity to remove all the unused cables and equipment from under the kitchen table. I ended up removing close to 50 pounds of cables alone (!!!) and a fair amount of now unused equipment including the (now decertified) kitchen printer and old spare DVD player for playing rental movies. I had to move all that stuff out of the way anyway just to pull the UPS away from the wall enough to change the 4 batteries in a long battery module. I also needed to go to Batteries Plus to buy the replacement batteries, and I took this opportunity to recycle the last set of batteries from the Living Room UPS.
I was going to take this time to also install the acoustic hard drive mounts for the security camera DVR, but didn't get around to that. Anyway, after putting things back a bit differently, the DVR doesn't make as much noise anymore, possibly because it has some stuff on top of it now.
The kitchen now looks entirely different if you look under the kitchen table. It's mostly empty space now. That empty space makes the whole kitchen seem much less cluttered.
Meanwhile I had a long saga with the super duper DVD player from ebay I purchased in June that didn't turn out to be as advertised. I brought it out for service but it couldn't be fixed. Finally I worked out a partial refund with the seller. So I am keeping this unit for the one thing it does exceptionally well--playing HDCD's. I rebuilt the stack of equipment in the right corner of the living room stereo so it now has two disc players, the new heavy one on the bottom for HDCD's, the old lighter one for SACD's, and I now play DVD-Audio's through a new SPDIF line from the kitchen and the Oppo BDP-95 player there. As I commented in my Audio blog, this gives me the best of everything.
The SPDIF line for digitally connecting my Mac (which now also functions as high rez audio player, thanks to being upgraded with Amarra Hifi) and Oppo in the kitchen to the living room audio system has been one of the more important inventions of this past few months. And it has gone through several iterations already, some which didn't work out. Just last week I installed the new Belden 1505F cable to connect the CO2 coax converter to the wall plate in the kitchen. Fortunately that change did work out--as it should have because the new cable replaced an inferior one. Additional cable upgrades have already been orderered. But my attempt to replace the two boxes used for digital Toslink splitting and conversion with just one box that might do both jobs better--failed. I'm back to the original two boxes I was using in mid July when I first set this line up.
Another little victory was re-programming the Insteon light switch in the bedroom. I'm not sure why that switch needed reprogramming, but it did.
Also, I completely re-did the time alignment and EQ adjustment of the living room stereo a few weeks ago. I measured the frequency response and impulse response and readjusted the crossovers and digital EQ for the best living room sound I have ever had (and especially with HDCD and DVD-Audio, for which I have new playback methods, and for HRx and other high rez files--which I now have a means to play for the first time ever). This time alignment done in the last two weeks of July was the first one I've done since 2011, and things had gotten way out of whack.
But apart from re-wiring under the kitchen table, some of the biggest changes were made this past weekend of August 22-24. I upgraded the video distribution to the Kings and Queen's bedrooms. The Kings room got an all new HDBase-T video network adapter, which seems to work even better than the video extension adapter used there before. The Queen's room inherited the one-cable video network adapter that I used to use in the King's room. That freed up one Cat6a STP connection between kitchen and Queen's room, and I used that connection for the all new connection from the Queen's Sonos box to the high speed internet switch in the kitchen. This means that the high speed switch now directly connects all Sonos boxes in my entire house. So drop outs should be a thing of the past. Fearing the previous indirect network connection of the Queen's room Sonos box was causing dropouts in the Kings room, I disconnected the Queens room a few months ago. Now everything is back online and better connected than ever before.
It was just before my vacation in June that I finally installed the right speaker in the Queen's room. I have now started on installing the left speaker, and on Sunday I got spackling compound to patch the test holes I made to find the wall studs.
My friend finally finished paining the pink trim in the Queen's room a few weeks ago. I was surprised that we could still use the paint purchased nearly a year ago, but after much shaking the paint was OK. Now she wants to paint the trim in the Queen's Bath, and has some other ideas for the Queen's Bath.
So there's been less attention to the Estate than in previous 4 month period. But I have most certainly mowed the front lawn many times, including two weekends ago, and edged the front at least twice, mowed the back several times, and for a brief period had the back all mowed and cleaned up (well, mostly). It's partly back into disarray now.
Some of the shortcomings of this "cleaning up" became clear last weekend when I removed the solar spot light from the oak tree so I could finally clear up the weeds around it. Some of those weeds included ivy, which had been climbing up and all over the little oak for the last year or so. I pulled much of that ivy down but will need to bring out a ladder to finish the job. The vines seem to stain the oak bark and I worry about that.
I need to do similar weeding around the crepe myrtle near the gate, and the two trees following it. The Crepe Myrtle and the first tree next to it have been "shielded" by aging solar light parts, which I will need to remove to complete the cleaning up. These solar lights are proving to be more trouble than they are worth.
