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.