#new rico kit i came equipped

[scientia-rex]

This gets notes every time it drifts into leftist circles. But here’s the thing: I am a doctor. I have cared for children in hospitals. Vast, intricate supply chains that rely on functioning world governments with trade agreements are necessary to the provision of modern medical care. There is no way to work it so those kids can win if electricity, water, food, or medical supplies like sterile intravenous fluid bags or EKG stickers get interrupted. Forget even permanent disruption, a temporary disruption of the sterile tubing necessary for surgery would mean a lot of kids die of appendicitis. The generators we have as back-up are meant to last minutes, not weeks. And you can say “under my new system, the total violence done would ultimately be less than the violence done by the state,” but it’s easier to say that about a hypothetical kid than one lying on a gurney in front of you. When you’ve been responsible for a life—when you’ve lost a patient, when you’ve been through a Code Blue for a one-year-old—there is nothing you would not do in order to protect that life. I think all the time about what Devil’s bargains I would make for various situations; it’s one of the fucked up things I do. I can tell you that I would kill anyone who tried to cut power to my hospital, or I would die trying. There is no alternative.

The world is too interconnected to allow one part of it to go down. When Puerto Rico got slammed by hurricanes and the US did fuck all about it, we had a nationwide shortage of bagged IV fluids. I was working in hospitals through that. Things we normally do as part of routine medical care, like giving the puking kid with the migraine IV Zofran and Reglan, got a whole lot harder. I was working inpatient during COVID, when there were sudden shortages of pain and anxiety medications we relied on, like opioids and benzodiazepines. There was a nationwide shortage of lidocaine last year and we had to save it for biopsies of suspect cancers. Surgery requires not only a surgeon but an entire team of people and complex equipment to safely sterilize tools, most of which are now based around laparoscopic surgery that requires camera tools instead of the old-school open surgeries. You could not even say “but the surgeons can still operate” because no. They can’t. Not safely. Not with ether instead of succinate and fentanyl. I could deliver your baby after the apocalypse, but who’s staffing the blood banks when you have a post-partum hemorrhage and I don’t have three trained nurses with a kit of specialty meds to slow the bleeding? I still remember the time during the worst of COVID when I couldn’t fly a patient from our rural hospital to an urban hospital that could have done the operation he needed, because the hospitals were completely full. I had to buy time with heavy-duty IV antibiotics (the one and only time I’ve been allowed to use a -penem) while he lay there in agony for 12 hours until a bed came open and we could transfer him. If we couldn’t treat the pain and keep the infection from killing him long enough to operate, he would have died then and there, in front of us, while we stood there helplessly.

So how many kids are you OK with watching die from a ruptured appendix? That’s what comes in to the ED at two in the morning and within half an hour if you’re lucky has an ultrasound proving the diagnosis and a surgeon getting scrubbed in. If there isn’t ultrasound, ultrasound techs, pain medication, anesthesiologists, ventilation machine for when you’re under, light-up scopes with blades to allow for intubation bc then there’s direct visualization of the vocal cords, paralytic medications to keep you still, medications to keep you asleep, monitoring machines that read your blood pressure ans CO2 levels and pulse oximetry while you’re under, computer scheduling for OR time, post-op recovery nurses, gurneys, autoclaves, specialized small metal tools for the surgery—if there are interruptions in training or production of any of these and a whole lot more, anyone could die of a surgical problem, but it hurts worse when it’s a kid. Watch breast cancer come back into vogue, as we lose mammograms. You ever treated a woman who’s ignored breast cancer so long it’s now a fungating mass? Go Google what that looks like. Two cases have walked into my office and they are both dead now. One was schizophrenic. Without modern global supply chains, we don’t have lorazepam or morphine for humane death, let alone psych meds. How many people would deteriorate? Get specific. Which friends would you be willing to watch die? Which of their kids are expendable?

What kind of violent revolution are you planning where you are able to look a patient in the eye and tell them, “Your death is necessary to my vision,” and not understand that you are the villain?

