Apex, NC

It's hard to believe that August is almost gone!  It will be September in one more week!

Today is overcast with lower temperatures.  It rained yesterday and it was cool.  Temps will be ramping back up this week with some rain mid-week.

Yesterday morning we went to BJ's Wholesale Warehouse and spent about $250 on miscellaneous grocery and paper products.  That's okay though - we haven't been in there in over two months.

Because I was paid on Friday, I sat down and took care of some of the bills yesterday.  I put off making the house payment until next payday because Bob won't get his pay until Friday, August 30.

Today we went to Food Lion to get our weekly grocery.  We spent about $130. 

We got some sweetener and cake mixes from the Swerve brand.  Bob decided to bake a yellow cake this afternoon.  From upstairs I heard a lot of banging around and when I got downstairs I found that he had made a big mess.  He used the mixer and the food processor to make the icing and there was powdered sugar everywhere.  Oh boy.

This morning the scale told me that I had lost another two or three pounds.  This brings me up to about 17 pounds lost so far.  Not going hungry either!

These weekends are so short and I have to return to work tomorrow.  I am working with Joe Moore on Twelve Hundred Pharma and the compound is a kinase inhibitor used in oncology.

At least next week will be a short week due to the Labor Day holiday.

Apex, NC

Another difficult week has passed.  This week started out rocky and it was challenging through Wednesday, but I made it to Friday and now it is the weekend!!

We are still in the middle of Twelve Hundred Pharma Compound 7 and waiting for the process chemist to provide us with instructions for completing the batch.  Up next:  Trevina.  I will be following Twelve Hundred Pharma into GMP in October.

After work I have continued working on QB64 programming.  I am still working my way through the UC Santa Barbara GIS curriculum from 1991.  It is slow going because I have to create data for the programs to read in and run.  In the picture here, you can see a relief map created from 25 points of known position and elevation.  The other 785 points were placed in the map by interpolation.  It actually took two programs to create the image - the first program to read the known points in and interpolate all of the others and write them to a file, and the second program to read the generated spot elevations in, assign a color based on elevation, and plot them on a map.

It rained several times this week and I have not had to water the grass.

When it rains the air temperature cools down, but then the humidity goes up and it is still very uncomfortable to work outside.  I need to work in the garage on the shelves for the kitchen pantry.  The boards are painted white, now I need to chop the oak strip for the front to 43 inches and glue/screw it to the front of the white board.  I will put a wipe-on poly finish on the oak.

The weekends are not long enough.  I probably need to take some vacation.

Chaffles

On Tuesday evening I took the car over to Firestone and got the two bald tires on the driver side replaced and then I got an NC safety inspection.  The total came to $390, but I put it on my new Firestone credit card and will pay it off over the next couple of months.

In addition to studying and practicing on QB64 at the computer, I found some videos about InForm for QB64 on Youtube.com and I began to follow the programming examples there as well.  InForm helps you make an event-driven program like VisualBasic by letting you design the forms or windows for your program.  After you finish the design work, you go into QB64 and write the code the runs when the controls are used.

I got a call from Bob on Thursday while I was at work.  He was very dizzy, had a bad headache, and severe ringing in his ears.  He called the doctor and was told to report to the ER.  He asked me to drive him to the UNC Emergency Room.  I left work around 2 pm and drove him to the hospital.

He was given 50 um of Fentanyl Citrate for his headache and he was taken to get a CT image of his head.  No cause could be found for his headache or tinnitis, but they saw that the previous bleed in his parietal lobe has actually resolved a little.  Around 9 pm we went home, ate some cold cuts for dinner, and went right to bed.  The next morning he felt better.

This weekend I filled all of the cracks and holes in the boards I will be using for Bob's pantry shelving.  Then I began painting the shelves white.  All sides except for the front edge of painted white enamel.  The front edge was left bare because a 1x3 strip of oak will be glued and screwed the the front edge to add stiffness.

We have found an acceptable substitute for bread on my diet - chaffles.  These are waffles made in the waffle iron with cheese and egg.  I put a thin layer of shredded parmesan cheese into the iron first to make it crunchy, then some mozzarella, one half of a stirred egg, more mozzarella, and more parmesan cheese.  Let the iron cook it until the sides are very crispy!

