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Category: Barbara

Thursday, 8 October 2015

08:38 – Barbara is starting today on packing up to stage the move. Even if this particular deal falls through, we will be moving, so it makes sense to get as much of the seldom-used stuff as possible boxed up and labeled.

We’ve been saving good cardboard boxes and packing material for months, and we get a lot of deliveries. The finished area downstairs is now so full of boxes, some broken down and some not, that it’s difficult to navigate the narrow corridors through the ceiling-high piles of boxes. Eventually, Barbara will get those filled, sealed, labeled, and ready to go.

Fortunately, much of our long-term storage food is from the LDS Home Storage Center and Augason Farms and is in cases of six #10 cans each. That’s something like 250 #10 cans, already boxed up. Much of the rest is already in boxed or shrink-wrapped cases of stuff like Bush’s Best Baked Beans (15 boxes at 8 cans/box), cases of canned soups, meats, vegetables, fruits, and so on (several dozen cases), bottled water (a couple dozen cases), assorted pastas and sauces (several dozen cases), and so on. Along with a bunch of miscellaneous stuff.

Then there’s science kit stuff, both finished goods inventory and components. I have to manage that carefully to make sure we can ship kits uninterrupted during the move. There’s a lot to do, but we’ll get it done.

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Monday, 5 October 2015

08:41 – Barbara is off to the gym this morning. While she was still working at the law firm, she did the gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays after work. This is her first full week of going during the day on Monday-Wednesday-Friday.

The wet weather is pretty much past. In the last 10 days, we’ve had about 6 inches (15 cm) of rain, which is almost two normal months’ worth. Everything is sodden, but we’ve been lucky. No damage other than limbs down, and only minor power blips. It could have been a lot worse, and in surrounding areas it has been.

We got a bunch of chemical bags and small parts bags for biology kits built yesterday. Barbara also taped up a couple of dozen shipping boxes, so today we’ll build another batch of biology kits. We’re still accumulating materials for the open-pollinated seed kits, and will begin production work on those this week and next. They won’t be ready to ship until next month, mainly because we have to do germination testing and there’s no way to speed up nature.

I commented to Barbara last night that I was surprised by how many readers were pre-ordering these kits, which are basically the proverbial pig in the poke. She said she wasn’t surprised at all, because we’ve spent the last five years shipping science kits that demonstrate that our company provides value for money. Interestingly, although the seed kits won’t be ready until next month, we’ve almost sold out the first batch. I’d planned to keep two seed kits aside for our own use, but I decided that since the next (larger) batch will be ready in December or early January, one will suffice for now. That means we have two-count-’em-two kits remaining available for readers who want to order them, first-come-first-served. If any of you regular readers/commenters want to order one or both of these remaining kits, you can do so for $100 per kit if you place your order in the next few days. To do so, go to paypal.com, choose the option to send money, and transfer $100 for each kit you want to orders (at) thehomescientist (dot) com. Make sure to include your mailing address, either street address or PO box. Your telephone number would also be helpful, just in case we need to call you for some reason.

10:19 – We’re now officially out of the first batch of seed kits. I decided to keep the offer in effect for now, so if you want a kit or kits for $100, please go ahead and order. The only thing is that your order will no longer go out with the first batch next month. Instead, it won’t ship until December or early January.

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Friday, 2 October 2015

08:28 – Barbara is settling in well to working for ourselves rather than for a paycheck. One of the things she was looking forward to was being able to go to the gym during the day instead of after work. She had been going after work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which made for late dinners and short evenings those days. Yesterday, she went to the gym during the day. She’ll probably start going three times a week instead of twice.

I’ve started preliminary work on a new line of science kits that we’ll introduce in 2016. The working title for the line is Science Basics, and the kits will be designed to sell for $99 each. They’re intended for students who will not go on to major in science in college, and will provide reasonable rigor and scope for a standard one-year laboratory course in biology, chemistry, or forensic science. I’m not too concerned about cannibalizing sales of our more expensive full kits. It’s a different market, and homeschoolers who are on a tight budget, which is to say many of them, should welcome these inexpensive kits. I’ll also design them to minimize the use of any really hazardous chemicals. They’ll also be micro-chemistry based to minimize clean-up and disposal issues.

