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.