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Month: June 2013

Sunday, 9 June 2013

09:13 – Barbara is cleaning house and ironing this morning before she heads over to have lunch with her mom.

Amongst everything else keeping us busy, we’re still working hard to build more science kits. Fortunately, Barbara has a sense of humor about the business taking over the house. The basement–both the finished and garage areas–is full of boxes, as is the living room, my work room, and part of the den. And I just keep ordering stuff. Yesterday, I ordered a case of 500 Petri dishes.

Speaking of which, we’re constantly working to improve the kits, both from the customer’s point of view and to make it faster and more efficient for us to build them. Our first batches of biology kits included a sleeve of 10 disposable polystyrene 90mm Petri dishes. From our point of view, the downside to those was that they took up a lot of cubic in the kit boxes. From the customers’ point of view, the downsides were that, first, although the disposable Petri dishes were conveniently pre-sterilized, they are one-use, so once they’re used you have to buy more. Second, the dishes weren’t individually wrapped but supplied in one sterile plastic sleeve, so it was very easy to contaminate the whole sleeve if you weren’t very careful.

So we switched to providing a three-pack of 75mm glass Petri dishes. The upside from the customers’ point of view is that glass dishes can be washed and sterilized, allow them to be reused indefinitely. The downside is that they’re fragile and easily broken. The downside for us is that a pretty high percentage of the dishes arrive here broken. Our wholesaler credits us for breakage, of course, but it’s still a pain in the butt to deal with all that broken glass. Also, it’s time-consuming to bubble-wrap the dishes into three packs to make sure they survive shipment to the customer.

So, although we’ll continue using those 75mm glass Petri dishes until we run out of them, I decided yesterday to switch back to plastic Petri dishes. However, rather than use the polystyrene (non-autoclavable) dishes, we’re going to start providing a six-pack of 50mm polypropylene Petri dishes with the biology kits. Polypropylene is autoclavable, so the PP dishes can be washed, sterilized, and re-used repeatedly, and we’ll no longer have to deal with the breakage issue.

12:15 – It’s still spring, but the heat is starting to get nasty. It’s 86F (30C) out there right now, and the humidity must be 70% or more. It’s bearable in the shade, but of course Colin wants to walk where he wants to walk, and that’s often in the sun. I half-seriously thought about wearing shorts, which I haven’t done more than a couple of times in the 30 years Barbara and I have been married. But I do have a pair or two of tennis shorts in one of my drawers. (Yes, despite the fact that I’m a guy, I actually do have more than one drawer.)

I’m not sure where the tennis shorts came from. I think Barbara must have bought them for me before she realized that I never wear shorts. I never wore them even when I was playing long serve-and-volley tennis matches in high summer. Mainly because I fell down a lot, usually lunging for volleys. If you’re wearing shorts, that’s bad on grass, worse on clay, and horrible on hard courts.

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Saturday, 8 June 2013

10:50 – Frances is visiting Dutch today, so Barbara and I are taking the day off to build science kits. She’s out in the den now, watching Private Practice on Netflix streaming while she tapes up bundles of wood splints. When I ordered 10 boxes of 500 splints, I figured that’d last us a long time. Now, as it turns out, it may not last out this year.

Among other things, we’re putting together 57 small parts bags for the chemistry kits. We’d planned to do 60, but as it turns out we had only 57 9V batteries in stock. So I need to order a few hundred more of those. And some more wood splints.

Last year at this time, I noticed while working in the unfinished area of the basement how humid it was down there. I thought about buying a dehumidifier then, but never got around to it. Barbara is running some errands this afternoon, so she’s going to stop at Lowes or Home Depot and pick one up. It’s comfortably cool down there, but the humidity must be up around 80% or 90%.

14:24 – The most recent NEO missed us, as we knew it would. Still, this one, an object somewhere between the sizes of a garbage truck and a large house, passed closer than the moon’s orbit. If you consider that earth’s diameter is about 8,000 miles and the moon’s orbital diameter is about 480,000 miles, then if the moon’s orbit is the outer ring and earth the bulls-eye, that makes the diameter of the bulls-eye about 1.67% that of the entire target and the area something like 0.03%. Considering the object to be a point, that means that if you know only that a large object is going to pass inside the moon’s orbit, there’s still only a tiny probability that it will strike earth, something like 3 in 10,000. Still, given the disturbing frequency of these NEOs, we should be doing a lot more to track them and to devise and implement planetary defenses. As things stand, an object large enough to wipe out civilization may not be detected until a few weeks before impact, too late to do anything but have the party to end all parties, literally.

