07:17 – We’re back in stock and shipping chemistry kits, so I’m back to working heads-down on the forensics book. I’ll finish the text later this week, which leaves me a week to go back and clean things up, shoot more images, and so on.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
07:59 – I finished the first two lab sessions in the forensic biology lab group yesterday, on pollen and diatoms, and got started on the third, on extracting and isolating DNA. After I finish that and the final lab session, on DNA gel electrophoresis, I have to write one lab session I left out, on chemical analysis of soil, and then it’ll be on to the front matter.
Mary Chervenak stopped by yesterday to drop off some empty one-liter soda bottles, which I use as disposable containers when we’re making up solutions for the lab kits. Paul left town last week, on his way out to Colorado or Utah, where he plans to view the Venus transit on June 8th. Ordinarily, I don’t mention when friends are away from home, but in this case Paul and Mary have both posted about it on their Facebook pages, so I’m not giving anything away. Anyway, anyone who tried to take advantage of Paul’s absence to bother Mary would be in for a nasty shock. Mary is a shooter.
07:57 – I finished the third and final lab session in the forgery group yesterday, and also finished the re-write on the Preface and Lab Safety chapters. All I have left other than the forensic biology lab group are the chapters on equipment and chemicals and lab procedures.
07:27 – I finished the second lab session in the forgery group yesterday, on analysis of inks by chromatography, and started the third and final lab session in that group, on analysis of papers. There are 20 days left until deadline, and I have every one of those allocated.