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Category: Barbara

Friday, 26 April 2013

08:40 – For the first half of April, I thought it would be an excellent month in terms of kit sales. Last year, something like 80% or 85% of our April sales were in the second half of the month, so I was kind of expecting the second half of this April to be big as well. Not so, as it turns out. Things have been pretty dead since the 15th. We’ve sold only five kits so far in the second half of April. Still, month-to-date we’re doing very well compared to last April, and for the first four months of 2013 we’re running ahead of the total sales for the first seven months of 2012–well into our busy season–so I can’t complain too much.

Barbara was finally able to get to the gym yesterday, which was the first time in at least a couple of weeks. That was a very good thing, because the gym is a stress reliever for Barbara, and she certainly needs that given the constant crises for the last several months. It’s been just one thing after another. The amount of stress on Barbara and her sister caused by caring for their parents is similar to the stress of caring for a baby. The obvious differences are that new parents are typically in their 20’s or 30’s rather than their 50’s, and that with a baby one looks forward to the future rather than dreading it. With elderly parents, there’s nothing to look forward to except more of the same and worse.

10:54 – I didn’t notice until this morning, but Amber Marshall is now Amber Turner. Congratulations to her and Shawn. (I hope he realizes he’s not good enough for her…) Amber will soon be shooting season 7 of Heartland. I wonder if she’ll decide to be credited as Amber Turner in the new season or to keep Amber Marshall as her working name.

Our finished-goods inventory is starting to dwindle, so I’m building more science kits today and over the weekend. We’re still trying to build stock for the rush period that begins in July, but we’re constrained by backorders on a couple of key components. One of those is the thick cavity microscope slides, which are included in the biology, forensic science, and life science kits. We have apparently cornered the US supply of those slides. I had 200 dozen on order as of 15 March, with expected delivery of 15 May. Earlier this week, I got a shipment that included 41 dozen, with the remaining 159 dozen backordered, now through 17 June.

To conserve our supply, I decided to reduce the quantity included in the biology kits from a dozen to half a dozen. None of the biology labs require more than six of these slides, so cutting the number included in half allows us to build twice as many biology kits with the same number of slides. The forensic science labs actually use the whole dozen, so those kits will continue to include the full dozen. The Life Science kits include only a two-pack, so they’re not a major issue.

Rather than reduce the price of the biology kits, we’ll simply reduce the price increase that’s due to take effect soon. In fact, ordinarily we’d have increased kit prices as of 1 January, but we’ve held off on doing that. We had been adjusting (read, increasing) kit prices on 1 January and 1 July, but I decided we could afford to go to annual rather than semi-annual price changes. As of now, kit prices are scheduled to increase on 1 June. Cutting the number of thick cavity slides in the biology kits just means the prices of those kits won’t increase as much as they otherwise would have.

Meanwhile, my vendor tells me that they shipped us every box of thick cavity slides they had in stock, and there are no more to be had anywhere until their next shipment arrives. They actually did get a shipment last week, which was the one they were expecting on 15 May. But that shipment had so much breakage that they ended up refusing it and keeping only the 41 undamaged boxes that they just sent me. So I should get another 159 dozen in mid-June, and then the pipeline is dry. If I reorder around then, the new batch of slides would show up 60 to 90 days later. Unless, that is, I want to pay for air-freight in. Believe me, I don’t. These slides are glass, and I shudder to think what the air freight charges would be on a case of them coming from China.

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Thursday, 25 April 2013

07:50 – This year has been just a continuing series of crises. It started in January, and the hits just keep on coming. I was expecting Barbara home regular time yesterday afternoon, but instead of coming in the garage she left her car parked at the top of the drive and came in the front door. We ate dinner on the fly and then she left to drive out to the nursing home in Clemmons to make sure that her dad had been moved to a new room–the first night he was in a room with someone who kept him awake all night–and that the nursing home had remembered to give him his IV antibiotic, which they seem to have a problem doing in a timely manner and sometimes not at all.

A few minutes after she left, the phone rang. It was Barbara. The woman driving in front of her had apparently hit a loose piece of pavement around a manhole, displacing the pavement. Barbara hit the hole and her tire started losing pressure. So she headed for Firestone, where we’d just had four new tires installed a week ago. It was just a couple minutes before Firestone closed, so she left her car there and I drove over to pick her up. I just called Firestone to check progress, and they tell me the wheel was bent. They’re going to hammer it out and then test it to make sure it holds pressure. Meanwhile, Barbara will drive my Trooper to work today, go to the gym after work, and then pick me up at home to head over with her to Firestone and get her car back.

