End of the Year

Vacation is almost over, so I'll get back to writing.

Happy New Year, everyone. All the best in the next...

m-65

So what does go on that big work surface?

Ah distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak September… Freshman year of high school, to be a little more descriptive. The high school of Paw Paw, Michigan, at the time, was a 1960s construction, which meant that it had a big "industrial science" wing. One of those classrooms – unheard of in normal public schools today – was an engine shop. Maybe three or four classes a year would cycle through and learn how to rebuild a lawnmower engine. With one piston and less than four horse power (remember when lawnmowers used to simply be functional?), most anyone could spend one hour a day tearing an engine down and putting it back together and get it done in twelve weeks. I was hooked.
The summer after that, I rebuilt another one on my own. I did another one the following summer. Around that time, I met a girl and – more important to this story – I met a girl's father. He went by Roadie. He had a dog named Sandy and a 1967 Chevy Truck with a Pontiac engine in it. That summer, the three of us (Roadie, the girl and me…the guy…) spent a lot of time together and I freely admit that he had a large impact on my life. Those things that I've screwed since wouldn't have happened if I remembered, "whenever you decide to do anything, imagine that everyone in the world knows why you made that decision and see how you feel about it." Sure, it's the golden rule reworded, but it makes a good point. But sometimes it's so hard to remember with some passion on the line! Nobody's perfect, and I digress…
One discussion I remember, on a dry summer day on the front stairs of the house…a mean and probably demonically possessed rooster stalking us, but that's another digression waiting to happen…was about was an old motorcycle he had way back when. That's the way he started learning about engine work. I said to him, "I took a small engines class once and really liked it." He said, "well hell, a Harley engine is just one step over a push lawnmower."
That was a little over twelve years ago. Sunday, I bought a 1967 Harley Davidson two-stroke m-65 motorbike (not a full size motorcycle, but something fun to work on). It came in two boxes of parts that broke the will of the previous owner. So it begins…

A Big Work Area

One of the more inconvenient things in my life of renting apartments was the lack of workspace. I don’t mean for this to be an excuse for my lack of creation over all of those years, as I am sure that millions of the world’s best inventions were born out of broom closets or studio apartments. But I’m not in the “have one of the world’s best ideas” line – I need workspace.
As you may recall, I recently finished my greenhouse. Today, I built an 8’ x 3’ workbench in it, with a ¾” plywood top. It’s magnificent. Hell, it’s a bed!
I have left over lumber and that one-foot wide strip of plywood, so after I pick up a bit more hardware, I’ll build a shelf up above it, too. But for now, I’ll let the deck stain cure and then I’ll add coat after coat of polyurethane until it looks just right.
Note what I, your gracious storyteller, am doing here: I’m practicing a lesson that I have learned from my time in This Damn House. Sure plywood isn’t the most attractive stuff in the world, but why should I throw a few coats of paint on it right away? Let the wood show through and collect those dings and scratches that it should have. One can always add paint later on, but a surface can never go back to the way it was before that first drop of paint fell. Well, not without an infuriating amount of mind-numbing and finger-losing work. And – Sweet Jesus…that stucco wall haunts my dreams!!! – I don’t feel like doing that ever again.Now, what do I do on that big work area?

The Art of Stifling an Idea

The very first line of defense against ideas is you. Take this very story, for example. I had the idea for it many years ago, but fought my best to make sure nothing ever came of it. I would get the urge to write it down, but then would have a beer and forget all about it. Or clean the kitchen. Or decide that I really needed to watch a buddy comedy. But I'm out of beer, the store is closed, I just cleaned the kitchen and my cable is out. I am, now, defenseless. But no one man can stop ideas alone, try as we might. Ideas will always make it out of our brains sooner or later. So I'll leave it up to everyone else from here on out. I'll do my best to give you the tools necessary to stifle this idea.
To fortify our defenses, as a society, we must understand this terrible misnomer called a "good idea." Because it is perceived as good, it lulls us all into a positive mood. Like we can actually make things better if we nurture this idea and bring it to fruition. We'll start our journey here.
Let's get concrete. Reinvesting in America's ailing infrastructure is thought to be a good idea. How did this rotten notion make it out of someone's brain in the first place? How did it convince so many Americans to nurture it? And not just normal Americans, but business people and politicians – the very group that is designed especially to stifle ideas too! If we can understand this example, foolishness masquerading as "progress" – green energy, economic transparency, electric cars, metropolitan train systems, and universal health care – will definitely be able to be stopped before it can do any more damage.
A few years back, a 100 year old drain pipe, which was around four feet in diameter and carried millions of gallons of water away from the Philadelphia area every time it rained, burst. Roads buckled, of course, and houses collapsed due to the water washing away tons of dirt that had held up the surface of the city. Local citizens – panicked, I'm sure – yelled for reinvestment in the aging infrastructure. And there we see that emotions like panic, fear, or even love or some sense of entitlement, can break our normal strong internal defenses and let an idea escape.
I'm not here to pick on these poor bastards. I too have been afraid sometimes and had ideas escape me. Nobody is perfect.
How should have we responded as a society to ensure that this idea stopped right where it started? The answer is clear to us all, I'm sure, as we're sober and thinking in our right mind. The man whose house collapsed screamed "we need a new sewer" should have been reminded that he is but one man and who the hell does he think he is that he expects that his wishes and ideas can actually change anything? "I mean Jesus! Who do you think you are? There's a lot of other things going on in this world and you think you can make a difference? Think you can just lay a pipe like that [snap fingers]!" The man would have slunk away.
But this didn't happen. The local political system had an idea of its own.
This requires some examination. Notice that one idea getting out leads to other ideas finding their ways through the cracks. We'll deal with this aftermath next time…

A Need to Catch Up

The weather was beautiful on my recent trip to Ireland. I was standing outside of a pub called The Tara Arms in Tullow, talking as idly as possible to a lady who said "this is our Indian summer." Nice to know we've exported our racism along with our Hillbilly's Chicken. Is this really what people know of us overseas?

