Not sure if we are 6 months late on the spring cleaning binge, or 6 months early, but we have been thinning out the junk. lots of FREE signs on the curb. Moved a bunch of storage boxes outside of the house to a new shed. Moved all the coats to the laundry room. Converted the old coat closet into a pantry. The new pantry is in the air conditioned part of the house which makes a lot more sense.
It has taken me half a year to get this all figured out but I am finally generating a little ‘free’ electricity. You can see all the pictures on the Projects tab above. I saved $0.06 yesterday!
I have 2 panels of 300W and a big ass lithium battery. There is a regulator thingy that measures the house current in real time and lets the solar power trickle in less than what I am using. No power goes to the grid and I don’t need a special meter. The battery will trickle current back out at night and charge during the day. It is a clever little system.
It took a while to run the circuit and get the antenna wires and get everything communicating properly.
The parts from Legion Solar via indigogo set me back $1500 with a few hundred more in rails, wire, roof parts. This is a ‘do it yourself’ kit and this was a big job. I actually have 2 more panels coming and an inverter. The inverter will let me run AC items from the battery if the power goes out.
How come I am just now finding out about this Houston trio? (It is Thai for ‘airplane’)
Over on the Ikea side of town is a small southern kitchen called Mama Bird. Lots of fun stuff on the menu for sure. The Chicken / Waffle / Mac-n-Cheese sandwich was a must try. The MMAD hot option is hot – but not Howlin’ Ray or Mattie B hot. The waffle was a bit undercooked and soggy, but the chicken was very moist, the mac-n-cheese was amazing. This is a strong #2 chicken waffle vote for me outside of the Whiskey Cake in San Antonio. The deviled eggs were good along with the cake in a jar. We need to go back to try the brisket.
There were a number of Hmong immigrants in MN / WI in the 80s. They were the hill people of Cambodia/Laos/Thailand. My college roommate had to sneak out of the country through a trail of land mines to get out. His uncle brought over the family one at a time, taught them the language and a job in the family business. They were good hard working people who knew the dangers of socialism. They were not welfare queens.
Anyway, there were a large number of Vietnamese restaurants up north that were really Hmong style cooking. Vietnamese restaurants now are all about the pho. I have been having trouble finding really good Vietnamese food in Vegas much less traditional Hmong style I grew up with.
Luckily, I have a secret weapon named Tomoko. I showed her pictures of what I was looking for and she snooped through a number of recipes on line. Bingo. 5 out of 5 stars on the first attempt. These have wrappers that blister like the Chinese version (not Thai) and have glass noodles, pork, carrot, shrimp, and other goodies inside. The Hmong also have a weird fish sauce for dipping unlike the standard sweet and sour commonly served.
Paella is a traditional Spanish rice dish. It is made with arborio rice and you dump in whatever leftovers you have in the fridge. The best I had was on the beaches of Spain 20 years ago. Valencian Gold just re-opened in Vegas. It is not often you find paella on a menu so we had to try. Firefly also does paella but the original location is dark and dreary inside. VG has a nice bright location and atmosphere. I would have preferred a different music selection than the rap crap playing. They have real Iberian jamon hanging from the ceiling and cook the paella in real pans over an open fire. We chose a couple of tapas and the seafood paella. It wasn’t excessively large so we had room for dessert. Food presentation was top notch.
Perfect weather for a bike ride to watch the sun set. There is a hidden park up in the hills nearby with giant sculptures of reptiles. The flying club who does the 4th of July flyovers was out practicing too.
I built three MagicMirror variations about 5 years ago and they have been running non stop without issue until last week. #2 stopped getting data and when I manually ran updates the whole thing ‘shit the bed’ as we say. I had a backup file and that did not work either so I figured I would just start over from scratch. I had an extra Gen4 Raspberry Pi laying around just like the one running this web site. I put in the newest OS, the newest MM software, rewrote some scripts and after a day of tweeking the config file, it is running again. All text is in white but the monitor is behind stained glass to give it the color.
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In the spirit of bike rotation I took the ’08 Yam WR250X out to Overton with the gang. The little 250 held it’s ground with the big boys until they wanted to take highway 15 back. The dirtbike gets blown around by trucks and tops out about 70mph – so I took the twisty road back home. That is such a fun bike to ride.