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Category: Barbara

Wednesday, 13 February 2013

08:15 – Barbara’s mom is home and seems to be doing okay. Frances stayed with them last night and will also stay with them tonight so that Barbara can go out to dinner with friends. Today, they have a home aide coming in to spend the day with them. Then Barbara will stay with them tomorrow night, all day Friday, and Friday night. Barbara and Frances are hoping that by the weekend their parents will be able to get along at night without one of them there.

Science kit sales have slacked off a bit, but are still running at several times the rate of a year ago. Two orders for chemistry kits came in overnight, which takes us down to half a dozen or so in stock. Those should take us through at least the weekend, when I’ll start building another batch of 30. Fortunately, we’re still in good shape on biology and forensics kits, although we do need to get bottles labeled and filled for the biology kits.

15:33 – I don’t usually bother reading stuff like this, but I read this opinion piece about the long-term unemployed all the way through. Like most leftish opinion pieces, this one shows prima facie that the author isn’t capable of thinking things through. He actually believes that Obama’s plan to boost the minimum wage is good news for the poor and long-term unemployed. In fact, it’s a catastrophe.

As late as 2007, the federal minimum wage was $5.15/hour. Even that was too high, pricing many would-be workers out of the market. It’s now $7.25/hour, which has caused a catastrophic rise in unemployment among the poor and low/no-skilled. And Obama wants to boost it to $9.00? As someone once said, the minimum wage doesn’t guarantee anyone a job at that hourly rate; all it does is guarantee that you can’t legally work for a lower hourly rate. And the upshot of the latest increases in the minimum wage have shown that beyond question. If Obama gets his wish, the effect will be more of the same. More unemployed poor people. More long-term unemployment. More people homeless or on welfare. With friends like Obama, the poor don’t need enemies.

And the other thing that annoys me is that most such articles mention that a family of four whose wage-earner is paid minimum wage is below the poverty line. So what? They never mention that a family of four with two wage-earners who each are paid minimum wage is well above the poverty line. And that’s the calculation they should really be making. If mom and dad both work for minimum wage, they can support those two kids at a lower middle-class standard of living. And what about single moms? Well, how about they share an apartment, which takes them both, with their children, to a lower middle-class standard of living.

If Obama were really concerned about the poor and long-term unemployed, he’d be pushing to eliminate the minimum wage, or at least reduce it to the $5.15/hour level that prevailed in 2007. By pushing to raise it from its already ridiculously high level, he’s dooming millions of low/no-skill people to permanent unemployment. He’s also dooming their children to being permanent members of the underclass.

And he’s making jobs disappear permanently. Most current minimum wage jobs are easily automated. The business decision is often whether it’s cheaper to pay a cheap person or make the capital investment to automate that job. And once that job is automated it’s gone forever. One day in the not-too-distant future, you may walk into McDonalds and find the only employees are the manager and his dog. Everything else is automated.

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Tuesday, 12 February 2013

08:21 – Happy Darwin Day, and happy birthday to Colin, who’s two years old today. In fact, over the weekend I suggested to Barbara that we change Colin’s name to Darwin, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

Barbara’s heading over to the hospital this afternoon to pick up her mom and take her home. She and Frances have been scrambling to get day-time care lined up. The doctor suggested that they have someone there with Sankie during the day as well as at night for at least a while because they’re afraid she won’t be able to cope physically with things until she’s recovered a bit more. Barbara is not optimistic, expecting another crisis will occur soon with her mom, her dad, or both. I think they both need to be moved to a skilled-care facility. Independent-living or even assisted-living is simply no longer appropriate for them.

16:23 – I spoke to Barbara a few minutes ago. Her mom is now home and seems to be doing as well as could be expected. She’s still physically frail, which is to be expected at her age and coming off a 16-day hospital stay. Mentally, it’s a mixed bag. Barbara says she remembers things like the year they moved into their house, 50 years or so ago. But she’s confused about why she was in the hospital. I told Barbara to give her a day or two to get used to being home before she worries too much about her mom’s mental state. It’s never easy being in the hospital, let alone for someone Sankie’s age. The aide they’re hiring to day-sit was over there when I talked to Barbara. Barbara vaguely recognized her. It turns out that Barbara went to elementary, junior high, and high school with her.

