07:11 – The phone call we’d been expecting from Hospice came at 2:21 this morning. Barbara’s dad died at 2:20, and they notified us immediately. We drove down to Hospice. Frances and Al drove over to Creekside to pick up Sankie and bring her to Hospice.
10:31 – Yesterday, I finally got around to ordering some stuff from Costco that had been on my to-do list for a week: a CyberPower PC, a Brother multi-function printer, and a DeLonghi dehumidifier. The dehumidifier kills two birds. It’ll make it a lot more comfortable to work in the unfinished area of the basement, and it’ll produce several gallons a day of distilled water for making up chemicals.
I’m debating with myself about introducing an AP Chemistry kit for autumn semester in 2014. I’d actually considered doing it for 2012, but it just wasn’t worth the effort. College Board was in the midst of revamping AP Chemistry for 2013, so a 2012 kit would have been obsolete after a year. They did the same thing with AP Biology last year, shifting from procedural labs to “the Big Picture” and “inquiry-based” labs. That’s fine for a classroom environment with a qualified AP chemistry or biology teacher directing things and keeping students from going off the tracks, but it doesn’t translate well to a homeschool environment.
The other problem with the current AP Chemistry labs is that they’re very equipment intensive. The $20 milligram balance I mentioned yesterday solves one of the problems, but the current AP labs as specified require quite a bit of other expensive equipment, most notably a decent pH meter and at least a colorimeter if not a spectrophotometer. Now, you can buy a pH meter with 0.1 pH resolution for $25 or $30, but the problem is that these cheap meters are notorious for requiring constant recalibration. Decent pH meters with 0.01 pH resolution are available for $75 to $150, but that’s not a minor expense for many homeschoolers, particularly for just one instrument. The real show-stopper is the colorimeter/spectrophotometer, which is used heavily in AP chemistry. Typical dedicated 3- or 4-color colorimeters cost $500 to $800 or more.
My first thought was that we should open-source this hardware, kind of like my $50 Dremel ultracentrifuge, which does pretty much the same thing as a commercial $5,000 ultracentrifuge. But only a tiny percentage of homeschoolers would be willing to “roll their own”. So my second thought was modular hardware designed for education, such as the product line from Vernier. You start with an interface, the simplest of which is a $61 unit that simply connects sensors to a USB port on your computer. You then install logging software, which ranges from free for a basic package to $200+ for their high-end package. You then add sensors, such as a $79 pH sensor, a $115 colorimeter sensor, a $29 temperature sensor, and so on. It’s still not cheap, but it’s a lot cheaper than buying dedicated units for each function. I’ll have to think about this for a while before I decide what, if anything, to do.
Oh, yeah. That iodine that I ordered on eBay showed up yesterday, or at least I assume that’s what’s in the small box I received from an address in the Ukraine. The small box weighs 320 grams, so I suspect there actually is the 250 g of iodine I ordered in there. Geez, that probably puts me on yet another list.
10:42 – I’ve been working with a woman who’s in charge of AP chemistry for a state distance learning program. I sympathize with her situation. College Board completely changed the lab portion of the AP chemistry curriculum for the 2013 school year, and she’s working madly trying to get something suitable ready to go for an August start. Complicating matters is that she has a very, very small budget. Obviously, “small budget” and “AP chemistry labs” don’t go well together. I told her that we planned to have a full AP Chemistry lab kit available for autumn 2014, but that it would probably be in the $250 range. That’s far, far higher than her per-student budget for this year. So we’re trying to do as much as possible within her limited budget, which isn’t easy.
Among other things, I was checking out the price of electronic balances for her. I was stunned to see the prices on Amazon.com. They had an American Weigh Scales (decent brand) AWS-100 (100 g capacity, 0.01 g resolution) for $10, with free SuperSaver shipping. Even more amazing, they had an AWS Gemini 20 balance for $21. That’s a milligram balance, with 20 g capacity and 0.001 g resolution. For $21. Both items are sold and fulfilled by Amazon, and their selling price is lower than what I’d have to pay if I were ordering them by the case. So I told the AP teacher that she should just buy her balances from Amazon, because I sure couldn’t match let alone beat their price. Oh, and I added a Gemini 20 to my own cart.
When I put together the AP chemistry kit for next year, I’m just going to tell buyers to get their balance on-line. It’s cheaper for them, and I don’t have to deal with warranty hassles and so on. Same deal for the pH meter.
09:35 – Dutch continues to hold on. Barbara went down to Hospice late yesterday afternoon and stayed until late evening. The stress on her, her sister, and their mom is incredible, and not much less on the rest of us.