You get to decide whether you want to end your own life for this glorious future. You do not get to decide to end my life or my patients’ lives or anyone else’s. You are not God and you do not get to make plans as if you are, as if you have the One Correct Vision and the rest of us just need to fall in line and follow the prophet. Fuck you. You think the Black kid whose treatment team I was on while he writhed in pain on a hospital bed because he had a kidney transplant and it was rejecting wouldn’t tell you to go fuck yourself about your violent revolution? Our society is no longer able to tolerate large-scale disruptions. We have built too much and we would lose too much. We are too big to fail, and although it’s easy to see that as a bad thing, what I keep seeing, over and over, is that transplant team. How the nephrologist and the resident and the nurses and techs and pharmacists and therapists were working together to keep that kid alive. The scientists who did the research, relying on impossibly complex systems that have taken hundreds of years to build. Collaboration is how we survive.

We cannot allow the vulnerable to die and call that progress. We cannot turn the lights out on any hospitals, because the people in the ICU on ventilators will stop breathing and die within minutes. Would you want that to happen if it’s your mother in that ICU? Would you tell your mother the answer to that? What if it was your child? What about your favorite sibling? How many of other people’s families are you willing to sacrifice for the sake of something that stands a virtually 100% chance of going up in flames immediately, when we look at prior attempts at creating a new government out of war and chaos? The massive impacts of even “small” shortages on patients is not theoretical and has killed patients since I’ve been an attending, starting three years ago.

You do not own the right to anyone else’s life.

And if you think you want a violent revolution, see how you do with your next toothache without pain meds, lidocaine, dental expertise, and composite that lets you keep the tooth and keep chewing. How long would you have to suffer to crack?

I think a lot about how, if the glorious violent revolution happens, every kid with significant medical needs in a hospital where power gets cut will die.

You can decide you're willing to sacrifice your own life, but you don't get to tell everybody else on the planet that they're acceptable collateral damage.

[lgbtqhp]

Scorpius and Arthur are everyone's favorite gays, yep, gay as hell, and popular as well

Astoria and Ginny liked to set up play dates between these two, so by the time they got to Hogwarts age, they were already best friends (Dominique, Rose, Roxanne, Lorcan, and Lysander were also present during some of these playdates)

But, first, their childhood: They loved making forts & watching TV (which had recently been incorporated into the wizarding world), they loved Astoria's grilled cheese & tomato soup but hated Ginny's spaghetti and hot dogs, and they loved racing around on their miniature broomsticks

Anyways, they sat together on the train, equipped with Astoria's brownies and Molly's homemade sanwiches ("My dad said when he was a first year, your father bought the whole cart," Scorpius said; "Weird. I wonder why he would do that," Arthur said)

When they got to Hogwarts, they swore to each other that they would be in the same house. Thankfully, the sorting hat decided it was about time that a Malfoy and a Potter room together. They were both sorted into Slytherin :) (So did Dominique and Lorcan)

The first night, Scorpius got homesick for his mom and Arthur offered to cuddle with him to help him sleep. It wasn't anything that they hadn't done before. Although waking up the next day to find one of Lorcan's elaborate booby traps all around and Dominique taking pictures of them ("for her memory book") was definitely something they hadn't done before.

During their first year, they joined forces with Dominique and Lorcan to become the next generation of marauders. They loved pranking their siblings/cousins/friends and soon became the most popular kids in their year. But they didn't really care about their popularity. They just loved being together. But the greatest thing about their group was that none of them ever got caught. Well, not by teachers at least.

Second year, they became beaters on the Quidditch team, because they knew each other's every move. And if after every game, Arthur tackled Scprpius into a hug, well, then, that was just a nice bonus.

For their winter break, Scorpius joins Arthur and his family on a trip to New York and falls in love with the Dear Evan Hansen musical + soundtrack. Which led to him loving all types of muggle books and musicals, including but not limited to: Heathers: The Musical, Legally Blonde (musical), Simon vs. the Homosapiens Agenda & Leah On the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli, What If It's Us by Becky Albertalli & Adam Silvera, The Gentlemen's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee, etc.

Arthur loved listening to Scorpius rant about whatever new obsession he had. He would just sit there and listen for hours and hours, never getting distracted by anything else. Because after Scorpius would finish, he knew that he would be able to rant about how beautiful he thought the creatures that swam through the Slytherin aquarium were and how he wished more people appreciated them.

Also in second year, Dominique decided that they should all become animagi. They started right after they got back from Winter Break and ended right before Winter Break in Third Year. Arthur was a black dog (Zeppelin), Scorpius was a ferret (Kit), Dominique was a white cat (Duchess), and Lorcan was a goat (Drove).

