Category: science kits

09:32 – It was 26.5F (-3C) when I took Colin out at 0630, our first hard freeze of the season. We didn’t get the snow flurries, though. Barbara is off to the gym and then the supermarket to replace the milk that aged out while she was away. I offered to make her up some Nestle Nido dry whole milk, but she prefers the fresh stuff.

Thursday afternoon, I ordered six cases of quart Ball jars from Walmart. I was surprised to see FedEx pull up Saturday to deliver three of those cases. I thought it was generally understood that “free 2-day shipping” doesn’t include Saturday delivery other than for items shipped via USPS. The other three cases are to show up tomorrow.

October 2017 revenues are running about 15% behind October 2016, but that doesn’t really matter since 2017 August and September revenues combined ran about 135% of combined 2016 August/September revenues. Being down 15% in the slower October period is barely a blip overall. The next three or four weeks will also be slow. November revenues are generally very small until Thanksgiving, when Christmas sales start to ramp up.

It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, happens starting Saturday the 4th. My guess is not much, but my crystal ball isn’t any clearer than anyone else’s.

08:54 – It was 57.3 (13C) when I took Colin out at 0715, partly cloudy. Barbara is off to the gym and store this morning.

Our weather is starting to get a lot more autumn-like. Most of the leaves are still green, but a lot of them are falling. Our forecast highs over the next week or so are in the 60’s, with lows in the 40’s and high 30’s.

Science kit sales are starting to taper off, as is typical for late September into October. This month’s revenues are just short of last September’s. We’ll probably end up selling only three or four fewer kits this month than a year ago. But this August was considerably bigger than August 2016, so on balance we’re actually doing better than last year.

Embarrassing prepper moment. I called Blue Ridge Co-op a couple days ago and asked them to come out and top off our propane tank. We last had that done back in April, I think, and I was curious to find out how much propane we’d used from our 330-gallon tank to run the cooktop in the intervening five months or so.

As it turned out, the answer was a massive 0.0 gallons. The guy pulled the hose down, but when he checked the overflow valve there was still liquid propane shooting out. So there was no point to even connecting up the filler hose.

I speculate that when they filled the tank in April, the temperatures were enough lower that simple thermal expansion of the liquid propane has accounted for all our usage. With the current higher temperatures, the liquid propane expanded to fill the available volume.

The good news is that my original calculations were apparently correct, although I questioned them at the time as being intuitively ridiculous. I calculated that that 300 gallon tank was sufficient to run our cooktop even under heavy use for between 10 and 14 years. Turns out that was probably a good estimate. So from now on I’ll have it topped off only every year or two.

Colin and I were surprised yesterday morning when we saw Al’s pickup pull into the drive. I guess he was short of things to do, so he drove up here to thin our turnips. He stuck around for an hour or so, thinned the turnips, and then turned around and drove back to Winston.

Our first attempt at turnips, planted this spring, failed miserably. They looked happy enough, but when Barbara pulled the first one it was full of worms. Same for the second, the third, and on and on. We’re hoping this autumn batch will do better.

Speaking of agricultural fails, here it is almost October and we have no apple crop to speak of. Nor any black walnuts. Last year, we had bushels of both. Next year may be a big year or a repeat of this year or something in between. Raising food crops is always a crap shoot.

I’m always puzzled when I hear from preppers who intend to raise their own food in a SHTF situation, but have never actually attempted to grow anything. Folks, that’s not how it works. If you’re counting on growing something, you’d better try it BEFORE you really need it. And even then there’s no guarantee that what works this time will work every time.

I’m also often puzzled by their choices of crops. It sounds like many of them are planning to eat mostly salads. I mean, stuff like lettuce and celery and peppers are fine as minor parts of the harvest, but they aren’t very calorie- and nutrient-dense. The bulk of your crop should be roots/tubers, legumes, and grain crops. Stuff like potatoes, yams, turnips, beets, parsnips, beans, peas, lentils, peanuts, wheat, oats, barley, amaranth, and so on. Stuff that produces large amounts of carbohydrates, proteins, and oils. And, most importantly, bulk calories. You can starve to death on celery.

We maintain only a small garden patch. That, and pots on the back deck. Last year and this year have been experimental, finding out what works and what doesn’t. We now know that some crops just don’t work here, notably broccoli. But some flourish, including several types of squash, green beans, potatoes and sweet potatoes. Tomatoes, onions, and peas do okay. Beets, not so much.

But the point is that we’re finding out what works for us, with our climate and our soil. In a real long-term emergency, we could expand our garden to 100 times or more the size that it is now. There would very likely be scaling issues, but at least we’d have some experience that would allow us to deal with those.

But if you’re a prepper who’s bought a supply of heirloom seeds and just stuck them on the shelf, you’re fooling yourself. You’re not much better off than someone who hasn’t even bought seeds. Thinking and planning is NOT the same as doing.