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Monday, 11 February 2013

07:50 – North Carolina is one of several states that are apparently in the early stages of revolting against the federal government. Every day, it seems, the front page of the paper has another article about one way or another that North Carolina is refusing to cooperate with the feds. We’re opting out of the expansion of Medicaid. As of July 1st, we’re reducing the duration and amount of unemployment benefits significantly, thereby becoming ineligible for the federal extended unemployment benefits program. And some local sheriffs and police chiefs have already said that they won’t cooperate with Obama’s proposed new gun control laws, because they are sworn to uphold the state and federal Constitutions. It wouldn’t surprise me if North Carolina followed Virginia, Utah and several other states in seriously considering introducing a silver- or gold-based state currency. And I’m hearing rumbles about some states considering declaring their residents exempt from paying all federal taxes. This could get interesting.

10:55 – I see the pope is going to abdicate at the end of this month. Media reports say this is the first time a pope has resigned since 1415, but in fact Gregory XII didn’t resign; he was pretty much fired from his pope job and demoted to bishop. IIRC, the RCC was then popeless until after GXII died. It seems to me that this is a great opportunity for the RCC to just wrap things up. Don’t bother electing another pope. Just let things wind down. Sell off all the assets and donate the proceeds to the current RCC members pro rata.

11:55 – I just finished filling 200+ 15 mL bottles with 1% phenolphthalein in IPA. It’s a lot quicker and easier to do that with the bottle-top dispenser rather than manually. The problem with manual filling is that the viscosity of IPA is low enough that it’s difficult to pour into the small opening of a 15 mL bottle without having it run down the sides of the bottle. The only problem with using the bottle-top dispenser is that phenolphthalein is extremely insoluble in water, so cleanup is a bit more involved than usual. Fortunately, phenolphthalein is soluble in basic solutions, so I’ll do multiple passes with a washing soda (sodium carbonate) solution, followed by a dozen passes of tap water, followed by a couple passes of DI water. The involved cleanup is why I did 200+ bottles in one run.

Next up is turmeric reagent, which is a solution of curcumin in IPA. It’s even more of a bitch to clean up, because it stains everything bright yellow, including even glass. For that one, I’ll start with a couple passes of IPA to get most of the staining gone. Curcumin is slightly soluble in sulfuric acid (about 1%), so I’ll follow the IPA wash with a dilute sulfuric acid wash to dissolve whatever curcumin remains. Several rinses in tap water and then DI water should finish the job.

15:25 – An hour or so ago I was surprised to get a call from Barbara’s mom. She was confused, thinking Barbara would be at home. I told her Barbara was at work and that I’d call her and have her return her mom’s call. So, a few minutes ago, Barbara called to say that her mom is going to be released at 2:00 tomorrow afternoon. That throws Barbara’s and Frances’s week into confusion, because the doctor wanted them to have someone with Sankie 24 hours a day. And that doesn’t include Dutch, apparently. So Barbara is going to pick up her mom tomorrow afternoon, take her home, and wait until Frances can get there. I’m not sure what they’ll do after that.

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Sunday, 10 February 2013

08:18 – Someone may have to have a word with the new neighbors. Well, with one of the new neighbors. There have actually been three houses sold on our block in the last couple months. The ones one house to the left of the house directly across the street from us are fine, as are the ones three houses to the right of the house across the street from us. It’s the ones two houses to the right of the house across the street that are the problem.

They moved in a couple of weeks ago. The owner is a young man, but he has three or four of his friends living there with him. That’s illegal in itself. This neighborhood is zoned R6, which means single-family dwellings. That means only close family members are allowed to live together. No one objects to modern families. For example, Steve and Heather live in the house across the street and two to the left of us. They aren’t married, and their four kids (three of his, one of hers) live with them. Fine. For all intents and purposes they’re a family. But this new guy is running what amounts to a rooming house.

And he’s really getting off on the wrong foot. If the four or five of them were just living there quietly probably no one would object. But they had a party Wednesday evening and had 20 or 30 cars parked up and down the street for most of the block. Okay, most of the neighbors probably figured they were having a moving-in/housewarming party. Again, no big deal. But then last night, three days later, they had another party with 20 or 30 cars parked up and down the block. If they keep doing that, someone is going to call the city to complain and the owner is going to find himself cited for running a rooming house.

