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.