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Category: Barbara

Tuesday, 22 May 2012

06:57 – I’m still working heads-down on the forensics book, putting together consolidated equipment/chemicals/specimens lists from all of the lab sessions. I should finish that up today or tomorrow, which means the manuscript is complete. I’ll then go back and do a quick clean-up pass, shoot more images, and so on.

10:01 – Barbara took her dad to an early appointment this morning with his doctor. She called about 9:00 to say that the doctor wanted her dad to go to the hospital. He has problems with fluid accumulation, which they’ve been treating by limiting his fluid intake and having him on a regimen of Lasix or some other loop diuretic. This morning, the edema was bad enough that the doctor thought IV diuretics were needed, so Barbara took her dad over to the hospital. I’m not sure if they’ll admit him or just treat him and release him. Barbara and her sister have been run ragged recently dealing with medical emergencies. I hope the hospital sends Dutch home today. Hospital stays are very hard on their parents, of course, but they’re also hard on Barbara and Frances. It’s fortunate that there are two of them to share the hospital visits and running around on errands for their parents.

13:41 – Barbara called to say they’ve admitted her dad to the hospital and he’ll be there several days. I guess their mom is going to stay with Barbara’s sister. It doesn’t sound like Dutch is in any real danger, but they have to get him dried out before they can send him home. He has a lot of fluids accumulated in his tissues, particularly his legs. The real worry, of course, is that the edema also occurs around the heart, causing congestive heart failure.

Here’s something weird. I just shipped a kit to California, which is in USPS zone 8, the most expensive zone. The kit, as all of them are, was in a USPS Priority Mail Regional Rate Box B. It cost $14.62 to ship. The weird part is that I could have used a USPS Priority Mail Large Flat-Rate Box–which is larger than the RR Box B and also has a weight limit of 75 pounds versus 20 pounds for the RR box–and it would have cost $14.61, a penny less. Very strange.

16:19 – The reason we assembled only 18 chemistry kits last weekend is that we ran out of one component, the 10 mL oral syringe. I’d been ordering those in bags of 100, and was just about to reorder two bags when I realized that was foolish. So I ordered a case of 500 instead. It’ll be a while before I need to reorder those. Our stock of chemistry kits is already dwindling fast, so we need to get more assembled in the next week or two. Other than the syringes, we have everything needed to assemble another dozen in a few minutes, but that’s not going to keep us for long. Once I get this forensics book put to bed, I’m going to order components for another 90 or 120 (we print labels in sheets of 30) chemistry kits and the same number of biology kits and get to work on making up and bottling the chemicals for them. While I’m at it, I’ll order components for 60 or 90 forensic science kits. Or maybe more.

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Sunday, 20 May 2012

08:00 – Barbara’s mom came home from the hospital yesterday, and seems to be doing much better. Both of Barbara’s parents have follow-up visits scheduled with their doctors, and I suggested that Barbara talk to the doctors about prescribing supplemental oxygen for her parents to keep at home, preferably an oxygen concentrator rather than something that requires oxygen tanks.

We’ll finish putting together a batch of 18 chemistry kits this afternoon, and resume shipping them tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’m still working on the forensics book.

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Saturday, 19 May 2012

09:07 – I finished writing the last of the forensic book lab sessions yesterday, although I still have to actually do the lab. It’s the one on using molybdate to assay soil phosphate concentrations. I’m pretty sure it’ll work as written because it’s widely used in the real world, but I still have to be certain.

Barbara and I are building a batch of chemistry kits this weekend so that we can ship backorders Monday. We’ll put together 30 kits, although only 18 of them will be ready to ship because we have only 18 of one of the subassemblies built. Still, that’s enough chemistry kits to fill backorders and carry us probably into next month.

Barbara’s mom should be going home from the hospital today, we hope. She’s doing much better. Barbara was glad to be home, after spending several days and nights away. Colin and I were delighted to have her home as well. Barbara and I had dinner with Mary Chervenak last night at a little Greek restaurant. I always enjoy spending time with Mary. She’s smart and outspoken, so the conversation never lags.

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Friday, 18 May 2012

07:52 – Barbara slept at her parents’ house Wednesday night and then went into work yesterday after visiting her mom at the hospital. She left work early to go back over to the hospital to visit and then have dinner with her dad. Her mom is doing better. She may or may not be released today. Barbara slept over at her parents’ house again last night. She’ll take her dad over to the hospital this morning and then head in to work. Colin and I have been scrounging meals as best we can. In the evenings, we’ve been re-watching series one and two of Heartland.