09:07 – It was 59.9F (5.5C) when I took Colin out at 0630. It was still dark, and he immediately disappeared into the gloom. I walked up and down the road shouting for him, but he was nowhere to be seen. At 0700, I finally woke Barbara and told her Colin was gone. She walked around yelling for him for a few minutes, and finally got in her car to drive around looking for him. She finally spotted him in the back yard of a house a quarter mile or so (~400 meters) down US21. We both chastised him, telling him he was a Very Bad Dog, but I doubt that will have any lingering effect.

I just placed my first order for bulk laboratory supplies with Amazon Business yesterday. I wanted to find an alternative source for several items that we’ve been ordering from one of our four major wholesalers for the last eight years or so. They’ve always been a bit more expensive than most, but I liked the quality of their stuff, which was mostly made in India rather than China.

But in addition to having higher prices, typically 10% or 15% higher than competitors, they’ve also always had high shipping charges. And those have gotten even higher since we moved to Sparta. The last straw came a couple of weeks ago, when they shipped me a small order. It was a small box that weighed only four or five pounds (~ 2 kilos), and they charged me $40 to ship it, which was almost 40% of the cost of the items themselves. They could have shipped it USPS Priority Mail for a quarter or less of what they charged me.

So, among the items I needed to reorder yesterday were 24-well and 96-well well plates. Ordinarily, I’d order those both by the case of 500 each, but I decided to order them from Amazon Business instead. The actual item price was similar, even ordering in boxes of 50 rather than cases of 500, and 2-day shipping was included in the price. They’re to arrive tomorrow, and assuming the quality is acceptable (which I’m pretty sure it will be), I’ll be ordering those in bulk from Amazon Business from now on. Those and probably half a dozen or more other items, such as 15 mL and 50 mL centrifuge tubes, which we also order in multiple case lots.

Email yesterday from someone I at first thought was another newbie prepper, with the subject line, “What else do we need to do?” My answer, as it turned out, was “not much”. If anything, they’re already better-prepared than we are. They’re retired, in their mid-60’s, and live outside a small town in Tioga County in north-central Pennsylvania, whose demographics look a lot like ours. They’re stocked up big-time on food, and have backups to their backups for water, heating, electric power, and so on. They maintain a large garden and keep chickens. Their nearest Costco is about a two-hour drive, one-way. Their home is large enough to accommodate their three kids with their spouses and the grandkids, who live in the State College and Altoona areas and visit them frequently on holiday weekends. They’re friends with all of their neighbors, and are active in the community. I couldn’t think of anything to suggest that they haven’t already done.

08:56 – It was 51.6F (11C) when I took Colin out at 0650, dim with heavy fog and drizzling. We’ve had about 1.6″ (4 cm) of rain in the last 24 hours or so. This is supposed to clear out later today. We’ll see.

Frances and Al had originally planned to spend the holiday weekend here, but given the weather they decided to stay home. Probably a good thing. Yesterday afternoon, at about the time they’d have left Winston, our visibility was down to about 50 meters.

Science kit sales are holding up. Month-to-date, we’ve already done 11% of the revenue we did in all of September 2016. We’ll be working on science kits today, of course, to get more built for stock. First up is to fill another 120 bottles of bromothymol blue, which is the limiting item on building more chemistry and biology kits. After that, we’ll continue knocking off other limiting items until we’re in good shape on finished-goods inventory.

Interesting email yesterday from a reader who wanted to know what I’d consider to be an “advanced prepper”. My short answer was someone who had the critical needs of themselves and their immediate family taken care of for a period of at least three months, and had begun to make provision for the needs of non-prepper extended family, friends, and neighbors.

This is borne out by recent events in Texas. Despite the supply chain being unable to cope with the sudden increased demand for food, bottled water, and so on, most of those who were better prepared have been sharing their stores with friends and neighbors, regardless of the political persuasions of those involved. Prepared Clinton voters are sharing their supplies with unprepared Trump voters, and vice versa. (Although Trump voters, on average, are probably much better-prepared than Clinton voters.)

With the exception of a few scumbags taking advantage of the situation, everyone in the affected area is co-operating, sharing supplies, having community cookouts, offering refuge to friends and neighbors, and so on. One of my readers, for example, is running his Big Berkey water filter constantly to provide safe drinking water for his neighborhood, as well as sharing his stocks of rice, pasta, canned meat, and so on. Another is lending out his numerous Coleman stoves and other items that are desperately needed by the folks affected.

That’s great, and illustrates the advantage of having at least one well-prepared person in a larger group, but I’m afraid this spirit of cooperation is going to start breaking down as more and more people exhaust their supplies and resupply continues to be problematic. It’ll be interesting to follow this over the coming weeks and months.