The farther out an object can be detected, the less force must be applied to it to make it miss the planet. All that needs to be done is to change the velocity–speed, direction, or both–slightly to cause the object to miss. How the velocity changes–faster, slower, up/down, left/right–doesn’t matter. Any change is effective, as long as it’s great enough that the orbit of the object no longer intersects our own orbit when we’re at the same point the object would otherwise have been. A high-power laser impinging on such an object may alter its velocity (orbit) in one or both of two ways. First, if the object is distant enough and the laser is powerful enough, light pressure alone can be sufficient. That works even on metallic objects that don’t ablate significantly. Second, on objects that contain frozen gases, the impinging laser causes outgassing, thereby altering the orbit.

I don’t see how anyone can dispute that it’s long past time that we had some serious space-based planetary-defense assets up there, including an array of nuclear-powered beam weapons. The US government currently wastes trillions of dollars on programs that are simply money down a rathole. It’s time they started investing in real infrastructure, before a planet-killer shows up. We should fund it ourselves if we must, but we should also encourage the rest of the first world to participate, both in funding it and in developing and deploying these planetary assets.

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Friday, 7 June 2013

07:36 – Barbara’s dad isn’t doing well, physically or mentally. For several days, he was back to his old self, but for the last couple of days he’s been declining fast. He’s angry, frustrated, and confused, all of which is understandable. Unfortunately, he takes it out on Barbara and Frances, which can make it pretty unpleasant for them to visit Dutch.

Yesterday, he said, “Barbara is doing everything for me”, which I first thought meant he appreciated what Barbara was doing. Far from it, as soon became clear. He was upset that he could no longer make decisions or do anything for himself and that Barbara (and Frances) were now making decisions for him and doing things on his behalf, including the sale of their old house. I explained to him that someone had to do these things for him because he sure couldn’t drive down to the closing at the attorney’s office, and that he was very lucky to have two daughters to take care of things that he couldn’t. But obviously it’s very difficult for Dutch, who’s used to making his own decisions and doing things for himself.

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Thursday, 6 June 2013

07:23 – Happy Birthday to me. Today I turn the big Six-Oh.

Barbara’s dad still isn’t doing very well. I’ll stop over to visit him sometime today, and talk to the staff to see if I can find out exactly what’s going on. It may be a treatable infection, but we’re worried that it’s renal failure that’s causing or at least contributing to the problems. If it does turn critical, Barbara and the rest of Dutch’s family have instructed Brian Center that they don’t want him transported to the hospital. Brian Center is to contact Hospice. If Hospice has a room available, they’ll transport him there. If there’s no room available, Hospice personnel will care for Dutch at Brian Center until and if a room becomes available.

09:36 – I’m filling four liters worth of 30 mL iodine solution bottles, which reminded me that it’s time to get more iodine. So I just ordered 250 g of ACS iodine on eBay. I don’t have an account there, so I bought it as a guest. When I was filling out the address information, I entered our city as “Winston Salem” rather than “Winston-Salem” because the hyphen gives a lot of ecommerce systems fits. The page refreshed and told me to enter a correct city name. So I entered “Winston-Salem”, which it accepted. Geez. So then I get to the page where I provide my credit card information. The address was already filled in with “Winston-Salem”. When I clicked on Continue, the page refreshed and told me to enter a correct city name. So I deleted the hyphen to make it “Winston Salem”, which it accepted. Double geez.

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Wednesday, 5 June 2013

08:30 – Dutch isn’t doing as well as he had been. Frances stopped over to see him on her way to work yesterday morning and said he was acting exhausted and a little confused. It was the same when I visited him around lunchtime, and when Barbara visited around dinnertime. Barbara talked to the nurse, who said his blood pressure was low, his temperature was slightly elevated at 99.8F (37.7C), his pulse ox was down to 77%, which is low enough to cause confusion in someone Dutch’s age and condition, and he’s coughing and nauseated. He’s not refusing food entirely, but he is eating much less.

