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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.