Oh, yeah. When Barbara arrived at the nursing home yesterday evening, they’d just gotten her dad moved to a new room. They hadn’t transferred any of his stuff with him, so Barbara had to get it from the old room and carry it down to the new room. And he hadn’t had his antibiotic. The nurse said she had other patients to care for, so Barbara’s father would just have to wait until she had time to do it. The nursing home doesn’t seem very concerned about getting Dutch his antibiotic on time, or at all for that matter. He’s supposed to get it three or four times a day, Barbara’s not sure which, and he’s supposed to get it through this coming Sunday. It sounds to me as though Dutch isn’t getting a whole lot of care or rehabilitation at this facility. When Barbara got home around 9:30 last night, I told her that if it were me I’d pick up Dutch Sunday and take him back to his apartment. At least he’d have Sankie to keep an eye on him, and she can call 911 if necessary. That’s probably better for him than what he’s getting at this “care facility”.

09:19 – We started watching The L Word on Netflix streaming a couple weeks ago. The first season was good, well written and interesting, although it did start weakening in later episodes. It was a series about a group of women who just happen to be lesbians. But beginning with the first episode of season two, this series went completely off the rails. It’s now all-lesbians-all-the-time. Instead of character development and plot, season two focuses just about exclusively on the lesbianism of the characters. Now, I have nothing against lesbians. In fact, I’ve known many and I’ve liked almost all of them. But a one-dimensional program like this isn’t worth watching. This series jumped the shark earlier and more abruptly than any we’ve ever watched. Oh, well, it’s not like we don’t have lots of other stuff in our queue.

10:05 – I was out front with Colin when Paula, our across-the-street neighbor, pulled out of her drive. I asked if she’d mind giving me a ride over to Firestone so that I could pick up Barbara’s car for her and save her the hassle of doing it this evening. She said sure, so I picked up Barbara’s car and drove it home. When I called to let Barbara know, I told her I’d walked to the Firestone, knowing she wouldn’t believe me. It’s 1.5 miles (2+ klicks) from our house. Barbara knows I wouldn’t walk that far other than in a life-and-death situation, so I finally admitted that Paula had given me a ride.

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Wednesday, 24 April 2013

07:29 – The hospital discharged Barbara’s dad to a rehab/nursing home facility yesterday. The transfer was supposed to happen at 3:30, and for once it sounds like they got something done on time. Barbara left work early to meet the ambulance at the facility. I finally called her cell phone around 5:00 to find out what was going on. Barbara was too busy to talk long, but she said she was signing a whole bunch of papers. I hadn’t thought about it until I talked to her, but then I remembered that the same thing had happened when we transferred my mom from the hospital to a nursing home. And it really pissed me off, because I remembered that the papers they’d really want signed would be financial responsibility papers that would ask someone other than the patient to voluntarily assume responsibility for paying. Of course, they never mention that accepting financial responsibility is entirely optional. They’re just looking for as many “co-signers” as they can get, to make sure that the facility isn’t stuck if the patient’s insurance or the government doesn’t pay. And they take advantage of the confusion to sucker family members into signing these agreements.

Actually, these financial responsibility agreements should be void on their face. A contract requires a meeting of the minds, and it’s obvious that no family member who understood what they were signing would agree to sign. By doing so, they’re voluntarily assuming a potentially large liability that they’re under zero obligation to assume. Most people in that situation just assume that this is routine paperwork that must be signed for their parent to be admitted. It’s completely unethical for health-care facilities to present these papers for signature without fully informing the family members that it’s their right to refuse to sign, and such refusal will have no effect on the patient being admitted or the level of care provided.

In practical terms, this is unlikely to affect us, but it still enrages me that the facility took advantage of Barbara’s concern for her father by requiring her to sign financial responsibility papers that she wasn’t legally obligated to sign without disclosing that she wasn’t obligated to sign them. Bastards.

