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Month: April 2014

Sunday, 20 April 2014

08:24 – Barbara got a phone call around 9:00 last night from Pam, her mom’s caregiver. Pam reported that Sankie was doing very badly, and apparently in pain. Barbara told her to call Hospice, who would send someone out to see Sankie and determine if she needed to be moved to the Hospice facility. We haven’t heard back from Hospice, so apparently the visiting nurse was able to administer pain medication and get Sankie stabilized. Barbara didn’t sleep very well last night, anticipating a call that didn’t come. With Sankie not eating and no longer able to speak, I suspect it’s not going to be much longer.

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Saturday, 19 April 2014

09:59 – Barbara and Frances met the Hospice nurse at 5:30 yesterday at Sankie’s apartment. The nurse determined that Sankie isn’t ready to be moved to Hospice yet, but she’s now officially under Hospice care. That means no more trips to the doctor, and if there’s a crisis they’ll call Hospice instead of 911. If Sankie continues to get worse, they’ll eventually move her directly to Hospice. There’s no telling how long that might be. It could be weeks or it could be days. I suspect days is more likely than weeks. So, for now, we’re all in waiting mode.

It’s a cold, breezy, wet day. Barbara has yard work she wants to do, but that’ll have to wait for tomorrow. She’s out running errands at the moment. When she returns, she’ll get started on labeling 90 more sets of bottles for chemistry kits while she watches some of the series she likes on Netflix streaming.

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Friday, 18 April 2014

08:22 – The lead story in the morning paper is about a guy who’s being tried for involuntary manslaughter. He’s accused of passing a stopped school bus, striking and killing an 11-year-old boy. The driver claims that the school bus had its yellow lights flashing, but had not yet extended the stop-arm and started flashing its red lights. At least one witness confirms the driver’s story. At least one other witness disputes it. Given what information the news stories have provided, if I were on the jury I’d vote to acquit based on reasonable doubt.

Regardless of what actually happened in this case, there’s no question that many drivers think nothing of passing stopped school buses. Barbara watched it happen earlier this week. She said the driver didn’t even slow down, just blew past a stopped school bus. That happens in North Carolina thousands of times every year. In the US as a whole, probably thousands of times every week. I told Barbara I was surprised that school buses don’t have HD video cameras installed front and rear as standard equipment, set up to start recording video and GPS data every time the yellow caution lights are turned on. When a bus driver finishes the run and reports an incident, that video should be provided to the police for investigation and prosecution.

I’m trying to cut down on the inventory of labeled but empty bottles. Right now, I’m working on getting bottles filled for another batch of 60 biology kits. Next up is filling bottles for 90 more chemistry kits, followed by 60 forensic science kits. Then it’ll be lather, rinse, repeat.

14:27 – Hmmm. One of our upcoming kits is for AP Chemistry, so I was out looking around the web to see what else is out there. I came across a supposed AP Chemistry kit from one of our competitors that included the following in its contents list:

qsl-ap-chemApparently, this kit contains a dilute solution of … water.

16:03 – This isn’t good. Barbara called to tell me that her mom’s caregiver had called to say that her mom had stopped eating and stopped talking. The most she could get out of Sankie was an occasional grunt. Barbara and Frances are going to meet the evaluator from Hospice over at their mom’s apartment at 5:30 to see what the evaluator thinks. If the evaluator thinks Sankie belongs in Hospice now and if they have a room available Barbara says they’ll transfer her tonight or perhaps tomorrow.

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Thursday, 17 April 2014

10:17 – Success! I finally managed to get postage/customs labels printed for the international shipment that’s been sitting here in the queue since Monday. I did it by installing the Opera browser. From now on, I’ll use Opera only for printing USPS postage labels.

Also, as it turns out, I was wrong about not being able to use PayPal Shipping to produce postage/customs labels for Priority Mail International. It didn’t offer me that option yesterday because I was shipping to US addresses. When I ship to an international address, it gives me the choice of Priority Mail International or Priority Mail Express International. Duh.

So at this point I’m comfortable using only USPS. One way or another, I can get postage labels printed, and that’s all that matters. I’m quite happy otherwise with USPS. It’s cheap, fast, and reliable.

Barbara has been quite patient, but she’s mentioned several times recently that she’d like me to get all the kit clutter cleaned up. Currently, I have kit stuff stacked up in my office and the stockroom upstairs, along with the library/living room, dining room, and kitchen. Until yesterday, there was also a lot of kit stuff in the den. In fact, only our bedroom/bathroom, the hall bathroom, and Barbara’s office are kit-free. The unfinished area downstairs, of course, has tons of kit stuff, although the finished area other than my lab is kit-free. So I told Barbara this morning that if she has time to help this weekend, I’d like to spend some serious time getting the clutter cleared away and organized. I’m sure she’s delighted.

The new neighbors, across the street and two houses down, moved in yesterday. They’re a married couple, Zakiah and Bernard. As is so often true of married couples, she is very friendly and outgoing while he is quieter and more reserved. Friendly, but not effusive. If I understood correctly, she is a mental-health counselor and he’s a substance-abuse counselor.

