Turkey Day!

Turkey Day is coming!  I’m feeling particularly thankful this year so I’m ready to feast.  So much so, in fact, that I bought two turkeys.  That’s one way to insure I get some leftovers I guess.  As far as the weekend went, well it was rather uneventful.  I was geared up for a big happy hour Friday, but nobody was buying into my plan so I ended up on my back patio as usual.  Hey, it was a nice evening out, nothing to complain about there.  I ended up with a big fat cigar and my feet kicked up on the coffee table, listening to some good tunes and enjoying the weather.  We did make it out to dinner at Selland’s a little later, which was tasty as always.  I’ll admit I go there for the very reasonable price though; Their $25 special cannot be beat, at least not around here.

Saturday I actually got outside and got a little yard work done.  My citrus trees, which I was just certain were going to produce a little bit of fruit this year, got all broken up in the neighbor’s landscaping project, so I tried to salvage them the best I could.  I think they’ll make it.  They offered to replace them but eh, no thanks.  I don’t so much mind buying new ones, I don’t want to dig the stinkin’ holes to plant them.  The so-called dirt out here is no joy to dig in, that’s for sure.  I got them all repaired, we’ll see if they heal up.  I trimmed a few of the rosemary bushes too, those things are ridiculous.  Definitely in the “drought tolerant” family.  They’ll take over your whole yard if you let them.  After I got done with that, we headed up to the AT&T store, presumably to get our monthly bill lowered a bit.  Several hours and a sizable sum of money later, we walked back out in a fog.  My head is still swimming, I don’t know what happened exactly.  Hopefully my monthly savings are enough to cover the out-of-pocket expenses over the next decade or so, but I rather doubt it.  Good grief.  Note to self:  Conduct all AT&T business online next time.

The majority of Sunday was spent on the couch, as has been the tradition as of late.  We got out to the grocery store and bought our turkeys, and that was about it.  I did spend a good deal of time fine-tuning my home automation setup that I’ve been working on.  I’m pretty happy with the door locks and lights and that generic stuff, but I was trying to program the thermostat schedules with it too.  The little voice in the back of my head kept saying “The thermostats have built-in scheduling, what’s the point?”  And the other voice would answer “Because it would be cooler to have it in your automation setup.”  Well, I woke up about 2:30 this morning and it had set the temp upstairs to 62, and downstairs to 70.  Not too bad, except I’d wanted 62 degrees on both.  Unfortunately though, the stupid thing had set the upstairs to “cool” and the downstairs to “heat.”  So yeah, the heater was rocking downstairs trying to get the house up to 70, while the air conditioner was trying to cool the upstairs to 62.  I shut it all off and turned the thermostat scheduling back on for the time being…