09:50 – I just finished the physical build on my new system, which is Barbara’s old system. It’s a Core i7 980X hex-core processor, which not all that long ago was a $1,000 CPU. I don’t remember how much memory is in it. There are three sticks, but I couldn’t see the labels, so they may be 4 GB or 8 GB sticks. Doesn’t matter. Even 12 GB is more than enough for what I do. I pulled Barbara’s old hard drive, labeled it, and stuck it in a drawer, just in case. Then I spent an hour or so vacuuming the case (an Antec Dark Fleet DF-85) and installing a new 3 TB hard drive. I’ll probably add more hard drives eventually, but that’ll do for now. I should also connect my eSATA external hard drive frame, which holds one or two standard hard drives. Either that, or I may just use the quick-swap bays in the case.

I started to install Linux Mint 13 Maya LTS from the same disc I used to build Barbara’s new system, but quickly realized that it was the 32-bit version. I’m downloading the 64-bit version now, but only because I want support for memory above 4 GB. I know there are still some apps that don’t work properly on 64-bit Linux, so I’ll just hope that all of the ones I need work properly or have adequate substitutes available.

Once I get the OS installed and make sure everything works properly, I’ll move the system unit, the new 23″ display I bought for it, and the other stuff off the kitchen table and into my office and plan the cut-over. I’m nervous about that because I have so many applications on this old system and I’d really like to get as much of the data and configuration settings migrated so that I don’t have to start from scratch. At least I’m running Firefox on the current system, so everything on it should migrate easily to Firefox on the new system.

I decided to give up Kontact/Kmail/Korganizer in favor of Thunderbird, so I’ll export the data from Kmail, including my contacts, in as many formats as possible before the cut-over. I also need to make a detailed list of all the applications I have installed for stuff like video/image/sound editing and so forth. I’ll leave the old system set up right beside the new one for a while, just in case.

12:57 – Well, this is depressing. I set up my new system with a 128 GB Crucial SSD and a new 3 TB Seagate Barracuda. I booted the 64-bit Linux Mint Maya disc and chose to partition manually, setting up the SSD as the system drive and the hard drive with a small swap partition and a large ext4 partition for data. When I told the installer to continue, it went to work and I watched the progress bar progress to about half way done. At that point, I heard an odd buzzing sound from the system unit. It lasted only a second or so, and I was hoping it was just one of the eight fans installed in the case. Alas, it wasn’t. That buzzing was the sound of the new 3 TB Barracuda dying. The partitioner finally blew up and said it couldn’t write the filesystem to the hard drive. I rebooted the system, and the BIOS told me the DVD and the SSD were now the only ATA devices present. Crap.

This drive is one that Seagate sent me as an eval unit a year or so ago, so there’s no warranty on it. So I headed over to NewEgg to look at hard drives. Not that I’ll ever again buy anything from NewEgg, but their reviewers tend to be a bit more technically-ept than the Amazon reviewers. I decided to look at capacities of 1 to 3 TB. There’s a 4 TB Seagate available, but that’s more than I care to put on one drive, and the cost/TB is much higher than for lower-capacity drives. It seems the sweet spot is 2 TB, so that’s what I looked at. I was surprised that the drive of choice seems to be the Seagate ST2000DM001 rather than a WD model, but so be it. NewEgg had them for $90 with free shipping, but I won’t do business with them ever again, so I went over to Amazon and found they had that drive for $99 with free shipping. Let’s hope it’s not DOA.

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Tuesday, 23 April 2013

08:14 – No word yet on when Barbara’s dad will be discharged from the hospital to the rehab facility. Barbara said her dad’s personality has changed. She’d never expected him to behave nastily, which he’s doing now. I told her we’d probably be nasty too if we were in his situation. He’s tired of being in the hospital, and being sent home and then immediately going back didn’t help any, either.

Our new friend Abby stopped over yesterday so I could help her get a domain name registered and get her set up on my shared server at Dreamhost. Abby’s mother is a friend of Paula, our neighbor across the street. We met Abby last autumn, when Paula hired her to dog sit Max, her very old dog, who needs someone with him constantly. One day, I spotted Abby raking leaves in the front yard. I asked her if Paula was also paying her to rake the leaves, and she said Paula hadn’t mentioned it but it needed to be done. So she’s a worker.

Abby is 26 years old and can’t find a job. She graduated from North Carolina State University in 2009 with a major in history and a minor in art and design, and then spent two years at the Irish School of Animation, Ballyfermot College in Dublin, Ireland, where she received a Higher National Diploma in Computer and Classical Animation. She’s smart, hard-working, and confident. But right now she’s limited to doing freelance work because the job market is simply abysmal.

