Daily Archives: March 2, 2018

Family, Photo-A-Day

How Was Your Post #DisneySMMC Re-Entry?

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Photo-A-Day #4706

Re-entry after a vacation is hard. It is even harder after one of the best vacations in my life. It truly was a magical time together as a family. We have never had a vacation like that before. Being away for ten days with non-stop fun experience after fun experience was tiring but exciting at the same time. Seeing the kids experience so many things for the very first time was also spectacular.

Then we got home.

We got home to a wind storm that we have never seen before. It was so intense that the wind kept slamming the porch swing into the house over and over. I went out and took the swing down. I turned around and put the ladder back into the house and the wind picked up the swing and blew it across the porch. I chained it up to the side of the porch because even though the wind could toss it around like it was nothing I would need a second pair of hands to put it into the garage. I should have taken it down early in the day and gotten some sleep but instead got woken up and then took it down only to not be able to sleep again before work.

Back to work was another reason for a tough re-entry into real life. There’s nothing like getting exhausted for 10 days, but having regular days and nights of sleep to come back to a flipped schedule. It is going to take me a few weeks to get back to being able to stay up through the nights without nodding off.

Then, when I get to work I get a message that Allison and the kids are without power. I guess that was a good thing that I was away because despite having a wonderful week of togetherness I don’t think that having the four of us in the same bed was going to work well for anyone. The kids slept with Allison and so did their cats. There was no way that I would have gotten any sleep in that situation. I did miss them, though.

Review, Technology

Review: Samsung SmartThings + ADT Home Safety Expansion Kit at Best Buy

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Smartthings Tools

The reviewer has been compensated in the form of a Best Buy Gift Card and/or received the product/service at a reduced price or for free.

We’ve had the ADT Home Security Starter Kit, from Samsung SmartThings & ADT in our house for a few months now. It like the service and the devices. I had written about the Starter Kit previously, but we also received the Samsung SmartThings Expansion Pack which included additional SmartThings. The expansion pack has an ADT Smoke Alarm, an ADT Carbon Monoxide Alarm, and an ADT Water Leak Detector. Each of these devices was easy to install and certainly provided me with the peace of mind to know that if something wasn’t right in the house, I’d know about it immediately.

I think that most of America has seen a little show about the Pearson family and how their lives were devastated by a fire. Knowing that the ADT Smoke Alarm was in the house keeping watch over the family brings with it peace of mind. Having help only seconds away through the ADT Security Hub and the connected devices also helps to alleviate the fears in my mind.

About a year back I was in the cellar over near the furnace. I noticed that there was a huge hole in the pipe that let the exhaust from the furnace into the chimney. I called my plumber right away and he dropped everything he was working on to come right over. When he told me that we were only alive because our house is so poorly insulated and drafty I felt sick. I didn’t know that such a danger from Carbon Monoxide poisoning was lurking there in my cellar. We’ve had everything fixed since then but to be able to have a Carbon Monoxide detector that could send me alerts directly to my phone would make me immediately aware of anything were ever to happen again.

Water Detector

We have an old house and as such, things like the water heater are old as well. With the ADT Water Leak Detector I would know immediately if that Hot Water heater failed. The older it gets the more of a real possibility it becomes.

Connecting these three devices to my existing ADT Security Hub was very easy. Each new thing has a QR code that you scan with your phone and then you tell the app where in your house you are placing it. That means that you don’t have to go searching the house trying to figure out which smoke detector is beeping for no reason. A game that Allison and I have played many times. I could have sworn it was the one in the basement, only to discover that it was really in the first floor hallway. With the devices set up in the app I would know immediately which device to inspect.