10:48 – We’re getting Barbara’s stuff ready for her to leave tomorrow morning on a driving trip with her friend Marcy up the Blue Ridge Parkway. Her Kindle is charged and has a good selection of books on it. I’m charging her cameras and clearing the memory cards now. Her notebook is ready to go, although I need to make sure she knows how to connect to WiFi networks where they’re staying.
10:06 – I managed to cut down on the backlog of labeled bottles by about a third, which still leaves me with 1,400 or so labeled bottles to be filled. I’ll try to get a few hundred more of those done today.
I really wish we could ship forensic science kits internationally, but it’s just not practical both for cost reasons and the amount of hassle involved for us. In the last two or three weeks, I’ve gotten four queries about shipping forensics kits internationally, one to the UK, two to Canada, and one this morning to Australia. I hate turning people down, but the only option would be to ship them as hazardous materials via UPS or FedEx, which costs hundreds of dollars. And even if the prospective customers would agree to that, I’d have to go through the process of getting certified by UPS and/or FedEx to ship hazardous materials, which would take a lot of my time and cost several hundred dollars. It’s just not worth it, but I really do hate turning people down.
Barbara leaves next Monday on a driving trip up the Parkway into Northern Virginia with one of her friends. They plan to spend the week sightseeing and making side trips, staying in B&B’s along the way. Colin and I of course will be desolate, but we’ll manage somehow. Colin suggested having lots of human food and watching Heartland re-runs, which sounds like a plan to me. I’m already most of the way through season one. At 13 hours per season, Colin and I will probably make it through season two and most of season three before Barbara returns home.
Boy, talk about inflation. The other day I mentioned that Amazon Pantry was selling the 16-ounce cans of Bush’s Baked Beans for $1.48, but the 28-ounce cans for $1.78. Yesterday, I noticed that the 28-ounce cans were now $2.59, a 45.5% increase in only two days.
08:06 – One of the minor annoyances with Netflix streaming has been that titles disappear with little notice. In the past, Netflix has provided as little as three or four days’ notice. That’s fine for a movie, but not very helpful for a series. Every time I’ve spoken to Netflix tech support about another issue, I’ve asked them to please make the end date available for each title, or at least give more notice. Yesterday, I noticed that they’ve started doing that. Three of the items in our streaming queue are marked as expiring on 1 July, including one series that we just started watching: Outrageous Fortune, a pretty good series from New Zealand. We won’t have time to finish it. There are 107 episodes, so we’ll just bag it for now and wait until Netflix gets it back, as they probably will.
In the first six seasons of Heartland, Amber Marshall’s character Amy didn’t drink alcohol, other than one incident where a bad guy spiked her drinks with vodka at a party. Even during holidays, birthdays, etc. when all the adults were having wine with dinner, Amy had a glass of water. But during an episode we watched the other night, Amy had a glass of wine with dinner. Apparently, she’s turned 21 and is now allowed wine. So I mentioned this to Kim yesterday because Jasmine turns 21 on June 21st. I mentioned jokingly that Jas would now be allowed to drink. I was flabbergasted when Kim said that Jas has already mentioned this and said that she expects to have wine with her birthday dinner. I thought Jas was an alcohol-shall-never-pass-my-lips kind of girl. For example, she refuses to go out with college boys who (gasp) drink beer. I may have to reconsider my opinion of Jas. She’s not as prissy as I thought she was. She does, however, have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws.
10:06 – I’m in the midst of making up 137 30 mL bottles of iodine solution, which is included in most of our kits. That’s as many bottles as I could fill with the ~4.25 liters of solution I had on hand. I’ll make up another 6+ liters of iodine solution today, but I can’t fill another batch of bottles because I’m down to only half a dozen of the special phenolic cone caps we use on those bottles to keep the iodine from outgassing.
I spent some time yesterday afternoon getting one of the new laptop systems configured for Barbara to use as her main system. It should have been easy to transfer her Thunderbird email data and Firefox browser data over from her Linux system, but it just didn’t work. I copied the contents of the .thunderbird and .firefox profile directories from her Linux system and pasted those files into her new default profile directories under appdata on the Windows 8.1 system, but neither Thunderbird nor Firefox used those data. Fortunately, Barbara doesn’t have much that she cares about having transferred. She said not to worry about it. She’ll recreate her addressbook manually and send herself any emails that she cares about keeping. What really matters are her documents and spreadsheet data, which I copied over directly.
I also got power management set up for an always-plugged-in desktop configuration. Apparently, even though the charger is connected at all times, the system ignores the charger and allows the battery to run down to 50% before it actually charges it. Supposedly, that’ll make the battery last a lot longer.
I connected a standard mouse to one of the USB ports because Barbara doesn’t particularly like touchpads. She’s happy with the keyboard and display, though, so I won’t bother connecting a USB keyboard and full-size display. I also didn’t bother to connect her Ethernet cable. She’s happy using WiFi instead.