Third Year, Arthur went on a trip with Scorpius's family over Winter Break (it was only fair, after all) and they spent the two weeks in the Carribean, going from one island to the next. They spent most of their days tanning on the beach, but also went on "adventures" like hiking in Puerto Rico and swimming in Mosquito Bay, night diving in Aruba and Bonaire and Curacao, taking historic tours through Santa Domingo, swimming with wild pigs in the Bahamas, and tricking their way into clubs in Jamaica, surfing in Haiti, etc.

But at the end of every night, they collapsed into bed with each other, and if Scorpius curled up against Arthur a little too much for boys their age, then it didn't matter (this is totally when Scorpius's crush on Arthur really began showing)

But they came back to terrible news. Lorcan had gotten sick, too sick, over break. He had been sick for a little bit before break, but no one had worried about it. At first, it was just a fever and chills, common symptoms of the cold. Over the break, he had begun getting tired all the time and food didn't appeal to him at all. Just after New Years, he was taken to a muggle hospital and it was declared that he had Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a type of cancer that begins in the lymphatic system. He was immediately pulled out of school, and Dominique and Lysander didn't return for nearly a month. It was devastating to everyone, including Scorpius and Arthur, who felt like they only had each other now.

The second semester of third year was mostly spent worrying over Lorcan. Scorpius had thought about telling Arthur about his crush many times, but it never seemed right. Something much bigger was going on, and he didn't want it to seem like he was selfish or anything. And then things got even worse. Scorpius's mother was pregnant again, and his father (and the doctors) weren't sure if she, or the baby, would survive.

Arthur spent the majority of the next summer at Scorpius's house, trying to take care of Scorpius as Scorpius took care of his mother. He slowly began to realize that he was, in fact, in love with his best friend, but he could deal with it after they were sure everything would be okay. Because everything would be okay. Maybe. Hopefully.

When they went back to school, despite Scorpius's protests, Scorpius began to have even more trouble sleeping. He had nightmares so bad sometimes that he refused to sleep. Arthur would offer to lay with him or steal some sleeping draughts from the potions lab, but Scorpius would always refuse because "It's my problem, not yours Art"

So with Dominique always worrying about Lorcan (he still wasn't back in school) and Scorpius always worrying about his mom, Arthur sort of lost himself. Not that he blames them for ignoring him, he would never do that... but they were his closest friends and he doesn't know how to help them.

By the time winter break came, Scorpius was out of his wits with worry. He couldn't sleep, his arms were scratched up from anxiety ticks, and he couldn't focus on anything for more than 2 minutes. Arthur couldn't bear to part with him at the station, but Scorpius did not want him coming home with him. Not this year.

Less than an hour after Astoria's death, the Potters got the news. Teddy, James, and Lily were upset, as they had all been babysat by the Malfoys when they were younger. Harry and Ginny were upset, as they had gotten closer with Draco and Astoria over the years. But Arthur was a wreck. He had to get to Scorpius, he had to, he had to, he had to... He couldn't stop crying.

Arthur refused to go back to school when break was over, so while his parents were dropping off James and Lily at the station, he stayed at home with Teddy. When he heard the knock at the door at ten past eleven, he wasn't sure what to think. Nobody from the neighborhood they lived in really talked to them. Muggle mail rarely came, unless one of the kids had ordered something off a muggle website. He heard Teddy open the door, he heard Teddy's voice speaking and another voice replying. A voice that was barely audible, yet still distinctly the voice of his best friend.

He heard the light footsteps on the stairs, and the click of his door opening, and he rolled over from where he was laying face down in his bed. Scorpius was standing there. With a baby in his arms. Arthur, of course, had heard that Astoria's baby had survived, but he also knew that there were many health problems. She was deaf for one. And would probably have breathing problems for the rest of her life.

"Her name's Indus. She just got released from Mungos. Dad's somewhere, I don't know where. But he's not home. He left us with (Great) Aunt Andromeda. She's downstairs, I didn't just leave without telling her." Scorpius kept on talking and talking until finally Arthur said, "Scor. You don't have to explain anything."

And Scorpius wanted to just collapse onto the bed. He wanted to hug his best friend for being so supportive. He wanted to kiss him too. But he had Indus in his arms and refused to let her go. If he let her go, she could die, and it would be all his fault.

