08:45 – I just got back from dropping off Barbara and her friend Marcy at the tour bus stop. They return next Saturday, so it’ll be wild-women-and-parties until then. Either that or the Heartland marathon. I just checked, and on this iteration I’m through series 3 episode 5, which means at 6 or 7 episodes per evening I can make it partway through series 5 before Barbara returns.
08:06 – Friday the 13th falls on a Friday this month.
Colin and I are preparing ourselves for Barbara’s departure tomorrow morning. She’s stopping at the supermarket on her way home from work to stock up on stuff she knows I’ll eat while she’s gone. Nothing that requires much preparation, because she knows I won’t bother if there’s much work involved. Speaking of which, I just realized something recently. Barbara sometimes buys those 10-ounce bags of small doughnuts. They’re labeled “Snack Size”. Until very recently, I honestly thought that referred to the bag as a whole, rather than to the small doughnuts inside. I finally looked at the nutrition panel, which I expected to say “Serving Size – 1 bag”. Instead, it said something like “Serving Size – 4 doughnuts”.
We’re back in pretty good shape on chemistry kits, so today I start filling bottles for biology kits.
09:32 – Kit sales continue to be strong. We shipped six kits yesterday, including our first ever to Switzerland. We’re getting perilously low on all types of kits, but the chemistry kits are the top priority. I’ll build another batch of two dozen of the regulated chemical bags for the chemistry kits today and then assemble a batch of kits. Over the weekend, I’ll work on another batch of two or three dozen biology kits.
Barbara leaves Saturday with one of her friends for a week-long bus tour, so Colin and I will be on our own. I considered doing the wild-women-and-parties thing, but I decided instead to have a Heartland marathon while she’s gone. Six nights at six episodes per night will get me through two full 18-episode seasons.
15:40 – I’ve been watching the growing literacy divide for the 25+ years that I’ve been on-line, and it’s becoming stunningly apparent that the US is no longer a nation in which basic literacy can be assumed. I’m shielded from this, at least to some extent. I correspond mostly with smart, well-educated people, and most of the blogs I follow are written by very bright people as well. Homeschoolers–students and parents–are generally well-educated and fully literate.
It’s when I dip my toe in the waters of general blogs that the low standard of general literacy nowadays becomes apparent. I have no doubt that the appalling decline in public schools over the last three or four decades has caused this. There are now 30-, 40-, and even 50-year-old people walking around who never learned basic grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I suspect that many of them cannot read at even what used to be considered an elementary-school level. Certainly, many of them cannot write above that level. And I don’t see anything on the horizon that will stop this growing catastrophe.
As just one example, I was reading an article yesterday about the Common Core. One of the criticisms leveled against it was that the standardized tests had changed some of the wording in test questions. The example they gave was that the earlier version of the question referred to the “main idea” while the updated question referred to the “central idea”. Apparently, many students’ vocabularies are inadequate to allow them to understand that the rephrased question is the same as the original question.
07:31 – Yet more evidence, as if any more was needed, that really smart people sometimes do incredibly stupid things. Dr. Robert Ferrante, a University of Pittsburgh medical researcher, is accused of murdering his wife, neurologist Dr. Autumn Klein, by poisoning her with cyanide.
I mean, come on. Conventional wisdom has it that physicians make the most dangerous murderers. (I’d put them fourth, behind toxicologists, biologists, and organic chemists/biochemists.) But the point is that any of those people should be able to figure out how to murder someone without being caught. Dr. Ferrrante moronically decided to use cyanide, which is trivially easy to detect both from the symptoms exhibited by the victim and in the body after death. To top it all off, having decided to use cyanide, rather than synthesizing it himself–which is trivially easy even without access to a lab–he actually ordered 250 grams of the stuff on his university credit card, the only item he ordered that had no place in his research activities.
Barbara is off on a day trip with her friend Bonnie Richardson. She’s been working very hard lately and needs a break. I’ll be working on science kits, as usual.
11:37 – I just got email from AmEx saying that they believed an unauthorized charge had been made on my card. Indeed it was unauthorized, which I told the lady on the phone. She’s canceled the current card and issued me a new one, which is supposed to arrive Monday. This is getting annoying. It seems to happen about once a year, although my record was only two or three months between new cards. Each time, it takes an hour or so of my time to get the new card issued and update sites like Amazon, Netflix, PhonePower, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, and the many others with whom I have recurring transactions set up. They really need to bring back the death penalty for scammers.
12:48 – Has technology ruined handwriting?
Who cares? Teaching schoolchildren to write cursive is a waste of time. Other than my signature, I haven’t used cursive in more than 40 years, and I’ve barely used it in 50. Like everyone else at the time, I was required to learn cursive in elementary school, but I used it only when forced. Otherwise, I printed, which I could do faster and more legibly. In junior high-school, we had one required course each year in a “practical” subject. Girls took home economics and the like; boys took mechanical drawing, wood shop, and so on. Mechanical drawing emphasized neatness and, yes, printing. I don’t think I ever used cursive after that other than for those few teachers who required reports be done in cursive. Then in 10th grade I started computer programming, and that really put a nail in cursive. Well, that and the fact that I also took a typing course in 10th grade, taught by Brenda Spanish, who was an extremely attractive young woman but, alas, married to Dan Spanish, our ex-DI gym teacher.
