Paradise ponders: coding, service, leaks, rain, and kittens edition...

Paradise ponders: coding, service, leaks, rain, and kittens edition...  We had something like a half inch of rain yesterday morning.  Naturally, this was not in the forecast at all!  All the exposed soil in my yard (roughly an acre and a half of it right now) promptly turned into a gooey, sloppy mess – completely stopping all work on the sprinkler system.  Dang it!  Good for the farmers, though...

The contractors who are going to (I hope!) fix all the leaks in our “filling station” will be here today.  This will be the third attempt to put it all together sans leaks.  They're going to try a new thread sealant this time, one that has a reputation for being leak-proof.  We shall see...

Our friend Michelle H. lives a mile or so south of us.  She had a problem with a skunk that was eating the food they put out for their animals, so they put out a trap for it.  They caught something – but it wasn't a skunk.  They got a little feral kitten, perhaps 8 weeks old.  Her son A.J. (the hooded fellow in the photo at right) is a real animal lover.  He donned a thick coat and a pair of leather gloves and went right to work taming down the kitten.  Two days later (this morning), we hear that the kitten is well on its way to becoming a household pet.  :)

I spent a few hours yesterday actually writing some code.  It's been so long since I've done this in earnest that it actually feels rather foreign.  I have a project that's on a sort of deadline: the supervisory computer I mentioned yesterday for my irrigation system.  Yesterday morning I realized that I could actually write large portions of this, and even test it, on my laptop.  All I need is some code that simulates the specialized hardware (pressure sensors, relay output, etc.), and that's pretty darned easy.  So I started working on it, beginning with some code to use the Hydrawise API for their cloud-based interface to my irrigation controller.  Inside of a half hour, I had bits of it working.  It's really kind of amazing how easy the Internet has made things like this!