We tried another new recipe tonight, Slow Cooker Spiced Lentils with Veggies from the Mercury News. It was good, but next time, we’ll add more spices.

The hardest part of the recipe was getting to the Crock-Pot; we hadn’t used it in a while, and it was at the back of the cabinet over the oven, which was also filled with many water bottles, an RPI Class of 1975 pitcher and mug, several rarely used appliances, and various serving pieces which we’d been given as wedding gifts (just like the Crock-Pot).

Some of the water bottles had given their all and made a final trip to the recycling bin; the others, along with the pitcher and mug, got put into storage in the garage in a Container Store bin that I bought last year. The serving pieces went back to the cabinet.

And I used one of my Mom’s gifts to us for the very first time – a Sunbeam Electric Bag Sealer. I don’t know when she gave it to us, but the copyright date on the manual was 1995, so I know it wasn’t a wedding gift. I used it to reseal the bag of dried chiles we bought for this recipe – it worked great!

Thanks, Mom!

It was smoky and dark and cool all day, but there was a lot less orange to the light today; I guess that’s an improvement.

I played Raspberry Pi Roulette today trying to figure out what’s going on. My Pi Zero W ran all night and didn’t miss too many temperature updates, but the logs show it dropping off the network fairly frequently for a few seconds and then recovering. My other Pi Zero W (the one attached to the alarm system) doesn’t seem to drop off the network at all. I could swap the two units and see where the trouble goes, but I’d rather not mess up the alarm system.

I still have a couple of first-generation Raspberry Pi Bs. They’re slower than the Pi Zero W, and it makes a big difference – one of the old units crashed as soon as I plugged the radio dongle into it; the other ran, but kept losing packets under load, so it wasn’t a help, either.

I guess the next step is to make a new SD card with the same software I’m using for the alarm, plug it into the Pi Zero W I’m debugging, and see if it stays on the network.

Computers are such fun sometimes.