Paula recently made an extended trip out to California and hired Abby to dogsit Max while she was gone. Over that couple of weeks, Barbara and I saw Abby frequently and decided we really liked her. I asked Abby if she did stuff like designing logos and brochures. She said she did, so I invited her over to our house to talk about doing some stuff for our business later this year. She rang the doorbell at the appointed time. I opened the door, found her standing on the porch, and invited her in. She asked if I was sure it was okay with Barbara for her to be here when Barbara wasn’t. I assured her that Barbara trusted me, and wouldn’t object to the two of us being alone in the house. So she came in, and we had a long discussion about logos and brochures, writing (she wants to be a writer), and everything else under the sun. When I told Barbara about Abby’s concern, she just laughed. The next day Barbara saw Abby out with Max and went over to tell Abby not to worry about being alone with me.

So Abby stopped over yesterday so we could get a domain name registered for her, get email set up for the domain, and so on. I’d originally intended to register her domain on Godaddy.com, where I have my domains, but as it turns out Dreamhost is also a registrar so I decided just to register Abby’s domain there.

Abby wasn’t sure whether she should register the domain, and it was obvious to me that she was concerned about whether having the domain was worth spending the $10 to register it. I told her she’d be nuts not to register it, particularly since she’s running her own business. I told her that I understood her problem because I remembered being young and poor. I was trying to figure out how to pay for the domain myself without making her feel obligated to me, but as it turned out that wasn’t necessary. I’d forgotten that Dreamhost bundles one free domain registration or renewal per year with an annual hosting contract. So when I clicked on the Register Domain button, the charge came back as $0.00. I explained to Abby what was going on, and she protested that I should use that $10 credit myself. I told her that all my domains were already registered at Godaddy.com, and that using that credit myself would require moving a domain over to Dreamhost, which wasn’t worth the time or aggravation.

When I told Barbara about all this later, she completely approved and said I should explain to Abby about pay-it-forward. I told Barbara that I’d already explained that to Abby and told Abby that some day five years from now or 25 years from now she’d run into a nice young person who needed some help getting started and that would be Abby’s chance to pay it forward. I also told Barbara that I suspected Abby would try to do some free design work for me in return for the help I was giving her, but that I’d insist on paying Abby her regular rate. Barbara said she agreed absolutely. No free work from Abby. She can just add that to her pay-it-forward account balance.

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Monday, 22 April 2013

07:57 – Barbara’s dad is still in the hospital, but I suspect they’ll soon be transferring him to a rehab facility. Given the way the hospital has behaved, I suggested to Barbara last night that she tell the hospital that getting him to the rehab facility is up to the hospital. If Barbara and Frances picked him up at the hospital to transport him to the rehab facility, I’m afraid they’d be stuck with him, with the rehab facility refusing to accept him. So I told her to refuse to take custody of their dad until he’s well enough to be on his own at his apartment.

Nor is just Barbara’s dad. When Barbara was walking Colin yesterday, she talked to our neighbor Kim. Kim’s mother, Mary, is in her 80’s. A week or ten days ago, she fell and fractured her pelvis. She was in the hospital for a few days, and was then transferred to a rehab facility. The rehab facility is discharging Mary this Thursday to go home. The problem is, Kim is totally disabled with a back injury and Jasmine is away at college. Mary is not supposed to put any weight on her pelvis, which means she can’t even stand, let alone walk. And yet they’re expecting Kim to take care of Mary by herself. Barbara said Kim’s teenage niece was at Kim’s house while she was talking to Kim, helping get the house cleaned up and ready for Mary’s return. I’d already told Kim when her mom was in the hospital to call me if she needed help lifting or moving anything, because Kim simply can’t lift anything and I’m only three houses away. I’ll tell her again today, because she’s going to need help when Mary gets home.

I keep thinking that with millions of unemployed people drawing government benefits, there shouldn’t be any shortage of unskilled labor to provide assistance like this to elderly people. We, the taxpayers, are paying people to sit at home watching TV and pretending to look for jobs that aren’t there, when they could and should be doing something useful with their time like assisting the elderly or cleaning up public areas.