I suspect pneumonia from aspiration or possibly another UTI. Dutch is still on metronidazole for the C. diff infection, but it’s very possible that whatever has infected him now, if something has, is resistant to metronidazole. Barbara and the rest of us are of course worried that this may be it. Dutch is under a DNR, but they will treat him for infections, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

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Tuesday, 4 June 2013

07:58 – The lead article on the front page of the paper this morning is disturbing on at least two levels. A 53-year-old man has been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of a 32-year-old pregnant woman and her young son in a boat wreck that happened a couple weeks ago.

The man who was charged was driving a speedboat that collided with a pontoon boat on a local lake. There were four people in each of the boats. No one in the speedboat was injured. The woman and her son in the pontoon boat were killed. Her brother sustained severe brain injuries, and her husband was uninjured. Alcohol was not involved, nor was excessive speed. It was what we used to call an “accident”. There were many witnesses to this unfortunate accident. No one was at fault. No one did anything wrong. There was no gross negligence nor reckless disregard. But nowadays, it seems, someone must be at fault any time something bad happens. So they charged the guy driving the speedboat with involuntary manslaughter.

Oh, yeah. The other disturbing part. They charged the guy not with two counts of involuntary manslaughter, but three. The third count was for the woman’s unborn child.

Barbara’s dad continues to do well. His condition is still terminal, but he appears to be holding his own for now, and he continues to act like his old self. When I visited yesterday, I read him the letter that we enclosed with the first CARE package we sent to the Marine unit in Afghanistan. He was delighted that we were going to continue sending packages in his name. I commented that I guessed they didn’t have girl Marines back when he was in, and he replied, “Oh, no. We had ’em.” He then proceeded to tell me some of the nicknames they called the girl Marines back then, but I think I’ll leave those to my readers’ imaginations.

I told Dutch what my dad had told me about women flying four-engine bombers in WWII. My dad flew on B-17’s over Germany, and he’d told me that those huge bombers didn’t have power steering. When the pilot needed to move the ailerons or rudder, he did it by sheer muscle power via cables connected to the controls on his end and the rudder and ailerons on the other. Flying a B-17 was a matter of literally physically wrestling with the controls, and it took a strong young man to do it for any sustained time. And yet, as new B-17’s were produced in factories here, someone needed to fly them to the UK. They couldn’t spare men pilots to do that, so they loaded those B-17’s up with gasoline and turned them over to women pilots, who flew them across the Atlantic to the UK. Those young women must have been in superb physical condition, as tough as any man. I suspect those girl Marines Dutch referred to were much the same.

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Monday, 3 June 2013

09:14 – We did a Costco run and dinner with Mary and Paul yesterday. With Mary’s and Barbara’s advice, I picked up some stuff to ship off to the Marine unit in Afghanistan. I’m very glad they were there. For example, one of the items the troops requested was wipes. So, as I was picking up a bottle of Chlorox2 bleach for us, I happened to notice a large box of Lysol disinfectant wipes. I picked it up, and Barbara intercepted me. Although she phrased it more politely, the message was basically, “No, you moron, they want BABY WIPES!” Me: “There’s a difference?” So she led me to the next aisle, where I picked up a case of 900 baby wipes.

As it turned out, Paul and Mary were already quite experienced with sending CARE packages to the troops. Mary’s cousin was over in the Middle East, and they’ve been frequently sending packages to him, so they’re intimately familiar with stuff like filling out customs forms, which items can’t be sent and so forth.

So now I have to figure out which items and how many of each will fit in each USPS Priority Mail Regional Rate Box B. That offers by far the best bang for the buck. It costs only $8.47 to mail to an APO AE address, versus $13.30 for the slightly larger PM Large Flat-Rate Box. The one downside of the RRBB is that it’s limited to 20 pounds, versus 70 pounds for the LFRB, so I may end up using an LFRB if I’m shipping a lot of heavy stuff like canned goods.

The one universal piece of advice is to seal the items in ziplock bags, ideally two bags per item. I’m going to use just one freezer-weight bag per item, because they’re pretty impermeable to odors and such, but I’ll use my heat sealer to run a seam between the ziplock and the edge of the bag. That way, they can cut off the heat-sealed part and rezip the bag if they need to. Anything to keep sand out. I’ll use the sink method to exhaust air from the bags: fill the bag, zip it most of the way closed, and then lower the bag into a sink full of water to press the air out.