So, I just checked. For the first time in at least 40 years, I just wrote a sentence in cursive. (Now is the time for all good men…) Not surprisingly, it was relatively neat and quite readable, if I do say so myself. Even after 40 years, muscle memory abides. I wonder if that means I could still hit the cover off a tennis ball. I also tried writing cursively left-handed, which made an unreadable mess; interestingly, I can print left-handed, albeit not as neatly as I can right-handed, but I can’t write cursively at all.
Again, I wonder why anyone cares about the decline and eventual death of cursive. Teach elementary school kids to print and to use a keyboard. Spend a little bit of time teaching them to make a reproducible cursive signature. That’s all they need.
I’ll admit that at one point I wondered whether cursive might be useful in teaching young children fine muscle control, but we now have many people in their 30’s and 40’s who never learned cursive. If they lack fine muscle control, that’s not evident from any data I’ve seen.
10:43 – We’ve had rain or a high likelihood of rain nearly every day for more than a month. Our total for June was over 11 inches (28 cm), which is three times normal. Even on days that there’s no measurable rainfall, the dew has been so heavy that the grass often doesn’t dry out until afternoon. There was a slight sprinkle this morning, but the sun is out now, so Barbara is grabbing the opportunity to get some yard work done. I’m doing laundry and my other typical Saturday chores, as well as continuing work on internationalizing the biology and chemistry kits.
I’ve already made up most of the substitute chemicals. All that remain are the 9.99% acetic acid, the 9.99% ammonia, and the 0.99% hydrochloric acid. There’s no danger of confusing either of the two acids with the more concentrated versions used in the US kits. The 6M acetic acid in the US kits is more than three times as concentrated as the 10% version for the international kits. The 6 M acetic acid has fumes that’ll knock your socks off; the 10% acetic acid smells like strong vinegar. The fumes from the 6 M hydrochloric acid in the US kits really strong; the fumes from the 1% hydrochloric acid are almost unnoticeable. The ammonia solutions do present a risk of confusion, because the 10% ammonia for the international kits is only slightly less concentrated than the 6 M ammonia used in the US kits. It’s impossible to discriminate the two by appearance or odor; both are water clear and have strong fumes. So I’m going to add a tiny amount of blue dye to the 10% ammonia for the international kits, just enough to make the solution noticeably bluish. Or I may do it the other way. Yeah, actually that makes more sense. The higher concentration has something more than the lower.
Thanks to everyone who commented or sent me email about international shipping with DHL, FedEx, or UPS. I ruled out all of those long ago. If the postal service can’t get it somewhere, I just won’t sell kits there. A year or so ago, when we first started shipping kits to Canada, I checked into using DHL, FedEx, or UPS. I called the 800 numbers for each of them and asked what should have been a simple question: “I have a box with the following dimensions and mass that contains the following items. How much will you charge me to ship it to a specific Canadian address?” None of the three could give me a specific dollar amount. There were so many potential added fees, many of which were variable and applied only under certain circumstances, that I couldn’t get even a ballpark number for what it would cost me to ship. For example, one of them (UPS I think) charges according to the distance that the recipient is from the local UPS office. Beyond x miles, a surcharge applies; beyond 2x miles, a higher surcharge applies. Another surcharge applies to residential versus business addresses, and a redelivery charge applies if the driver isn’t able to deliver the package on the first attempt. There were something like (and I am not making this up) 80 different types of surcharges. The customer service rep actually had the nerve to suggest that I open an account with them. She said that my account would be billed for the nominal charge until the package was delivered, after which my account might be billed additional surcharges retroactively. Jesus. Who could run a business that way? “Hire me to provide a service. After I’ve provided it, I’ll tell you how much you owe me.” So, yeah, I’m sticking with USPS Priority Mail for US shipments and USPS Priority Mail International for foreign shipments.
08:40 – It’s been a week since Barbara’s dad died, and things are gradually returning to some semblance of normal. Barbara went out to dinner with a couple of her friends from the library last night. Colin and I stayed home and watched Heartland re-runs.
I got another kit order from the UK yesterday, the second this week. I always explain that we can ship kits only within the US and then refund their entire payment. We take a $0.30 loss on each refund, but it’s not worth trying to explain to the would-be buyer why we’re refunding them $0.30 less than their original payment.
I’ve actually thought about using Bongo to handle foreign shipments, but it’s unclear to me how (or if) that would work since our kits include materials that the IATA defines as dangerous goods for shipping purposes. If it worked, it’d be ideal. I could simply accept orders as usual and ship kits as usual to Bongo’s Connecticut facility. They would then forward the package to the buyer in whatever country, charging the buyer for the shipping and handling fees and taking care of all the customs stuff.