09:43 – It’s been pretty hectic for the last couple of days. We were without power from Thursday afternoon until Friday evening. A couple hours after our power came back on Friday evening, Frances called to let Barbara know that their dad was in pretty bad shape. We drove down to Hospice and ended up staying all night. We were expecting Dutch to die during the night, but he held on. We finally left and got home around 8:00 yesterday morning to let Colin out and give him some attention. Then we headed back down to Hospice yesterday afternoon and stayed through the evening. At this point, Dutch is basically gone although he’s still breathing. Barely, and sometimes he stops for a while. My guess is that one of these times he just won’t start breathing again.
At this point, I think Barbara is going to stay home and wait for a call from Hospice. There’s nothing she can do for her dad, who’s not awake let alone alert. If she does go down to Hospice it’ll be to support her mom. Right now, Sankie is at Frances’s and Al’s house. It’s Sankie’s decision whether she wants to sit over at Hospice waiting for Dutch to die, but we’re encouraging her not to. She’s 85 years old, and it’s very wearing on her. Right now, she’s terrified about what’s going to happen after Dutch dies. Sankie has never lived alone in her life. She married Dutch in 1946 right out of high school and has lived with him for 67 years. She’s terrified at the thought of living on her own.
Barbara and I sat and talked with her last night. Her dream is completely unrealistic. She wants to find a little house in a little town that has everything within walking distance. She’s thinking Ozzie & Harriet in the 50’s, with local grocery stores and butchers and green grocers and druggists a few steps from her door and a downtown main street packed with shops and small restaurants run by friendly people that she’s known for years. Barbara and I pointed out that the world isn’t like that any more, even in small towns, and hasn’t been for 50 years or more. We also pointed out that she already has the closest modern equivalent to that where she is now, at Creekside retirement village.
19:59 – Our power failed at about 3:48 p.m. yesterday when a strong windstorm popped up. It lasted all of ten minutes, but by the time it had blown through power was down all across the northwestern part of the county and some other areas as well. Our power just came back on about 7:00 this evening.
This morning, Barbara and I hauled out the generator. For some reason, the last time we used it (some years ago) I hadn’t run it dry, so there was gunky fuel in it. We siphoned out the bad gas and put in fresh gas and then tried using ether-based starting fluid to get it running. No deal. Fortunately, our neighbor Steve, who’s a master mechanic, was available. He ended up having to tear down the carburetor and clean it out, but he did get the generator running around noon. We connected just our upstairs refrigerator and the big freezer downstairs, both of which ran for several hours. I just went down and shut off the fuel to let the generator die. Tomorrow, I’ll siphon out what’s left in the tank and let it dry out completely.
10:14 – Barbara visited her dad twice yesterday, morning and afternoon. Then she came home to make dinner and we passed a relatively ordinary evening and night. Frances just called to give us an update. At the nurses suggestion, no one stayed overnight with Dutch, who’s refusing to talk to anyone. Barbara plans to head over to Hospice this afternoon to visit Dutch, although it may be pointless if he continues to refuse to talk.
Work on science kits continues. Barbara is downstairs now building 120 solids bags for chemistry kits. I’ve already built 60 of the small parts bags that are used in both chemistry kits, so the next step will be to build 30 sets of chemicals bags for each of the two chemistry kits and assemble 30 each of the final kits. With what’s already in stock, that’ll give us sufficient finished-goods inventory of both chemistry kits, the biology kit, and the life science kit.
I’m concentrating on filling bottles. Barbara had already labeled 60 sets of each for the chemistry, biology, and forensics kits, but I decided to do batches of 120+. The reservoir on our automated dispensers holds two liters. We slightly overfill bottles, which means one reservoir filling is sufficient for 120+ 15 mL bottles, usually 125 or so. So I’ve been filling the 60 labeled bottles and then filling 60+ more unlabeled bottles. That much more efficient than filling batches of 60, because it halves the time needed for setup and teardown/cleanup between batches.
We’d originally planned to introduce an AP Chemistry kit next year, but we may do it sooner than that. I was just contacted by a state department of distance education that wants us to produce kits for their students who are taking AP Chemistry at home. They actually want two types of kits, an equipment kit and a consumables kit. The state organization will purchase equipment kits, which they’ll lend to students’ families for the duration of the course, after which the families will return those kits. The families will purchase the consumables kits. The problem is, the course starts in mid-August, which doesn’t leave much time to get components ordered and in stock, build the kits, and ship them to the students. This time of year particularly, components are often back-ordered, so it’s possible we won’t be able to meet their schedule.
09:54 – Barbara’s dad is still rallying. As of this morning, he was awake, sitting up in bed, and eating breakfast. He’s also talking, but he’s not making much sense. His urine output is still nil, so I’m not sure how he’s still even conscious let alone behaving comparatively normally. Al stayed with him overnight. Frances took Sankie home with her, where they were both able to get some sleep. France dropped Sankie off at Hospice on her way to work. Barbara and I stayed home last night. Today, Barbara is working on science kit stuff while waiting for a phone call. She’s going to run down to Hospice this afternoon to check on her mom and dad, but we simply can’t sustain the 24-hour thing any more. Someone, usually Sankie during the days, will be with Dutch, but we’re no longer going to try to have several or all family members there until the final crisis hits.
