Troubles and Progress....

You should know by now that if you do not hear from me either things are going along really well or not so much.  This time it is a little of both.

I have been busy and not busy.  There are days when I have things to do and I am up and down, in and out, and by the end of the day I am too tired to post.  Then there are days when I am just down and do not feel like posting.  It is called life as a widow.  There are days when I really miss having someone in the house to help take the burden of the normal chores.  And then there are days when I say, why bother, as there is not anyone in the house who would care if the bed is not made, the dishes in the sink are piling up or I have not planned for dinner, so I do not eat and just snack.

The alarm system arrived.  I was able to install it.  The entry sensors are in the same places as the other company's entry sensors.  The one motion detector is located on the shelves in the same area as the motion detector in the living room but not attached to the wall.  Will make changing the battery in a few years much, much easier.  The basement motion detector is midway up the steps and attached to a wooden box that once kept my potatoes in the dark and cool in the basement.  The different thing about this system is the keypad (located in the kitchen so as to cover the hole made by the old company in my kitchen wall) must communicate with the base station which is now separate from the keypad.  The old company had the keypad and the base station together and that is the part that fried.  I had placed the base station near the window in the dining room so it was farther from the basement sensor than the old system base station.

It had been in for close to a week without an issue.  Last Sunday I went to a cookout at Nancy & Jeff's house in Delaware.  While Winston and I were there, I got an email about the basement door entry sensor no longer communicating with the base station.  When I got home I logged into the web site and began to follow the troubleshooting list.  First, go to the door and open and close it a couple of times to see if it reset.  It did not.  Next, was to move the base station closer to the door sensor.  So I relocated it to the sewing machine table at the end of the wall in the dining room. Still no difference.  Next was to check the battery.  Since it was only 6+ days old, I doubted that, but stranger things had happened.  I did not want to undo a working sensor that late at night, so I set the "home" alarm which sets the entry sensors to armed but not motion detectors.

I could not sleep.  Kept thinking about what might be wrong and liking the fact that I had 60 days to try out the system where I could return the components and get my money back.  Then I remembered that I might have the special battery for the entry sensor, so I got up and sure enough, I had several of the special sized battery.  I grabbed one and headed to the basement.  Took the sensor down, took the original battery out and put the new one in.  Placed the refreshed unit back on the door and then opened and closed it  a couple of times, hearing the base station twiddle which told me it was communicating with the base station.  I closed and had just locked the door when the siren began screaming.  I had forgotten to turn of the alarm!!!  I race upstairs, enter my code and just as the last number went in, my phone is ringing.  It is the monitoring station asking if I am alright.  I explained my plight, gave them my safeword and reset the alarm before going to bed.

The next day the sensor stopped communicating again but by now I have called the SimpliSafe people and they had already shipped out a replacement sensor.  But then the keypad was giving me fits.  It would not acknowledge the pin number entry or it would take multiple entries to get things shut off.  When the new sensor arrived, I again called the SimpliSafe technical support people and had a lovely young woman helping me.  She diagnosed the keypad issue as not communicating with the base station.  I moved it back to the dining room window and the keypad issue was gone.  The door sensor was installed and the serial number changed for the base station but still not recognized by the base station.... but I now understood that my plaster and lathe walls along with cinder block in my almost 100 year old house make modern, wireless communication difficult.  I have now moved the base station to the top of the bookcase in the dining room so is easily communicating with the keypad and also in closer to and communicating with the basement door.  If it loses communication with the door again, I will need to move the web camera and perhaps relocate the sensor to the center of the door, away from the metal enclosure for the electrical lines.  But I have great confidence that I will get everything set up to communicate with the base station and have a really nice security system that I can expand piece by piece over the next couple of months.

I did run into a problem with my home phone.  When I replaced the security system, I had to unplug the base station from the kitchen wall.  It was two wires (power) and a plug (I had no idea).  I did this on a Monday afternoon.  Tuesday morning I needed to call someone and discovered that I had no dial tome.  I called Verizon and finally got a young woman who, when she checked my line said she was reading that I had a receiver off the hook.  It was then that I realized that the plug I had removed was part of the communication system for the old system and I had essentially left an open circuit thus looking like a receiver off the hook.  So I scheduled a repair person and by the time he had arrived, I had located the line from the old system and could tell him exactly what was needed.  The only issue he created was that he had to make sure the signal was coming to the house before he came in.  Bees had built a nest inside the box outside so he sprayed it to not get stung.  After he left, I was on the phone with Marji and the phone kept hanging up on me.  I called the tech (I had his number in my cell phone from when he called to let me know he was on his way) and he came back and dried out the box outside which solved the problem.  I am hoping, fingers crossed, that this is all finally taken care of and settled.

We had another Sew Much Love session.  Each time we do better and better at making the pillowcases and other projects.  This time we had to relearn how to do the pillowcases.  The lady at Piece By Piece had returned some to us that were not up to her standards.  So we took time to show all of the places that needed to be watched.  Then we ripped up seams, restitched pillowcases and helped one of our sewers (who preferred doing her pillowcases on her serger) learn how to do the french seam with a regular machine.  We had decided that everyone should learn how to do the pillowcases the same way.  We also found that one of the other sewers had used the wrong bobbin in her machine and had bad seams in her pillowcases.  So we got her back on track as well.  It was a good day all the way around.

I am now getting ready to head out to visit Brian in Minneapolis.  I leave here on the 12th and will not return until the 28th.  I will stay just outside of Cleveland and then stop near Chicago to stay with my cousin for two nights and one full day before heading to Minneapolis.  I will leave Minneapolis on the 24th and back to my cousin's for three nights and two days before heading back to the Cleveland area on the 27th and get home on the 28th.

I have an embroidery job to do before I leave and a quilt that I have agreed to make for a dear friend.  She currently is living in Belgium so I must wait on the box of tee shirts to arrive from her.  If they get here before I head to Minneapolis I will take them with me so I can work on it while I am in Minneapolis.  If they do not get here, then I have another project to take to Brian's house and I will jump into the tee shirt quilt when I get back.  I find it amazing that people think I am good enough to make a quilt for them.  I just think of myself as a novice sewer.  Perhaps I am selling myself short.  But I will be getting very busy over the next several days.  I will be packed up and heading out in 9 days!  Yikes, I better get off my tush and get busy!!