Our community website was hacked. It went down last weekend. I restored it and it went down again Tuesday. We brought in a consultant who suggested the security plugin “Sucuri”. That seems to have done the trick for now. I learned that hackers like to take over WordPress sites, then fill the database with their nefarious files. It works well for the hackers, because a lot of WordPress sites are abandoned. They get free storage that can’t be tracked back to them.

After a bunch of beautiful and warm weather, we were promised a cold week coming up, with even some snow. I decided this would be a great week to get my bike tuned up. My bike’s sitting in the shop, but it wasn’t easy. The first several bike shops I visited were either closed or out of business. I don’t particularly care for the shop I left it at, but the bike needs some attention and the shop is at least in business. I should have it back by Friday.

Smoke detectors should be replaced every 10 years or so. Our house has an amazing 6 detectors — one for each floor, plus one for each bedroom. That sounds like a lot of smoke detectors. What I don’t understand is why they didn’t put one in the garage. There are two things wrong with common smoke detectors these days. The first is that they are all tied together. One will hear the alarm from anywhere in the house, but it also means it is difficult to figure out which detector triggered the alarm. The other problem is that it is difficult to add a new detector location without a major project, running new wires so the new detector will be tied into the others. Fortunately, technology has come to the rescue. I purchased 7 Nest smoke & CO detectors. They connect to each other through a wireless signal. There’s no need to run extra wires into the garage. And if an alarm is detected, they broadcast a verbal message stating the problem and location, such as “Replace the batteries in the living room”. This being the age of computers, they do a lot more stuff, but that’s all fluff. Installing the new smoke detectors will be a nice little project while I don’t have my bike.

Guinness Cake

In addition to all that fixing stuff, we have 3 social activities this weekend. We had a neighborhood party Friday and a neighborhood concert tonight. Yesterday we had a Circle lunch with a St. Patrick’s Day theme. Danita made an Irish stew (with Guinness as one of the ingredients) and a Guinness cake. Not only did the cake use Guinness as one of the ingredients, the chocolate cake with a frothy white icing was supposed to look like a pint of Guinness. The visual effects weren’t obvious, but they were fun to talk about. And the cake tasted very good (as did the stew, of course).

That’s a lot of stuff for one week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.