This morning when I got on the scale I found two more pounds gone.  I am down about 14 pounds in the last 60 days.  Not as fast as I would like, but the numbers are going in the right direction.

Weekend

These weekends pass too quickly.  I miss having every Friday off like we did at Burt's Bees, but I don't even think they have that schedule anymore.

I finished my miter spline joint jig for the table saw and I quickly made up a box from leftover plywood that has mitered corners.  These were just glued together.  This morning I clamped the little box into the jig and made the mortises.  Then I sanded down little pieces of contrasting wenge and glued these splines into the joint.

A few hours later I cut the wood off that was sticking out of the joint using a flush-cutting saw and sanded it all smooth.  It looks nice and it makes the joint much stronger.

I continued to dink around on the computer with QuickBASIC.  I am transcribing programs from the GIS Lab Exercises onto my computer and running them, if they will run.  Sometimes the data does not plot the way you expect it to.

We went to Firestone to get new tires and a safety inspection for the car, but they were too busy to see us yesterday.  We made an appointment to come back on Tuesday evening at 5 pm to get two tires and an inspection.

Today we went to Food Lion and got our weekly haul of groceries.  Again, our bill was realistic.  Bob made another keto cheesecake in his Instant Pot and we are going to have some with our dinner of baked hamburgers, mushrooms and onions, and spinach.

Back to work in Durham tomorrow.  We will take a sample of our material and decide if we are going to filter it out.  When I left on Friday it was refluxing at 78°C and it would continue for 18 hours (1080 minutes), then it would cool down to 20° over 4 hours (240 minutes) and hold it there for us on Monday.

August

Here we are in August already!  July?  Where did you go?

At work, I do not think we did very much with Twelve Hundred Pharma's Compound 7 at all.  We have an impurity that is 2% concentration and we don't seem to have a good way to get rid of it.  So we are stuck stirring it in the pot.  Last night we heated the batch up to 78°C and programmed a ramp so that it would reflux for 18 hours and then cool down to 20°C over four hours and then hold at 20° until Monday morning.  We will sample it on Monday morning and hopefully get the material drying.

I am continuing to play around with QuickBASIC 64.  I found geography programs written in QB4.5 back in 1991 on a NCGIA website.  I am especially curious about seeing how the programs calculate the area of a polygon and how topographic maps are generated by the computer.  The programs were part of a lesson plan and the code was included with the questions.  My problem was that the data files were missing.

I wrote to Karen K Kemp, PhD of USC who now lives in Hawaii.  Incredibly, she replied within 24 hours and told me that 1991 was a LONG time ago, and that she was afraid "those files were lost to the sands of time".  However, she said she would check with Howard Veregin, PhD, the Chief Cartographer for Wisconsin, who edited the lesson plan back in 1991.  Howard had recently tossed out a box of 3.5" floppies and the files are not part of their archives, so it looks like they are gone.

I thanked her for her help and told her that I might be able to reconstruct some of the data by studying how the programs read the data into arrays from the file.  Pictured here is a screen shot of a program called "Darts" that reads in the points that define a polygon and then generates random points for the screen.  If the point falls within the polygon it is colored red, if the point falls outside of the polygon it is colored gray.  I found a simple math site that had the outline of a maple leaf on it and transcribed the points to my data file and here is the result!

We have had some severe weather the past two nights.  Strong thunderstorms and rain.  Lots of rain.  We got 4.5 to 5.0 inches of rain last night!  Yesterday morning and this morning I have had to go outside and drain the container my tomato plants are growing in.  The tomatoes must think that we are running some kind of hydroponic experiment on them!  LOL!

Today we are taking Bob to The Guys Place to get a haircut.  Later I am taking the car to Firestone or Mr. Tire or someplace, to get two new tires installed on the driver's side.  After that I will let them do the annual safety inspection.

With that out of the way I may take advantage of the cooler temps to work in the garage/shop or come back here to the desk and keep working on another QuickBASIC program.