Here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I ordered some gun accessories from Midway USA, including a magazine loader for AR-15 mags, a tactical sling for the Ruger AR-556, four more 30-round Magpul AR-15 magazines, and two Tapco 30-round magazines for the Ruger Mini-14. That takes us to eight total mags each for the AR-556 and Mini-14, which should be sufficient. We’re in decent shape right now on .223/5.56mm ammunition, but once we get relocated I want us both to shoot familiarization on both of those rifles. Rather than shoot up the good stuff, I think I’ll order a few test 20-round boxes of the cheap TulAmmo stuff from cheaperthandirt.com. If it functions reliably in both rifles, I’ll go ahead and order another case or two. The stuff is steel-case and so not reloadable, but at around $0.22/round the price is hard to beat, assuming it works reliably.
  • I continued research into the Sparta, NC area as a possible relocation destination. I was pleased to find the Alleghany County Rifle Association has a range outside Sparta. If we end up buying a house in the Sparta area, one of the first things I’ll do is join that club. There’s also a good gym for Barbara. There isn’t much shopping, but that’s okay. We can make the half hour trip to the Walmart Supercenter in Galax or West Jefferson whenever we need to, and we’ll be coming down to Winston-Salem for a Costco run every month or two. And there’s always walmart.com and amazon.com.
  • I managed to get in a few hours’ work on the prepping book. As of now, I intend to devote at least two full days a week to working on it until it’s complete.

So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.

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Thursday, 1 October 2015

09:01 – Yesterday was Barbara’s last day of work at the law firm. As of today, she’s working for our own company. Now that she has control of her own time, she’s heading over to the gym this morning. This afternoon she’ll be doing science kit stuff, starting with filling a bunch of chemical bottles.

I called Amazon yesterday about the problems I was having with my Fire HD7. They’re sending out a replacement, which should arrive tomorrow, along with a return label for the old one.

Science kit sales are down. Not a single order so far this month.

I started work yesterday on the heirloom seed vault we’ll offer in the book. So far, we have maybe 2/3 of the final lineup, including high-nutrition and/or flavorful vegetables like beans, beets, carrots, corn, onions, peas, sweet pepper, tomatoes, and turnips. For herbs, we have basil, oregano, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. We’ll be adding several herbs, including perhaps stevia (a no-calorie sweetener, although it’s hard to grow outside the far south), St. John’s wort (a natural anti-depressant), tobacco, and so on. We’ll also be adding peanuts and sunflowers as sources of oil, and perhaps poppy.

There’s a lot of work to be done. Obtaining suitable seeds is the least of it. We need to dry the seeds to 7% to 8% moisture before packaging them, and I need to write detailed instructions for planting, harvesting, preserving, and seed-saving.

The varieties included will be suitable to grow in temperate climates, including all of the continental US. Hawaii and particularly Alaska have issues all their own, but most or all of the varieties should do acceptably well in those two states as well. We’re also focusing on reliable varieties with reasonable disease resistance, which is to say ones that are easier for inexperienced gardeners to succeed with. The quantities included–at least 100 seeds of each variety, and often several thousand–are intended to be sufficient for a family of four to six people, with allowances made for newbie mistakes, crop failures, reduced germination rates after long storage, and so on.

One of the annoying things about a lot of similar products is that the packaging could almost intentionally be designed to encourage people to put them on the shelf and forget about them rather than actually plant some of the seeds to check viability. You open a #10 can and find a bunch of paper envelopes inside. There goes your seal.

