The Learned League season started on Monday. I lost my first three matches, but this morning, I awoke to the pleasant news that I’d won Thursday’s match. I’d gotten all six questions right, so I was assured of not losing the match, but it was nice to notch the win!

We took two bags of clothes, a couple of cordless drills, and an old Apple TV to Goodwill this afternoon and then went to Costco to pick up a few necessities; it took less time than I feared it would, and we hardly bought anything that wasn’t actually on our list (just some Balsamic Vinegar, which is a staple so it doesn’t count as an impulse buy, right?).

I made a lot of progress on the Home Assistant conversion. I still don’t know why it decided my keypads have only 6 buttons, but I found out how to tell it that there are 8. And I migrated some of the key behaviors I’d set up in Indigo (for example, turning off all the lights in the kitchen when I turn off the kitchen counter light) – it’s fairly straightforward, but tedious. So far, I’ve been able to do everything in their UI instead of having to edit control files, which is a great improvement over the last time I tried to convert.

Small wins make me happy.

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.