08:00 – ObamaCare strikes. The top headline in our paper this morning was “Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center Cuts 950 Jobs“. The spokesman made a point of saying that the cuts were preemptive, and not a result of any financial difficulties. WFU/BMC is preparing itself for the new economic realities. As the article pointed out, we can expect to see similar cuts at other hospitals across the state and the nation.
That’s just the beginning of the destructive and distorting effects that ObamaCare will have on our economy and our society. I have many acquaintances who own small businesses, and several of them have told me that they’ll be making changes to minimize the effects of ObamaCare on themselves and their companies. These range from shifting away from using all full-time employees toward temporary/part-time/contract labor to cutting payrolls to get under the 50-employee statutory minimum to splitting their companies into two or three smaller companies. Two or three that currently provide health insurance have said that they plan to eliminate it because it’ll be cheaper to pay the annual fine than to continue to pay health insurance premiums. One thing is sure: ObamaCare is going to hurt small businesses and their employees.
10:04 – Well, that was interesting. They’re still re-roofing the house across the street. Colin is terrified of popping and banging sounds, so I’ve been taking him downstairs and out the back door.
The instant we went out the back door, Colin froze in his alert position. I followed his sight line and saw what I at first thought was a stray dog down in the corner of our back yard. But Colin wasn’t barking frantically, as he would if there was another dog in his yard. Instead, he froze and snarled. Let me tell you, Colin has an absolutely vicious-looking set of fangs and a low, rumbling growl that should scare anything.
It was a coyote, of course, and it quickly decided that discretion was the better part of valor. I could just see what was running through its mind in the instant before it turned and ran for its life. “Holy Shit! That thing is twice my size and its ears stick straight up. WOLLLLLFFF!”
11:31 – Well, crap. I just finished making up three liters of IKI (iodine/potassium iodide) solution for the kits. I make this solution and many others up in gallon orange juice bottles that Barbara provides me at a rate of about one a week. So, I just finished making up the three liters of IKI when I realized that I’d need to transfer it to glass bottles because the IKI penetrates the orange juice bottles if it’s left in them for more than a few days. So off I went in search of six 500 mL glass bottles with cone liners. I found six of them, all already filled with IKI solution. So now I have six liters of IKI, which is enough for about 200 kits. Oh, well. The stuff keeps forever, and fortunately I have many spare glass bottles to transfer it to.