And we simply have to keep up with business here. For the last week we’ve been out of the CK01B chemistry kits, which sell two or three a week. So I’ve been tearing down CK01A kits and using the subset of the components that go into the CK01B kits to build more CK01B kits on the fly. We simply can’t keep doing that, if only because I’ll run us out of stock on the CK01A kits, so we’re working today on building a new batch of 30 of the CK01B kits. Then we’ll turn around and build a new batch of 30 or 60 CK01A kits to replenish stock on them.
07:13 – Barbara’s dad took a sudden turn for the worse yesterday. When I arrived at Brian Center and got up to Dutch’s room, I first thought he was asleep. I spoke his name and he didn’t react. So I spoke it louder and he still didn’t react. He didn’t appear to be breathing, and for a moment I thought he was dead. So I spoke his name even louder, and he did finally half-open his eyes and attempt to greet me. It was obvious that he couldn’t remember who I was. So I talked to the nurse, who said he’d suddenly declined that morning, which was typical of end-stage renal failure. She asked if I wanted her to call the family, and I told her I’d take care of that.
Barbara left work to get over to Brian Center, as did Frances and Al. Barbara’s friend Marcy brought Sankie over from Creekside, and the nurse from Hospice arrived soon after. She quickly determined that Dutch was eligible for transfer to Hospice and initiated the transfer, even though Dutch had in the meantime rallied somewhat and was sitting up in bed, talking, and eating. That turned out, as expected, to be very temporary, and by the time he arrived at Hospice around 4:00 that afternoon he was again unresponsive. At this point, they’re just trying to make Dutch comfortable. The hospice folks obviously have a lot of experience with people in Dutch’s condition, and the consensus seems to be that he could die at any time, but he may last a few days or a week. It’s unlikely to be much longer than that.
13:22 – Barbara and I just got back from visiting her dad at Hospice. We got there about 8:30 and found Dutch awake and semi-aware. He was shouting that he was being tortured because he hadn’t had anything to eat since noon yesterday, which was true. Of course, he’d been unconscious for all but a tiny part of that time. Hospice had him NPO because of his condition, but Barbara and Frances told them to go ahead and give him the tray he was shouting for. He proceeded to eat his entire breakfast.
These rallies are torture for Barbara and her sister and their mom. Everyone knows they’re illusory. They don’t mean Dutch is getting better or has any hope of doing so. His urine output is down almost to nothing, and the poisons continue to accumulate in his blood. Every bite of food he eats poisons him further. Short of dialysis, which he wouldn’t survive and we wouldn’t approve anyway, he has no way of eliminating these toxins, which will kill him sooner rather than later.
I told Frances and Barbara that their dad’s situation was analogous to a flashlight with very weak batteries. You turn it on, the beam dims and eventually goes out completely. But if you turn it off, allow the batteries to rest a few minutes, and then turn it back on, the batteries will have recovered sufficiently to run the lamp, dimmer than before and not for long. Dutch’s situation is the same. He goes away in an almost coma-like unconsciousness, during which he gathers enough energy to rally. Yesterday, the rally lasted only an hour or so. Today, it lasted from about 3:00 a.m. until noon or so. I’m afraid today’s rally may have taken everything he had left.
07:49 – The morning paper reports an unusual case of hit-and-run. The driver stopped and called the police; it was the victim who ran. Apparently, the driver was proceeding south on US 52 near Akron Drive at about 1:00 Sunday morning when someone stepped out in front of his car. He was unable to stop in time or avoid the pedestrian, and his car struck the pedestrian, knocking him down. The driver didn’t have a cell phone, so he ran up to Akron Drive to find a phone, leaving the pedestrian lying by the side of the road. When the cops arrived, the pedestrian was gone. They found only one shoe, a bit of blood, and damage to the front of the driver’s car. A K9 unit tracked the victim as far as Patterson Avenue and then lost the trail. The police are checking hospitals and asking anyone with information to call them. It sounds to me as though the victim was probably carrying drugs or something else that made him anxious to avoid the police at all costs.
For the time being, Barbara’s dad is doing no better and no worse. Barbara had lunch with her mom yesterday, and said her mom wants Dutch moved to Hospice because she’s convinced he’d be happier there. Barbara explained to her that Dutch’s condition isn’t bad enough yet for Hospice to accept him, but that they will move him there when he’s ready to go there. Frankly, I’m surprised that Dutch has been able to hold on this long. I didn’t expect him to live through April, let alone May. He’s fragile but tough.
Work continues on new batches of science kits. I made up a bunch of chemical solutions for the kits yesterday, two or four liters at a time. I have thousands of labeled bottles ready to be filled, which I’ll get started on today.