11:29 – Barbara is home until she leaves for work tomorrow. She has dad-sitting duty MWF nights this week. Frances took their dad to visit their mom yesterday and said Sankie was doing a lot better. Of course, that was during the day and it’s usually in the evenings and at night that she has the problems. Sankie has been in the hospital for two weeks as of yesterday. It looks as if they may release her Friday, which is the last day of her antibiotic course. The doctor said she could go home any time and continue the antibiotic at home, but Barbara and Frances want to leave her in the hospital until Friday while they get some things lined up. Barbara is taking Friday off work anyway, so it’d be a good day to get Sankie home. That way, Barbara is there anyway and between her and Frances they can cover the weekend 24 hours a day if needed. I did suggest to Barbara that she and Frances remove all knives, scissors, and other sharp objects as well as club-like objects before they take their mother home to their apartment. I don’t think either Dutch or Sankie is likely to become suicidal or homicidal, but better safe than sorry.

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Saturday, 9 February 2013

07:49 – Barbara had the night off. She and Colin are back in the bedroom now, having a lie-in. She’s dad-sitting tonight, and will be off-duty again tomorrow night.

It should be an ordinary Saturday for us until Barbara leaves this afternoon to head over to her parents’ apartment. I’ll do laundry and work on science kits. Barbara plans to do some yardwork, and maybe label some empty bottles and seal some filled ones this afternoon while she watches something on Netflix streaming.

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Friday, 8 February 2013

07:49 – Another one-dog night. We dodged the proverbial bullet. It rained for hours last evening, and the temperatures were barely above freezing.

I’ve been making up chemicals for the chemistry kits, doing raw-materials inventory as I do so. Yesterday, I put together an order for several hundred dollars worth of chemicals from Elemental Scientific. A gallon of reagent-grade glacial acetic acid, a gallon of reagent-grade n-butanol, two pounds of this, five pounds of that. When I clicked on the button to check out, there was a drop-down list that forced a choice of one of three options for payment: call-in, fax-in, or mail-in. I chose call-in.

I called to give them my credit card number, and spoke to Wade Van Ryzin, the owner. I asked him what was going on, and he said they were in the midst of changing credit-card processors and hadn’t yet gotten the API for the new processor set up on their web site. So I gave him my credit card number and, as usual, we started chatting about this and that. I finally remembered to ask Wade something I’d been meaning for years to ask him. Why does Elemental continue to package chemicals in traditional measures–ounces, pounds, pints, and so on–rather than grams and milliliters? Wade laughed and said they were asked that question all the time. The answer? He said that they’d have to re-do all of their labels, thousands of them, and that doing so would require devoting someone’s attention full-time for a month or more.

Barbara made a flying visit home last night to have dinner before heading over to her parents’ apartment to dad-sit overnight. She’s off-duty tonight, with Frances covering, and then back on-duty Saturday, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I asked about getting someone to stay with him nights, and Barbara said she and Frances were talking about it. The problem is that Dutch wants Barbara or Frances to stay with him because he’s afraid that a hired sitter will steal him blind while he’s asleep. I told Barbara that she and Frances need to make her dad understand that the two of them can’t do this indefinitely, and that if he wants someone staying with him it’s going to have to be someone hired from an agency.

11:28 – It all makes sense now. Barbara just told me that the IV antibiotic they have her mother on is levofloxacin, a 3G fluoroquinolone. Here’s some of what Wikipedia has to say about CNS ADRs with levofloxacin:

Fluoroquinolones can induce a wide range of serious adverse psychiatric effects. These reactions may manifest as extreme anxiety, panic attacks, depression, anhedonia, cognitive dysfunction (or brain fog), depersonalization, paranoia, hallucinations, toxic psychosis, seizures, tremors, taste perversions, abnormal dreams, chronic insomnia, vertigo, delirium, suicidal thoughts, and usually involves all five senses. For some people the symptoms resolve relatively soon after discontinuing the fluoroquinolone; for others, in the case of a neurotoxic effect, symptomatology may persist for months or even years after discontinuation. Fluoroquinolones are associated with a significant number of serious psychiatric events.