They have four children, ranging in age from 1 to 13. Barbara and I met the three older kids last night when we were walking Colin. The oldest is at a STEM magnet school. He wants (for now, anyway) to major in college in marine biology. Zakiah says that until recently he wanted to pursue robotics, but one way or another it sounds to me as though he’ll be a STEM major.

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Wednesday, 16 April 2014

11:36 – The USPS Click-N-Ship website is still not accepting payments. I’ve done everything I can think of on my end. I’ve tried using two different browsers on two computers. I’ve cleared the cache and cookies. I’ve tried paying with three different credit cards, all of which are good and none of which worked, and I’ve tried paying via PayPal. No dice. The USPS website simply refuses to accept payments. I even created a new USPS Click-N-Ship account in Barbara’s name. It does the same thing. I’ve emailed USPS and gotten no response. I’ve called them repeatedly and spent long times on hold before finally giving up and trying again later.

As it turns out, I am able to ship some kits by using the PayPal shipping feature, but it’s less than ideal. It provides only some USPS Priority Mail options. The only two useful ones are the USPS PM Large Flat-Rate Box and the straight distance/weight Priority Mail option. Notably absent are the Regional-Rate Box options, and we use RR boxes for about 90% of our kit shipments. I just used the distance/weight PayPal PM option to ship a kit to Florida in a regional-rate box B. That would have cost $8.10 in postage if the RR box option was available with PayPal. It isn’t, so I shipped via the standard PM distance/weight rate, which was $8.55. The extra $0.45 on this shipment isn’t too bad, but that’s because it’s a nearby destination. The RR box B rate is the same as the 4-pound distance/weight PM rate, but our kits range from 5 to 7 pounds. The one I just shipped was at the 5-pound rate, but the differential increases rapidly with each extra pound and each additional zone. A typical kit is going to cost me several dollars extra to ship via PayPal’s USPS PM option relative to the USPS price for a RR box. But at least I can ship the kits. The problem is that PayPal has no International PM option. I’ve had a kit sitting waiting to ship to Denmark since Monday, and no way to generate postage for it.

As I was fuming about this problem yesterday, I had a scary thought. This is happening now, during a very slow time for kit sales. What if it happened in July, August, or September, when we might be shipping 50 or 100 kits a week? Right now, the problem is annoying; if it happened in August, it’d be disastrous. I simply can’t afford to take that risk.

So yesterday I looked again at UPS and FedEx. I set up a UPS account, and I intend to get set up to begin shipping via UPS Ground. (Air isn’t an option at this point because of UPS restrictions on hazardous chemicals.)

Comparing shipping costs between USPS and UPS is complicated. USPS provides free boxes. With UPS, I have to buy boxes, which cost around $1/each delivered. For our typical kits, which weigh 5 to 7 pounds, USPS Regional Rate costs from $6.16 for nearby zones to $14.42 for zone 7. For zone 8, we use Large Flat-Rate Boxes, which cost $15.80, versus $16.28 for a RR box B to zone 8, including Alaska and Hawaii. UPS Ground costs $7.30 to $11.61 for similar distance/weight, except that shipments to Alaska or Hawaii cost from $34.36 to $45.76. None of those include the numerous surcharges that UPS applies, including fees for picking up from or delivering to a residence, delivery area surcharges, package tracking surcharges, fuel surcharges, etc. etc. And UPS also charges to pick up the packages here, which costs $10 to $20 per week.

Just eyeballing things, my impression is that UPS will cost considerably more than USPS for shipments to the lower 48 states, and for 2 to 5 day delivery times versus 1 to 3 day for USPS. For shipments to Alaska and Hawaii, there’s no contest. USPS charges $15.80, while UPS will cost at least $40 and probably $50, $60, or more. International shipments are even worse. A kit that costs us $50 to ship via USPS Priority Mail International will cost two to three times that much via UPS. And that doesn’t count the very high customs brokerage fees that UPS charges and USPS doesn’t.

You know what? I just talked myself out of using UPS. Costs much more, slower deliveries, more hassles. Worst case, even when the USPS website isn’t working properly I can use PayPay to ship via USPS Priority Mail distance/weight or flat rate, at least to US addresses.

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Tuesday, 15 April 2014

09:58 – With the taxes done and off, at least I can get back to my real work. Or I could, if the USPS Click-and-Ship website would let me print postage labels. I have kits sitting here ready to go, if only I could print postage for them. What is it about government websites? One would think that the disastrous roll-out of the Obamacare website would have made USPS think twice about the website “upgrade” they did earlier this year, but apparently not. I have this mental image of rooms full of government website developers, all wearing kamikaze headbands.

Kit sales are extremely slow. In fact, kit revenues for the month to date are less than half the amount of the purchase orders I’ve issued this month. I’m beginning to feel like the Maytag repairman. I suspect kit sales will pick up now that tax day has passed. They did in 2012 and 2013.

