Category: science kits

08:39 – Barbara spent the night with her dad and will return home later this morning. Frances will stay with Dutch tonight, and then Barbara will stay with him again Monday night.

Barbara was surprised yesterday afternoon when her cell phone rang and it was her mother, calling from the hospital. Her mother apparently thought she was working in a bank, and was calling Barbara to tell her that her check hadn’t cleared. Barbara tried to explain to Sankie that she was in the hospital and that there was no check. She then called the hospital to ask why her mother was being allowed to make phone calls, which she hadn’t been allowed to do while she was in the psych ward here in Winston-Salem. Apparently, the Thomasville hospital has different policies. They told Barbara that Sankie was allowed to make one phone call every three hours. Barbara asked the nurse to make sure that her mother didn’t have her or Frances’s cell, home, or work phone numbers. They’re going to allow Sankie to call Dutch and only Dutch. Understandably, Dutch doesn’t want to see or talk to Sankie while she’s in this state, but he can just let the answering machine pick up and screen his calls. Everyone is hoping that Sankie will recover, but at this point I don’t think anyone is really expecting her to.

Even with all of this going on, Barbara has been helping me build more science kits. We sold a biology kit and a chemistry kit yesterday, which took us down to less than a dozen biology kits and only two chemistry kits in stock. Fortunately, we now have everything we need to build another five dozen chemistry kits, and we’re not far from having what we need to build another five dozen biology kits. Forensic kits are still in good supply.

09:14 – Barbara and her dad took Sankie to her psychiatrist yesterday afternoon. She wasn’t in there five minutes, literally, before the doctor said he’d been seeing her for many years but he’d never seen her like this, and that she belonged in the hospital. He has an outpatient clinic here in Winston-Salem, but his home hospital is in Thomasville, about 40 minutes to our southeast. There was a bed available, so Barbara drove her dad and mom to Thomasville and waited while they admitted her mother. By then, it was nearing dinnertime, so they met Frances at a restaurant here in Winston-Salem. Getting out of the car, Dutch shut the car door on his leg and gashed it badly, so it was off to the emergency room again. Frances took their dad to the hospital. Dutch wasn’t badly hurt and it didn’t require both of them to be there, so Barbara came home. When she got home, the first words out of her mouth were, “I have no life.” I am reminded of Dorothy Parker, “What fresh hell can this be?”

11:13 – Barbara is out running errands–supermarket, library, drugstore, etc. She talked to her sister this morning. Frances had stayed last night with their dad because they didn’t arrive home from the hospital until midnight. Bonnie Richardson, one of our astronomy club buddies, called Barbara Friday to let her know that her dad had died. Barbara’s going to visit the funeral home this evening on her way over to stay with her dad tonight. Tomorrow, Frances will take over and Barbara will come home with her parents’ laundry for me to do. Frances stays with her dad tomorrow night. Barbara goes to work as usual on Monday and then goes straight from work to her dad’s. She stays with him Monday night, which makes sense anyway because she has to take him to an 8:00 a.m. doctor appointment Tuesday morning to get the paperwork filled out for Dutch to get one of those battery-powered scooters.

The federal government has apparently clamped down bigtime on paying for those scooters, which is understandable because they cost $2,000 or more. What’s really strange is the scooter becomes Dutch’s property as soon as it’s approved. Once Dutch no longer needs it, the feds don’t take back the scooter. We can sell it on eBay or whatever. Conversely, although one can buy identical products on-line for $600 or so, Dutch’s oxygen apparatus is only rented. It goes back when he no longer needs it.

I ordered only one pack of 500 of the RIA vials and caps, and I wish I’d ordered more. They’re basically 12x75mm hydrophobic polypropylene 5 mL test tubes with snap-fit airtight HDPE caps, and they’re ideal as storage containers for small amounts of chemicals. We’re currently building components for a batch of 60 biology kits, and we’re using eight of those vials per kit to contain materials that we used to package in coin envelopes. Things like gelatin, carrot seeds, and so on. The RIA vials/caps cost a bit more than coin envelopes, but they’re easier to label, fill, and seal and they’re more convenient for users, so we’ve decided to start using them rather than coin envelopes for many items.

09:23 – Barbara and Frances called it quits last night. Frances stayed with their parents last night, but that was the final night. They’ve decided that their parents don’t need them there at night; their mom simply desperately wants them there 24 hours. Barbara and Frances are now convinced that their mom is simply acting out to make sure they won’t leave her alone with Dutch. Barbara’s friend Marcie cares for older people, and they’re hiring her to visit their parents as needed to help their parents during the day.

Even with everything that’s been going on, we’ve made progress on kit stuff. We now have everything needed to build another batch of 60 chemistry kits, and much of what we need for another batch of biology kits. Once we finish that, we’ll start labeling yet another batch of bottles for 60 chemistry kits, then bottles for biology kits again, and so on. My goal is to start the busy period in early July with components on hand that will allow us to quickly assemble at least 240 chemistry kits, 120 biology kits, 120 life science kits, and 60 forensics kits.

One thing I’d thought about but hadn’t fully realized the implications of is that our bin system is breaking down. It’s one thing to have bins, each with, say, 30 filled bottles of the chemical and another 30 labeled but unfilled bottles. It’s quite another to have to store, say, 120 filled bottles and another 120 unfilled. The current bins aren’t big enough, and there’s not enough shelf space to substitute bins four times the size. Same thing with storage for made-up solutions. Until now, I’ve been using a mixture of one- and two-liter bottles. I might, for example, have made up one liter of iodine solution, which is sufficient for about kit 30 bottles. Now I’m making the stuff up four liters at a time. And then there’s the matter of storing finished kits to await shipment. The current storage area has room for 60 kits, but certainly not four or five times that many.

That leaves two options, neither of which Barbara is crazy about. First, I could use the finished area downstairs. Second, I could park my Trooper outdoors, at the end of the drive, and build floor-to-ceiling shelves in the vacated area. On balance, given the level of sales I expect this year, I think we can make it through 2013 without any major changes. But if our growth rate continues, we’re probably going to have to rent space in 2014.

08:20 – It’s spitting snow as I write this. Barbara is coming home this morning. Frances will be covering tonight at their parents, and they’ll discuss whether their parents can get along without one of them starting Sunday night. I hope so, because Barbara and Frances both need their lives back.

I labeled and capped 63 125 mL bottles of the fertilizer concentrate yesterday, to go with the dozen bottles I already had in stock. I may just go ahead and make up another 75 bottles, which’d give me enough for 150 biology kits. The solution is completely stable, so shelf life isn’t an issue. As with many of the solutions in our kits, we add 1 mL/L of 10% thymol solution as a preservative. Thymol at 100 mg/L inhibits growth of molds and bacteria.

I also discovered that the Vita Grow Part C powder (pure monopotassium phosphate) had doubled in price since I ordered it less than a year ago, from $18 for four pounds to $36. That means that for about the same cost, I can just make up the fertilizer A concentrate from reagent grade phosphoric acid and potassium hydroxide. It’s also quicker. I can just dilute 149.3 mL of concentrated phosphoric acid to about 3.5 L, dissolve 224.3 g of potassium hydroxide in that dilute acid solution, make it up to 4 L, and the solution is complete.

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.