i did have the commands in the wrong place, i had the publish commands in the main body void loop (), but i should have had them in a separate void command, i tried that unsucessfully in a previous debugging session, but i had tunnel vision and never returned back to it... thanks for pointing me in the right direction... also figure out how to concatenate strings, so i can push information as one payload to the MQTTBox...
it's working so on to some more clean up and tinkering,
keep up the good work!