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Monday, 14 April 2014

12:12 – The taxes are complete and in the mail, so I don’t have to bother about them for another year. Well, except for the big estimated tax checks I have to write every quarter. Everything would be so much better if government at all levels operated like a charity, and had to depend on purely voluntary contributions. And those contributions should be earmarkable, so that I could, for example, allocate X percent of my check to the fire department, Y amount to garbage collection, Z amount to the libraries, and so on. Of course, I could instead decide to support free-market alternatives to any or all of those, as could anyone else.

Barbara and Frances took their mom to a doctor appointment this morning. The doctor specifically asked that both of them be present. As expected, the news isn’t good. They did a DNR for Sankie. Barbara and Frances intend to keep Sankie at the Creekside independent-living facility as long as possible, paying for a caregiver to be present around the clock. The doctor is contacting Hospice to arrange for their palliative care folks to visit Sankie at home to keep her comfortable. At this point, there’s nothing anyone can do to fix Sankie’s problems. Barbara and Frances will move Sankie to Hospice when the time comes. As Barbara said, that could be 6 months, 6 weeks, 6 days, or 6 hours. No one knows, although I’d be very surprised if it’s as long as six months.

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Sunday, 13 April 2014

08:52 – Barbara is cleaning house this morning. She plans to watch golf this afternoon, and wanted some kit stuff to work on while she did that. So I’ll have her cutting, packing, and labeling fabric swatches for forensic kits. That’s 90 each of six different fabrics, or 540 total envelopes.

I’ve finished our taxes, so I’ll get them packaged up and ready to go into the mail tomorrow.

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Saturday, 12 April 2014

11:00 – Barbara is off to the supermarket and I’m doing laundry. Before we could do that we had to unpack and check in a shipment from one of our vendors in order to clear a path to the washer/dryer and Barbara’s car. This shipment takes us back up to comfortable inventory levels on a lot of components: 200 more boxes of flat microscope slides, 45 dozen 6″ rulers, 30 dozen 100 mL graduated cylinders, 40 dozen test tube brushes, and similar numbers of several other items.

Barbara took her mom out to dinner last night. She said Sankie is doing a bit better. Not a lot, but at least not any worse.

13:36 – You know those stories (many confirmed) about light bulbs that have been burning steadily for 100 years or more? Well, I have a similar situation with one of my calculators. I’ve printed the state and federal tax forms, but before I send them off I always double/triple-check my math. For this final check, I’m using my HP-12C calculator, which I bought in 1983 when I started on my MBA from Wake Forest University’s Babcock School. I used it very heavily then and for some time thereafter, although in recent years it’s mostly sat in a desk drawer. But the odd thing is that the batteries I installed when I bought it 30 years ago are still in there, and still working fine. The original and only set.

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Friday, 11 April 2014

08:17 – Yesterday was one of those days when nothing goes right. I tried to print our federal tax forms duplexed. The printer sat there with the receiving data LED blinking for about four or five minutes and then just did nothing. I checked the print queue. There was nothing in the queue and the printer status showed ready. So I sent the job again. Same deal. So I sent the job to the other laser printer. Same deal. So I tried sending it non-duplexed to the first printer. Again, five minutes of waiting and then the job just disappeared with nothing printed. So I tried printing just the first page. Again, I waited five minutes or so with the receiving data LED blinking. This time, the printer actually printed a page but when I looked at it it was just a box with a data overflow error.

So I called Barbara at work and asked if she could print the forms there if I emailed them to her. I did that, and she sent them off to her printer. The printer spat them out, but when she looked at them they were just the blank forms, with none of our data filled in. Okay, obviously the problem was okular, the PDF reader supplied with Linux Mint. So I installed Acrobat Reader on my computer and called up the completed 1040 form. No user data were visible in the fields, so I started over using Acrobat Reader to fill in the blank 1040 form. I saved the form and sent it to the printer, where it printed normally. Geez.

By this time it was almost 5:00. I checked my email and found a message from AmEx alerting me to suspicious charges on my card. So I called them and learned that someone had tried to put a $2,700 charge on my card at Best Buy. I told them that I hadn’t made that charge, along with a couple of others that had been made that day. They said they’d refused those charges anyway, but my card had been compromised (yet again…) and so they were voiding it and sending me a new one.

I decided to bag work for the day. Barbara got home from the gym and we had dinner. Then Frances called about 8:30 to say that she’d gotten a message about the tests that the doctor had done Monday on their mom. Sankie has a Streptococcus pyogenes (hemolytic streptococcus) infection, and the doctor had phoned in a prescription, presumably for penicillin. Frances had already had a long day, and wondered if she could wait until this morning to pick up the prescription rather than going to the pharmacy to pick it up and take it over to her mother immediately. I told her that, given her mom’s very frail physical condition and the potential severe risks of an S. pyogenes infection, she really should get her mom on the antibiotic as soon as possible. So Frances drove over to the 24-hour pharmacy to pick up the prescription and take it to her mother. She called back a little while later to say that the doctor had phoned the prescription in to the wrong pharmacy, one that was already closed. So she’s headed over to that pharmacy this morning and then delivering the prescription to her mom. At this point, I’m thinking about applying for a DEA number so that I can write my own damned prescriptions.

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