We’ll use a foil-laminate Mylar bag as an outer container, which can be resealed with a hot clothes iron. We’ll use various sizes of plastic vials, tubes, and bottles to contain the individual seeds. We’ll encourage people to open the bag when they receive it and plant at least a few of each type of seed so that they can get some experience growing them. The package can then be resealed with a clothes iron and stuck in the freezer, where it’ll remain useful for many years to come. This is what we ourselves will be depending on if we’re reduced to growing our own food, so you can be sure we’ll be making this kit as reliable a source of food as we possibly can.

Our target price for this kit is $150, shipping included, although it may end up higher than that. We intend to begin shipping the first batch of these kits next month. If any of you regular readers/commenters want to order one or more of these kits, you can do so for $100 per kit if you place your order in the next few days. To do so, go to paypal.com, choose the option to send money, and transfer $100 for each kit you want to orders (at) thehomescientist (dot) com. Make sure to include your mailing address, either street address or PO box.

Read the comments: 60 Comments

Wednesday, 30 September 2015

08:04 – Today is Barbara’s last day of work at the law firm. As of tomorrow, she’s working for our own company.

Instead of rooting my Fire HD7 and installing Android, I decided to contact Amazon about a warranty replacement. Even after wiping it to defaults and using nothing but the standard configuration to check web pages and email, it locks up several times an evening to the point where it requires a hard reboot. The usual symptom is that the screen either goes completely black or the left 2/3 remains lit up although unresponsive and the right 1/3 is black. I’ve had it for only five months, so it should still be under warranty. I’ll contact Amazon today.

Science kit sales are fine. For 8/15, we did only 74% the revenue of 8/14, but for 9/15 we’ve done 153% the revenue of 9/14. Total revenue for 8+9/15 is at 99.8% of total revenue for 8+9/14. One more order today would take us over 100%.

We are getting low stock on biology and forensic kits, so I’ll spend some time today making up chemical solutions and filling bottles.

Email from Jen. She and her husband decided to order that Renogy 400W solar starter kit, a decent inverter, and some heavy cabling for a battery bank. They picked up several golf cart batteries locally. They’re going to charge up the battery bank with an AC charger, connect the inverter, and then run a known load to see what kind of life they get from a full charge. They’ll then connect up the four 100W panels and see what kind of charging performance they get from them. After that, they’ll stick the fully charged batteries on the shelf in the garage and store the panels and associated gear in a Faraday cage they’ll build from copper screening.

Read the comments: 27 Comments

Tuesday, 29 September 2015

07:54 – It’s Barbara’s next to last day of working for someone other than ourselves.

I’m seriously thinking about blowing away the Amazon-hacked OS on my Fire HD7 and replacing it with vanilla Android. I’m getting tired of the crashes and forced reboots with Fire OS, and the other night for the first time the splash ad screen was a video with loud audio. That’s simply obnoxious. I’m not sure how to go about installing Android, but I’m sure there are instructions all over the Internet. If I brick it, I brick it. No great loss at this point.

I’ve harshly criticized those ridiculous X-person/Y-year emergency food kits in the book, but yesterday I followed a link to the most ridiculous one yet: the Augason Farms Mega 40-Person 1-Year Food Storage Set for only $29,999.09. Wow, enough food to feed 40 people for one year, at “only” $750 per person-year. The catch is that this kit provides only “Approximately 1,297 calories/day/person”, which is roughly what the Nazis fed inmates in their concentration camps. So this kit is fine, if you want your 40 people at the end of one year to look like those stick figures in the newsreels shot when the Allies liberated the concentration camps at the end of WWII. Jesus wept.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Augason Farms products, and recommend them. We have a bunch of AF #10 cans in our long-term storage, but only stuff like powdered eggs, butter, and cheese, TVP in beef and chicken, and similar supplemental items to give some flavor to the bulk rice, flour, pasta, and similar items we keep in quantity. But their so-called 40-person/1-year kit is actually more like a 20-person/1-year kit or even a 15-person/1-year kit. Calling it good for 40 people is simply a lie.