Two weeks left until the final deadline for Illustrated Guide to Home Forensic Science Experiments, and it looks like we’ll make it with time to spare. That’s good, because we definitely need to spend some time this weekend rebuilding our stock of chemistry kits.

13:12 – It’s looking increasingly possible that the breakup of the eurozone won’t result from the Greek government (such as it isn’t…) defaulting, but instead from a run on Greek banks. Greeks are now lining up outside banks to withdraw the entire amounts in their accounts. Ordinary Greeks perceive, rightly, that their money is much safer under their mattresses than it is in a Greek bank. One day soon, Greece and the world will learn with no notice that Greece is no longer in the euro, but has converted back to the drachma or whatever they choose to call their new local currency. When that happens, Greece will institute capital controls even harsher than those now in effect, to prevent euros from fleeing Greece. (Smuggling literally suitcases full of euro notes is now common; a lot of that is stopped at the borders, but I suspect most of it gets through.)

When the banks open that Morning After, Greeks will find that all of their euro deposits are now are now drachma-denominated, no doubt at an exchange rate of 1:1. Of course, despite the fact that the euro will soon itself be in free-fall, one drachma won’t actually be worth anything near one euro. When Greece adopted the euro a decade ago, the drachma:euro exchange rate was, IIRC, something like 350:1. And Greece was at that time in a lot better financial shape than it is now. My guess is that the drachma:euro exchange rate will soon be at something like 1,000:1, if not 10,000:1. And then we’ll see the real inflation taking hold, just as it did in Weimar Germany. People will have to haul a wheelbarrow full of overstamped drachma-euros up to the counter to buy a cup of coffee.

But for now, Greek banks are paying off euro depositors in euros, of which they are embarrassingly short and getting shorter. At this point, there isn’t technically a run on the Greek banks, because they’ve been able, so far, to meet depositor demands. But with Greek depositors withdrawing euros at a net of something like 5 billion a week and increasing fast, that’s likely to change very soon. Remember, neither Greek banks nor the Greek government can issue euros. They print them, yes, but only as authorized by the ECB, which isn’t authorizing them to print any more. In the absence of authorization, any euros that Greece prints will legally be counterfeits. Not that I’d expect that to prevent them from printing those euros. Desperate people take desperate actions.

So ordinary Greeks now have two priorities. First, get their euros out of Greek banks. Second, get those euros out of Greece. And who can blame them?

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Thursday, 17 May 2012

08:01 – Barbara spent most of yesterday at the hospital. Her mom is doing better. She may be released today or tomorrow. Barbara came home yesterday afternoon for a couple of hours to shower, pick up some clothes, and see Colin and me. She headed back down to the hospital around dinnertime to have dinner with her dad and sister, visit with her mom, and then spend the night with her dad at her parents’ house. She’s going into work today, and may or may not be home this evening.

I got started yesterday on the final lab session for the forensics book. This is the one I skipped back in the first group of lab chapters on soil analysis. I knew I wanted to do a session on chemical analysis of soil, but at that point I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do. I decided to do an assay of soluble inorganic phosphates using molybdate reagent, which is a 1% to 2.5% w/v solution of ammonium molybdate in a 30% to 40% aqueous solution of sulfuric acid. This reagent provides a quantitative color change in the presence of inorganic phosphates, and is sensitive down to the sub-ppm level.

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Wednesday, 16 May 2012

07:42 – We had a brief power failure Monday during the deluge. Our cable modem isn’t connected to a UPS, and Barbara commented that evening that since we had no phone service during a power outage she was going to start keeping her cell phone turned on. (In the past, she kept it off except to make calls or when she was expecting a call.) She asked me to remind her to start doing that, which I did yesterday morning.

Talk about a timely decision. About 6:15 p.m. yesterday, Barbara’s sister, Frances, called to tell me that their mom was on her way to the hospital in an ambulance. She’d been feeling ill for a couple of days, and was having trouble breathing. Of course, she didn’t want to bother Frances or Barbara, so she hadn’t said anything.

