12:10 – Science kit sales are extremely slow at the moment, better than last March but not by much, so we’re focusing now on building inventory. Right now, we can build kits a lot faster than we can sell them. Come the summer/autumn months, we’ll be selling them a lot faster than we can build them. So, other than making up and filling chemicals with limited shelf lives, we’re doing all the stuff now that we won’t have time to do later.
Barbara and I have talked about relocating once she’s ready to retire from the law firm and her mom is no longer around. One of my primary candidates, which I think Barbara agrees with, is the mountains up near the North Carolina/Tennessee border. We want a small town, but not too small. We want services like municipal water and sewer, a reasonable local hospital, and so on. Broadband Internet is obviously a requirement, and it’d be nice if there were competing ISPs. Natural gas would be nice, and Barbara insists on garbage pickup, either municipal or private contractor. A Costco within reasonable driving distance would be nice.
The other issues are religiosity and diversity. We were watching an episode of Friday Night Lights the other night. The high school football team traveled to an away game in Kingdom, Texas. As one of the characters commented, “92 churches, no bars”. Although I won’t say I’d prefer the converse, we certainly don’t want to be the only non-churchgoers in whatever community we relocate to. That’s one of the main reasons I was thinking about Boone, which as a university town has a fair degree of diversity and a considerable secular presence.
Barbara has made a couple other suggestions. Sometime this spring or summer, we may do a day trip or weekend trip up to the mountains to look around.
15:34 – As I mentioned, science kit sales have been pretty slow overall. What’s odd is that forensic kits are selling at several times the normal rate. The percentage varies month to month, but ordinarily forensic kits make up 7% to 12% of total orders. So far this month, they’re close to a third. As of this morning we had only three in stock, and that’s now down to two. I need to get more built this week.