08:44 – I got Barbara’s new desktop system installed and configured yesterday. That was harder than it should have been. All she really uses the system for is OpenOffice, email, and web browsing, with Kontact/Kmail/Korganizer for email and Chrome for the browsing. After pulling three full backups of her system, two to DVD and one to a flash drive, I disconnected her system and slid it out of the way. I slid the new system, an Intel Atom, into place, connected it up, and got rolling. The first problem was that the current version of Kmail uses a completely different format for storing email and contact information than the version Barbara had been running. I’d copied her email/contact data to /home/barbara/.kde, and expected the new version simply to see it and use it. No dice. When I started Kontact on the new system, it informed me that it was using a new data format. It offered to import the old data, so I told it to proceed. About two seconds later, it said it had encountered a fatal error, and terminated. So I tried running it again, and it said it had already been run. So I deleted all the appropriate directories, recopied over her data, and tried again. No dice. The new version simply wouldn’t touch the maildir email files, and apparently had no clue what to do with the contact information.

So I fired up Thunderbird, which was installed by default, and tried to get it to import Barbara’s mail/contact data. I screwed around with that for a while, including installing a maildir->mbox converter, but no joy. So I disconnected the new system, reconnected the old system, fired up Kontact, exported her contacts as a .VCF file, and forwarded all her email to myself. I then disconnected the old system, reconnected the new system, blew away Kontact and all the old data, and reconfigured Thunderbird, including installing the Calendar plugin. I then forwarded all of Barbara’s email from my own system back to her and pulled it into Thunderbird. Geez.

But at least I was finished except for getting the Chrome data off the old system and into Firefox on her new system. (I’ve found I don’t much like Chrome; compared to Firefox it’s feature-poor and unstable.) Surprise. The conversion didn’t work. So I installed Chromium on her new system, expecting it to just use the data from the old Chrome installation. Surprise. It wouldn’t import Barbara’s old data. So we just said the hell with it and re-entered her bookmarks and so on manually. Geez.

Barbara’s old system is now sitting on the floor of her office. She says her new system is working fine, but I think I’ll leave the old system there for a while, just in case we missed migrating something. Once I’m pretty sure everything on the new system is present and working properly, I’ll pull the hard drive and put it on the shelf. I’ll then clean up her old system (a hex-core i7), install a 3 TB hard drive, and turn it into my new system.

Given what I just went through migrating her simple configuration to a new box, the idea of migrating my configuration to a new box scares the hell out of me. I don’t have just OpenOffice, email, and browsing. I have literally dozens of other apps installed, from science number crunching to DVD ripping to video/photo/ sound editors and converters to scanning apps to astronomy apps to who knows what else. Even just figuring out what I have installed will be time-consuming, let alone getting everything moved over.

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Sunday, 21 April 2013

09:10 – Barbara’s dad came home briefly, but is now back in the hospital. I almost paid a visit to the hospital myself yesterday, to have a heart-to-heart chat with some of their staff. When Barbara got home yesterday morning, I was downstairs doing laundry when she pulled in. She got on her cell phone as soon as she got out of her car, and I overheard her end of the conversation with her sister. I heard her mention a conversation with one of the nurses, and she mentioned that the nurse had said that she and Frances were horrible children. I roared, “WHO THE HELL SAID THAT?”, and was getting ready to get in my truck and head down there. Barbara quickly assured me that the nurse hadn’t actually used those words, but that had been her implication. Not much better, but I sat down and listened to what Barbara had to say. In effect, the nurse accused Barbara and Frances of abandoning their father, when the truth is that the hospital flat-out lied to them about his condition and essentially forced them to take their father home when he wasn’t anywhere near ready to be released. And this nurse actually told Barbara that if they brought him back to the hospital they wouldn’t treat him further and that their father was now their responsibility.

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Friday, 19 April 2013

07:38 – Congratulations to the FBI and Boston Police. It took them only three days to identify and track down the two terrorists responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings. As I write this, one of the terrorists is dead, killed in a shootout last night, and the other is the subject of a massive manhunt. Unfortunately, a police officer was also killed last night and another seriously injured. Let’s hope the cops track down and kill the other terrorist before he hurts anyone else. In what comes as no great surprise, it appears that the two terrorists are brothers from Turkey or Chechnya, which means they’re almost certainly islamic.

