Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 168

I got an email from Tripit this afternoon telling me that they could no longer monitor our flight next Friday from Porto to Madrid. Of course, we weren’t going to be taking that flight, but the note did encourage me to look at Iberia’s site to see what was going on.

They had cancelled our flight and rebooked us on a flight with “Air Nostrum” at exactly the same time; Air Nostrum appears to be an Iberia subsidiary. The rebooking notice offered three choices: accept, take a voucher, or call a US toll-free number to request a refund.

Ten minutes later, mostly spent on hold, I think I have a refund on the way. I’m not 100% positive because the connection was terrible – the agent and I had to keep repeating things to one another, but I’m pretty sure he said they’d refund the payment but to allow at least 40 days.

I’m hoping we’ll be able to take the trip as rescheduled for 2022 – but I’m not going to buy any airline tickets yet.

Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 167

Our next-door neighbors used to have the same kind of alarm system that we have; when they replaced it, they gave me all of their hardware. I used one of their motion detectors to replace one of mine that had gone bad and put everything else in a box in the garage and forgot all about it.

Part of trying to figure out what’s going on with the AlarmDecoder is looking at the logs it creates so that I can correlate events caused by opening and closing windows with what the system reports. I kept seeing a LOT of events for devices that aren’t attached to our house’s system, which I had to filter out. I decided to look at the box in the garage and discovered that all of the detectors still had batteries installed and were faithfully reporting their status every few minutes – probably including a plea for a new battery.

I took all of the batteries out (fortunately, they weren’t leaking) and put the box back in the garage, where it will sit more quietly.

There are still a lot of events in my log from other people’s systems, but it’s a little less messy. And what else can you ask for these days?