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Category: Barbara

Monday, 2 December 2013

08:15 – Happy Birthday to Barbara, who turns 20:39 today.

Our D-Link DIR-615 router/WAP has started dropping the WAN connection sporadically, so I ordered a D-Link DIR-826L to replace it. I hooked it up yesterday, and it didn’t work. Didn’t work as in wouldn’t even recognize that the cable modem was providing a WAN link. So the DIR-615 is back in place until I figure out what’s going on with the new unit.

I just read a big article in the morning paper about Common Core. The article couldn’t say enough good things about Common Core and its emphasis on “critical thinking”. The real problem with Common Core, which the article failed to mention, is that many students are not capable of critical thinking. Nor are many teachers.

The fundamental problem is that the powers-that-be refuse to recognize that there are very real and very large cognitive differences between the best, the average, and the worst students, which simply reflects the population at large. Remember the old saying: One can’t teach calculus to a horse. But these cargo-cult thinkers apparently believe that any student can learn any subject, regardless of difficulty, if only they’re given the opportunity. If only that were true, but it’s not.

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Saturday, 30 November 2013

08:57 – Barbara has finished installing and decorating the Saturnalia tree, which means I’m now free to walk Colin around the neighborhood wearing the Saturnalia antlers and little red blinking Saturnalia snout cover. I just realized that that sentence is ambiguous. It’s me who wears the antlers and snout cover, not Colin.

That also means it’s time to start planning the ASG (anti-Santa gun) installation for this year. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in previous years, it’s that the old bastard is FAST. So this year I’m thinking speed-of-light weapon, maybe a 4-megawatt UV laser. The utility feeds into our neighborhood can’t provide 4 MW of electrical power, so it’ll have to be a chemically-pumped unit.

Yesterday I decided to add another SKU for the earth science kit, a 30 mL bottle of ACS reagent grade 98% sulfuric acid. We’ll use that in the labs on chemical weathering and the effects of acid rain on plant growth. I thought about using technical-grade acid, which is cheaper and would have been fine for those purposes, but using the reagent-grade stuff will allow that SKU to do double duty. One of the forensic kits includes two presumptive drug test reagents, Marquis reagent and Mandelin reagent, both of which are reagent-grade concentrated sulfuric acid with a small amount of formaldehyde or ammonium metavanadate added, respectively. Both of those reagents are reasonably stable, but they do degrade eventually. So in the past I’ve been making them up on-the-fly as I shipped the kits. So yesterday I made up new batches of Marquis and Mandelin reagent bottles that contained only the formaldehyde and ammonium metavanadate. We’ll also include a separate bottle of sulfuric acid, which will allow kit buyers to make up those reagents themselves simply by adding sulfuric acid to the appropriate bottles, thus extending the shelf life and allowing us to pre-pack those two reagents rather than adding them at ship time.

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Thursday, 28 November 2013

08:34 – One of the advantages of ordering so much stuff on-line is that I always have something handy to use for a gift. For example, I realized yesterday that I hadn’t ordered a Thanksgiving present for Barbara. No problem, though. UPS showed up with a delivery from Amazon. So Barbara ended up getting not one but two Thanksgiving presents: a D-Link wireless router and a 3.25 pound (1.5 kilo) restaurant-size box of Idahoan instant mashed potatoes. The beauty of this method is that Barbara, who likes surprises, never has any idea what she’ll get for a gift. It might just as easily have been a case of 1,500 bottles or 500 Petri dishes or 2.5 kilos of salicylic acid.

Barbara left work yesterday at 1500 and stopped on her way home to pick up the Saturnalia tree. We got it set up in the living room. She’s putting up Saturnalia decorations now, and will probably start working on the tree later today. Colin is helping.

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Sunday, 17 November 2013

14:41 – We did the usual Sunday morning stuff and then headed over to Costco to buy a flat-screen TV for Barbara’s mom. We stopped on the way home to get the TV installed and set up. Barbara’s mom seems happy with it.

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Saturday, 16 November 2013

10:48 – The phone rang at 0215 this morning. Barbara’s mom had pushed her Lifeline button to summon the EMT’s. She was having chest pains and difficulty breathing. So they hauled her down to the hospital, where they checked her over and eventually sent her home. Barbara and Frances met at the hospital and waited to find out what was going on. From what Barbara told me, it sounds like it was just a panic attack, but as the doctor told Barbara, at her mom’s age one can never be sure. Frances took their mom home, and Barbara got home about 0655. Barbara slept for a while and then headed out to do errands. She’s downstairs now, defrosting the big freezer and filling baggies with sand for the earth science kit.

I ordered Barbara’s birthday present from Amazon yesterday. She doesn’t want to know what it is. I just gave her a hint. They’ll deliver it on a large truck.