At the cost of a couple gallons gas, a pack of hot dogs, and a case of beer, I spent a wonderful evening last weekend around a campfire near a spring-fed pond. Good life can be so cheap. How is it that everyone is broke?

I've pulled all the plants from the garden and tilled everything into a picturesque scratching land, from the perspective of a chicken.

When did progress become a sign of weakness? The move to the suburbs was a movement of progress. Making those little pieces of paradise outside of the city carbon-neutral is socialism? Big inventions like the light bulb were progress. So using energy-saving light bulbs is left-wing nuttery? Oil is boring. Making wagers on the health of people is boring. War is boring. Where there hell are the flying cars that run on solar power? Where is the technology that lets me commute from Michigan to Paris in a few hours daily for pennies? Why do we kill off things that are new?

Come hell or high water, I'm finishing my greenhouse this weekend.

I spent a weekend in Washington D.C. with my parents. My father was meeting up with the survivors of Delta Company, Americal Division, 40 years after they went into Vietnam. The guy who, when he was 19, was the company commander for this bunch of one-time kids in the jungle, said "let's go to dinner." This statement made every man at the table jump up and move to the door without thought. Strong habit.

Congratulations, Mr. President, on your Nobel Peace Prize.

Last of the Firsts

On this most inauspicious day, I had my very last of the firsts… in so far as my chickens go at least. My bantams (Banty, to those in the rural states of our great land) started laying eggs today – little green ones.

And now, it occurs to me, winter will soon be rolling in. What the hell am I going to do with these chickens in the winter?Until next time.

A Late August Garden

Right after planting, during the time when a gardener is constantly worried about a late spring freeze, a garden could not be more beautiful. Every tiny plant is in a nice, straight row. They're all the same size. There is nothing there – except a lot of order and promise.

Then the universe's natural tendency of chaos takes over. One row of eggplant grows like hell and is quickly eaten by bugs, while the row right next to it inexplicably doesn't grow at all. Volunteer tomatoes pop up all over and the vines crush the delicate bib lettuce and blur the lines of the straight rows laid down with care in the spring. Crab grass takes root so close to the peppers that to pull out the one destroys the other. July is full of many drunken nights – a cigarette in one hand, five gallons of gas in the other – wondering whether the rewards could be worth this torment.

Finally, August arrives. The lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, and other early plants are done. This is where I made my mistake in years past. I was nostalgic for those May days of nice straight rows. I would leave the plants – less the veggies – until every last plant in the garden was harvested from for the last time. One wants to keep the garden's baby shoes, so to speak, but gardening quickly kills that nostalgic instinct. I didn't wait to pull all that non-edible stuff this year. It has long since found its way into the chicken coop, where it was mostly devoured by those little devils, and the rest was composted.

Now, the coop is on the soft, tilled dirt where the garden will be again next year, giving the semblance of a yard I still have a chance to recover from a summer of scratching.

The tomato plants are looking like the end is near. The jungle of green is now somewhat limp. The Jersey plants can be called "desiccated" now and the Brandywine are not too far behind. So far this year, they've given me two batches of sauce: one pasta, one salsa. And this is how the season ends.

But never fear. Today was the first three egg day! All sex-links (those crosses between a Rhode Island Red and Plymouth Rock…none of which turned out to be roosters) are laying now. I'm going to need to start working out or something.

Dispatched from the Farm: Until next time.

The Land of Pharma – Fresh Air, Part 1

If you're lucky enough to have central air in your house, you probably have only one unit for the whole thing. The ductwork going from that unit will have a branch going to every room. Somewhere in the basement, or attic, or in some cut away part between floors, every branch will have a damper so you can balance the air to prevent your bedroom from being an inferno and the room closest to the "trunk" from being a meat locker. And you know full well the jump in your power bill after that first summer month when you kick on the AC.

The same is true in winter, of course, when you kick on the furnace to a toasty 70 degrees. The family is wearing t-shirts and looking out the picture window at snow blowing past completely sideways.

Human bodies are pretty forgiving. If the AC broke or the heat went out, we could cope for quite awhile. Or you could always crash at someone else's house, who wasn't too cheap to buy that new furnace last summer… Well, vaccines aren't forgiving.

