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Category: Barbara

Saturday, 3 May 2014

09:12 – Barbara is off to finish cleaning out her mom’s apartment. We hope she’ll be able to finish today and have done with it. She and Frances have already given away their mom’s clothes and most of the furniture, so what remains is mostly small items.

We’re now in good shape on bottles and caps, but I just realized that I somehow got out of sync on the two. Our vendor sells bottles by the case, but the number of bottles per case varies from 160 to 1,500, depending on the size and type of bottle. The caps, on the other hand, are always sold ten gross per case. As it turns out, I now have many more 15 mL plastic bottles than I have caps for them, so I need to place another order for a case of those bottles and two cases of caps. That’ll bring our total inventory of those bottles and their caps into close agreement.

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Tuesday, 22 April 2014

09:41 – Sankie’s funeral is Thursday. I’ve arranged with the neighbors to walk Colin while we’re gone and keep an eye on our house. Barbara is heading over to her mom’s apartment this morning to meet Frances and get the place ready to meet people after the funeral.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the Opera workaround for getting labels printed on the USPS website was not the permanent fix I’d hoped it was. I had kits to ship yesterday, so I fired up Opera and entered the data for the labels. When I attempted to pay for them, I got the old “payment method denied” message. So I fired up Chrome or Firefox, I forget which, and clicked on the link to pay for the labels in my cart. This time it worked, and I was able to pay for some of the labels, get them printed, and get the kits shipped. Not all of the kits, though. The USPS web site choked on the foreign shipments, so I have two kits going to Canada that are still sitting in the cart.

So I tried using PayPal shipping for the Canadian kits. No dice. It appeared to work normally. It let me pay from my PayPal balance. But PayPal uses Pitney-Bowes, which doesn’t produce a downloadable PDF label. Instead it runs a script that is supposed to send the label to your printer, but doesn’t allow you to save a copy of the label. Long story short, I could not get the label to either printer no matter what I tried. Bastards.

I decided to give up trying to make this work. I checked the Costco site for Windows notebook systems. Barbara is going to pick one up for me while she’s out today. Assuming that solves the USPS label problem, I will dedicate that system to printing labels.

13:19 – Barbara called from Costco to say they had literally no Dell laptops. Apparently, they’re in the midst of a model-year changeover. They did have a few Toshiba and HP laptops, but I told her I wasn’t interested in any of those and that I’d just order on-line.

I checked Amazon, which of course had slews of laptops, but everything they had in Dell models was more expensive than Costco. And Amazon doesn’t have the doubled warranty or the easy return. I ordered a model that was a couple steps up from the bottom model Costco carried. It has an Intel Core i3 rather than a Celeron. Only a 500 GB 5400 RPM hard drive and 4 GB of RAM, but that’s fine for what I want it for. No touch screen, which I explicitly didn’t want. The total, with $30 shipping and sales tax, was just over $400. Not bad.

It comes with Windows 8.1. If there’s an option at first boot to choose Win 7, I’ll do that. Otherwise, I’ll probably install the shell program that several readers have recommended.

Oh, and a guy just showed up at the front door with flowers for Barbara. I called to see how her day was going, and mentioned the flowers. I also made it very clear that they’re not from me. (Barbara has told me in the past that if I ever buy her flowers she’ll know I’ve been up to no good…) She claims that she doesn’t think I’m funny (although just about every other woman I know does think I’m funny…) but she did laugh at that.

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Monday, 21 April 2014

09:00 – Barbara’s mom died last night at her apartment. We knew that Sankie couldn’t last much longer, but we were still surprised at how quickly it happened. Although her sudden death was a shock to everyone, particularly Barbara and Frances, it was actually a good thing. The Hospice nurse had started her Saturday night on morphine for severe pain, so at least she didn’t linger on in pain for days or weeks.

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Sunday, 20 April 2014

08:24 – Barbara got a phone call around 9:00 last night from Pam, her mom’s caregiver. Pam reported that Sankie was doing very badly, and apparently in pain. Barbara told her to call Hospice, who would send someone out to see Sankie and determine if she needed to be moved to the Hospice facility. We haven’t heard back from Hospice, so apparently the visiting nurse was able to administer pain medication and get Sankie stabilized. Barbara didn’t sleep very well last night, anticipating a call that didn’t come. With Sankie not eating and no longer able to speak, I suspect it’s not going to be much longer.

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Saturday, 19 April 2014

09:59 – Barbara and Frances met the Hospice nurse at 5:30 yesterday at Sankie’s apartment. The nurse determined that Sankie isn’t ready to be moved to Hospice yet, but she’s now officially under Hospice care. That means no more trips to the doctor, and if there’s a crisis they’ll call Hospice instead of 911. If Sankie continues to get worse, they’ll eventually move her directly to Hospice. There’s no telling how long that might be. It could be weeks or it could be days. I suspect days is more likely than weeks. So, for now, we’re all in waiting mode.

It’s a cold, breezy, wet day. Barbara has yard work she wants to do, but that’ll have to wait for tomorrow. She’s out running errands at the moment. When she returns, she’ll get started on labeling 90 more sets of bottles for chemistry kits while she watches some of the series she likes on Netflix streaming.

