09:53 – We went down to Winston-Salem yesterday. Barbara had a 1:30 dentist appointment, and we had meetings scheduled before that at the house with the realtor and the guy who’s going to take care of getting the place cleaned up, painted, hardwood floors refinished, and so on. We’re back to doing kit stuff today.
08:06 – We got a lot of science kit stuff done yesterday, with more on the schedule for today.
I think I’ve mentioned .308/7.62mm API’s (armor-piercing incendiaries) “blue tips” in the past. They’re a handy thing to have on hand. From personal experience firing them, they’ll punch a nice hole in a steel engine block, and the incendiary charge is more than enough to ignite gasoline, and often even diesel. I used to have a bunch before I accidentally lost them in the lake.
As far as I remember, the ones I lost were heavy hand-loads made with pulled bullets, which may have been US-issue .30-06 bullets or NATO 7.62mm bullets. They had very pale blue tips, robin’s egg blue or even sky blue, not the darker blue tips found on some current US-issue (frangible?) ammo. I believe the charge is white phosphorus. I do remember that they generated a bright flash when the bullet hit even thin metal like an auto body (we used to shoot at junked cars a lot…). Presumably the tungsten penetrator core continued unaffected by losing the incendiary compound that surrounded it.
I was going to recommend that everyone pick up at least a few rounds of this stuff, but as far as I can tell it’s no longer available, except perhaps under the counter at a gun show. That’s a pity.
10:42 – Barbara, Colin, and I were down in Winston yesterday. She had some errands to run, followed by lunch with one of her friends, after which they went to the Ansel Adams exhibit at Reynolda House.
While they were doing that, I was supposed to be scrubbing down walls, preparing them to be painted. Barbara thought scrubbing and painting would be too much for us, but was willing to at least give it a try. She was right. I got a total of two walls scrubbed down in my office before I called her and said she’d been right. Constantly looking up and bending over was playing Hobb with my vertigo. It is simply beyond my capacity to do this. Barbara was relieved, because she was dreading doing the wall scrubbing and painting. We decided just to pay someone to do it for us, particularly since we have a lot of work remaining to be done up in Sparta, particularly science kit stuff. What was easy for both of us at age 30 isn’t easy at age 60+.
While I was taking a break out on the front porch, Mr. Marshall showed up with his crew to cut our grass. He cuts several of the lawns in the neighborhood, and had done some yard work for us in the past, so Barbara arranged with him to cut our grass in Winston until we sell the house. When I told him what I was doing, he mentioned that he owns 67 rental properties and has good people that do all that kind of stuff for him. He said all of his folks were good at what they did, reliable, and charged reasonable prices. I asked if he’d give us the names and numbers of the people he used for washing down walls and painting, and said he’d be happy to do so, although he didn’t have the information with him. He asked me to call him at home in the evening, which I did last night. We arranged for him to meet us at the house the next time we’re down and get the ball rolling.
When Barbara gets home from the gym and supermarket, we’ll go to work on science kit stuff. We’re running short of a lot of kits and subassemblies, so we’ll be working on those for the next several days.
08:00 – We got a lot of kit stuff done yesterday. More today and tomorrow. Otherwise, not much to report.
09:10 – Kit sales are continuing to ramp up. This morning is the first time in a long time that I have three kits awaiting USPS pickup, including one going to the UK. We’re down to only four chemistry kits in stock. Fortunately, yesterday we got everything done we need to make up another batch of those. We’re also low-stock on our other science kits, so we’ll be working on those for the rest of the week and through the weekend.
I think we reached a milestone yesterday, when Barbara declared that she was pretty much satisfied with the state of the house, including the finished areas upstairs and downstairs, my lab area, and the garage. There’s more to be done, certainly, but I can now focus more of my time on business stuff and writing.
12:50 – Kit sales are starting to ramp up a bit, so we’re building science-kit subassemblies all this week. Barbara binned and bagged a bunch of chemistry kit small-parts bags this morning. She’s down in the lab area now binning/bagging chemistry kit regulated chemicals bags. Next up will be chemistry kit non-regulated chemicals bags, followed by regulated and non-regulated chemicals bags and small-parts bags for biology and forensics kits. For some of those, we’ll need to fill chemical bottles first, and sometimes make up the chemicals before we have them to fill bottles with.
I also have more of the never-ending administrative tasks to do, most of which are of course government-mandated paperwork. Oh, how I wish that government at all levels would simply disappear.
10:33 – I just called to set up an appointment with an electrician to come out and tell us what we need to do to get our generator hooked directly to our well pump and pressure tank, and if possible to measure how much current those two motors draw under load.
Once we have that done, I can put a quart of gasoline in the generator, load it up with a couple of 500W quartz-halogen work lights, and time how long it’ll run on a quart of gasoline with a 1KW load. Between our vehicle gas tanks and gas cans, I want to have enough fuel on hand to pump 100 gallons of water a day for at least 30 days, and ideally 90 days or more.
I also need to pick up a couple cases of motor oil and a couple cans of ether-based starting spray. We haven’t been running the generator periodically as the manufacturer recommends, but I intend to start running it every two to three months on a pint or a quart of gasoline until it runs dry. That should ensure that it starts reliably if we ever have a power outage that’s long enough to make it worthwhile to fire up the generator. We’ll also move the generator from the garage down into the unfinished basement area. It’ll probably fit underneath one of the work tables. It’s a 6KW Generac unit rated for 7KW surge, so it should be sufficient to power the well pump and pressure tank, but we’ll verify that when the electrician visits.
I was running short of iodine, so I ordered 250 grams of ACS reagent grade for $34.68 from a Chinese vendor on eBay on March 4th. It arrived the other day via USPS, labeled as “Clothing accessory” with a stated value of $7.00. In my experience, Chinese vendors on eBay are completely honest about the important things. They ship what they say they’re going to ship, and it arrives quickly. They never short me on weight, and I have no doubt that this iodine is in fact ACS reagent grade. The only thing they’re dishonest about is labeling and shipping paperwork. Apparently, they’re not worried about getting caught by the postal authorities.
09:28 – We’re working in the unfinished basement area today, getting stuff that doesn’t belong there moved out, stuff that does belong there moved in, and everything a bit more organized. We’re in pretty good shape for now on science kits.
08:24 – We got chemical bags and small parts bags built yesterday for a new batch of biology kits. We’ll get the kits themselves built this weekend. Now is our slowest period of the year for kit sales, so we’re really building for inventory.
As expected, the two leading psychopaths dominated yesterday’s primaries. It’s really looking like November will be Clinton versus Trump, unless she drops dead or the GOP powers that be have Trump assassinated. I wouldn’t rule out either or both.
14:11 – Barbara is downstairs filling and labeling vials of l-glutamine and oxytetracycline for biology kits as she watches Netflix’s House of Cards. I told her that I had no interest in watching a series that features lawyers and/or politicians, particularly one that presents them as the Good Guys, nor any series (like any by Shonda Rhimes) that features prog propaganda, nor anything that has embedded commercials or a laugh track. That limits my viewing choices significantly, which from my viewpoint is a good thing.
We got our electric bill yesterday. It was something like $177 for the month, which included a lot of days with temperatures well below freezing and often down into the single digits F. Considering that we have electric heat via a heat pump, I didn’t think that was bad at all. I asked Barbara, and she said it was comparable to the bill for our Winston-Salem house if you combined the electric and natural gas bills.
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