08:31 – When I was adding money to Barbara’s PlatinumTel prepaid cell-phone account the other day, I checked their phone offerings. Barbara’s phone used to be my phone, so when hers died I just gave her mine. I’d intended to order another of the same model, but they didn’t have any in stock at the time. So I’ve been checking periodically to find that or a similar model. I wanted a clamshell phone with no gimmicks. All I wanted was a simple four-banger phone to make and receive calls, something that folded so that I could just put it in my pocket without worry about cracking the screen or whatever. But for several months PlatinumTel had nothing on offer other than models with slide-out keyboards and various smartphones. The other day they had $30 Alcatel One-Touch 665 phones in stock, so I ordered one for myself. I so seldom need a cell phone that this one is ideal. No contract, $0.05/minute, and very simple to operate.

11:09 – I’m hoping they don’t capture the second terrorist. That just means a trial and prison. That’s too good for him. Ideally, I’d take him alive and feed him, slowly and feet-first, into a wood chipper. But we all know that’s not going to happen. They haven’t even cut off the first terrorist’s head and posted it on a pike. So about the best we can hope for is that the cops shoot the second one and that he dies in agony before he gets to the hospital. The hospital! Why on earth did they even bother to transport the first terrorist to a hospital instead of letting him bleed to death on the street?

I’ve been reading The Grass Crown, the second in Colleen McCullough’s First Man in Rome series. Last night, I was reading a section covering the Social (Marsic) War. The Roman commander besieged an Italian town held by the rebels, who thought their water supply was secure. It wasn’t, but only because the Romans undertook a massive engineering feat to stop the flow of the river from which the town got its water. Eventually, they surrendered. The Roman commander proceeded to order the slaughter every adult male in town, and then turned out the women and children without food into the war-torn landscape to starve and freeze to death. Another Roman commander took another besieged rebel town, whereupon he set up an assembly line with 100 of his legionaries flogging all of the rebel men. After the flogging, they moved down the assembly line to another section, where 100 more of his legionaries beheaded those who’d already been flogged. The commander then turned the women of the town over to his legionaries to be raped and then killed. And, at that, the Roman commander was being merciful because these were Italians, who’d until recently been friends and allies of Rome. If he had wanted to, the Roman commander could have ordered all of the rebels to be crucified instead of being put to the sword.

This was during the late Republic. From Julius Caesar’s time onward, Rome had even less of a sense of humor about rebellion and particularly killing Roman citizens. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people thought long and hard before doing anything to piss off Rome. I think it’s time we considered emulating Rome in that respect. Crucifying muslim terrorists would be a good start.

21:17 – As of mid-afternoon, Barbara was planning to leave work at 3:30 and head home. We were planning to take Colin to the vet for his annual checkup. Then the USWS issued a tornado watch for the afternoon through 9:00 p.m., so Barbara called to reschedule the vet appointment for next Friday. At that point, she planned to stop at the supermarket on the way home and have a relaxing evening, assuming the hospital would release her dad tomorrow.

Relaxing evening. Some joke. The hospital decided to release Barbara’s dad this afternoon with almost no notice. So she went over there to pick him up and take him back to their apartment. But Dutch needs to be on IV antibiotics for a week or ten days longer, so the hospital was supposed to send a supply home with them. Barbara or Frances would have to change the supply container once a day. I wasn’t crazy about that idea. Someone who’s on IV antibiotics should be in the hospital, with qualified medical staff administering the drugs. The last time this happened, Barbara called in tears because she’d made one minor mistake in the procedure. She thought she’d killed her dad. I told her then that she or her sister shouldn’t be doing this; a nurse should be doing it.

That was bad enough, but it got worse. The hospital was supposed to send over a supply of the drug to Dutch and Sankie’s apartment, and then have a nurse come to teach them how to administer it. Well, the nurse showed up, but the supply of drugs didn’t. And to make matters even worse, the drug supply container has to be changed every 24 hours, at 8:00 p.m. Not during the day when the visiting nurse could do it, or at least Barbara or Frances could do it with less inconvenience, but specifically at 8:00 p.m., which means that Barbara or Frances would have to drive over there specially every evening at 8:00 p.m.

So of course my first thought was that they should just discard the first container before it was empty and substitute a full one, which would allow them to change the daily time from 8:00 p.m. back to something a bit more convenient. No dice, Barbara said. The hospital would provide only the number of containers needed to do things on the schedule they mandated.

Not that that turns out to matter much, because the hospital released Dutch knowing that he couldn’t even stand with his walker, let alone walk or even get out of a chair. Barbara assumed, of course, that they’d had him up and walking every day. They hadn’t. He’d been in bed constantly for the entire week. He’s completely helpless, and needs someone who’s able to physically manhandle him into and out of his chair and so on.

