The theme of the Silver Tongued Cats meeting today was “Preparation or Lack Thereof” (our Toastmaster had been drafted to present at a conference for her job and didn’t have time to work on the meeting until yesterday).

I was on the schedule to speak today and didn’t really have a good plan for my speech until I got the meeting theme, and realized that it had given me a handle for the mandatory “Introduction to Toastmasters Mentoring” project. I decided to talk about being mentored as I learned improv – not about the skills of improvising, but about the “Yes, and!” outlook that improv is built upon.

I’ve given more organized talks, but I think that the title gave fair warning: “Winging It”.

Late this afternoon, I got back to working on Home Assistant; I have the alarm system and the Insteon switches defined and more-or-less functional. For some reason, the system thinks all of the Insteon keypads have 6 buttons rather than 8, so I’ll have to convince it of the truth. But not tonight.

I posted early last night so that I could get off the computer and ignore the election news. It’s not that I wasn’t interested, it’s that I knew that the returns would trickle in all night, that there would be pundits filling the time with information-light prognostications, and that watching wouldn’t improve my sleep.

Instead, we watched some of our backlog of Young Sheldon and Call Me Kat – not the most intellectual shows on TV (especially the latter), but just what we needed.

Today, we got our windows cleaned for the first time in quite a while. I’d found Pioneer Services through Consumers’ Checkbook, and they lived up to their reviews. Our windows are so clean that we’ll have to use curtains again!

And this evening, I went to the Shir Hadash Mens’ Club annual dinner and saw a very interesting documentary: 9th Circuit Cowboy, about Harry Pregerson, who served on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for more than 40 years. He was a real mensch – someone who used the law for good.

Back on Halloween, I confessed that I’d accidentally spilled DEET on my Panasonic Lumix FZ-1000M2 while I was in Africa and that I’d sent it off to Lumix Pro Services to see if they could fix it.

They couldn’t. They described the camera as “Unrepairable per heavy liquid damage – caused parts to glue together” and offered me a choice:

• Pay $50 for the diagnosis and $15 for return shipping
• Pay two-thirds of the price of a new camera for an exchange unit

I took the second option, and FedEx says that the replacement camera should be here on Monday. I even have its serial number already!

I expect the learning curve to be pretty shallow.

I didn’t get very far on any of my projects today; the most constructive thing I did was to update the settings on the Harmony hub to remove the Amazon Fire Stick and replace the old Apple TV with the new one.

Perhaps tomorrow will be more productive.

This morning, we took our usual trip to the Farmers’ Market, including a nice walk through Los Gatos. We had to hurry, because I was chairing a Ritual Committee meeting at Shir Hadash at 10am; I made it with five minutes to spare.

After the meeting and lunch (Sesame-Crusted Tuna), I upgraded both of my Macs to Ventura. It was painless, somewhat to my surprise. We took a walk while the upgrades were happening; the trees in the neighborhood are still pretty colorful.

I also installed Ubuntu on Diane’s old Dell so that I could use it to build a new Home Assistant setup without messing up the one that’s already running on the Raspberry Pi. They’ve made a lot of improvements to the onboarding process for Home Assistant since the last time I installed it; I’ve gotten most of my devices set up already without having to write a single line of code (or even having to edit a configuration file).

The devices I haven’t touched yet are the biggies, though: the alarm system and the Insteon hub (with its dozens of switches). And then I have to set up the HomeKit integration, which will be the real payoff. Tomorrow….