09:23 – It’s still chilly and to get more so over the next few days. It was 51.8F (11C) when I took Colin out at 0700 this morning, sunny and windy. The high today is to be 70F (21C), but after that it’s to cool down noticeably, with highs in the 60’s tomorrow and then in the 50’s for the next few days.
Barbara is at the gym this morning. This afternoon and for the next several days we’ll be working on kit stuff. We have bottles to fill, chemical bags to make up, and so on. Kit sales remain steady at or above the usual numbers for this time of year. As of this morning, we’re roughly 7% through the month, with kit revenues at about 13% of last May’s total.
UPS showed up yesterday morning with a bunch of hand sanitizer from Costco, about 6.25 liters worth in a dozen 12-ounce pump bottles and one 2-liter pump bottle. With what we already had, we’re in good shape on hand sanitizer, especially given that I have a couple gallons (7.5 liters) of 91% IPA to stretch it with if necessary.
Not long after, FedEx showed up with my Amazon order, a case of 80 rolls of G-P toilet paper. I told her I wanted to try it, and if she hated it she was welcome to keep using the Costco TP and I’d use this stuff. Her only remark was to ask if it was two-ply. I assured her it was, and pulled out a test roll. She rolled some between her fingers and said it was fine with her.
I like to keep plenty on hand. I’m old enough to remember the Great Toilet Paper Panic back in the 70’s, when an innocent comment by Johnny Carson caused a nationwide run on toilet paper that lasted for weeks, if not months. There was actually a black market in toilet paper, with people paying five or ten times the normal price for it. Hell, brides were putting toilet paper in their wedding registries. I am not making this up.
FedEx is due again tomorrow with my latest Walmart order. I noticed when Barbara made fried rice the other night that we were low on sesame oil, so I ordered a couple of 12.5 ounce bottles of it. We also use a lot of vanilla extract, which Costco was out of when Barbara tried to buy some last week and said it might be some time before they were back in stock. So I ordered one 8-ounce (237 mL) bottle of McCormick artificial vanilla extract to try. My guess is we won’t detect much difference between it and the real stuff. The artificial stuff is much, much cheaper. An 8-ounce bottle was $0.98 at Walmart, versus eight or ten times that much for the genuine stuff. And the only difference is that the genuine stuff is made from actual vanilla beans while the artificial stuff is 100% synthetic chemicals. Yum.