Font Size:     

Category: science kits

Tuesday, 15 September 2015

09:14 – I sent in the state and federal estimated taxes yesterday. Grrrrr.

Barbara suggested last evening that given the several burglaries we’ve had in the neighborhood, I should start locking the front main door when I walk Colin. Colin and I just spend 10 or 15 minutes each time going up and down the block, so we’re never out of sight of the house and always within 175 yards of the front door. Colin can cover that distance in under 10 seconds, and the sight of a 70-pound dog charging flat out would certainly disconcert most intruders. Even so, I think she’s right, so I’m now locking the door each time we’re away. I don’t feel at all threatened in our neighborhood, but it is better to be safe.

She said it’d only be for a couple of weeks, because after her last day of work she’ll be at home most days. I disagree. If I leave the house and she’s here alone, I want her to lock me out. At least the glass storm door should be locked at all times. Otherwise, she could walk out of the bedroom or her office and find an intruder in the house with no warning.

I’m building and shipping science kits, as usual.

10:58 – Big surprise. Hungary is discovering that those hordes of muslim invaders are cutting through their razor-wire fence. I have zero military experience, and I could have told them that a fence is useless unless it’s defended. Hungary needs to set up machine-gun emplacements about every 300 to 400 meters and order those manning the emplacements to open fire without warning on anyone who tries to come over, under, or through the fence. It would also help to build a second fence about 100 meters inside Hungarian territory and sow the dead zone between the fences with a lot of land mines. Of course, that’s also what the US should be doing on our border with Mexico, and we haven’t done it either.

14:43 – Here’s irony:

fema-sandy-closed-2

Read the comments: 39 Comments

Monday, 14 September 2015

08:05 – We’re having definite signs of the approaching autumn. It was 50F (10C) when Colin and I went out the first time this morning.

Barbara made a Krusteaz cinnamon swirl crumb cake yesterday. We both liked it better than the pastries she gets at the supermarket, so I stuck a few boxes of it in my Walmart cart for the next time I place an order with them.

August turned out to be slower than expected for science kit sales. Our August revenue was only about 75% of the August 2014 revenue. This month, on the other hand, although we’re less than halfway through the month we’re already at 100% of September 2014 revenue. Things go up and down.

Another cop shot to death by a young black man, this one yesterday in Kentucky. Now is not a good time to be a cop. Their rules of engagement really suck. If they shoot a millisecond too soon, they’re liable to be in a world of hurt; if they shoot a millisecond too late, they end up on a slab in the morgue. This will not end well.

Read the comments: 43 Comments

Saturday, 12 December 2015

09:43 – I just signed up for Obamacare, the least expensive plan they had available, at $1,200/month. That pays for pretty much nothing until each of us pays $5,500/year out of pocket. The application is now complete, and we’re covered as of October 1st, once we pay the bill. Unfortunately, they won’t let us do that on-line.

Barbara and I are working all weekend on science kits.

Read the comments: 13 Comments

Wednesday, 9 September 2015

08:00 – One of the neat things about our business is that I get to do fun stuff, like making mud pies. We got a flood of orders yesterday for forensic science kits. Only two of those were from individuals, with the rest a bulk order from a state university. Those orders wiped out our current finished goods inventory on those kits and left us at negative 7 forensic kits in stock. So I’m desperately making up more kits. One of the pieces I’m missing is the spectroscopy questioned soil specimen, which is basically a soil specimen that contains known quantities of various species like barium, cerium, and half a dozen more. I make that up by dissolving the nitrate salt of those species in water, adsorbing it onto vermiculite (expanded clay), and then drying the mud.

So I made up the glop, spread it on an old oven pan, and stuck it in the oven at 350F to dry. When Barbara arrived home from work, she immediately asked what she smelled. I told her that I was baking mud pies. She didn’t even comment.

This morning, I have overnight orders for three or four kits that I do have in stock–as well as another forensic kit–so I’ll get the ones I have in stock queued up to ship and then go to work making up and packaging chemicals for more forensic kits. I already made up some Kastle-Meyer reagent, which needs to reflux for an hour or so before I can bottle it. The only other thing I’m out of is 30 mL bottles of concentrated sulfuric acid, so I’ll get some of those made up as well.

10:22 – I’d mentioned that I picked up a can of Gatorade powder at Costco on Saturday, and someone emailed me to ask if that was a reasonable substitute for oral rehydration salts. Actually, if you mix it according to directions, the G-series 02 Perform Gatorade is a reasonable rehydration solution, comparable to the homemade stuff made with table sugar and salt. It’s heavy in sugar and the osmolarities are outside the WHO recommended low-osmolarity formulation, but Gatorade does at least include some potassium and citrate.