Before I can get into the extreme realm of HVAC at a vaccine plant, I first must describe a typical building layout better than I have previously. Let's revisit Menengvax and the company that makes it, WMC. Their new plant will make vaccines that sell in the United States, Europe, Australia, some parts of South America and in most of Asia (if you wonder why not Africa, it is because WMC doesn't sell to Africa, but donates a million doses a year to various NGOs for distribution, but you don't ever hear that in the news). Because this product will sell in all these areas, WMC's plant must align with the regulations of all these different areas (the FDA in the US, the EMEA, IMB, MHRA and others in Europe, the TGA in Australia, etc.). What are the basics for all these different regulated markets? We'll boil them down here:
1) Space: lots of it. Cramped working quarters leads to having product and waste in the same area, to lots of people in one room, and to the potential for accidents, all of which leads to low product quality.
2) Organization: one start and one finish. If product moves as if on an assembly line, you're not going to get a car with two engines and no tires, so to speak. This is like saying your dining room is for dining and the kids better damn not do homework on that table!
3) Engineering: don't tell personnel to do something (a procedure), don't give them a choice (engineer the work). Vaccines are temperamental. The greenest person on the floor has a few hundred thousand dollars worth of training behind them. If you have them focus on a real problem, like how to make a few thousand cells that live in a test tube, grow into a few gazillion cells in a 5000L fermentation tank, they'll get it right every time. They shouldn't be tripped up by something like walking through the door on the left instead of the door on the right. "Enabling success" in the brains on the floor means dedicating money, other people, and real estate to the job.
4) Document: if it isn't written down, it didn't happen. That's pretty clear, in and of itself.

So to facilitate these things, WMC has built a facility that, in the very center, has less that 100 particles bigger than 5 micrometers (there's a million micrometers in one meter) in diameter. If you figure that at least once a summer, you inhale a full sized fly while mowing the grass, you can see how keeping air this pure all of the time is a bit difficult. All air starts like that around us all the time: full of pollen, bugs, dirt, bacteria, moisture, and everything else in the world.

There are two ways for air to get into a room: the doors and the ducts (assume the rest of the room is as tight as a drum, which is true in the Land of Pharma, but hardly anywhere else, save a submarine). The ducts can have filters on them. So could the doors, but it'd be hard to get a person through a filter in one piece. Instead, a room with air ALMOST as clean is adjacent to that most clean central room. Then another almost as clean as that one is next. And on it goes until WMC can be sure that the air in the room where they make Menenvax is as clean as it needs to be to make good product and thereby ensuring that all regulators will be happy with the process.

Enough for now. We need to get back to the matter at hand: how do we get "Fresh Air," full of all that pollen and spit, to be so clean?

The Culmination of Effort, Heartache, and a High-Protein Crumble Feed

Just over a week ago, on the last day of July, one chicken laid an egg. As all the books told me, it was right smack-dab on week 18 for the three sex-linked chickens. Since then, six more have been laid, as the birds grow into their laying phase.

Of course, given my current work situation, as soon as these things started popping out and I could eat backyard-fresh eggs, I find myself back in Ireland for two weeks. Word across the pond says that my tomatoes are coming into their own as well. The peppers and eggplant are making a showing, too.

Stay away from trouble, chicks, and I'll be back home soon.

Yours always.

The Land of Pharma – Marble Floors

When we last approached this topic, we spoke about the vagaries of a vaccine building. Let me go into a bit more detail here.
One has strong memories of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," "The Peter Principle," or some other take on Big Business and, I will admit, comedy is always based on fact. But situational or observational humor is found just about everywhere. The inconsistencies we live by every day fill volumes. I laugh my fool head off every time I go to my home state and see beer sold in gas stations or, now rather rare, in a drive through convenience store. Those easily-recognized oddities are simple to turn into hot-button issues or "wedge debate" or whatever and do absolutely no good in our attempts to make this world a better place. Understanding this next bit might help get us all to a more proactive stance where we might make good arguments and make better policy.
If I parked my car in my living room, it wouldn't be long until my car had fallen into my basement. If I drove my car down the road, but first removed the rubber tires leaving only the metal rims, I would put neat lines right down the blacktop. Then I'd go to jail.
In any event, in the vaccine industry, it is very common to have an 800 liter stainless steel tank balanced on four stainless steel casters and push that down a hallway.
Quickly, in very clean industries like vaccines, we use stainless steel very often because it is, indeed, stainless. It cleans well and doesn't discolor. Discoloration is, after all, a chemical reaction to the metal, which could "leach" metals or other compounds into our medicine. That isn't at all good.
So, an 800L stainless steel tank full of vaccine fluid weighs the same as a small car. If that was in my living room, it would fall into my basement. Once there, it would certainly crack my foundation, bankrupt me, and force me to live on the streets of Santa Monica. If I put it in the road and tried to push it, it would destroy the very same blacktop we trust to hold our rubber-tired cars in place when we speed off from the bar.
Don't drink and drive.
But that's not all. Those incredibly heavy tanks full of fluid must be weighed! Enter the tricky world of floor scales. Now, we obviously can't push such a heavy tank up an incline as we don't want to risk tipping it over and killing someone. So the scale itself must be buried in the floor. This is commonly known as a pit scale. For those that have ever had to weigh a vehicle when dumping garbage (or if you're a truck driver), it's a lot like those scales. There is one huge difference, though. These scales are accurate to a tenth of a kilogram. If the tank really truly weighs 1994 kilograms, then the scale could give a number between 1993.9 and 1994.1. I hope you see how stupid accurate that is.
These scales weigh a heck of a lot themselves. Now, you have the tank and a heavy stainless steel scale all on one little piece of real estate.
But that's still not all! These scales must be calibrated. So somewhere in your facility you have over 2000 kilograms of calibration weights just sitting around to be used once or twice a day to ensure the scale still works. Those weights don't hover in mid air! That is still more weight sitting on the floors. Marble, the most beautiful floor ever put on this earth, would shatter in a second.
What's the point? Well, here it is: there is more thought, planning, execution work hours, and money in the floor of one vaccine facility floor than there is in the entirety of any house, save maybe Bill Gates' super mansion. If that's only the floor, what else does the cost of the vaccines we take pay for?
Well, until next time…

This Damn House – Working my way down

Three more windows have been scraped. The living room and dining room walls are being painted with no VOC paint. I had no intention of doing this. My parents are visiting for a few weeks and my mom got bored. One night, she talked me into diving into another project. So my eight months of simply enjoying the house I live in have ended and my hands hurt from scraping. I hope my body had sufficient time to process out the lead from the last round of paint removal.

