It’s been two years since the initial “Shelter-in-Place” order was issued for the Bay Area. While I can’t say we’re back to normal, we are doing a lot of normal things, including taking volksmarches with friends, as we did today in downtown Campbell.

The route included the Ainsley House, across the parking lot from the Campbell Library. I’ve been to the library many times, but I’d never bothered to look at the Ainsley House – it’s an interesting place, with a bit of a history. It was built by one of Campbell’s first industrialists (he owned the first local fruit cannery) and was saved from demolition and moved to the Civic Center/Library complex in 1990.

After the walk, we came home and I did a little more work on the Home Assistant migration, and then we made dinner and watched the Shir Hadash Purim Service and Shpiel.

Hag Sameach and Happy Purim!

I got Home Assistant (HA) talking to the Insteon (which is what controls the lights and switches in the house) this afternoon. It was able to bring all of the devices into its database, and now I will put a human-friendly name on each one (recognizing “4C.13.AE” isn’t quite as easy as recognizing “Porch Light”). There should be some way to import all of the names I’ve already defined in Indigo, but with only 20 devices, it’s probably easiest to just do it through the menus in Home Assistant. Tedious, but easy.

I was even able to set up an automation to make pressing a button on a switch in the kitchen turn the Sonos in the living room on and off – just like I have in Indigo.

Despite spending too long on the computer, we did manage to take our usual walks; there are more flowers every day, like this sunflower.

Diane spent the afternoon working on a photo book for our 2019 Tulip Time trip with her brother and sister-in-law, and I spent the afternoon working on improving our home automation.

Today’s project was installing the latest version of Home Assistant on the new Raspberry Pi I bought last month. Yesterday, I’d tried installing the version that runs on the “Home Assistant Operating System”, which is their preferred Raspberry Pi setup. It’s based on Linux, but is locked down tightly; it was also painfully slow to boot up and shut down (to be fair, that might have something to do with running it from an SD card). So today, I tried installing Home Assistant in a Docker container; it was much faster.

I had a basic setup running with a few critical devices defined in just over an hour – and then I discovered I’d made a mistake in my Docker configuration. I wanted all of the Home Assistant configuration and log files to be in a directory on the host machine, but I hadn’t put that into the Docker file – so when I restarted the Docker container, all of that work vanished.

I fixed that mistake and started again; it was easier the second time. I still have to get the lights and switches into the system, expose everything to Alexa and HomeKit, and rebuild my automations, so there’s a lot of work ahead, but I’m hopeful.

I’m also motivated. Apple released Mac OS 12.3 today, which removes Python 2 from the system. That breaks Indigo completely – they’re working on an update to use Python 3 but it’s not ready yet. And then all of the user-contributed plugins will need to be updated, too, and not all of them still have owners. I suspect it’s not going to be smooth.

We went to Shir Hadash this morning to hear Mark Oppenheimer discuss the book he wrote about the effect of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting on the Squirrel Hill community in Pittsburgh; it was quite interesting, as were the questions afterwords. The session was recorded and is available on YouTube – be warned, it starts with a little over a minute of black screen!

After that, we had a quiet day with walks and travel planning. This morning’s Murky Nooz had a multi-page ad for Mariposa County and Yosemite, and we got inspired to plan a two-night stay there before tourist season really starts. The Ahwahnee Hotel was available for one of the nights we want to visit, but we’d have to move for the second night – and it’s pricey! So we’re casting a wider net and hope to hear from a nearby B&B when they open tomorrow.

We did something unusual this evening – we attended an in-person talk at Shir Hadash. The speaker was Mark Oppenheimer talking about the Newish Jewish Encyclopedia, which he’d edited along with the other two principals of the Unorthodox podcast – their goal was to touch on all aspects of being Jewish and to be funny in the process.

The entries he read during his talk certainly lived up to that goal; I’d hoped he’d have copies for sale, but I guess that would have been too much to schlep, so I’ve ordered a copy. And we’ve put Unorthodox on our podcast queue.

He’ll be giving another talk tomorrow on his most recent (and much less funny) book, Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, and I’m looking forward to hearing him again.

Beyond that, it was a typical Saturday – Torah Study and Shir Shabbat in the morning and lots of walks. The weather was pleasantly warm, and flowers are blooming!