08:02 – Well, here it is almost a full day later, and still no Mercedes-Benz. Not so much as a Yugo, nor even a skateboard. I have wasted two candles proving that prayers are not answered, which I knew anyway. Oh, well. I’ll just use the rest of the case in science kits, where they’ll at least do some good.
I did manage to find a source for the food coloring dyes for the AP Chemistry kit. I needed FD&C Blue #1 (Brilliant Blue FCF or E133), FD&C Red #40 (Allura Red or E129), and FD&C Yellow #5 (Tartrazine or E102). I’d found a Canadian supplier who was willing to sell me five kilograms of each for about $500 each, but that would have been enough for something like 100,000 kits. Fortunately, I found a supplier in the UK who packages these dyes in 25 g containers, so I ordered a supply of all three. Of course, the per-gram price was much, much higher than the Canadian supplier’s price, but I can live with that. They’re shipping via slow boat, so the product won’t arrive until early to mid-September, but I can live with that, too.
12:20 – Barbara and I are still watching Dawson’s Creek. We’re in season five now, and the kids are college freshmen taking first-semester final exams. The episodes we watched last night had them pulling all-nighters, desperate to learn what they needed to know before they took the exams. I commented to Barbara that it seemed counterproductive to show up in a zombie state for a final, and not only had I never done that, I’d never even cracked a book to study for a final exam on anything. She said she’d pulled an all-nighter once before a final exam, and the results were catastrophically bad. Her professor was a pretty nice guy. He noticed that she was a zombie, asked if she’d stayed up all night studying, and told her to get some sleep and show up that afternoon to retake it.