I found the gate needing fixing again. I removed the moving part and cut away metal and replaced it, applying new locktite to the screw. I had deferred from removing all the metal in the way as it moves last time, and it just barely cleared enough to close. But now the ground has shifted enough that I needed to remove all the metal. Now I can't imagine what kind of change would be required next time.
A week after I returned from my July vacation, I found the kitchen UPS constantly starting and stopping its fan. I knew immediately (from previous experience with same unit in Living Room) that this means the battery has failed. I felt the unit and it was getting pretty hot also.
The repair for this was a large project which took most of a weekend to finish. (And more if you could all the cleaning that had to be done afterwards). I decided to take this opportunity to remove all the unused cables and equipment from under the kitchen table. I ended up removing close to 50 pounds of cables alone (!!!) and a fair amount of now unused equipment including the (now decertified) kitchen printer and old spare DVD player for playing rental movies. I had to move all that stuff out of the way anyway just to pull the UPS away from the wall enough to change the 4 batteries in a long battery module. I also needed to go to Batteries Plus to buy the replacement batteries, and I took this opportunity to recycle the last set of batteries from the Living Room UPS.
I was going to take this time to also install the acoustic hard drive mounts for the security camera DVR, but didn't get around to that. Anyway, after putting things back a bit differently, the DVR doesn't make as much noise anymore, possibly because it has some stuff on top of it now.
The kitchen now looks entirely different if you look under the kitchen table. It's mostly empty space now. That empty space makes the whole kitchen seem much less cluttered.
Meanwhile I had a long saga with the super duper DVD player from ebay I purchased in June that didn't turn out to be as advertised. I brought it out for service but it couldn't be fixed. Finally I worked out a partial refund with the seller. So I am keeping this unit for the one thing it does exceptionally well--playing HDCD's. I rebuilt the stack of equipment in the right corner of the living room stereo so it now has two disc players, the new heavy one on the bottom for HDCD's, the old lighter one for SACD's, and I now play DVD-Audio's through a new SPDIF line from the kitchen and the Oppo BDP-95 player there. As I commented in my Audio blog, this gives me the best of everything.
The SPDIF line for digitally connecting my Mac (which now also functions as high rez audio player, thanks to being upgraded with Amarra Hifi) and Oppo in the kitchen to the living room audio system has been one of the more important inventions of this past few months. And it has gone through several iterations already, some which didn't work out. Just last week I installed the new Belden 1505F cable to connect the CO2 coax converter to the wall plate in the kitchen. Fortunately that change did work out--as it should have because the new cable replaced an inferior one. Additional cable upgrades have already been orderered. But my attempt to replace the two boxes used for digital Toslink splitting and conversion with just one box that might do both jobs better--failed. I'm back to the original two boxes I was using in mid July when I first set this line up.
Another little victory was re-programming the Insteon light switch in the bedroom. I'm not sure why that switch needed reprogramming, but it did.
Also, I completely re-did the time alignment and EQ adjustment of the living room stereo a few weeks ago. I measured the frequency response and impulse response and readjusted the crossovers and digital EQ for the best living room sound I have ever had (and especially with HDCD and DVD-Audio, for which I have new playback methods, and for HRx and other high rez files--which I now have a means to play for the first time ever). This time alignment done in the last two weeks of July was the first one I've done since 2011, and things had gotten way out of whack.
But apart from re-wiring under the kitchen table, some of the biggest changes were made this past weekend of August 22-24. I upgraded the video distribution to the Kings and Queen's bedrooms. The Kings room got an all new HDBase-T video network adapter, which seems to work even better than the video extension adapter used there before. The Queen's room inherited the one-cable video network adapter that I used to use in the King's room. That freed up one Cat6a STP connection between kitchen and Queen's room, and I used that connection for the all new connection from the Queen's Sonos box to the high speed internet switch in the kitchen. This means that the high speed switch now directly connects all Sonos boxes in my entire house. So drop outs should be a thing of the past. Fearing the previous indirect network connection of the Queen's room Sonos box was causing dropouts in the Kings room, I disconnected the Queens room a few months ago. Now everything is back online and better connected than ever before.
It was just before my vacation in June that I finally installed the right speaker in the Queen's room. I have now started on installing the left speaker, and on Sunday I got spackling compound to patch the test holes I made to find the wall studs.
My friend finally finished paining the pink trim in the Queen's room a few weeks ago. I was surprised that we could still use the paint purchased nearly a year ago, but after much shaking the paint was OK. Now she wants to paint the trim in the Queen's Bath, and has some other ideas for the Queen's Bath.