Maybe we'll get into the kitchen too. I need a new refrigerator to hold all of my eggs! That is, if these cursed birds ever start laying them.

So it goes.

The Rooster – 2

I woke this morning to a sound I know I have heard before – that has struck terror into my heart before. Cock-a-doodle-do.
The only reasonable explanation is that the chicken Y chromosome is infectious in more than the usual way. One of my hens was infected before I tossed out the last male and has now turned into a rooster!
So that is nonsense. However, the thing is definitely a rooster. It seems to have grown about four inches over the Independence Day holiday, leaned out, and grew a crown. I was assuming that one of the hens would become overly-dominant when the cock of the walk was sent to his reward, but this is an unforeseen development.
The long and the short of it: I now and always have had five hens.

The Rooster – He ain't gonna die

Not by my hand, anyway. Yes, it turns out that I don't have seven hens. I have six hens. That seventh chicken, over the past weeks, started getting this red crown down the center of its head, bossing the other chickens around, and making these remedial cock-a-doodle-do-ing sounds. Then Sunday, it happened. Full on early morning wake the hell up crowing. This is the greatest fear of anyone raising chickens in a compact suburban neighborhood.

I shoved it in a bag and lit out up north to a friend's house. He lives in the country and has plenty of room for it to roam, thought I. But even better, I find out, he lived near a chicken farm. A drive by chicken tossing followed and all the problems were solved.

Well, all the chicken problems. It's been about the most wet late spring and early summer I can remember. The garden is drowning. It rained yesterday for just a little bit and the water pooled on my yard. I think it is all this rain that made my broccoli go to seed before it got bigger than a baseball. And my tomato plants look very sickly. The peppers aren't putting on any height to speak of either. But the cucumbers are going nuts.

Man cannot live on cucumbers alone.

Until next time.

Three hour tour

Yes, dear friends, a short trip has turned into a month – and is not yet over. I should be back in a little over a week and will get back to espousing my never-ebbing surprise regarding how easily I can make a mess of things…

Now to make a short-wave radio out of these coconuts.

This Damn House – Capitalist Structure

“I have a great idea,” said the fellow that built the kitchen on the back of the house eighty years ago. “I’ll pour some concrete stairs and a flat concrete walkway to those stairs along the back of the house. This will keep my boots clean.” Right he was.
“I have a great idea,” said the fellow that owned my house in the 1980s. “I have this concrete walkway and staircase already, but it looks so plain. I will build a raised garden bed along the edge and frame it in with four by fours. This will look pretty full of tulips in the spring.” Right he was.
“I hate flowers,” thought the fellow that owned my house in the late 1990s. “Especially tulips. I’ll build a deck right over that goddamn flower bed, those old concrete stairs, and that stupid walkway and it will raise the value of my house.” A jerk, but right he was.
Also, he was an idiot and a litterbug. I count abandoned houses, old unused roads, and broken down sheds as nothing more than really big litter.
When I moved in, I noticed this odd flowerbed resting under the deck, but figured it couldn’t do any damage. How wrong I was. Over the years, the dirt sloped back toward the house and directed all of the rainwater right back to my basement. I decided to do something about it one night while drinking, I’m sure.
Last summer, I pulled out all of the four by four timbers that held the original bed. The best of those timbers became the edge of my patio in front of my shed. The worst burned in last October’s bonfire. I still had the dirt to contend with.
A bit of back-story on this dirt. My neighbor tells me that one day in the 1990s, a fellow offered him and my home’s old owner a dump truck full of mulch. All but a wheelbarrow full of this ended up inside of those timber frames – slowly turning into dirt – lying in wait to ruin a few weeks of my life.
Beginning last weekend, I decided to spend those ruined weeks. My deck, at its closest point to the earth, is only about a foot up. At the highest, maybe two feet. To remove the five cubic meters of dirt from under the deck, without razing the deck, which was my first thought, I would have to belly-crawl under there with some sort of sleigh, load the sleigh with dirt and drag it out. All this, while lying face down in rotting mulch and being attacked by my neighbor’s dog with vicious consistency. Oh boy.
I have a four by two foot plywood board I found under that same deck last year and a long length of clothesline that was used all last summer and twice this summer in its intended way before snapping in stiff winds, throwing my clothes across my neighbor’s yard. Two good shirts died that day. May they rest in piece (as stuffing for a new pillow). Anyway, I drilled two holes in the board, looped the rope through, harnessed it over a shoulder, and crawled in carrying my garden trowel in my teeth.
Each load is enough dirt to put about three inches around two rows of six plants in my garden. I’ve done this now five times. I’m eaten by mosquitoes every time.
I should be done by August. So remember, dear reader, if you decide to build some new beautiful outdoor structure, remove whatever was there when you showed up. Even better, call a team of archeologists to dig down about fifteen feet just to be sure there is nothing there. They need the work anyway.