But of course the hospital never did bother sending over the drugs that Barbara and Frances are supposed to adminster. So I got a call from Barbara about 8:35, saying she was at the hospital emergency room with her dad, pleading with them to give him the drug that they say is so important he get at 8:00 every evening.

Then, adding insult to injury, the hospital tells Barbara that they wanted to release Dutch to a nursing home, but Barbara refused to allow them to do so. She told them that she’d done no such thing. When the social worker called earlier in the week, she said the hospital planned to release Dutch to a nursing home so that he could get physical therapy. Barbara told the social worker that the physical therapy, and occupational therapy as well, could be done at her parents’ apartment.

What concerned me the most was that Barbara said as soon as the emergency room gave her dad the IV antibiotic, she was going to drive him home. Presumably she intends to stay the night, since Dutch sure can’t be there on his own or with just Sankie. I told her she should tell the hospital to keep her father until he’s actually in a fit state to be discharged, and that doesn’t include being on IV antibiotics or being unable to rise from a chair. She said the hospital told her they couldn’t refuse treatment, but Dutch would have to pay for it. Bastards. They had no business discharging him in the first place.

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Monday, 15 April 2013

07:58 – We still don’t know exactly what the problem is with Barbara’s dad. At one point yesterday they were talking about moving him to the ICU, but they decided not to, so he’s on a regular floor. They started antibiotics immediately, in case his lung infection is bacterial, but we won’t know for sure until the results of the culture come back. At this point, it appears that Dutch isn’t in any immediate danger.

We’d planned to do a Costco run and have dinner with our friends Paul and Mary yesterday. Barbara was adamant that we proceed with our plans, even if I had to go without her. But she called from the hospital around 2:30 and said she was on her way home. So we went to Costco and then out to dinner normally, and then came back home so Barbara could watch the end of the Masters golf tournament. Barbara’s going to work late this morning. She has to stop over at her parents’ apartment to pick up the checkbook and her mom, drop her mom at the hospital, and drop a couple of checks at her parents’ accountant’s office to send in with her parents’ tax returns.

All of the neighborhood dogs know that I carry dog treats when I’m walking Colin. Sophie, Kim’s 5-month-old Yorkie, learned that the first time I gave her one, and now every time we visit Kim and Sophie Sophie begs shamelessly for treats, standing with her front paws on my leg and bouncing up and down. I always give Colin his treat first, because to give Sophie hers first would offend Colin’s sense of order. He is, after all, both the senior dog and my dog.

So, yesterday, I was handing a treat to Colin, but we dropped it. Colin bent his head down to pick it up off the sidewalk, but Sophie got to the treat at the same time Colin did. She lost the struggle for the treat, of course. Colin is 15 or 20 times her weight, and her whole body is about the size of his head. But I was amazed that he didn’t even growl or show his fangs at her, even though she was literally trying to pull the treat out of Colin’s mouth. Kim was watching fearfully and probably assumed her puppy was about to be eaten. After seeing what didn’t happen, I told Kim that if she needed any evidence that Colin wouldn’t hurt Sophie she’d just gotten it in spades.

11:08 – Barbara just called to let me know she’d gotten to work. Her dad is doing better. He has pneumonia, again, but it appears to be responding to antibiotics. He’s still very confused. He told Barbara he’d been in the hospital for two days and they’d given him nothing to eat. She tried to convince him that he’d just gone in yesterday afternoon and that they were in fact feeding him, but he’s as contrary as usual. Some of his confusion may be due to the illness and some to the antibiotics they have him on. They’re moving him from intermediate care to a regular room today.

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Sunday, 14 April 2013

09:01 – The taxes are in the mail, so I can forget about taxes for another year. Except, of course, for quarterly estimated tax payments, quarterly sales tax returns, and so on.

Barbara and I are watching The L Word and series five of Mad Men. Both are excellent, but The L Word is the better of the two. Oddly, it appears that only one of the actresses playing major roles in The L Word is actually gay. Several of the others are married (to men) according to Wikipedia. A couple of the primary actresses have never been married, but that of course says nothing one way or the other. I’m rather surprised that there was no outcry from the gay community, or at least none that I heard about. Having straight actresses playing lesbians seems a bit like having white people playing blacks.