13:38 – Another day being eaten by locusts. I thought, as just one example, that I had another case of 500 Petri dishes in stock. That turns out to be wrong, so I just did a PO for another case of 500. For the time being, I’m fine, but I’m down to only 150 Petri dishes in stock, which is only 25 biology kit’s worth.
It took Barbara an hour to get to work this morning. We had a thunderstorm last night, which wasn’t at all strong here, but a couple miles down the road at the Wake Forest University main entrance it knocked down a tree and powerlines, which blocked traffic on Reynolda Road both ways. Which is an example of why I want to be prepared for emergencies. If something as minor as a downed tree can bollix things up so badly for so many people for so long, just imagine what a serious problem could do, let alone a catastrophic problem.
07:35 – Barbara is taking today off work. With the holiday Monday, that gives her a four-day weekend. We’d planned to sleep in this morning, but Colin woke us at 6:15 vomiting. At least he wasn’t up on the bed at the time.
Barbara has lots of work planned for the next few days, including painting the new columns on the front porch and the new threshold at the back door. I hope we can keep Colin away from the wet paint. Over the years, our experience with Border Collies and wet paint hasn’t been good.
There’s an article in the paper this morning about state government subsidies for movie and TV production companies. North Carolina has been a major participant. Most of the action takes place in Wilmington, where many TV series have been or are being produced, including Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, Hart of Dixie, Under the Dome, Revolution, Sleepy Hollow, and Eastbound and Down.
But now many states are rethinking these tax breaks and production credits, wondering if they’re getting enough bang for their bucks. Many states are eliminating subsidies entirely. North Carolina is tweaking the rules, eliminating subsidies for talk shows and sporting events and focusing more on credits for building production facilities and other infrastructure. I suspect that North Carolina has already reached critical mass, with major production facilities already located here, a continuing flow of talented and skilled graduates from Winston-Salem’s North Carolina School of the Arts, and our generally low cost of living.
09:16 – In terms of physical components, chemicals are by far the largest cost item in our kits. The chemical cost for a bottle ranges from a few cents to a few dollars each, depending on the chemical. But the second largest cost item for physical components is the containers themselves, which range from about $0.15 to $0.90 each. That may not sound like much until you realize that one kit may contain 50+ containers.
Until recently, I’ve been happy with our primary container supplier. Their prices are competitive, they stock most of the containers and caps we need, and they ship quickly. They also provide free ground shipping on any order of $250 or more, which isn’t a problem for us. But I’m starting to worry about them. In the past, I’d place an order with them and it would be shipped the same day or the following day. I’d generally receive it two or three days after I placed the order. But on the last couple of orders they’ve been much slower to ship. It’s not a backorder problem. When I placed those orders, they showed all items as in-stock. But rather than ship the same or the following day, they’re now taking five to ten business days to ship. In one sense, that’s not a big problem. I always keep reasonable stock levels of the containers we use. But I do wonder what’s going on with them.
11:44 – Amazon just added a new benefit for Prime members, called Amazon Prime Pantry. They charge $6 for shipping, but that’s for a very large box. Adding a Prime Pantry item to your cart starts a new box. Each Prime Pantry item states how much of a box it fills. If you exceed the volume or weight capacity of the box, it automatically starts a new box.
So I started playing around with it, just to see how much would actually fit in the box. I’m still building our long-term food storage (as opposed to just the car emergency kits). Lipids are an issue for long-term storage, and one of the best ways to store lipids is canned Crisco. The manufacturer says Crisco remains good for at least two years, but in fact an unopened can will remain good for at least ten years, and probably a lot longer. We don’t routinely use Crisco here, but Barbara frequently uses vegetable oil for frying chicken, stir-fry, etc. Crisco works just as well for that as liquid oil, so I decided to add some Crisco to the box. (Incidentally, canned Crisco is also excellent for emergency lighting. Sticking a piece of string in a can gives you an emergency candle that’ll burn all day long for literally a month.)
Despite Python, I happen to like Spam canned meat, so I added a few cans of that as well. I ended up with 11 48-ounce cans of Crisco and 14 12-ounce cans of Spam in that one box. Amazon informed me that my box was 100% full and asked if I wanted to check out.
I typically place several Amazon.com orders per month, and every time it offers a discount if I apply for an Amazon Visa card. I finally decided to click on the Learn More link, and I liked what I saw. I’d been using our Costco AmEx card at Amazon. It provides a 1% rebate on all purchases, with a higher percentage for Costco purchases. The Amazon card provides a 3% rebate on Amazon purchases, and lower percentages on non-Amazon purchases. So I filled out the on-line application, asked for a second card for Barbara, and clicked Submit. After about 10 seconds, the screen refreshed and said the card was approved and that it had been set as our default payment method for Amazon purchases. It also said I’d been issued a $60 credit that would be applied automatically to our next Amazon order unless I told them otherwise.