Barbara was stuck at the ballgame, because she’d left her car in the parking deck at work and ridden over to the game with a friend from work. I told her that from what Frances had said, her mom didn’t appear to be in any immediate danger now that she was at the emergency room. Barbara got over there as quickly as she could, and called later to say that her mom was stable and that they were waiting to see if the hospital would admit her or just pump her full of antibiotics and send her home. She kept me updated through the evening, although there wasn’t much to tell. They were just sitting waiting to find out what was going to happen.

Finally, around 12:30 or 1:00 this morning, Barbara called again to say they’d decided to admit her mom. Barbara didn’t want her dad, who turns 90 in July, to be at home alone overnight, so she decided to sleep over at her parents’ house. She’ll either go in late to work today, or take the day off, depending on what they find out this morning. If she goes into work, she’ll have to come home first to shower and change. I’m going to suggest that she pack a small bag with work clothes, nightgown, toothbrush, and so on, and keep it in her car just in case something like this happens again.

At this point, all we know is that Barbara’s mom has a nasty lung infection, possibly pneumonia, and that they have her on strong antibiotics. We’ll find out more this morning, no doubt. And poor Colin has no idea what’s going on or where Barbara is.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been working heads-down on the forensics book, while I watched our supply of finished science kits dwindle. I knew this would bite me. The good news is that we got four chemistry kit orders yesterday. The bad news is that we had only three finished kits in stock. So now we’re in a backorder situation until we can get more kits built. We’re waiting on one component, which I didn’t get ordered as quickly as I should have due to being busy with the forensics book. That component will arrive tomorrow, and we’ll build another couple of dozen kits over the weekend and resume shipments next Monday.

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Tuesday, 15 May 2012

07:48 – I’m working on the final lab session in the forensic biology group, on separating DNA with gel electrophoresis. That’s the final lab session, other than the one that I skipped back in the soil analysis group, on chemical characteristics of soil. For that one, I intend to do a quantitative analysis of phosphate using the molybdate test. I’ve never done that one, or if I have I don’t remember doing it, so I need to mix up some reagents and do the reaction several times under different conditions to make sure things are reproducible before I write up the lab.

Barbara’s firm is having an employee night at the stadium tonight. If it’s not rained out, she’s going to baseball game; if we have another deluge–we had 6 inches (15 cm) of rain yesterday–she’ll just hit the gym as usual.

11:33 – A year ago, I said that Greece reminded me of that scene in Blazing Saddles where Bart takes himself hostage with his pistol to his head, threatening to shoot unless his would-be lynchers backed off.

That worked for Bart, and it’s been working for Greece for a year now. Each time the Troika tried to force Greece to implement realistic measures to deal with its debt crisis, Greece refused, with the implied threat of defaulting on monies owed to EU banks, the ECB, the IMF, and other government and quasi-government entities. The EU, of course, never really cared if Greece defaulted on monies owed to private creditors. In fact, the Troika forced through the short-sighted private-sector involvement, whereby private investors were forced to take an immediate 75% write-down on the debts owed them, in return for new Greek bonds valued at a nominal 25% of the debt Greece actually owed. (Of course, those “new” Greek bonds, issued in March 2012, are now worth essentially nothing.) But the Troika made sure of the important part; that Greece continued to pay the debts owed to the Troika.

Well, it’s now obvious to everyone that those debts will also have to be written off. Actually, it’s been obvious for a long time, but EU leaders are just getting around to admitting it publicly. And, with Greece’s departure from the eurozone and return to the drachma no longer in any doubt whatsoever, Greece no longer has that threat to hold over the Troika’s head. That means no more money from the EU, the ECB, and the IMF, which means Greece must default (again) the next time a significant bond payment becomes due. That won’t be long.

Meanwhile, the EUrocrats are, as always, living in a dream world. They believe–just how catastrophically wrongly will become obvious very soon after Greece defaults–that “contagion” can be avoided. This despite the fact that Spanish 10-year bond yields are higher now than they’ve ever been since the euro was introduced, with Italian bond yields not far behind. When Greece defaults, the bond market will immediately shift its focus to the other weakling eurozone countries, namely Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland, with Belgium and France not far behind. Many people, including me, have made reference to a toppling row of dominoes, but in fact the impending catastrophe is more likely to resemble a house of cards, with the whole mess collapsing in one huge pile. I hope Germany has done as I speculated they’ve been doing, printing new marks and getting ready to change back to their old currency overnight. Otherwise, even Germany won’t escape the collapse.