Harry and Ginny come home and are definitely surprised, but they don't show it. Ginny coaxes Scorpius to let go of Indus ("You can't protect her when you're this tired. I promise to take care of her. I promise."). Harry heads out to search for Draco (whom he found and immediately brought back, so that he could warm up in front of the fire and eat for the first time in days). Teddy offers his room to Draco ("I can take Jamie's. He doesn't need it right now anyways."). Andromeda writes her sister, who is teaching at Hogwarts and wasn't able to get out of her duties, and then goes to the kitchen and cooks for group. Scorpius and Arthur are sleeping in the same bed for the first time in months, and despite everything that's happened, neither one of them has a nightmare.

After the funeral, Scorpius and Arthur go back to school, and to make sure the nightmares don't come back, they start sleeping in Arthur's bed every night.

And one night, many weeks later, Scorpius woke up around 2 AM, having just had a dream about Arthur. He couldn't think of anything else and he couldn't go back to sleep. So, he nudged his best friend awake ("Art. Artie. Arthur. Wake up," Scorpius whispered.) and Arthur freaks out ("Did you have a nightmare? Are you okay?", Arthur whispered back in a state of panicked drowsiness.) and Scorpius blushes and shakes his head ("No. I just had a dream. About you," Scorpius replied, a blush spreading across his cheeks.)

And Arthur sees his chance ("I like you, Scor. And I know that it could be awkward, because we're best friends and we could ruin everything but I really want to try this and - " and then Scorpius cuts him off and days "I like you too Art". And Arthur is super happy, but also super tired ("Talk about this tomorrow?", "Yeah") and they go back to sleep, cuddling a bit closer now

The next day, they wake up and they're both so happy and they don't want to get out of the bed, but they're also not talking. Finally, Scorpius rolls over in bed and looks at Arthur, whose eyes are already wide open, and says "Boyfriends?" and Arthur laughs at the lack of effort putting into the asking out, but it's okay, because he doesn't really like big gestures anyways (but Scorpius does). Anyways, he says yes, of course. And they finally kiss and end up skipping breakfast.

They go on dates whenever a Hogsmeade weekend comes around, and by the time they leave for spring break, they're pretty set in their relationship except now they have to be apart for an entire week and they do NOT like that.

To be continued...

[newstfionline]

U.S. companies see opportunity in exodus from storm-ravaged Puerto Rico

By Chico Harlan, Washington Post, January 1, 2018

HURON, S.D.--The airport terminal doors slid open and out came 22 people from Puerto Rico, walking a few weeks ago into the whipping South Dakota wind, not quite ready for what was ahead. One person still wore shorts. Another zipped up a hoodie. The group climbed into three waiting vans.

“You guys good?” asked one of the drivers who would be taking them to their new home. “Does anybody speak English?”

“No,” one person said, and the driver let the van go silent before turning up some country music.

Through the windows, there were miles of emptiness, and Gretchen Velez, 21, looked at the others in the van and was quiet. She’d started the day on an island that was desperately short on electricity and clean water and jobs because of Hurricane Maria. Now, 10 hours later, she was in South Dakota--a place she knew almost nothing about, other than what a job recruiter had told her, that he had a position for her at a turkey processing plant in a rural town nearly 3,000 miles away.

Velez had never left Puerto Rico, but after years of economic crisis and then a natural disaster, almost everybody she knew was wondering whether they had any choice but to go. By some counts, nearly 2,000 Puerto Ricans were leaving every day, and in that exodus, some mainland U.S. companies were starting to see an opportunity of their own--a new answer in their ever-evolving struggle to find workers who would perform lower-rung American jobs. “Off to my new life,” Velez had told her mother that morning, but now she was wondering: What am I doing here? Is this the right thing?

Another way to ask it: How does someone arrive at such a place in the U.S. workforce? When Velez and the others arrived in Huron after a two-hour ride from the airport, it was after midnight, and on the horizon were the lights of a turkey plant called Dakota Provisions. The temperature had dipped into the 30s, and earlier in the day, fierce wind gusts had carried thousands of white turkey feathers from the plant, scattering them for several miles, onto farmland and road medians, and onto the grounds of a motel where the vans now pulled up. The Puerto Ricans unloaded their luggage, and a Spanish-speaking human-resources employee from the turkey plant passed out keys and showed them to their rooms.

The employee guided Velez and her brother Carlos, along with a friend who had also come, to a room on the second floor. They stepped inside and looked around. The lights worked. So did the TV. Warm water came out of the bathroom faucet.

