Cop Car's Beat

Exoskeleton for children

Doesn't this exoskeleton (photo, below) look cool? Wouldn't Sigourney Weaver look right at home wearing the assembly? Actually, the exoskeleton was "Developed by the Spanish National Research Council and its spinoff Marsi Bionics," according to Top Tech #252: Exoskeleton For Kids, Measuring Blood Oxygenation, Switching Glass.

The posting goes on to say:

A new exoskeleton that specifically helps children with spinal muscular atrophy walk is the first of its kind.

Developed by the Spanish National Research Council and its spinoff Marsi Bionics, the exoskeleton’s brace and support rods fit around the child’s torso and legs. In each leg, it has five motors that mimic muscles, sensors, and a controller that responds to the child’s subtle movements. It weighs 12 kilos, and is made of aluminum and titanium.

It’s designed for children 3–14 diagnosed with Type 2 spinal muscular atrophy, who can’t walk or stand on their own, the Council says. The degenerative illness affects one in ten thousand babies in Spain.

 

Neighborhood sighting

Our new next-door neighbor sent me a video, this morning. I replied to her email that while Hunky Husband sees a fox around here every once-in-a-while, I thought that I had only seen one, once. She replied: "That wasn't a fox!!!!  It's a bobcat." She included stills (that, I assume, were culled from the video). How could I not have noticed the absence of a long, bushy tail? (In the one "pose" it looks more like a monkey!)

Photos courtesy of: Tonya Toche-Howard and Jason Howard

 

Video courtesy of: Tonya Toche-Howard and Jason Howard

 If you didn't recognize the birds: the trill was that of a Carolina wren while the call was that of a Northern cardinal.

Another hectic week has gone by.

For my volunteer work, I've been engaged in cleaning up sloppy data gathering and encouraging others to input data into their own (computer database) accounts, taking training to qualify them for what they say they are qualified to do, updating the medical form that they presented more than five years ago (or submitting one for the first time), providing email, cell phone, and/or driver's license info, etc. We (another volunteer and I) are reviewing only those who are identified as disaster responders - not those who work with blood donations or other departments. In four weeks, I put in 177 hours on the project (and, yes, there were additional hours put in on other projects). One week ago, I called a halt to my efforts. We started with 800 disaster responders (in Kansas, Nebraska, and SW Iowa) and, by the time I called a halt to it, had whittled the number of disaster responders down to about 530 - dropping by the wayside those who did not qualify or who no longer are active. It was well that I called a halt because Hunky Husband was about to dump a load on my plate.

For the month of June, the Disaster Response Management Team that HH leads (there are three such teams covering a 12-state area) is on standby - to provide leadership should a major disaster occur within the 12-state area. Last Monday, he was told to put his team on alert - that, at least part of the team might be deployed to work the flooding & tornadoes in Texas (oh, joy!) While I was working at the office on Tuesday, HH called to let me know that his team was no longer on alert (good news!) Then, late that afternoon, HH received another call asking him to catch a flight to Houston! I ran him to the airport the next morning.

But, wait...before we left for the airport, we noticed that the sprinkler system was still running. Since we have it start at 3:00am, it should be completed by about 6:15am...and it was 8:00am when we left the house. Yes, the darned system was still cycling through the stations when I returned from the airport. I turned the system off and, seeing nothing wrong with the way HH had set it up, called our landscaping people. They couldn't get out to look at it until tomorrow morning. That's OK. It just means that I must remember to run the system manually on the days the grass needs watering.

Let's see...what else falls to me when HH leaves town? Well...he had, for about a year, been working on getting someone to replace the shingles. He had finally gotten serious about it when the flooding we had was attended by a third leak of water through the ceiling (we had found evidence of the first leak one year ago.)

I left voice mails to two of the officers in our Homeowners' Association (HOA) to assure that I knew what they needed from me in order to approve what we planned to do. As it turned out, one was out of town (but, within the USA) while the other is in Europe. The in-USA guy dropped by this evening, went through the proposal from the roofing company with me, looked at the sample shingles that I had had the roofing guy bring by, and signed the approval form. He will scan and email the form to the woman in Europe and she will sign and return it to him for scanning and emailing to me. What would we do without electrons?

At any rate, I plan to call the roofer, tomorrow, and have him draw up the contract so that we can get started. The old shingles are wooden shake shingles, but (now that the State of Kansas has passed a law that HOAs may not require wooden shingles) the replacement shingles will be composition.

The graphic, above, shows the color that will be installed - Driftwood. It's very close to what all of the neighbors have had installed. (I think there is only one house, among the 300 in our HOA, that still has wooden shake shingles.) The HOA rules call for installing "Weathered Wood" color shingles; but, most companies don't have such a critter. Originally, when the law passed (about three years after we built - too late for us, much to my chagrin) the HOA specified that one or the other of two specific shingles must be used; but, I think both companies went out of business!

Other than that, I've been privileged with doing the jobs that HH normally does around the house (makes me appreciate him even more!) - mowing (every fourth day), washing & ironing, and gathering in the newspaper and the US Mail (which I remember to do about every 2nd day).