The EU succeeded in putting off the collapse for a year now, but at hideous cost. I am reminded of that famous film clip of the catastrophic failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, caused by positive feedback. Everything, and I mean everything, the EU authorities have done for the past year has been positive feedback in terms of the effect on the euro, which, like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, was fatally flawed at the design stage. Ultimately, the result will be the same.

16:31 – Now that Merkozy is no more, with Francois Hollande replacing Sarkozy as the French president, we needed a new name for the French partnership with Angela Merkel. Apparently, Frangela is out to an early lead. I think my proposal is much better. Merde.

16:44 – Oh, my. The day has been full of bad omens for Greece, if you believe that sort of thing. First, Hollande’s plane was struck by lightning on its way to Berlin. Then, in a story eerily reminiscent of Harry Chapin’s 30,000 Pounds of Bananas, a tractor-trailer crash in upstate New York has spilled 36,000 pounds of yogurt. Greek yogurt.

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Sunday, 6 May 2012

08:26 – Barbara is cleaning house this morning and then heading off to her parents’ house for lunch. She’ll make a small Costco run on her way home.

I’m still working on the impression analysis lab sessions. Once I finish this group, all that remains are the groups on gunshot and explosives residues, forgeries and fakes, and forensic biology. Those and the front matter. I’m hoping to finish all of those with several days to spare before the 31 May deadline so that I can go back and do some polishing before submission and maybe even add a lab session or two.

I’ve been issuing purchase orders for materials for the forensic kits as I finish each group of lab sessions, so I’ve already accumulated a lot of stuff. The only exception is the chemical orders, which I’ll combine once I know everything I need to order.

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Saturday, 5 May 2012

08:13 – Barbara spread about 3,058,180 mL of the mulch yesterday, leaving a gigantic 37 mL (2+ tablespoons) pile of the stuff in the driveway. While she was working, we had Colin on a tie-out in the front yard. Someone came down the street walking a dog, and Colin charged out to see them at a dead run. So much for that collar. The plastic quick-release snap connector fractured. We have a drawer full of old collars, and I was going to replace Colin’s collar with a very robust one that used a standard buckle instead of a quick-release plastic snap connector. Barbara pointed out that if Colin had been wearing one of those he might have broken his neck. So we replaced his collar with another snap connector model.

I finished up the bloodstains stuff yesterday and got started on the group of lab sessions on impression analysis. If I have time, I’m going to add a session to that group. Just about every recent cop show has the cops standing around a whiteboard in the squad room, using dry-erase markers to add information to it. Well, it may surprise some people to know that criminals are also big users of whiteboards and dry-erase markers. And, like most people, criminals usually use erasers to erase the stuff on those whiteboards.

But using an eraser on a whiteboard doesn’t actually erase what’s on it. All it does is remove the microscopically thin layer of dried ink powder, leaving traces of the carrier on the board. Those traces can be dusted with fingerprint powder to make them readable. Although I can’t find anything in the literature about using iodine fuming to make those latent traces visible, I suspect that might work at least as well as dusting. I’ll try it. Meanwhile, smart criminals use a paper towel soaked in isopropanol to wet-erase their dry-erase boards. I’ve already tried that, and found that it makes dusting useless to recover latent traces.

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Friday, 4 May 2012

07:27 – I finished the group of lab sessions on revealing latent fingerprints yesterday, and got started on blood. I think we’ll include only one or two sessions on revealing bloodstains. The problem is that, with the exception of Kastle-Meyer reagent, blood reagents are (a) extremely expensive, too much so for a kit, and/or (b) very hazardous, and/or (c) require specialized equipment like a forensic alternate light source, and/or (d) just don’t work very well. Meanwhile, stuff for the forensic science kits is starting to accumulate in large piles.

Barbara is taking a day off work to run errands and get some stuff done around home. She had a pile of mulch dumped in the driveway yesterday. I estimate there’s about 3,058,207 mL of the stuff. Right after the guy left, Colin ran over to the pile, sniffed it, grabbed a mouthful, and ate it.

If you want to grab any O’Reilly ebooks, today’s the day. They’re having a 50% off sale on all titles, and all of them are DRM-free.

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