The Land of Pharma 3 - Buildings

First – obvious but easily overlooked – a building is needed. The WMC is a huge and rich company that makes a wide variety of products, so you'd expect WMC products to be made in nice buildings. You'd be right – mostly. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (the FDA) has oversight for medicines. "Oversight" includes the buildings the medicines are made in. Each building must be licensed (approved) for use. The approval process is a long and difficult (and costly) so once licensed for production, it's unlikely that WMC or any other large company would willingly put themselves through that task for fun.
Let's make sure that's clear. The news does a good job of telling everyone when a new pharmaceutical product is approved by the FDA. But the building that it's made in has to be approved too? Yes, indeed. So when WMC first developed Hemopres and Menengevax, it first had to ensure it had a place to produce them.
This wasn't all that difficult for Hemopres. WMC has been making non-sterile small molecule pharmaceuticals for years (in Imaginationland, where this running example takes place). The company already had multiple buildings outfitted with all the necessary equipment to manufacture Hemopres. All they needed was the API, really, and they have multiple API sites already.
The story is different for Menengevax. Where pressing powder into tablets is relatively straight-forward, vaccines are biological systems and each vaccine is different. So each vaccine manufacturing process is different. And every building is different.
But regardless of the product inside, buildings still have their own needs. Heat and air conditioning, for example. Then there's the roof. Most manufacturing buildings have flat roofs so the heater and air conditioner (collectively known as "air handlers") can be put up there, but flat roofs are notorious for leaking as well. Under that roof are offices, hallways, bathrooms that all need cleaning and maintenance. And this is to say nothing about the actual manufacturing process.
Further, the toilets have to get hooked up to the sewers. Electricity lines have to run to the building. And the property surrounding that building is taxed, of course. So despite the fact that there are difficult scientific processes happening in that building, it has all the same, mundane, run-of-the-mill issues that a house has. And parking is a bitch.
So now WMC has a building. But that's WMC. That's just one "Big Pharma" scenario. There's a lot of other ways to fulfill the "building" requirement. And this was obviously a sketch overview, at best. From here, we'll get into some details.

The Heartbreak of Trash

Trash and Waste are two wildly different things. There is nothing that aches with waste. There's foolishness, as waste was something that never got to add anything to someone's life. Packaging is waste. The shavings from a piece of wood on a lathe being shaped to replace a leg on a chair are waste. That leg, though, brings a chair more years of use. Eventually, though, the seat will wear down to a point that the chair cannot be saved and it becomes trash. That's heartbreaking.
Today, I threw a suitcase into my trashcan. I bought it in Michigan one Christmas as the one suitcase I owned was in the Middle East. When I flew home to Michigan from Philly, I had all of my clothes wrapped up in a red laundry bag which I didn't know I owned. I bought the bag with my parents in some big box store and used it very rarely until this past August. It was then that I flew overseas for the first time. I went four more times after that, each time carrying this bag.
Last Friday, stopping at my last hotel before flying home, the wheel broke off. It was dead. So today, I emptied out the loose change, stripped off the metal for recycling, and tore off the "Sonoma" tag for posterity and tossed out the trash.
Trash is something that was very, very useful. Through usefulness, the now-trash becomes sentimental in the way that you expect it to be there. I would open my downstairs closet and without having to really identify the thing as my suitcase, I would grab it out and start packing. Sure I will get another suitcase, but I'll remember the one I used up.
In that vein, I just bought a car. My truck is parked to be used rarely, in an attempt to keep it from being trash. I drove that truck for the first time at the age of 15 to take my grandmother to a chemotherapy treatment. Illegal, but nobody else could possibly take her. It moved me and many friends to college. Hauled some couches and then eventually moved me to Philly. It moved me from house to house until finally I bought one of my own. Throughout that time, it took me back home to Michigan many times. The idea of it being trash someday is heartbreaking. I'll look at this new car, but I'll remember my truck.
My life is full of these things. A pair of boots I've had resoled four times now. My crepe pans and a hand mixer I use to make my crepes every time. Then there's the flip chair that my dad and I sewed up their first visit to my new life in Philly. I have every wallet I've ever carried, which, counting my current one, is only three. A little clock with a date engraved for the year 2020. I could go on naming most everything I own. These things all become more than just useful items, but memories in their own right.
Maybe I'm too sentimental. I certainly am given the nature of the mistakes I tend to make, which always revolves around something becoming trash far too early, if it ever should or could have become trash were I more thoughtful. But sometimes I don't make mistakes and the trash, like my suitcase, is inevitable. But it's still feels like something has been irrevocably lost.

Irish Hedgerows: The Way and the Truth

There are many different types of woody plant that make up the famous Irish hedgerows (privet is only one…). I only know this because I was told it and given my inability to identify almost any plant species and my rather remarkable lack of drive to learn them, I'll never be able to know this for sure. Whatever the species, every plot of farm and pasture land between Doolin and Carlow, Ireland is boxed in by these things.

Here's what I found to be most charming about this: every few hedged in areas was the house. It's the norm to have sheep and cows living tangentially to the house (and the neighbors' houses, and the road, and the little town…).

According to some various and probably completely sensationalistic and unreliable internet sources, backyard chicken raising in suburban areas is only now making a comeback in the U.S. and the snobbish laws prohibiting poultry in these areas are being overturned.

