Winter weather and random catching up

I can't believe it is almost Christmas; we noted the solstice passing two days ago.  The weather here has cooled slightly and is a bit more windy and rainy compared to a few months ago.  We are living on the dry, leeward, side of Oahu.  There are actually nopales (Opuntia cactus) growing here and there wild.  The grass in our yard was dry and brown but with the increase in rain lately it has started turning green and growing.  I took today off of work and T and I did some yard work to cut the grass and weeds.  Then I put both T and M to work to collect bits of trash out of the yard.  (We live in a densely populated area and small pieces of plastic can blow around and accumulate.)   Each day I have been watering some plants we have planted and I was worried about how dry it has been, but this increase in rain and cloudiness has helped a lot. 

We have adjusted a lot to the temperatures here.  When I say the weather has cooled this means it gets down to about 70 F before sunrise, perhaps in the high 60s.  We were laughing at ourselves when V said she was cold in the morning and I checked to see what the temperature was.  A year ago this would have been unbelievably warm. 

We use a clothesline in the back yard to dry our laundry.  Now that it is raining intermittently this would seem to be a problem, but if we don't get the clothes off in time the rain quickly clears up and they dry right out again.  A couple of times we have had heavy downpours, but so far the rain here has never lasted long. 

We drove around last night to look at the lights and decorations people have put up.  V and the kids went out again tonight to have another look.  There were several barges from the west coast that came in a month ago carrying Christmas trees.  They were selling like hotcakes at some of the stores around here.  We put up a small Charlie Brown tree for fun.  Next year I would like to decorate a small palm tree with lights.

I programmed our microcontroller to blink a series of different colored LEDs in various patterns as a Christmas decoration.  I tried to teach the kids how to count in binary numbers while doing it, but they seemed more interested in the "Knight Rider" pattern as the light sweeps back and fourth.  Here is a picture of the lights with the system hanging up from a hook on the wall and running off a 9 volt battery.

Here is part of the source code that flashes the lights in a binary integer series. 

There is a potential bug, the interior for loop should start with "count=(LEDnumber-1);" to make it more general.

In other news, V earned her first paycheck in years!  (She could not work legally in Germany because she was not an EU citizen.)  It was just a one time thing, but every bit helps.  She got paid to ... sleep!  She was a guinea pig in the control group for a medical sleep study.  I took care of the kids over night (we had a party!) and she got to go, get a good nights sleep while hooked up to monitors, and get paid for it!  I need to find a job like that.  It is too bad she can't do that more often, but V is job hunting for more permanent work. 

And here is a random picture:

If you look closely you can see one of our neighbors dogs relaxing on a back porch.

And here is a picture of F from this morning.  We are out on our back porch.  It is tricky to hold her and take a picture at the same time. 

Above is a picture of M in another project.  We are trying to make our own batteries.  We picked up some used film canisters from a local pharmacy for the containers and made the battery out of aluminum foil, pennies, felt, wire and diluted vinegar.  After hooking eight of them together in series we only managed three volts.  This one is still a work in progress. 

This is a giant centipede (Scolopendra subspinipes) that is native to Hawai'i and can give a nasty bite.  It was on the sidewalk in front of our house one morning.

As a final thing to mention on this update, the kids have had a lot of fun playing a computer game called minecraft lately.  You can play it as a single player, but I set up a server so they could play together in the same game world (my setting up the server seemed to impress them much more than showing them how to make a motor, radio or speaker out of household parts).  One one hand the game is simple, but on the other it can be very creative.  You mine blocks that have different properties and you can combine them to make new tools, etc.  You can also arrange things to build complex machines.  I was playing with them and we made an automatic harvester and a powered rail line you could ride on in the game.