These side-effects are distressingly common with this drug, and are much more likely to manifest in older people. When you consider that Barbara’s mom is 85 years old and was mentally frail to begin with, it’s not surprising that she’s completely lost it while being treated with this drug. When I told Barbara that I was shocked that they were treating her mom with this drug, particularly in a hospital environment where MRSA is endemic, she said that Sankie is allergic to penicillins and sulfas. I realize that they have to choose a drug that is effective. Still, the one they’re using is hideously dangerous, even within the fluoroquinolone group. I can only assume that cipro or one of the other less risky fluoroquinolones wasn’t effective against her infection. Or at least I hope that’s why they decided to use levofloxacin.

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Thursday, 7 February 2013

07:26 – Things with Barbara’s mom have gone completely to hell. She’s now refusing to eat and announced yesterday that she was writing her last will and testament. Barbara and Frances decided last night that they will no longer visit their mother as long as she’s in her current mental state. Visiting does their mother no good–in fact, it makes things worse–and it simply tears up Barbara and Frances. And, as Barbara said last night, her father doesn’t need to be seeing their mom like this.

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Wednesday, 6 February 2013

08:06 – Barbara made a flying visit home last night for dinner and a quick visit before heading over to spend the night with her dad. Her mom is no better and probably worse. She’s still in the hospital and seems likely to remain there at least through this week. There’s been no improvement in her mental condition, which may or may not be a result of the IV antibiotic they have her on for the lung infection. She’s still not eating and is sleeping only because they’ve increased the dosage of the drugs they give her in the evening. Barbara, her sister, and her dad are increasingly concerned that Sankie won’t snap out of it this time. My worry is that even if she does get back to normal and they send her home, the stress of trying to deal with Dutch’s condition will put her right back in the hospital within days.

The stress on Barbara and Frances, and of course their dad, is simply unbearable. Barbara and Frances are spelling each other, taking turns spending the night with their dad, but even that doesn’t help much. When Barbara is off-duty, she’s still spending a lot of time on the phone with Frances and the doctors, talking about what’s going on and making decisions about what’s to be done. The same is true for Frances when she’s off-duty. Neither one of them gets any real break.

09:55 – The USPS just announced that it will end Saturday delivery of first-class and lower mail starting in August. They’ll continue Saturday delivery of Express Mail and Priority Mail. Of course, Congress is supposed to have to approve such changes, but it sounds to me as though the USPS is going to do this whether Congress likes it or not.

I think this change is long overdue. USPS says it’ll save them about $2 billion a year, and few people will be adversely affected by the absence of Saturday delivery. In fact, I think it’s long past time for the USPS to tell Congress to go pound sand. USPS is, in theory, a private business, and it should start behaving like one. All of the financial problems the USPS has been having are directly attributable to Congressional meddling. USPS has hundreds if not thousands of post offices and other facilities that should have been closed long ago. They remain open because Congress won’t allow them to close them despite the fact that it make no business sense to keep them open. And Congress won’t allow USPS to close these facilities because voters object. USPS should be operating as an NGO (essentially, a non-profit), with its original goal of delivering the mail while breaking even. In fact, absent governmental meddling, that’s exactly what USPS is doing now.

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Tuesday, 5 February 2013

09:30 – Barbara’s mom and dad are doing about the same. Instead of heading directly over to her parents’ apartment after work today, Barbara’s going to go to the gym and then come home for dinner before heading over to dad-sit.

I filled a few hundred bottles yesterday, using the bottle-top dispenser. That’s basically a pump that sits on top of a reservoir bottle. The body of the pump has a slider that’s calibrated from 2.5 mL to 30 mL in 0.5 mL increments. To fill a bottle, you just place the mouth of the bottle over the dispenser tip, slide the pump body all the way up and then press it all the way down. It takes about five seconds to fill a 15 mL bottle and a bit longer for a 30 mL. The reservoir bottle is one liter (the largest they had), which is enough for 60+ 15 mL bottles or 30+ 30 mL bottles.

I’m doing batches of 60 or 90 bottles at a time, so I sometimes need to refill the reservoir with the same solution during a run. That takes 30 seconds or so. Cleanup during a changeover to a new chemical is faster than I feared it might be. I just rinse the reservoir bottle and dispenser under running tap water, put the supply tube into a beaker of tap water and pump 10 or 12 passes of tap water through the dispenser, and then repeat with a couple passes of distilled water.