We’re also getting an increasing number of queries and orders from schools, public and private, as well as virtual schools and distance-learning programs. I got us set up yesterday as an approved vendor for a virtual school program run by a small-town school system that supports 200 to 300 distance-learning families. The interesting thing about this arrangement is that the school system coordinates things, but which curricula/kits to use is up to the individual families. Each family decides which curricula/kits they want to use, and lets the school system know. The school system then orders and pays for the materials, which are shipped to them. On a specified day, the families all show up at the school to pick up their materials. So at this point I have no idea of how many kits we’ll sell to that group. It could be 20 or 30, or 2 or 3, or even none at all.
Work continues on building more science kits.
10:16 – Barbara went back to work this morning, although she’d used only two days of the five days’ funeral leave she had available. She said she just couldn’t afford to miss any more work with everything that’s going on there. In addition to her usual duties, they’re in process of training for the changeover to a new “paperless office” system, and Barbara doesn’t want to fall behind on learning that.
Today will be a tough day for Colin. He’s had Barbara home more than usual for the last couple of weeks, so he’ll have to get used to having just boring old me around during the day. This morning, I heard Colin barking. Nothing unusual about that, but the barking usually occurs either near the front door or from back in our bedroom, where Colin lies on the bed and looks out the window for things to bark at. This time, the barking sounded like it was coming from the hallway. So I got up and walked out to the hall, where I saw the rear half of Colin sticking of of Barbara’s office. He was bounce-barking and growling, obviously at something in Barbara’s office. The mystery was solved when I walked back and looked in the door. Barbara had brought home the poster-size picture of Dutch from the memorial service, and stood it up against the bookshelves on the far side of her office. Colin apparently thought the picture of Dutch was an intruder.
Science kit sales this month have been much lower than I expected. As Barbara said, in one sense that’s a good thing, because we’ve been otherwise occupied. I suspect the slowdown in sales is just a blip. As I told Barbara, last month we had a four-day stretch with no kit orders at all. The following day, we sold seven kits to seven different customers. And June is part of our historically slow time anyway. The first six months of 2012 accounted for something like 17% of the year’s total business. So we’re still filling bottles and making up subassemblies like mad to build stock for the coming rush.
09:33 – The memorial service for Dutch took place yesterday.
To most people’s way of thinking, Dutch is gone, except perhaps in some mystical religious sense. I don’t think of things that way, and haven’t for a very long time. I think of people as a part of a Tree of Life. Not the Tree with branches that represent mammals, birds, and so on. A human tree. I think of humans not as individual organisms, but as parts of a single organism that can be thought of as a gigantic, immortal tree. We’re all leaves and branches on that tree. New branches and leaves sprout constantly, as old ones age, wither and die. But the tree abides.
There’s nothing mystical about any of this; I’m speaking literally. Looking at the big picture, humanity is one organism, in the same way that a stand of aspens is one organism. The pieces that made up Dutch’s genome still exist, just as they existed before meiosis and homologous recombination stirred them up to create Dutch’s genome. And Dutch’s genome, like all of our genomes, is simply a minor variation on the generic Human Genome.
08:02 – Thanks to everyone who posted or emailed condolence messages. Barbara, Frances, and Sankie are all doing well. As hard as it is to lose Dutch, the worst part of it was watching him suffer, knowing that there was no hope for recovery. So now he’s at peace. We’ll all miss Dutch a lot, but now our lives can return to some semblance of normality. No more waiting for that middle-of-the-night phone call. No more dropping everything and rushing over to the nursing home or Hospice to stand vigil. Barbara actually got a full night’s sleep last night, the first in a long, long time.
10:10 – Barbara is out running errands this morning. Yesterday, she mentioned to me that the unlock function on the keyless-entry remote for her Chevy HHR was working only intermittently. She’d replaced the battery recently and the lock function works fine, so obviously there’s a physical problem with the unlock button on the remote. The car is still under warranty, so I called the Chevy dealership this morning. The guy I talked to said she could just stop by, no need for an appointment. So Barbara drove over there first thing, only to be told that the remote wasn’t covered under warranty. They wanted her to pay $100, so she called me. I told her that was bullshit, and heard her tell the guy at the Chevy place that I’d told her not to do it. She told me he then said he’d check into it and see if he could get it covered under warranty. Yeah, right. A few minutes later she called back and told me that the guy had discovered that it was in fact covered under warranty. Geez.
When it comes to trying to get customers to pay themselves for work that’s covered under warranty, some car dealerships are slime. I told Barbara I could get a new OEM Chevy-branded remote on Amazon.com for less than $20. Of course, programming it requires special equipment that only a Chevy dealership or an automotive locksmith has access to. I’m told that programming the remote takes about 12 seconds, literally, and that most dealerships will do it for free as a courtesy. I think I’ll buy one of those Chevy-branded remotes on Amazon as a spare and see if I can get one of the local Chevy dealerships to program it for me at little or no cost.
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.