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Monday, 14 April 2014

12:12 – The taxes are complete and in the mail, so I don’t have to bother about them for another year. Well, except for the big estimated tax checks I have to write every quarter. Everything would be so much better if government at all levels operated like a charity, and had to depend on purely voluntary contributions. And those contributions should be earmarkable, so that I could, for example, allocate X percent of my check to the fire department, Y amount to garbage collection, Z amount to the libraries, and so on. Of course, I could instead decide to support free-market alternatives to any or all of those, as could anyone else.

Barbara and Frances took their mom to a doctor appointment this morning. The doctor specifically asked that both of them be present. As expected, the news isn’t good. They did a DNR for Sankie. Barbara and Frances intend to keep Sankie at the Creekside independent-living facility as long as possible, paying for a caregiver to be present around the clock. The doctor is contacting Hospice to arrange for their palliative care folks to visit Sankie at home to keep her comfortable. At this point, there’s nothing anyone can do to fix Sankie’s problems. Barbara and Frances will move Sankie to Hospice when the time comes. As Barbara said, that could be 6 months, 6 weeks, 6 days, or 6 hours. No one knows, although I’d be very surprised if it’s as long as six months.

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Saturday, 12 April 2014

11:00 – Barbara is off to the supermarket and I’m doing laundry. Before we could do that we had to unpack and check in a shipment from one of our vendors in order to clear a path to the washer/dryer and Barbara’s car. This shipment takes us back up to comfortable inventory levels on a lot of components: 200 more boxes of flat microscope slides, 45 dozen 6″ rulers, 30 dozen 100 mL graduated cylinders, 40 dozen test tube brushes, and similar numbers of several other items.

Barbara took her mom out to dinner last night. She said Sankie is doing a bit better. Not a lot, but at least not any worse.

13:36 – You know those stories (many confirmed) about light bulbs that have been burning steadily for 100 years or more? Well, I have a similar situation with one of my calculators. I’ve printed the state and federal tax forms, but before I send them off I always double/triple-check my math. For this final check, I’m using my HP-12C calculator, which I bought in 1983 when I started on my MBA from Wake Forest University’s Babcock School. I used it very heavily then and for some time thereafter, although in recent years it’s mostly sat in a desk drawer. But the odd thing is that the batteries I installed when I bought it 30 years ago are still in there, and still working fine. The original and only set.

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Tuesday, 8 April 2014

09:49 – Spring seems finally to have arrived in Winston-Salem. All the plants are in bloom or in bud, and everything is covered with pollen. Highs for the next week are in the mid-60’s to low 70’s (19 to 21 C), with lows in the 40’s and 50’s (7 to 12 C). No rain in the forecast.

I’m still working on taxes. It’s not that they take so long to finish. I could probably complete them in one long day working straight through. But I can deal with this crap for only a couple hours at a time.

Barbara’s mom is not doing at all well, either physically or mentally. She and Frances have decided to keep Sankie in her apartment at the independent-living facility as long as the facility is willing to allow her to stay there. They’re paying for a caregiver to be with Sankie 24X7. That costs more than moving her to an assisted-living/nursing facility, but Barbara and Frances believe that Sankie can’t survive on her own in a room. Her dementia is getting worse, and she’s terrified at night. Physically, she’s in very bad shape and getting worse. She needs someone with her at all times.

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Wednesday, 2 April 2014

07:55 – Barbara is taking the day off work today to make a day trip up to Virginia with her friend Bonnie Richardson. As usual, I tried to convince her to take Colin along. As usual, she deemed that suggestion unworthy of a reply.

I did a phone interview yesterday with Lauren Wolf of Chemical & Engineering News about the S.P.A.R.K. Competition, mostly about the disappearance of real chemistry sets since the 60’s and what S.P.A.R.K. might do to improve the situation. She asked if I knew of any scientists who got their start with a chemistry set, and I told her that she’d be hard-pressed to find any scientist of my generation who hadn’t gotten started in science with a chemistry set. Lauren’s Ph.D. is in physical/bioanalytical chemistry, so I asked her if she’d had a chemistry set as a kid. She hadn’t, but she said she had spent some time in her grandmother’s basement mixing detergents and other chemicals she found there. Of course she hadn’t had a chemistry set. Lauren is young enough to be my daughter, and by the time she should have gotten her first chemistry set, such things no longer existed. More’s the pity.

10:11 – Kit sales still “feel” slow subjectively, but I just checked the figures. In Q1 of this year, our revenues were about 10 times those of 2012Q1 and 1.8 times those of 2013Q1. If that trajectory holds, we’re going to sell a lot of kits this year.

I’ve boosted our batch sizes accordingly. Originally, we made up and bottled chemicals for batches of 15 forensic kits and 30 each biology and chemistry kits. As of now, we’re making up and bottling chemicals for batches of 60 forensic kits and 120 each biology and chemistry kits. The larger runs use our time more efficiently. Which reminds me that I need to get the last half dozen or so solutions made up that we need for another batch of biology kits. And I need to get started on the taxes.

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Saturday, 15 March 2014

13:36 – We just returned from a Costco run, this time without Mary and Paul. We picked up a couple more cases of Costco brand bottled water. I was surprised to see the price had gone up from $3.09/case to $3.59/case. Then I realized that the cases had gone from 35 500-mL bottles to 40 500-mL bottles, so although the price had gone up it wasn’t by much.

Barbara is out in the yard cleaning up fallen branches and planting some new plants. She’s going out to dinner this evening with a friend, followed by a concert. I think I’ll watch Heartland re-runs.

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