Which got me thinking that I really needed to add a section to the book about Basal Metabolic Rate. I just used the Mifflin St Jeor equation to calculate my own BMR, which is 1,750 calories/day. Understand that BMR is the amount of energy required just for autonomic functions like respiration, circulating blood, digesting food, making new cells, and so on. It assumes you’re lying flat on your back and engaging in zero physical activity. BMR typically accounts for 60% to 75% of total energy needs, assuming only very light physical activity. For my 1,750 cal/day BMR, that means I actually need 2,333 cal/day to 2,917 cal/day. If I’m engaging in heavier physical activity, I’ll need more, perhaps 3,500 cal/day or more.

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Monday, 28 September 2015

08:39 – This morning, Barbara starts her last partial week at the law firm. Three more days.

Meanwhile, from the news reports it appears that Europe is in its last partial year of being European. Some pushback against the flood of muslim scum invaders has begun, but it’s going to be much too little, much too late. And Merkel and most of the other EU “leaders” are not just acquiescing with this invasion, but are actively encouraging it. The signs of what’s to come are already evident, with muslims protesting Oktoberfest and demanding that such celebrations cease, and attacking decent European people on the streets. The barbarians are indeed inside the gates. At least the eastern EU countries understand what’s going on and what’s at stake, but the other EU heads of government refuse to listen.

Perhaps the UK can save itself, but only perhaps. There won’t always be an England, I’m afraid.

10:02 – Email from a reader who’s been saving 2-liter soda bottles to use for long-term food storage, and has a good question. She says once they’re washed and rinsed with dilute bleach to sanitize them they’re fine for storing water, which she’s doing, but she’d like to use some of them for storing rice and other bulk staples. The problem is that just inverting them and leaving them to drain doesn’t get all of the water out. Depending on the relative humidity of your home and how much air circulation you have, it can take a week or two for them to dry out completely.

The solution is to use a food-grade drying agent to remove the last of the moisture. The drying agent we use is ordinary rice. You can dry it in the oven on low for half an hour or so if you want to, but it works fine straight out of the bag. Get the bottles as drying as you can by draining them inverted and then shaking out droplets. Then add a cup of ordinary rice to the bottle, cap it, and shake it to bring the rice grains into contact with the inner surface of the bottle. You can use that one cup of rice to dry several bottles. Each time, dump the rice back into the cup and bang the bottle to release any stuck grains. After you’ve done the last bottle, recover the rice and cook it for dinner. Problem solved.

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Thursday, 17 September 2015

08:21 – I’m losing track of days. Barbara pointed out last night that she’s taking a vacation day tomorrow, not today. For some reason, I was thinking that yesterday was Thursday. At any rate, she’s off tomorrow.

The way things seem to be trending, the American people are making it pretty clear that the last thing they want as president is a politician. On the Republican side, the leaders are: Trump, a demagogue but not a politician; Fiorina, a businesswoman who destroyed Hewlett-Packard, but not a politician; and Carson, a non-entity, but not a politician. On the Democrat side, we have a small group of elderly political hacks, but no non-politicians. Sounds to me like the Democrats are badly in need of a non-politician.

The FedEx guy sneaked up on Colin yesterday, even though the main front door was open and Colin had an unobstructed view of the street through the glass storm door. FedEx delivered one box from walmart.com that contained the five boxes of dog treats that I’d ordered. When I checked the walmart.com site, it claimed my entire order had been delivered, but none of the bottles of Bertolli pasta sauce were in the box. When I checked the FedEx tracking number, it told me that everything had been delivered, but below that line it said that a shipment had been damaged and was being returned to sender. This is the second time this has happened on a Walmart order that contained items in glass.

11:21 – September 30th is Barbara’s last day of work at the law firm. On Thursday, October 1st, she comes to work for our company, The Home Scientist, LLC.

I need to get ready for that so that she can hit the ground running. Actually, I’ll probably give her the rest of that week off so that she can enjoy some free time, unless she just wants to start work immediately. Of course, one of our corporate benefits is that any employee can take as many paid vacation days as he or she wants to.