Where is it that the U.S. went astray? I can understand moving all large livestock out of downtown New York City to the pasturelands outside of Manhattan Island when the intensity of land usage for people alone grew to its present state (a cow has to walk a little from time to time). I can imagine keeping pigs and cows out of the suburbs today (not necessarily the exurbs, though). But chickens? Even two or three without a rooster? These laws look to be written less to protect animals or property than to simply sterilize the landscape.

There are many dogs that bark almost nonstop within earshot of my house. There are some folks that blast White Snake (poor bastards) while passed out in their backyard. I imagine that this happens in other towns as well. And in these other towns, barking dogs and 80s hair metal, for some reason, are lawful while chickens may not be.

Keep barking dogs legal too, but ban White Snake.

This mixture of pasture land and suburban or "small town" living is reflected in France (outside of Paris, no less), northern Germany and Switzerland. That's only my personal account. This was also the practice, in my youth, in some of the small towns in Michigan. However, I, along with everyone else of my age, called these the homes of rednecks. Over the next generation, the older folks died off and severed the last ties with the land their forbearers brought with them from the old country. Those homes (now shacks) are now in the hands of "white trash" – the chickens and goats replaced by supped-up cars and hot tubs they can't afford, or have been abandoned letting more farm land go under a housing development.

Land of Pharma - 2

I need to fill out the description of WMC's products here before I can get into much else:
Hemopres is the marriage, basically, of an API and some excipients (an excipient is a material found in the finished drug product that is not the API). The total weight of a single Hemopres tablet is about 200 milligrams. But we said above that the prescription is for a 5 mg tablet each day. The number of milligrams on the label doesn't mean the weight of the entire tablet – it means the amount of API in the tablet. A 5 mg tablet would be so small that it would probably get lost on the trip from the bottle to your mouth, so it's bulked up with a lot of sugar or some other completely inert substance. Then there are some other things added, like binding agents to hold the whole thing together. This mixture is put into a press where it is all smashed together under huge forces, then it's coated to keep from turning to dust when it's in the bottle with 499 other tablets.
Menengvax is three milliliters of liquid. It's in a sealed bottle that has to be kept refrigerated. In that three milliliters are purified virus particles. In this case, a virus particle is a protein specific to this meningitis virus that has been removed from the virus. So there is nothing infective in this vaccine – you need the full virus (and it's nucleic acids) to get sick. But you'd need a ton of virus particles to get the immune memory you need to be safe from that disease for the rest of your life. So, also in those three mL of liquid is the adjuvant, which hightens the body's response. There are a handful of other things, like stabilizers, and the rest is purified water, which allows for the material to be injected.
With the differences in these two medicines, it's certainly clear that there must be differences in the overall manufacturing process. Sure, we already spoke about tablet compression and filling of fluid into bottles, but that's obvious. Next, we'll explore the buildings where these products are made.

Airports

As I write this, at 6:54 am local Frankfurt time, the sun is rising over the far terminal at the airport. I am watching it climb in the sky. In front of me, I see Singapore Airlines, Air India, Qatar Airways, Thai Air, and Lufthansa. And that big, gorgeous sun in an unobstructed sky.

Traveling for work as much as I have of late can be a drag. You're always on someone else's turf working on their schedule. And time is always limited. So my days stretch and stretch into 12 hours or better in the office. Then I work from the hotel until the end of the workday in the U.S. The work is incredibly rewarding and that's why I go through those long days and those numerous weekends that I lose to airports.

But right now, with this sun (and my morning Bitburger), the edge is dulled. For 22 years in Michigan and now another eight around Philadelphia, I have seen this sun rise in a similarly unobstructed sky. When you watch it come up red and then get yellow on it's way to white, how could you not be happy? Or, maybe more in line with today, how is it that people are scared, mad, or indifferent to our environment (terrestrial or celestial)? It's all so beautiful.

I feel that way and I'm seeing it from a mere airport.

Composting

Those romantics in the crowd will realize that love lost, hard times, and broken dreams pile up and become the foundation of new opportunities. Then there those of us that have given up on that. But those romantic thoughts certainly work for food scraps! Hot dog!
Half of my backyard is turned over into garden and I have neighbors on all three sides. I realized that if I was to compost, I had to find some sort of technological solution or be run out of town on a rail. Through a series of other accidents, I discovered the Lehman's catalog. Much of the goods there are American made, as the Amish don't really live anywhere else except Ohio. There, I found the Urban Composter, a black recycled plastic barrel that composts without omitting hardly any smell.
When I first got the barrel, I put it close to my house so I could easily put my scraps in it. Sounds reasonable, no? Everything worked that first summer. Then fall came. My backyard is to the north of my house, which means in the winter, the sun does not touch the earth close to my house and my big black plastic compost barrel froze solid. Finally, spring came and I started over.
So last year, I moved the compost barrel as far away from my house as possible. This kept the compost cooking – very slowly – all last winter. I emptied it just a few weeks ago and tilled it into my garden.
Of course, I didn't let it cook quite long enough and I fear that as the composting continues, I will leach every last free molecule of nitrogen out of my soil and kill all my poor plants. Where could I find some free nitrogen?
Enter the chickens. Well, more specifically, chicken poo, which is jam packed with nitrogen. Raising these chicks has helped complete the use and reuse cycle of my own little backyard farm. Plus, when fully grown, chicken scratching aerates the soil and the birds eat grubs and other pests. Just make sure to wash the veggies before you eat them…