If I’d run out of official ORS, I’d use the Gatorade 02 Perform. Actually, what I’d probably do is use it initially to treat a patient with vomiting and/or diarrhea. If that didn’t start clearing up in a day or so, or if it became severe, I’d switch to the ORS, use the real stuff until I ran out, and then start using the Gatorade again. If Gatorade was all I had, I’d use it for a full course of treatment, because it’s sure a whole lot better than nothing.

Read the comments: 36 Comments

Thursday, 3 September 2015

08:08 – The morning paper reports that a company called RealtyTrac has released its 2015 U.S. Natural Disaster Housing Risk Report, which evaluates the natural risks facing US counties. As far as I can see, it’s completely bogus. It ranks the county where we live as high risk overall because we are supposedly in danger from hurricanes and wildfires, which we aren’t, particularly. Certainly no more so than the counties to our west, north, and east, all of which are rated as lower risks. Give me a break.

Work on science kits continues. All of the biology kits we have in stock are now spoken for, so I need to build more today.

More interesting stuff. The racist demagogue scum Farrakhan calls for 10,000 volunteers from his black muslim scum followers to stalk and kill white people. Interestingly, there have been no calls from white people for 1,000,000 volunteers to stalk and kill black muslim scum. H/T to OFD.

Read the comments: 80 Comments

Wednesday, 2 September 2015

07:54 – With Barbara retiring at the end of the month, I need to get us covered under Obamacare by then. We need to make a lot of decisions about what level of coverage we want, trading off monthly premium costs against deductibles and out-of-pocket amounts as well as issues like which doctors and hospitals are part of the network on different plans. I’ve already look at small-business Obamacare plans, which look like non-starters based on monthly costs alone. So we’ll start looking at individual plans in more detail. Then we’ll need to do it all over again when I become eligible for Medicare in three years and Barbara in five.

Work on science kits continues. We’re low-stock on all of the kits now, which we’ll have to address this weekend by building more.

12:26 – Well, isn’t this interesting? A call from a terrorist for open season on killing white people and cops, presumably of any skin color. Something tells me that this asshole is not alone. If he or any of his like-minded terrorist buddies show up around here, they’re likely to get a surprise. H/T to Nick.

Read the comments: 48 Comments

Monday, 31 August 2015

08:52 – Barbara and I have been watching series five of Downton Abbey on Amazon Prime streaming. We’ll watch the last episode tonight. There’s supposed to be a series six, but with the way things are going in the UK I wonder how much longer they’ll be turning out series like this.

I’m still working heads-down on science kit stuff. I want to be ready to roll out several new science kits for 2016, including at least two or three classroom kits. When we started this business, we intended to focus exclusively on home schoolers. We’ve been surprised at the number of kits we sell to public and private high schools and even to colleges, universities, and government departments. So right now I’m working on expanding that part of our business. There’s a lot of room to grow there, but there’s a lot of work to be done to get there.

Read the comments: 79 Comments

Sunday, 23 August 2015

09:03 – We need to make up more biology kits today. We’re down to seven finished biology kits in stock, which might last a few days or might last just one day. We’re in a little better shape on chemistry kits, but not much. We have 15 of those in stock, so building another batch of those is next.

Barbara goes back to work tomorrow. Five weeks left until her last day. Between now and then, I need to get us both signed up for Obamacare. It’ll be a big change, having her at home all day, but a good one for all of us. Colin will be delighted, once it sinks in that it’s not just a weekend, but permanent. Of course, it’ll be even harder for him when she goes on trips, because by then he’ll be expecting her to be home all day every day.

With Barbara available full-time, we’ll be able to ramp up the science kit business, both in terms of volume and the number of different types of kits we offer. Doubling our full-time staff from one to two should allow us to triple or quadruple sales volume and revenues, which is about as big as I want to get.

I’ve been wanting to expand down into middle-school science kits, including earth science and physical science, as well as adding AP-level kits for biology and chemistry. I also want to add classroom kits. We already sell a lot of our homeschool kits to homeschool co-ops, public and private high schools, universities, and so on, but having kits specifically for classroom use should allow us to expand that business significantly.

Read the comments: 23 Comments

Friday, 21 August 2015

08:39 – Barbara returns sometime this afternoon or this evening, which means Colin and I need to get rid of the nekkid women and dead bodies. Fortunately, we get recycling pickup (blue cart) and trash pickup (black cart) today, so I figure we’ll recycle the nekkid women and toss the corpses in the trash. Or vice versa. We got yard waste pickup (green cart) yesterday, but neither Colin nor I was quite ready to get rid of the nekkid women. Or the dead bodies.