The first week or two we’ll focus on Barbara learning the business. Eventually, I want her to be able to do everything other than design new kits and write manuals. She doesn’t have any lab experience, so I’ll continue doing stuff like making up chemicals myself, but I will have her at least watching me to get some idea of how it’s done.

I intend to transfer all the administrative to her, including inventory, ordering and receiving, and so on. She’s much more organized and detail-oriented than I am, which isn’t surprising considering that she’s a librarian. I think this will all work out very well. The problem may be in her handling of mistakes. I expect mistakes. They’re just something that has to be dealt with. But Barbara REALLY hates making mistakes, so I’ll have to get her past that. We simply have too much to deal with to expect perfection.

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Saturday, 5 September 2015

08:34 – Before I bought Barbara her Kindle Fire HDX, I did some reading. The consensus seemed to be that tablets, including the Fire, were well-suited for content consumers but sucked for content producers. After months of using Barbara’s HDX and my own Fire HD, I conclude that Kindle Fires suck, period. Short battery life, unreliable WiFi connections, and my HD locks up frequently and requires a power reset. Barbara is also frustrated with her HDX, whose WiFi connection is even less reliable than my HD’s.

It may be that not all tablets suck as badly as the Fires. I’m prepared to believe that Amazon butchered the OS in the interests of encouraging customers to buy their products. If I have time, I may replace the Amazon OS on my HD with a vanilla Android.

Or I may simply start using the Dell notebook that’s been sitting unused for months on my side table. It runs Windows 8, but even that has to be more reliable than these Kindles.

13:24 – Just back from a small Costco run. I didn’t grab much in the way of shelf-stable stuff, other than 12 gallons (45 liters) of bottled water, 22 pounds (10 kilos) of assorted pasta, six large jars of applesauce, a can of Gatorade lemon/lime drink mix, a couple large boxes of Ritz crackers (which have surprisingly long shelf life even in the original cellophane tubes), a jar of cashews, and a couple other small items.

Barbara is out doing yardwork at the moment, while I do laundry and ship kits. This weekend, we’re going to make bread the easy way.

Read the comments: 40 Comments

Tuesday, 1 September 2015

08:36 – The final countdown commences. Barbara retires in 30 days, at the end of this month. I’m sure she’s looking forward to it, as I certainly am.

Not that “retires” means she won’t work any more. She’s retiring from the law firm but will be coming to work for our own company, to which we’re both looking forward. What this really means for Barbara is that she’ll have control of her own time. She’ll work when she wants to, or when we need her to. She’ll take time off to do her own thing when she wants to, whether that means taking a long weekend to go to a craft fair with one of her friends or taking a couple weeks off to go on a bus tour with another friend. But mostly she’ll be working for our own business.

All of which got me to thinking about what an odd concept retirement is. The idea that at a certain age, one simply stops working and takes a multi-year (or multi-decade) vacation. Our parents’ generation was the first in human history to take the idea of retirement for granted. Before then, most people worked until they dropped. Everyone who wanted to eat had to work for their food. People who were too old to do hard physical labor worked at tasks that were less physically demanding, like watching children or shelling peas or darning socks or sharpening tools.

When the first Social Security checks were issued in the 1930’s, they were to retirees aged 65, who could be expected to continue living and drawing checks for a couple of years. And those checks were just enough to keep the retirees from starving or ending up on the streets. They were intended to provide only a basic supplement to whatever the retirees had saved on their own. Nowadays, it’s common for a retired couple to draw SS checks of $50,000/year or more. Our children are paying for that, and they can’t afford to do it. The American population over 65 is bankrupting our young people, who are just barely able to support themselves, if they’re lucky. We’ve gone from about 30 working people minimally supporting each retiree in the 30’s to a ratio much nearer to one worker supporting one retiree in style in 2015. That’s simply not sustainable. It never was, and it never can be. That’s why Barbara and I will never really retire. We’ll keep the business active as long as we can physically do so.

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