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.