Given that we make a huge percentage of our purchases from either Costco or Amazon, it makes sense to have a stored-branded card for each. We already have a Visa card from our credit union, but it’ll be easy enough to cancel that. The new card has only a $5,000 credit limit, but I’m sure we can get that increased if we need to.
10:01 – Yesterday, of course, was very hard for Barbara, as it was her first Mother’s Day without her mom. We did a Costco run and dinner with Mary and Paul. Neither we nor they actually needed much at Costco, but I think it did Barbara good to see them and relax over dinner.
Kit sales remain very slow, although we’re building like crazy. Come July, August, and September, things will reverse. We’ll be shipping kits much faster than we can build them. We’re in pretty good shape on component inventory, so for now I’m concentrating on bottling chemicals that have long shelf lives.
10:23 – Barbara is out planting potted flowers before the rain arrives. I’m doing laundry, shipping kits, and getting ready to build more.
I also just climbed up on the roof to get rid of the spring accumulation of maple seeds and so on in the troughs. This may be the last year I’ll do that. Having vertigo means I can lose my balance without warning, which isn’t a good thing when I’m standing up on the roof. I don’t want to pull a Max McGee. As Harry Callahan said, a man’s got to know his limitations. Next year, I’ll just do the best I can with a rake while standing at the top of the ladder.
I got email yesterday from Netflix announcing that they’re increasing streaming prices from $8 to $9 per month, but only for new customers or those who change their plans. Others are grandfathered in for two years. I still think that Netflix is being too timid, but I suppose they must know what they’re doing. If it were me, I would have doubled the monthly price and announced that I was doing that so that I could afford to greatly increase the number and quality of streaming titles available. In an era of $150/month cable TV bills, I can’t imagine that many people would drop the service if it increased from $8 to $16/month. More likely, they’d drop some of the cable TV options.
Amazon is now streaming a limited selection of old HBO series. As far as I can see, it’s no big deal. Every HBO series I checked on Amazon is pay-per-view. If you want to watch an HBO series, it’s actually cheaper just to sign up for Netflix DVDs than it is to pay per episode or per season on Amazon.
Speaking of expensive streaming, Barbara and I watched the first five seasons of the Canadian series Murdoch Mysteries on Amazon Prime streaming, all at no additional charge. They also have series six, but the only option is to buy episodes or the entire series. I don’t know who Amazon thinks they’re kidding. They charge $4.99 for each 45-minute episode or $58 for the 13-episode series. Give me a break. For comparison, I recently bought the most recent season of Heartland on DVD from Amazon.ca. Those five discs and 18 episodes cost about $22, including shipping.
08:21 – Barbara is taking the day off work to take Colin to his annual vet checkup, run errands, and catch up on some stuff at home. I’m still filling bottles, hundreds and hundreds of them, for science kits.
The morning paper reports that the results of the nationwide assessment of 12th graders has only three-eighths of them proficient or better in reading and about a quarter proficient or better in math. Those figures are bad enough, but what goes unmentioned is that the bar for “proficient” is set extremely low. By any reasonable yardstick, the sorry truth is that probably at most 5% to 10% perform at what would historically have been considered a 12th grade level. Is it any wonder that private schools and homeschooling are booming?
On a related note, I see that fast-food employees are planning protests in 150 cities on 15 May to demand an increase in the minimum wage to $15/hour. Give me a break. The vast majority of them aren’t even worth the $9/hour that they currently average.
As the articles always point out, $9/hour is about $18,000/year, which is $4,500/year below the poverty line for a family of four. The articles never point out that if both parents in that family of four flip burgers at McDonalds, the family income is $36,000/year, which is $13,500 above the poverty line. Apparently, we’re supposed to think that Ozzie should be able to support his family flipping burgers while Harriet is a stay-at-home mom.
07:50 – Barbara is on a day-trip today with her friend Bonnie Richardson. Bonnie got here about 7:00, and they left to drive to Greensboro, where they’ll catch the train to Raleigh. They’ll return sometime this evening.
I’m still filling bottles. This weekend we’ll start making up chemical bags for 90 biology kits and 120 chemistry kits.
09:36 – Barbara finished over at her mom’s apartment yesterday. She gave her keys to Frances, who still has a few things to pick up today.
Barbara and I will watch the final two episodes of The Shield tonight. It’s an excellent series, albeit grim. In tone, it reminds me of Rescue Me, another excellent series. From what I know of inner-city policing, it seems realistic, with one exception. Over and over again, they have cops entering a dark threat environment with pistols drawn and flashlights on. But they all hold the two very close together, with crossed wrists, putting the pistol and flashlight only inches apart and directly in front of the cop’s head and chest. Does LA really teach its cops to do that? If so, that’s nuts. You should keep the flashlight as far from your head and body as possible, held out at arm’s length. If a bad guy shoots, he’s going to shoot at the light nearly every time. Just as the cop will return fire by aiming just below the muzzle flash of the bad guy’s gun.