The Land of Pharma - 1

I'm going to start a new type of entry. I've have some experience in the Pharmaceutical Industry and, with all of the new attention on that industry, on socialized medicine and on the FDA, I figure I should try to explain what I know about the industry.
What are we talking about?
"Big Pharma" is a convenient way to discuss a certain kind of company. However, just as terms like "republican platform" or "socialism", Big Pharma does little to explain anything about the pharmaceutical industry. So let's begin by explaining as best we can everything that goes into this industry. Along the way, we'll do a pretty good job of describing a lot of industries, in case you, dear reader, are interested.
Behind the counter of any pharmacy lies hundreds of different prescription medicines. There's hundreds more in the surrounding area known as Over the Counter (OTC) drugs. That's just the piece found in the store. In every doctor's office are another host of medicines that can't be dispensed through the corner store. These are vaccines, tetanus shots, anti-venom shots, and things like that. In hospitals are another suite of therapies like antibiotics of last resort (those ultra-antibiotics that still work against our ever increasing number of antibiotic resistant super-pathogens). That's the goal. Everything we're going to talk about is a means to that end: medicine.
Let me say one more thing now. There are arguments or editorialists that hold to the idea that our reliance on Type II diabetes drugs is because of the larger issue of obesity. Or that we have these super-pathogens in the first place because of over use of antibiotics medicines and cleansers. They say that Big Pharma pushes it's products on the public and…. Yes, television is littered with drug advertisements and yes, millions of people run to the doctor for a prescription for a little ache or a sniffle. That interplay is incredibly important and interesting, but that won't be explored much here. We'll talk about the social use of these products only insofar as the public does use them and that gives this industry the same capitalist footing as any other industry.
So, the goal is medicine. We'll use the company I just imagined, The World Medicines Corporation, as our example. It's an established Fortune 500 company (way, way higher on the list than number 500, I assure you, as I only imagine big things) with factories and research centers all over the world. It employs many tens of thousands of people. This is the general conception of "Big Pharma," right? The World Medicines Corporation (WMC, as it's known on Wall Street) makes all forms of medicine as well, so we'll be able to look at each sort. And we'll start with two: Hemopres, a pill that lowers blood pressure and Menengvax, a shot that vaccinates against the virus that causes viral spinal meningitis.
Hemopres is one of those first drugs we talked about above. It's found behind the pharmacy counter in your local grocery store. It's called a "non-sterile small molecule" pharmaceutical. This type of pharmaceutical must be taken at some regular interval (this one is one 5 milligram, or mg, pill each day). It's an oral tablet, which means that when it's manufactured, it doesn't have to be manufactured to be sterile. A person's stomach is pretty much a big bag of acid and will kill most any bacteria that gets in there, so oral medicines don't need to be sterile. The small molecule (the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient, or API) passes through the stomach into the intestines, where it is taken up into the blood stream. When the API circulates around the body, it can do it's work.
This is in contrast to Menengvax. Most vaccines (a biological product) are injectables (you don't get this in a pharmacy – a doctor or nurse sticks a needle "subcutaneously" and injects the fluid into your body). Vaccines, generally, are based on a protein or other complex molecular structure, which is a "large molecule." Proteins couldn't survive the acid in your stomach, so it's put into your body in a way that bypasses the stomach. But because it doesn't go though the protective acid of the stomach, it must be manufactured to be absolutely sterile. Also different from the small molecule pharmaceuticals, this vaccine will only need to be taken once (or at least only a couple of times). Vaccines make the body's immune system react as if you were sick. When that happens, the body "remembers" what made it sick and will be able to react much faster when the natural form of the illness-causing agent tries to infect the body again.
Before this gets too boring, I'll stop here and go further later.

Forward Thinking and Hanging Cloth

I was lucky enough to have a week off last week. One of my many little tasks I desperately needed to complete was settling the second story bathroom privacy issue. Long ago, the door, if it could be so called, was pulled down and thrown out. The bathroom, which is far smaller than the inside of a late 70’s Chevelle, couldn’t have a normal swinging door and the closet-style collapsing door made being in that bathroom feel like jail time. After deciding against saloon doors, I settled on a curtain that gives privacy and would still let light in from the hallway.

It has been more than a month since I went to Fabric Row in Philly to purchase the proper cloth to make my curtain. It is an unbacked off white base with soft blue and green stripes matching the colors of the bathroom and offsetting the hallway color (so I’m told as I’m horrible with color schemes). Anyway, it was measured, sewn and hung.
As I made the inaugural use of that bathroom post-curtaining official by washing my hands, I realized I didn’t hang a curtain. I envisioned a dozen drunken friends going into and out of that bathroom and realized no, it isn’t a curtain – it’s a very big hand-drying towel. Tomorrow, I start work on signage for use of the second floor bathroom.

Fury and the Art of Patching Up an Old Truck

Like clockwork here in Pennsylvania, my 1991 Chevy C1500 pickup was tested by the State to ensure it was safe for the roads and met environmental standards. I have been fighting back and forth in my mind regarding the environmental part for years now. How can I square my desire to grow a lot of my own food, by local goods, organic goods, and environmentally-safe / petroleum-free products whenever I can with my utilization of an old truck?

