09:41 – Barbara’s mom seems to be doing pretty well. Last night was the first she’d spent alone since she got out of the hospital. Barbara and Frances are arranging to have someone come in for a couple hours three or four times a week to help her with laundry, cleaning, and so on. But they’ve made it completely clear to Sankie that she’s going to have to make it on her own. No more having someone with her 24 hours a day. Unfortunately, Dutch isn’t doing well at all. I cringe every time the phone rings.
We’re hoping that today will be a relatively ordinary day. Barbara is out cutting the grass right now, and I’m doing laundry. She’s going to go over to visit her dad this afternoon. I’ll go with her if she wants me to. Visiting Dutch isn’t easy for me and of course is even harder for Barbara. The last two or three days when I visited, he just sat there unresponsive most of the time. When he did speak, I couldn’t understand most of what he said and I got no sense that he understood anything I said. Frances and Sankie visited Dutch last night. Barbara talked later to Frances, who said that Dutch was so deeply asleep when they arrived that they couldn’t wake him. When they did, he was talking nonsense for a while, but he did eventually start talking and acting normally for a while at least. I told Barbara that that reminded me of my father toward the end. He was generally non-responsive, but when my brother drove over from Raleigh to visit, my dad would intentionally try to act and speak normally and would tell my brother that he was fine. As soon as my brother left, my dad would immediately drop back into his non-responsive state. Dutch is behaving the same way, telling people that he’s not ill and that he’s going to get his strength back and return to live with Sankie at Creekside. Obviously, that’s not going to happen, but I think Dutch actually believes it will.
13:50 – Barbara is out running errands and visiting her dad. I’m finishing up the laundry, printing container labels, and putting together purchase orders.
We’re down to about 4,000 bottles in stock. With about 1,800, we’re in good shape on the 30 mL wide-mouth pharma packers, because we don’t use them in large numbers. Depending on the mix of kits, 1,800 is enough for something in the range of 350 to 600 kits. We also have 1,000 or so of the 30 mL amber glass bottles on hand, which again we use in relative small numbers. But we have only 1,100 of the 15 mL PE bottles, which we use in very large numbers, and we’re completely out of the 30 mL PE bottles, which we use in numbers about half as large as the 15 mL ones. So I’m cutting a PO for 4,400 more of the 15 mL and 3,000 of the 30 mL, along with caps for them.
It’s time to stop screwing around with making up only enough for 30 or 60 sets of chemicals or small parts bags. Other than chemicals with relatively short expiration dates (such as the Kastle-Meyer reagent in the forensics kits), we’re going to start making up stuff in batches sufficient for 90 to 180 kits at a crack.
That also means I’m using some different suppliers. For example, until now, I’ve been buying multiple bottles of methylene blue stain from one of our regular suppliers. That vendor carries only 10 g bottles, which is sufficient to make up one liter per bottle of stain powder. So this time I’m going with a vendor that carries methylene blue stain in 100 g bottles. That’s sufficient for 10 liters, or 667 kits’ worth. I may make up only four liters at a time, but at least I won’t have to keep track of how many small bottles of the stain I have on hand.
re Suppliers, if you’re happy with VendorX but they offer only 10mL bottles, why not ask if they can start offering the bigger bottles? In particular, you might be able to get a 40mL bottle rather than 100.
Unless, of course, you’ve already been dealing with VendorY and are happy with their service and they offer the 100mL.
In my own life, both business and personal, I’m willing to spend a little extra in order to keep dealing with reliable people. Often this means the particular sales person or service person rather than a particular corporation or owner, but the principle holds.
Of course. I’m the same way. The second vendor is reliable, and I really need to second- and third-source stuff anyway because of backorders.
Incidentally, I don’t mean to be insulting when I make probably-obvious suggestions to you or Lynn or whoever.* I find that it’s better to share too much information or experience than too little, even at the risk of coming off like a condescending know-it-all. I don’t know how many times it’s been mentioned that PersonA learned something useful in life or business or PersonB figured out how to do something. Something I’d known for ages and would have been glad to share with them if I’d known they didn’t know. And in the other direction, too.
* As a rule, if I mean to be insulting, there’s not a shadow of a doubt about my intent. The only times I can recall not managing to insult someone involved a language barrier in one case and a massively inflated sense of self-worth in the other. In the latter case, she was so full of herself and so bone-deep convinced that any man would fall at her gorgeous feet to worship them that she simply couldn’t comprehend that I was saying things to her in order to make her feel bad.
I don’t offend easily. The last time anyone really offended me was in 1979, and he used a 2×4 to do it.
