08:34 – Only two more days until Barbara returns. Colin is getting impatient. Since Sunday, Barbara’s been in the Michigan UP area, first at Mackinac Island and yesterday at Sault Ste. Marie. She hasn’t had a cell signal since they arrived at Mackinac, so I called her last night at her hotel just to make sure everything was okay. She said everything is fine and that she and Marcy are having a great time.
The morning paper reports that Duke Energy has joined a large and growing list of big companies that are eliminating retiree health insurance. Duke will now pay a fixed amount toward Medicare supplement policies for its retirees. I expect this phenomenon to snowball over the next few years. Eventually, all private retirees and many local and state government retirees will find that their only option is Medicare, with their former employers perhaps paying something towards a supplemental policy. Eventually, I expect federal government and military retirees will also be lumped into the Medicare system. This is just an early sign of the creeping defaults government will make on unsustainable promises.
Kit work continues. I need to inventory our bottle supply and put together a PO for more bottles and caps once I figure out what we’re short of.
12:07 – As it turns out, we’re in a lot better shape on bottles than I thought we were. I found a couple of cases that I didn’t realize we had. That gives us enough empty bottles for another 100+ kits–in addition to the labeled bottles we already have in stock, another 100+ kits worth–so I can put off ordering bottles and caps for another couple months.
I did start transferring cases of bottles from the manufacturer’s packaging–large plastic bags inside cardboard boxes–to 66-quart translucent plastic bins. Those stack a lot better than the boxes and make it easy to see how many bottles of each type we have in stock with just a glance. I need to pick up another six or eight of the 66-quart bins the next time we’re at Home Depot.