Similar other struggles have been vexing me for years, now. I think that dairy cases in shopping centers are about the dumbest things in Creation. They are refrigerators designed to not have doors, yet keep milk from spoiling. How are these things legal? Then, not only is the milk kept cold by open refrigerators in stores, but dairy products are shipped cold and kept in huge fully-refrigerated warehouses while still at the dairy. That, to me, is a broken system. What to do instead?

I started buying ultra-pasteurized milk. This milk is sterilized, shipped and stored warm. This system could save huge amounts of energy costs and air pollution (unless, of course, electricity somehow went 100% renewable), but the containers for the milk are like big juice boxes. This means many different types of material (a product contact surface, structural layers, paper to print on, etc) compressed into one package. Multiple inseparable materials means that this is a package that cannot be recycled or reused.
Damn it! Why can't any of these things be easy!?! So either you can save fuel energy or you can save waste put in landfills. Right, but I was talking about my truck.

I could buy a Toyota Prius or some other foreign-made ultra-fuel-efficient vehicle, thereby adding to the death of American companies, American jobs, and removing one industry where science and engineering is paramount from the U.S. Or, I could hang on to my Fort Wayne, Indiana-made truck until an electric hybrid is made on U.S. soil by one of the (remaining by then) Big Three.

At least this one has a middle ground. I'm looking for a used Chevy car to get me through. I can keep my truck long-term for the utility of having such a vehicle and have a day-to-day fuel-efficient car to keep emissions down.

The Fabled Tale of the Mobile Suburban Chicken Coop

I need to better the original idea of the coop. Or better the memory I still have of the original idea of the coop, rather. The length of the coop itself (not counting the wheels or the handles) will be six feet long with an A-frame design with the cross of the A forming the second-story floor. The structure will be made of 1 x 4s - legs, A-frame and all. The lower (ground floor) enclosure that will allow for the chickens to free-range will have chicken wire on the A-frame sides. The long sides will have chicken wire "frames" so all pieces will be able to fold open. Also, the plywood upper structure (long sides) will be hinged at the top connection strap so all four panels will be able to open as well.

The ends will not be removable in any way, but with eight fold-up portions, the entire thing will be very cleanable. The "A" ends and middle will have cross braces, as is the habit of all capital letter A's, which will give the floor strong support on the ends and in the middle. The floor, cut to fit within the frames of the A, will be pushed up into the frame and then the cross brace added and fixed to make a tight fit.

Where the cross braces are on the A's, an eight foot 1 x 4 is fixed to extend two feet off of one side as handles. The side opposite the handles get wheels so the entire thing can be moved around wheelbarrow-style by one person.

From the floor, a ramp must allow for the chickens to get up to the floor-level. The ends of the floor level (the upper part of the A on either side) will be chicken wired in and allow for the addition of glass windows for the winter so light can be allowed in but the winter cold kept out. Somewhat.

This design fits in nicely with my backyard garden. The chickens, once full grown, will be able to roam around in the grass completely safe from attacking dogs, cats or hawks. I can move the coop to fresh grass every few days. The birds will have the warm penthouse to roost in as well.

What could possibly go wrong?

This Damn House - March 2009

It's been a bitter winter. The Summer 2008 Second floor and patio projects ended abruptly when I decided to rededicate myself to my career. This decision coincided wonderfully with my 401k diving into the toilet, but was in no way caused by this, of course. So I still have not added the quarter round to the baseboards and most of my patio has heaved toward the grey sky.

All did not cease, however. Slowly, I worked up the nerve to finish the staircases. They were painted and American-made carpet runners were stapled down with my new Craftsman brad nailer. The hardness of old wood is surprising, as are the brads that carom off of that wood and imbed in your thigh. Remember to always wear safety glasses when using power tools.

The worthless washroom door has found its way out of the second story window and into the trash. Lucky I live alone. Though I have the material, bought on one fine Saturday trip to Fabric Row in Philly, I haven't found the gumption to sew a curtain for the door yet. All in due time. I am rededicated to my career, after all.

Avid readers of this communiqué will remember that my bathroom is one of the certain projects in the not too distant future. Though I have done some tiling in the past, I was nothing of an expert (or a practiced novice for that matter) until this past Christmas. The key to successful home renovation and repair is to always practice on someone else's house first. Preferably a new acquaintance that doesn't know you very well. A small tiling job (only the tub surround) deftly turned into a three-wall demo down to the studs, a full rebuild, and a new floor. And now I have a new hammer drill to boot.

Winter turned to spring and my attention has been on the garden for months now. Six weeks ago, I planted all of my seeds as I did not want to drop another $200 on plants. Those sons-of-bitches still haven't sprouted. But I'm not afraid. Sunny days will come and I'm sure I'll be able to grow everything from seed. Just in case, I have a plan B.

One thing my backyard farm has lacked, besides a Paw Paw Tree, is a source of protein. I've got that licked now. Weekend before last was spent crafting a new mobile chicken coop of mostly my own design. It's an A-frame with wheels on one end to allow for easy movement. It allows for free ranging of the chickens and has a second-floor enclosure to keep them warm at night. This should also be found to be suitable for the neighborhood skunks and copperheads that will invariably kill my chickens and attack me at sunrise some horrible Tuesday morning. Tomorrow, I buy a gun.

So the summer plans are laid. Gardening, chickens, living room window stripping and repainting, and a fresh color for the living room walls that is as far away as possible from the last-night's vomit color they currently are. Hopefully, this will be completed before my foundation crumbles and the house finally kills me.