The batch of bottles we’re currently working on is sufficient for 60 more chemistry kits and 30 more biology kits. After we finish this pass, I think I’m going to bump that up to batches of 120 chemistry kits and 60 biology kits. I’m also going to bump up the size of the chemical solutions we make up. Right now, I’m doing one liter at a time of the solutions that go into 15 mL bottles and two liters of the solutions that go into 30 mL bottles. That’s sufficient for 60+ sets of each. Other than solutions with relatively limited shelf lives, after this batch I’m going to start making up four liters at a time of the solutions for 15 mL bottles and eight liters of the solutions for 30 mL bottles, which is sufficient for 250 sets of each.

10:49 – I see that the Catholic hospital in Colorado that had made the unusual argument that a fetus is not a person has now backtracked and is admitting that a fetus is a person under Catholic doctrine. They were being sued for the wrongful death of a pregnant woman and her twin fetuses and had claimed that the two fetuses were not people under Colorado law. Now they’re saying that they were “morally wrong” to claim the fetuses were not people, which presumably means they plan to continue arguing that in the eyes of the law there is only one wrongful death at issue.

And some articles are now claiming that that image of Obama shooting skeet is a fake. Fake or not, it really doesn’t matter. I don’t think anyone really believes that Obama is a shooter.

From the image, if he’s shooting skeet it would appear that he’s shooting a sitting clay. (The shotgun is in full recoil, which even with the ported barrel and light skeet loads means it must have been about level when he pulled the trigger.) I suspect it would be more accurate to say that this image is of Obama shooting at skeet, because I doubt he’s ever actually hit one. If indeed this isn’t the only round Obama has ever fired in his life.

So I have a challenge for Mr. Obama. As Barbara, Paul, and Mary can attest, I pretty much suck at shooting clays, at least with a shotgun, so if Obama is actually a skeet shooter my challenge should be trivially easy for him to win. The deal is, Obama gets his shotgun and 25 rounds of skeet shells. He shoots a round and we total how many he breaks. Then I get my Colt Combat Commander and 25 rounds of hardball. I shoot a round and we total how many I break. If Obama breaks more than I do, he gets to claim to be a shooter. What could be fairer than that?

I should say that I actually tried shooting clays with my .45 back 35 years ago or so. I used a box of 50 rounds and IIRC broke half a dozen clays, for a success rate of 12%. Some of the guys I was shooting with did better than that, but they were using higher-velocity rounds.

12:56 – I just got off the phone with PayPal support. I was starting to get concerned about a couple of things. First, the from: line of the payment-received emails that PayPay sends me had changed. Until the end of January or thereabouts, they were in the form:

“jdoe@johndoe.com” <jdoe@johndoe.com>

For the last several days, they’ve been in the form:

John Doe via PayPal <member@paypal.com>

My second concern was a change in withdrawals. I regularly sweep our PayPal balance into our corporate bank account, at least daily and sometimes two or three times a day. Until now, as soon as I did a transfer I’d get an email immediately from PayPal noting the details of the transfer. For the last few days, I haven’t been getting those confirmation emails, so I began to wonder if I’d been hacked.

As it turns out, there’s no problem. Mallory at PayPal support said they’d changed the way they format the from: line on payment-received emails to cut down on fraud attempts. And she said not to worry about the lack of confirmation emails for transfers from PayPal to our bank account. Apparently, they’ve been having some kind of issue getting those emails sent.

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Monday, 4 February 2013

07:32 – Barbara is back on dad-sitting duty this evening and tomorrow evening. Ordinarily, that’d mean Colin and I wouldn’t see her again until Wednesday after work, but she’s decided to come back here after work Tuesday, have dinner, and then head over to her dad’s place to spend the night. The hospital is still running tests and otherwise trying to figure out exactly what’s wrong with her mom, but it seems likely she’ll be in the hospital for at least a few more days.

Barbara got a bunch of bottles labeled over the weekend, so among other things I’ll be filling bottles this week. Despite all the upheaval, we’re still in reasonably good supply on finished inventory of all the science kits, with more abuilding.

08:11 – I see that it’s been confirmed by DNA testing that the skeleton found under that British parking lot is in fact the remains of King Richard III. Furthermore, from the photo in the news article I saw, it appears that King Richard had been decapitated, lending credence to the idea that Richard III was in fact killed accidentally by Lord Edmund Plantagenet and succeeded by King Richard IV.

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