On my trip back to Maryland to check on the house, I examined the monitor, which had last reported on July 23rd. The Asus eeepc had a blank screen, but had power and the modem was lighted. I rebooted the eeepc OK, but there was no indication in the logs why it had crashed. I started the monitor again, and it worked. I came back up to New Hampshire and monitored the monitor for 4 days, while it worked perfectly.
However it stopped reporting Sunday AM early, and I found out we had a power failure, so the computer likely ran out of battery and stopped. I had neglected to issue the "Alarm+" text comment, so the power outage text message and tweet had not been issued.
Some lessons from all this, not unexpected:
The eeepc battery lasts maybe 1-2 hours at its age. The power is still out after 12 hours so clearly a robust backup is needed. Probably a deep discharge battery-power inverter with a large battery.
There should be a default alarm action, like twitter or texting my cell phone.
I need to write startup scripts that will restart the whole eeepc and monitor program on powerup.