“Everything okay?” the employee asked, and when Velez said “Yes,” he said, “Have a good night.”

Velez pushed her suitcases into the corner and then tried to make the room feel like home, walking over to the thermostat and turning the heat to high.

Ten weeks earlier, Velez had been a college student with a part-time job and no plans to leave Puerto Rico. But then the hurricane hit, bringing with it 30 inches of rain and 120 mph winds, and when it was over she had knee-high water in her house and no idea what to do. She had lost her job; the building where she’d worked was flooded. Her college classes were canceled. The train she used to commute wasn’t running. As the weeks passed, Velez saw only deeper evidence of a place falling apart: long lines for bottled water; empty grocery shelves; waits at Kmart where residents could charge electronics. To catch phone service, Velez walked toward a cell tower until she had enough of a connection to see the goodbye notes friends were posting on Facebook as they left the island. And then, one day, a different kind of message popped up, posted by her cousin, about an opportunity in South Dakota at a turkey plant where he worked. “Take advantage!” he wrote.

The turkey plant had opened 12 years earlier and since then had grown into one of the largest employers in South Dakota, with more than a thousand workers. It had also transformed the character of Huron: The starting-level jobs--breast-pullers, carcass-loaders, bird-hangers--rarely attracted anyone from the local workforce, so instead the plant filled with people from all over the world. Soon, a town that had been 97 percent white had four Asian grocery stores and a school district where half the students were learning English as a second language, and at the center of it was a plant in constant need of workers--people who would be ready every morning as trucks dropped off 19,000 live turkeys that would be killed, deboned, sectioned and sliced, and wrapped for restaurants and grocery stores.

For a year, the company had tried recruiting in Puerto Rico, where the economy over a decade had already contracted 10 percent. But then came the hurricane, and in the turkey plant’s HR office, one of the recruiting managers, Oscar Luque, saw news footage of what looked to him like a “Third World country.” He asked Puerto Ricans already at the plant to spread the word that he was coming. He flew to the island with 48 drug-test kits, somehow found a vacant hotel room in San Juan, and waited to see who would show up.

Over the next week, with workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency still directing traffic, 80 people came from across the island to meet with him. Luque told them about the work--that it was repetitive, physical, “not always pretty.” He told them about the wages--$10.00 per hour, jumping soon after to $12 or $13. He said the company would fly them to South Dakota and slowly deduct the flight costs out of their paychecks. He described the jobs available.

“A good opportunity,” Luque called it, and he offered the job to welders and bartenders and security guards, and then to Velez, who said she would come, and then sold her iPod and a video game console to gather spending cash for the trip.

The morning after she arrived in South Dakota, she opened the motel room curtains and looked outside. Just beyond the parking lot was a baseball field, a restaurant called The Plains and a 28-foot-tall statue of a pheasant, the region’s favorite hunting target. She put on three layers, walked outside and video-chatted with her boyfriend back in Puerto Rico, holding up her phone to show him the view.

“Is that a duck?” he asked when Velez walked up to the bird.

“I don’t think so,” she said, and when they talked again the next day she told him that Huron was very cold and quiet, that it was flat, that it had nice houses and also a Salvation Army, where she’d picked up a red winter coat, one that she planned to wear during her shifts inside the plant.

As her first day of work approached, she had so many questions about how life inside the plant would feel. How would the turkeys look? Would she see blood? Could she handle the cold? During two days of orientation--mostly instructions on safety and health--she didn’t once see the work area. It was only on the eve of her first shift, while she was being fitted for rubber boots, that a veteran Puerto Rican employee walked out of the work area and into the break room. He was tall, with a neck tattoo and skinny sideburns, and quickly drew a crowd around him.

“First two weeks, you’ll hurt,” he said. “But you’re coming from Puerto Rico. Put your heart into it. This is your life.”

The next morning, there was a fresh layer of snow on the ground. At the plant, 19,900 turkeys arrived in trucks and 22 workers clocked in for the first time.

“I’m a little nervous,” her brother said.

“I’m okay,” Velez said.

She’d been assigned to the deboning room, one of about 185 workers standing shoulder to shoulder. She buttoned a white smock over her red jacket, pulled on her rubber boots and walked through two swinging doors, entering a narrow, frigid hallway that led to her work area. In the hallway, she stopped by a booth that provided her the rest of her equipment, and she pulled it on layer by layer--a vinyl apron, a hairnet, protection for her ears and eyes, a pair of cotton gloves, and over that a pair of rubber gloves, and on her right hand a mesh steel glove for protection against cuts.

