Category: Barbara

09:37 – Barbara’s out working in the yard, I’m doing laundry, and Colin is whining to go out and play. A typical Saturday. We haven’t had many of those recently. But now things seem to have settled down with Barbara’s parents, which is exactly what she needed.

My vendor acknowledged the PO I sent yesterday. Unfortunately, two of the items were backordered. One of them, the 96-well plate, is out of stock permanently. They’re out and don’t intend to get more. That’s not a big problem. I can order those elsewhere. The worrisome one is the deep cavity slides. I ordered $600+ worth of those, and they’re backordered until May 15th. No one else carries those, unless I want to order directly from the factory in China. That’s a can of worms I’d rather not open.

11:06 – Barbara got home a few minutes ago from her sister’s birthday breakfast. A bit unusual, but Frances’ husband has to go in to work later this morning, so it was breakfast or nothing.

Reorganizing downstairs is proceeding apace. Last August, we went out to Home Depot looking for plastic storage bins. They had generic shoebox-sized 6.5-quart storage bins with lids for $1.17 each, so we bought 37, which was their entire stock. I was intending to buy another bunch, so I checked the website to see how many the local store had in stock. While I was there, I started looking at alternatives. They also had Sterilite plastic shoeboxes. That’s a decent brand name, but the Sterilite boxes were a lot more expensive. Then I noticed that they sold them in a 60-pack, on-line only, for $70. That item was flagged “no free shipping”, which concerned me a bit. But I added it to my cart anyway, and ended up paying only the $70 plus $5 shipping and $5 sales tax. That’s $1.33 each delivered, and they’re nicer storage bins than the no-name ones we bought before. And I don’t have to carry them home. I did check Amazon, of course. They didn’t have the 60-packs. They did have 12-packs with free shipping, but five 12-packs would have cost me $132.

When they arrive, 30 of them go downstairs on the work tables. We’ll use them to assemble batches of 30 each of the various chemical bags that go into the kits. They’ll replace the cardboard boxes we had been using. The other 30 stay upstairs, where we’ll use them to assemble batches of 30 of the small parts bags for the kits. The nice thing about these bins is that they’re stackable when not in use, which cardboard boxes are not. That means we can get them out, set up an array of 30 of them, build 30 (or 60 or 90) small parts bags, and then stack the bins out of the way.

10:35 – Barbara’s dad is in the hospital again, but she’s expecting him to be released today or tomorrow. Dutch had a follow-up doctor visit yesterday, and the doctor was concerned about the amount of water-weight Dutch had gained. So they did a direct-admit to the hospital so they can put Dutch on IV diuretics to get some of the fluid gone. As Barbara said last night, this’ll probably be a regular thing every couple of months for the rest of Dutch’s life. He’s doing what he’s supposed to in terms of limiting fluid intake, salt, and so on, but eventually the fluid builds up anyway. Barbara said the good news was that the blood tests showed Dutch was otherwise doing well, including kidney function.

Barbara already had plans for last night with her friend Bonnie to attend a concert. She decided that Dutch’s condition wasn’t an emergency, so she went ahead with her plans. Frances and Sankie went to the hospital with Dutch. Sankie, who is apparently doing very well mentally, stayed with Frances last night, so presumably they’ll go over to the hospital today. We’re hoping Dutch will be dried out and ready to go home this afternoon.

One of the downsides to our increasing kit sales volume is that we’re ordering in a lot of components, which have to be stored somewhere. Storing one case of 1,100 or 1,500 bottles or 60 test tube racks, for example, is no big deal. Storing a dozen or two dozen cases of bottles and 600 test tube racks is a different thing entirely. So one of my high-priority projects for this weekend–especially since I have cases and cases of more stuff on order–is to get the downstairs finished and unfinished areas better organized. I need space to store all this stuff, and I need to be able to find it quickly.

First up is to get the half dozen or so cases of bottles that are currently lining one wall of the garage area in the basement moved over into the finished area and sorted out by type. There are more cases in the library upstairs that we’ll also move down to the finished area of the basement, along with some of the stuff that’s currently in my upstairs workroom.

Then I want to convert my work/storage area in the unfinished part of the basement into a pure storage area. That means moving out the two 6X2.5 foot work tables in that area and installing floor-to-ceiling 12-inch shelves where the tables were. Those tables will go out into the garage area, where the cases of bottles were.

09:17 – Barbara picked up her mom from the hospital yesterday and brought her home. Sankie was apparently talking nonsense for most of the trip home and for a while after they got back to the apartment, but Barbara said her mom started to settle down after Barbara gave her the no-more-of-this-or-else speech. Our phone didn’t ring after Barbara got home, so we’re hoping that Sankie will settle down and start behaving. Sankie must know that if she starts up again, Barbara and Frances will have no option but to move her to a different facility.

One of the “new” chemicals we plan to include in the life science kits is universal indicator, which provides a visual indication of the approximate pH of solutions. In very acid solutions, pH 2 or lower, the indicator is red. As the pH increases, the color changes through rose (pH 3), orange (4), orange-yellow (5), yellow (6), lime green (7), green-blue (8), cyan (9), lilac (10), violet (11), and finally to pure blue in extremely alkaline solutions. So I just made up and tested two liters of the stuff, which is enough for 60+ life science kits.

10:04 – Barbara stayed with her dad last night, and will be back sometime this morning. Before she headed over there last night, I talked to her about ending the dad-sitting duties she and Frances have been doing every night since he hurt himself a week ago. Staying over there every other night is very wearing on Barbara, physically and emotionally, and must be the same for Frances. I told Barbara that I thought she and Frances needed to pace themselves, because no one knows when the next real crisis will occur.

We’re in pretty good shape on science kit inventory now. We have, either as completed kits or as subassemblies ready to build, about six dozen each of the chemistry and biology kits. We introduced the biology kits last April, and I just checked the sales ratio of biology:chemistry kits over that full period as well as the last six months and the last three months. It’s remarkably consistent, with biology kit unit sales holding at about 55% of chemistry kit unit sales. In other words, we sell about 1.8 chemistry kits for each biology kit. That means that if we want a total of 350 more biology and chemistry kits ready to ship as of 1 July we need 125 biology kits and 225 chemistry kits. That in turn means that over the next four months or so, we need to label and fill something like 15,000 containers, or roughly 125 per day. That’s doable, but we’ll be busy between now and the end of the year.

07:37 – Unless we get a flurry of kit sales today and tomorrow, February 2013 will be our worst month in a long time. Not that that’s anything to worry about. For the last several months, kit sales have been four to seven times higher than month-on-month figures for a year earlier. For February 2013, our sales have been “only” three times those of February 2012. Unless March through May are catastrophically bad, we’ll remain on track to at least triple if not quadruple kit sales this year, assuming we can get them built.

We’re almost out of chemistry kits, so I took some time yesterday from working on the new batch of 60 biology kits to put together two dozen each of the regulated and non-regulated chemical bags for the CK01A chemistry kits. I’ll build a dozen chemistry kits for stock today.

Barbara is coming home after work to have dinner and then head over to her parents’ place to do dad-sitting duty tonight. Dutch is doing pretty well, but Barbara and Frances don’t want to leave him alone at night until his leg wound is completely healed. Sankie is doing marginally better. Her 85th birthday is tomorrow, so Barbara, Frances, and Dutch are going to drive down to visit her in Thomasville tomorrow evening.