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Saturday, 2 November 2013

09:11 – Barbara had a nice, relaxing day off yesterday. She got home at 6:30, with a stromboli she’d ordered on her way back and picked up just before she got home. Al was released from the hospital yesterday. Frances called about 9:45 to say they were about to leave the hospital. I drove over to their house to meet them, and then sat with Al for a few hours while Frances ran errands and picked up groceries. Al seems to be doing fine, although he’ll be off work for the next six weeks.

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Friday, 1 November 2013

07:55 – Barbara is taking the day off work today and heading out on a day trip with her friend Bonnie. She needs the break. For the last year–the last two years, really–she’s been coping pretty much constantly with serious medical issues with her dad and mom, and now her sister’s husband. She and her sister have both essentially been on-call 24×7, so having even one day off once in a while helps. I tried to convince Barbara to turn off her cell phone today and stay completely off the grid, but she said she’d better keep it on, just in case.

We got hammered pretty badly by the Federal Follies last month. Revenues for October 2013 were only about 120% those for October 2012. I realize that most people would be delighted with 20% growth, but I’m disappointed by anything short of doubling.

09:07 – The numbers for ObamaCare signups are finally becoming public. On 1 October, the first day of sign-ups, the expected flood of sign-ups took place. ObamaCare signed up not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but SIX people. And that torrid rate has apparently continued all month. During October, HUNDREDS of people signed up for ObamaCare. The sign-ups may even have gone into FOUR FIGURES, leaving only about 99.9999% of those eligible not yet signed up. Not to worry, though. There’s still two whole months before the end of the year.

And I’m betting that nearly all of the people who’ve signed up are insurance companies’ worst nightmares, with pre-existing conditions that are hideously expensive to treat. I wonder if the health insurance companies that foolishly supported ObamaCare are finally realizing that the true purpose of ObamaCare has always been to put them out of business and force a change to a single-payer government monopoly on health insurance. If they doubt that, they need only look at the numbers: after only one month, the net effect of ObamaCare is that millions of people who used to have private health insurance now have no insurance at all.

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Sunday, 27 October 2013

09:25 – Barbara just talked to Frances. Al had emergency surgery yesterday to fix a bowel obstruction caused by a twist in his small intestine. The surgeon removed his appendix while she was at it. She got the bowel resectioned before it burst, but apparently peritonitis was imminent. Al is in ICU, but doing very well. He’s sitting up and talking, and even took a tech-support call on his cell phone from another driver who was having trouble getting the Wi-Fi working on his bus. I suspect that may be the first tech-support call ever handled by a patient in ICU. They may move Al to a regular room today. He’ll probably be in hospital for another few days and then off work for most of the rest of the year, but everyone is pleased at how well things have turned out. Barbara is going to head over to pick up her mom this afternoon and take her to visit Al.

12:56 – The FBI is investigating the police shooting of that 13-year-old boy in California. I’m at a loss to understand why. As far as I’m concerned, that boy should be a favored Darwin Awards Candidate. If I’d been the cops present, I’d have shot him, too. I’d have shot him a whole bunch of times. I’d have kept shooting him until I was sure the threat had been eliminated. Carrying around a pellet gun that looks very much like an AK-47 is going to draw attention. Ignoring the police when they ordered him to drop the weapon, instead turning towards them and raising the barrel, goes beyond stupid.

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Saturday, 26 October 2013

09:59 – Barbara met her mom and sister for dinner after work yesterday. She’d talked about stopping at her mom’s apartment after dinner to do a re-scan of the TV channels, so when she called I thought maybe she needed some help getting that done. As it turned out, that wasn’t the problem.

Barbara’s sister’s husband, Al, drives tour/charter buses. He’d been having some GI problems for the last couple of weeks, and apparently things came to a head around dinner time yesterday. He was returning from a charter trip with a bunch of kids, when the GI problem really acted up. He got as far as Statesville, about 45 minutes west of Winston-Salem on I-40, when he decided it wasn’t safe to try to drive any further. So he pulled over. There was a second bus with the charter. The other driver called 911, and the EMT’s showed up. They transported Al to the Iredell County Hospital in Statesville. The other driver stayed with his own bus and Al’s to await a replacement driver. They notified Frances. Barbara didn’t want her driving to Statesville herself, so Barbara drove her there.

The doctors at Iredell consulted with Al’s doctor here in Winston-Salem, and they decided to transport him here to Forsyth Memorial Hospital to determine whether surgery was necessary. Barbara brought Frances back to Winston-Salem and they waited at the hospital until the doctors told them what was going on. Barbara then took Frances over to pick up her car. Frances went back to the hospital and Barbara arrived home about 0230. As it turns out, Al will need surgery, so Barbara just headed back to pick up their mom and go to the hospital. Poor Colin can’t figure out what’s going on.

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