“All right, let’s go,” a supervisor said, and he led her down the hallway and into a room with high ceilings, bright lights, silver metal surfaces and a temperature set at 36 to 38 degrees.

This was her first time inside the plant. Her eyes darted. To her right, she saw plucked and headless turkeys arriving into the room on a chute, where workers picked them up and hooked them by their feet to a conveyor belt. She saw the turkeys then move into deeper recesses of the room, where people with knives hacked and disassembled them, separating drumsticks and wings, scapulas and wishbones. Finally, plump pieces of breast meat arrived on conveyors at a table of 16 workers, who used knives and meat hooks to trim a piece every four or five seconds.

Everywhere she looked, she saw people from somewhere else. Only a handful seemed to be local. The people hanging the birds were from Burma. Some of the people trimming the breasts were from Puerto Rico. Deeper in the factory, cutting skin, removing organs, there were people from Cuba and Guatemala and Vietnam. More than a dozen were from Chuuk, an island chain in Micronesia.

A supervisor, from Haiti, led Velez to her station, on what was called the wing line. “Thank you!” Velez said, shouting to him over the noise, and then another worker, from Puerto Rico, pulled Velez aside and showed her the motion she would make hundreds of times for the rest of the day: picking up a turkey wing from a trough in front of her. Setting it on a white cutting surface. Using a knife, shaped like a small ice-cream scooper, to pull the wing meat away from the bone and then dropping it onto a conveyor belt.

“Try it,” the other worker said, and Velez settled in.

On her first attempt, she fumbled with the knife and missed half the meat. Her second attempt was better, and same with her third. But on her fourth, she dragged the knife into the bone and got stuck. Her fifth, she fought to yank away the skin. The wings were massive and slippery, she thought; she couldn’t figure out how best to hold them. She was a lefty, using a knife designed for righties.

She was on the line with five other workers, and no matter how fast they cut, they couldn’t keep up. Every few minutes, somebody came by with a shovel and dumped more wings into the trough. The trough was never empty, and there was no time to look elsewhere. Velez kept her head down, eyes on the knife and the cutting space and the wings, grabbing and cutting, grabbing and cutting. She handled a wing every 20 seconds, and then every 18. Flecks of turkey fat flew onto her apron and got matted into her steel glove.

Then, the cold set in. Somehow, she would later say, it seemed to build and build, sinking into her feet and hands, and impossible to shake away. The meat was cold. The knife was cold. Even the ground felt cold, and after hours of cutting, Velez walked gingerly into the break room. “It hurts a little,” she told a more experienced worker, who said, “Oh, yeah, it does.”

She returned to the line. The wings kept coming. She trimmed a wing in 25 seconds, then 22 seconds, then 29. The muscles in her hands kept tightening, and between cuts she bent back her fingers on the table. She adjusted her gloves. She sharpened her knife. She sharpened her knife again.

With 15 minutes to go, she found a last wind. She shook her hands and picked up the wings as quickly as she could--13 seconds, 15 seconds--until another worker looked at the clock and said the day was almost over. Velez cut the meat from one more wing and dropped it onto the belt.

Other workers guided her out of the deboning room, into a cleanup area where she washed bits of turkey flesh and skin from her boots, her rubber gloves, her apron. She said she was exhausted. She said the muscles in her lower legs hurt from standing. She said the muscles in her hand hurt from cutting. She tried to make a fist and couldn’t. “I’m just so tired,” she said.

She walked slowly toward the turkey plant’s exit and, while waiting for the other workers to filter out, sat in a chair and dropped her head on a table. Her first day as a worker in South Dakota was over. The next morning, her alarm would ring at 5 a.m.

“I need to get some sleep,” she said, but for now, all she wanted to do was get a ride back to the motel. She wanted to get back to Puerto Rico eventually, but here, for her, was opportunity--the chance to stand under a hot shower for as long as it took to take away the chill of the day.

[datawiresolutions]

Crestron Home Automation System Helps Couple Entertain Guests

Suzanne and Irl Engelhardt love entertaining – so much so that they have set up their extraordinary home largely for that purpose.