Mad Men, as always, is well written but very dark and depressing. Nearly all of the major characters are weasels or weaselettes. The one exception is Megan Draper, wife of the lead character, played by Canadian actress Jessica Paré. What is it about Canada that it turns out so many adorable women? I think we should invade Canada and steal their women. In return, we can give them some of ours. I have a list, starting with some female politicians who are frequently mentioned in the comments here.

14:31 – Barbara got a call from her sister about 1:30. Her dad apparently collapsed at lunch and the EMTs were on the way. Frances told Barbara to meet them at the hospital, so Barbara got dressed and headed for the hospital. Frances is driving Sankie to the hospital. At this point, we have no idea how serious Dutch’s condition is. Of course, Dutch is 90 years old, and we all fear the worst.

15:00 – Barbara just called from the emergency room. Her dad is okay. He had a temperature around 103F (39.5C), which is enough to make a young person feel pretty ill, let alone someone who’s 90. The EMTs also had a hard time finding a pulse. Barbara says he not in any serious danger now other than the obvious for someone 90. They’ll probably admit him. Barbara is going to come home. As she said, there’s nothing she can do there.

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Wednesday, 10 April 2013

08:38 – Barbara is taking the day off and driving up to Mt. Airy with a friend. They’re going to spend the day visiting antique stores and doing other girl stuff. They’ll have a nice day for it, with no chance of rain and a forecast high of 84F (29C). Yesterday’s official high was also 84, although it actually touched 90F (32C) here.

Yesterday I had to mail a replacement for a broken Petri dish. As usual, I sent that first-class mail rather than Priority Mail. Sending parcels by first-class mail is less expensive, although it’s limited to packages of no more than 13 ounces and doesn’t offer tracking. But the USPS Click-and-Ship website lets me generate postage labels only for Express Mail and Priority Mail, so for first-class parcels I use regular stamps. The postage for the package I sent yesterday was $2.41 (versus $5.15 for Priority Mail). Five first-class stamps are $2.30, so I had to add a sixth, for a total of $2.76.

I was already on the USPS website to find out how much postage was required, so I decided just to order a roll of lower-denomination stamps. They had rolls of a hundred $0.20 stamps for $20 plus $1.25 shipping, so I decided to order two rolls. I added them to my cart and tried to check out. Everything seemed to be going fine. I entered the CVN for the credit card number I have on file for them and clicked the Submit Order button. It came back to the previous page and displayed a message in red that said I hadn’t entered my telephone number, which was required. Nowhere on that page was a field for telephone number. Geez. I guess I’ll just pick up a roll of $0.20 stamps the next time I’m at the post office.

The taxes are finished, although I won’t mail them until the 15th. I plan to spend some time today cleaning up my lab and making up more solutions for kits.

12:09 – I see that a New York City councilwoman is pushing hard to get a law passed to make it illegal to buy “counterfeit” purses and watches. Not sell them, you understand. Buy them. And the law she proposes has teeth: up to a $1,000 fine and one year in jail. Geez.

So-called “counterfeit” consumer products are not a societal problem. If someone wants to buy a “counterfeit” purse or watch, whose business should that be? Certainly not the government’s. In effect, we have the government police doing the companies’ jobs for them, at public expense. If Louis Vuitton or Coach or Rolex is concerned about people buying and selling “counterfeits” of their products, it should be up to them to do the policing. Let them sue the sellers.

This is a civil matter, not a criminal one, unless the sellers are falsely (and convincingly) claiming to be selling the real product. If a seller offers a fake Coach purse for $100, for example, it’s clear to any reasonable person that this could not possibly be the genuine $1,500 Coach purse. It’s either fake or stolen. On the other hand, if the seller attempts to sell a fake Coach purse for $1,200, a reasonable person might believe it to be genuine. That’s fraud. Let the police concentrate on real crimes like fraud, not pseudo-crimes like violating someone’s copyright. And, before anyone mentions it, I am aware that there are times when fake products can indeed be a societal problem. Criminals regularly sell fake products that do matter–things like pharmaceuticals and aircraft fasteners and automotive brake pads–where lives are actually at stake. But no purchasing manager is going to buy a fake $50 aircraft bolt if the price is suspiciously low. Buyers of this type of item are being defrauded, and the sellers should be prosecuted on that basis, not for copyright violations.

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