09:14 – I just shipped off the first box to the Marines in Afghanistan. I managed to get nine 7-ounce cans of tuna, three Kraft mac & cheese dinners, and two 100-packs of baby wipes into the box, which is all the cubic would allow. Other than the tuna, I bagged and heat sealed everything. As I told Barbara, it costs so little to do that we cab send packages frequently without even noticing the cost. Even counting the $8.47 postage, I don’t think the entire box cost us more than $25 or so.

You wouldn’t know that from the customs declaration, though. I entered the description as “Tuna, 7-ounce cans”, the quantity as “9”, and the value as $10.50. It wasn’t until I’d already printed the label and stuck it on the box that I noticed the 2976A customs form listed 9 cans of tuna with a total value of $94.50 rather than $10.50. Oh, well.

If I’d mailed the items in a regular box the same size as the RRBB, postage for the 12-pound-2-ounce box would have been $18.83 rather than $8.47 with the RRBB. But that gave me a cunning idea. Unless I filled it entirely with canned goods, it’d be difficult or impossible to hit the 20-pound weight limit on that box. But I can send 12+ pounds via Priority Mail for $18 or $19 even in a box, presumably within reason. Cubic is really limiting on the RR Box B, so I think we’ll start using those only for dense shipments. For less dense items–tampons, facial tissues, and so on–I’ll start using a larger box.

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Sunday, 2 June 2013

08:13 – Barbara spent some time labeling bottles for me yesterday, and will do more labeling today. As of this morning, I have 2,288 labeled bottles that need to be filled, which, with what’s already on hand, is most of what’s needed for the next batch of 60 chemistry kits and 30 forensics kits. While she was doing that, I was making up solutions: 4 L of iodine solution, 4 L of copper(II) sulfate solution, and so on.

We’re in reasonably good shape in terms of finished-goods inventory for the moment: 41 biology kits, 25 chemistry kits, 20 life science kits, and half a dozen forensics kits. With the exception of the forensics kits, that should be sufficient to take us through June, or nearly so. With the batches already in progress and those we’ll start and finish later this month, I’m hoping we’ll be able to start July with about 90 each of the biology and chemistry kits and 30 each of the others on hand. With a few exceptions, all of which are readily available from multiple sources, we have enough component inventory on hand to build another 700+ kits. Our original goal for 2013 was to double 2012 sales, but through the end of May our actual sales have been quadruple 2012’s. If that holds up, we’ll sell about 1,000 kits this year rather than the 500 we’d planned on.

Barbara visited her dad yesterday and took lunch to him. She said he’s still doing extremely well. With his congestive heart failure and renal failure, there’s no hope of recovery, but Dutch’s personality is back to what it used to be. Barbara is taking the day off from visiting. Frances and Al are taking Sankie over to visit today.

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Saturday, 1 June 2013

09:54 – There’s been some discussion over the last couple of days about sending CARE packages to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Someone posted a link to a very useful web site, http://www.anysoldier.com. Among other things, that site has a frequently-updated list of Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine, and Coastguard personnel who serve as contacts for their units. Each has a page on the site that lists information about them and their units, and what kind of stuff they need.

Sending packages to the troops is one of those things that everyone knows is a Good Thing, but it’s one of those get-a-round-tuit things. As I was sitting there looking at one Marine’s page, I got to thinking. We make a Costco run every month or so, and I send out Priority Mail packages every day. So it’d be no big deal to “adopt” a unit, pick up some stuff for them every time we make a Costco run, box it up, and send it off. And if we make that a regular thing, the round tuit problem goes away.

So I picked out a unit, which’ll be in Afghanistan through December. There are 15 people in the unit, all women, and the unit is based in North Carolina. They maintain and fly attack choppers. On our next Costco run, we’ll pick up some of the stuff they’ve requested and ship it off. Being girls, Barbara and Mary will be good advisors as to what to send. Also, having run around the world with Blue Planet Run a few years ago, Mary knows from experience what kind of stuff women are likely to want when they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere.

One note. In the comments the other day, Lynn mentioned sending homemade cookies to his son while he was deployed in the Mideast. That’s fine if you’re sending stuff to a friend or family member, but otherwise the rule is only commercially packaged items. It’s sad but true that our troops are told to discard homemade food because it’s simply not safe to eat homemade food from an unknown source.

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