“We bought kitchen towels that say, ‘Guests of our guests may not bring guests,’ but we’ve broken that rule,” Sue Engelhardt says. She has held parties for their grown children, for their friends, for employees, college alumni, even her book club from St. Louis. “I love to have people come and stay,” she says.

  The five-bedroom house is unusually long and narrow. Most rooms have windows on two or three sides plus private patios. “We might have eight guests each in their own areas – but when they’re ready to socialize, they all congregate at the center of the house.”

  The center is a beautiful living room, kitchen and dining area, with floor to ceiling windows that retract, on both sides, to bring the outdoors inside. Here the Engelhardts and friends can lounge in the sun, eat, talk, watch movies, or binge-watch Netflix.  “After dinner, we always love to watch something, whether an action movie, a drama or Downton Abbey. We take turns deciding what it will be, but we watch it together. It’s a form of bonding.”

  Blending Design & Smart Home Technology

  Sue Engelhardt says she and Irl bought their original property in Naples in 2003, but after retirement they were able to purchase the adjacent lot, tear down their existing house and build something special.

  “I knew nothing from a technical point of view, but I know good design,” she recalls. She found Vero Beach-based architect Clem Schaub and loved his designs. “He grew up in Puerto Rico and enjoys the tropical lifestyle,” she says. “He understands that if you’re in Florida you want to be outside.”

She had trouble finding a good technology integrator, but Schaub recommended Will Gilbert of Fort Lauderdale-based Think Simple. “I felt comfortable with Will. He’s very open with how they will build something and transparent about pricing. If I would say, I really want this to be this way, he would always find a way to do it.”

  The living room is something special. Schaub and Think Simple designed a media system with a JVC projector, James Loudspeaker surround sound and a huge projection screen, but hid everything in the ceiling and behind a beautiful piece of fabric art by Olga de Amaral. But because the family hates to close draperies, Think Simple also installed an 80” Sharp TV, a better option when the room is bright. Press a button on a handheld remote or iPad and the artwork rolls out of the way to the right, revealing the TV or lowering the screen and projector.  “It’s really cool,” Sue says. “You can’t even tell they are there.”

Sue says she was surprised and impressed when the Think Simple people came back after the audio system was installed and tuned each room with Crestron’s Surround Sound Tuning Kit, using a microphone to compare the sound coming from the speakers with a reference tone generated by a computer.  “It’s night and day how much better it sounds.”

As concerned as she was about sound and image quality, Sue did not want to look at the A/V equipment when she wasn’t using it. Think Simple installed an equipment rack in the attic, mounted speakers in the ceilings, and hid TVs in cabinets whenever possible. In the master bath, they installed Seura mirror TVs, which disappear when powered off.  If someone wants to play a movie or song list from a phone or tablet, they can connect wirelessly via AirPlay. The sound system defaults to the room they connect from, but it’s easy to play music in multiple rooms or throughout the house.

  The Finer Details

  Getting the details right was a bit of a challenge. Gilbert says he had the bathroom vanities custom built so that the glass would match the glass in the Seura mirrors perfectly.  “We also had to use linear actuator motors in the living room to keep from damaging the artwork,” he adds.

Think Simple owns its own “CNC” computer-controlled lathe and milling machine, which they used to build bronze plates for security cameras and wood plates for some of the outdoor lighting fixtures, all of which exactly match fixtures chosen by Schaub interior architect Christine Pokorney.

  Network, Lighting and Security

  In addition to the A/V systems, Think Simple installed the home network, a home telephone system including a cellular antenna,  and Crestron controls to integrate the security, lighting, shading, climate and A/V, coordinating with the family’s security and IT suppliers based near their main home in St. Louis.

“The name of the company [Think Simple] is interesting,” Sue says. “As technical as they are, they really do make it very simple for the end user. I was impressed, too, with their service after the sale. I was watching a movie with some friends one evening and something happened – the movie just quit. I called Will, and he fixed it immediately by connecting remotely to my house. We went right back to our movie.”

  “The Think Simple people are all kind of nerdy but a good nerdy,” she adds. “They are all truly excited about what they do, and they are always looking for the next thing that will be great to use in a home.”

  That’s one reason she recommended the company to a neighbor down the street. But the other is simply that she loves her integrated home.

She says her son is building a new house now and she told him to be sure to include an automation system. “I said, ‘Do it now before the house is finished. You’ll be really glad you did.’”

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