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.