Nearly all of my time this week was devoted to working on science kit stuff, but here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I bought a box of 15 packets of Oral Rehydration Salts, with each packet sufficient to make up a one-liter serving. Actually, we stock the chemicals we’d need to make up hundreds of liters of ORS solution on-the-fly, but I wanted the commercial product to shoot an image for the book. Also, it’s not a bad idea to have these on hand for an emergency, and they’re cheap enough. What’s bizarre is that they have an expiration date two years after the manufacturing date. All the packets contain is anhydrous glucose and some inorganic salts, all of which have real shelf lives measured in centuries or millennia. These won’t go bad any time soon.
  • I continued work on our long-term food storage inventory spreadsheet. Overall, we’re in pretty good shape, although there are a couple areas that need attention.

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

11:49 – When I was talking to Kim yesterday, she mentioned that her aunt had just been taken by ambulance to the hospital. I figured she must be pretty old, since Kim’s mother, Mary, is in her mid-80’s. I asked Kim if this was her mother’s sister or her dad’s. Kim said, no, that it was actually her great-aunt, her mother’s aunt. My estimate of the patient’s age went way up.

When I talked to Mary this morning, she said her aunt had a urinary tract infection. UTIs can be very serious, particularly in older women, where they’re often asymptomatic until the infection is well advanced. One of the standard treatments for UTIs in patients who can tolerate sulfa drugs is sulfamethoxazole/trimethoprim, AKA SMZ/TMP. Like all sulfas, sulfamethoxazole is a broad-spectrum antibiotic, which is useful for a lot more than UTIs. But bacterial resistance to sulfas is pretty widespread, so they’re often used in combination with TMP or another DHFR inhibitor. The two in combination work synergistically and are more effective in most situations than sulfas used alone.

From a prepping standpoint, a lot of people buy Thomas Labs Bird Sulfa tablets, which contain 400 mg of SMZ and 80 mg of TMP each, or Fish Sulfa Forte, which are twice that amount. The problem is the cost, which is $0.50 per tablet or thereabouts. Here’s one place that sells bottles of 500 SMZ/TMP tablets (800/160 mg) for $115, or less than half the cost per tablet. If you’re storing antibiotics for a large family or group, you might want to grab a bottle and stick it in the freezer.

Note that I am not a doctor. I don’t even play one on TV. Sulfa drugs would not be my first choice of a broad-spectrum antibiotic, not least because severe sulfa allergies are quite common. But SMZ/TMP is effective against a pretty large number of bacterial pathogens, and it’s something I’d want in my toolkit.

I just added a new category that I’ll use when I write about something that I’ve found that’s particularly important or a particularly good deal.

Read the comments: 65 Comments

Wednesday, 19 August 2015

08:12 – Only two more days until Barbara gets home. Colin reminded me that there was some supermarket roast beast sandwich meat in the refrigerator that needed to be eaten, so we had roast beast sandwiches and potato chips for dinner last night.

Since Barbara left, Colin and I have gotten through the first 15 episodes of Heartland series 7, leaving three more episodes to watch tonight to finish up series 7. Colin watches the livestock; I watch Amber Marshall. Then we’ll start re-watching series 8. We’re watching five episodes per night, so we should get through series 8 episode 7 before Barbara gets home. Series 9 premieres on October 4th, but we won’t start watching it until the series concludes next April or May, so that gives me plenty of time to go back and start with series 1 and make it all the way through all eight seasons at least once more, if not twice. Have I mentioned that I love Amber Marshall?

I spent most of yesterday making up solutions and filling bottles, which I’ll do again today. I keep my inventory spreadsheet sorted by number of finished bottles of each chemical, so the limiting items are always at the top and get addressed first. For example, yesterday I was down to four bottles of Fertilizer A, which goes in the biology kit non-regulated chemicals bag. So I made up 8 liters of Fertilizer A, which was sufficient to fill 66 bottles of that. That made the limiting item for those bags, Benedict’s Reagent, which I have nine bottles of in stock. At this point, I could make up nine more biology non-regulated chemical bags, but instead I’ll make up another four liters of Benedict’s reagent today and fill bottles, which makes the next limiting item neomycin sulfate powder, which I have 19 vials of in stock. And so on. Once I have enough of everything in stock to make up three dozen bags, we’ll do that and then start again on something else.


Read the comments: 105 Comments
// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- // end of file archive.php // -------------------------------------------------------------------------------