I was in a warehouse that we had security for. The company was on strike, and the warehouse was very difficult to secure. We heard some stuff that sounded suspicious, so a few of us went in to do a walk-through. I encountered an intruder. Well, actually, he surprised me. (I hate walking into things instead of waiting for someone to come to me…). He got in one swing with the 2×4, which fortunately only grazed me. I was lying on the floor offended, and getting ready to offend him several times with my .45 but he dropped the 2×4. He’d spotted three of my buddies, one with a 12-gauge and two with .45’s, getting ready to offend him repeatedly.
Damn, that’s really offensive, Bob. And I am just taking a really wild guess here, but I bet there are actually people in this country, yes, this very country, who were/are offended that you guys were so offensive.
I have to say that in all my years working for Uncle and the street cop and civvie life thereafter, no one has ever, ever got the drop on ol’ OFD. Sure, someone can easily snipe my ass from whatever distance, but nobody’s ever jumped me physically, not since junior high. Being on the football team helped me become certifiably paranoid (I was an “end”, what would be a wide receiver or tight end nowadays) after being driven into the turf a few times by gigantic fat guys. Then some of Uncle’s good ol’ boyz instructed me real good in how to become even more paranoid, and the kicker was when they ran a demo of an NVA sapper (turncoat volunteer), yeah, just like in a couple of movies that showed this since then. These buggers trained for a full year in how to do this gig; just wearing shorts and carrying satchel charges, an AK and a pair of wire-cutters, slide on through a shit-load of triple-standard concertina wire, trip flares, sentry dogs, mines, regular patrols, etc., and get onto an air base and blow up the aircraft. Then fight your way back off the base.
This guy went through all that stuff like shit through a goose and was in our faces in no time at all.
Since then, and with the years on nighttime city streets walking a beat, I don’t get jumped or “offended.”
And gotta be even more paranoid now because I’m so old and rickety.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/PaGAy5XEv-o?feature=player_detailpage
(via Daily Pundit)
Very nice; as one commentator mentioned, names and addresses and work locations and vehicle intel can easily be found, collected and dealt with accordingly. Lawsuits are fine for now, assuming one has the wherewithal financially to get them going; viral media/internet distribution is vital, as is the case here; and eventually, yeah, more drastic measures will have to be taken.
This will not stand.
“I don’t offend easily. The last time anyone really offended me was in 1979, and he used a 2×4 to do it.”
Did he live to see 1980?
“Did he live to see 1980?”
I am guessing that young Bob and his trusty sidekicks did not actually murder the poor stupid bastard on the spot.
I will further guess that they may have let him go, seeing as how he probably crapped his skivvies.
But more likely they called the local huckleberry cops (and during this period I was one of those guys myself, only much further northeast) and they came and arrested the slob. Doubtless he had a record of similar bullshit and he maybe got sent off to the local county jail for B&E In The Daytime and A&B w/DW, and whatever else they felt like tagging him with depending on how much of an asshole he was. So probably a year or two, max, in the local slam. Doubtless also, being so stupid as to whack a guy Bob’s size with a measly 2×4, he went on to make a career of similar bullshit crimes and maybe somebody finally dumped a round or two in his brisket.
-sniff- I love a story with a happy ending.
We turned him over to the local cops. I have no idea what happened after that.
Actually, the local cop we turned him over to was named Muzzie, although I’m not sure how that’s spelled or if it was a real name or a nickname. He worked for the Greentree, PA PD, which was only fair considering the crime occurred in Greentree. The guy who owned the company was the son of the Greentree Chief of Police.
To this day, I giggle when I see a cop on TV carefully press down a cuffed suspect’s head before putting him in the back seat of the cruiser. Muzzie was an accomplished expert at putting scum into the back seat, making sure they bashed their heads hard on the roof of the cruiser on the way in.
“Muzzie was an accomplished expert at putting scum into the back seat, making sure they bashed their heads hard on the roof of the cruiser on the way in.”
Some of us were also accomplished experts at that sort of thing, depending, like I mentioned above, on how much of an asshole the guy was. Another trick, if the guy struggled and fought us a lot, was to bend him forward over the hood of the cruiser and then pull his cuffed wrists high up in the air behind him, a portable strappado, if you will. This usually got them howling and made certain of their immediate cooperation. Some guys also had special cuffs that were like thumbscrews for the wrists. And some guys also had leather gloves in the colder months with powdered lead shot in the knuckles. Etc., etc.
OFD never bothered with any of that stuff, though; being large and in charge usually did the trick; worst troublemakers were the scrawny wiry little bastards that could get their feet/legs back through the cuffs so they’d be cuffed in front, usually in seconds, too. And women. Women never to be trusted, period.