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Category: science kits

Sunday, 14 June 2015

10:44 – Barbara just finished cutting my hair and cleaning house. I hate getting my hair cut because I always feel so weak afterward. We’ll do kit stuff the rest of the day.

Good news for preppers. Walmart has just started offering Keystone Meats products on its web site, which has free shipping on $50+ orders. Their prices are noticeably lower than those on the Keystone website, which charges shipping. Unfortunately, Walmart is showing out-of-stock on nearly all the products, and low-stock on others. I guess they must have been surprised by a flood of orders from preppers.

11:34 – What goes around comes around. I was just out with Colin and ran into our neighbors two houses down carrying in groceries. Their son is 12 years old, very bright, and interested in science.

O’Reilly/MAKE just sent me a comp copy of a new science book they’ve just published, which is actually a home science book from the 60’s, updated to reflect availability of items and to get rid of or modify some of the stuff we used to do back then without a second thought but which is now considered hideously dangerous. I gave the book to Shane, whom I suspect will be doing a lot of this stuff over the summer. As he walked away with the book, I had a flashback to 50 years ago, when I was his age and guys the age I am now gave me neat science stuff to encourage my interest.

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Wednesday, 10 June 2015

07:33 – If you don’t already have them, you can freely download Matt Bracken’s Enemies Trilogy for Kindle today through Friday. Or you can do as I prefer to do. Download the first one as a free sample. If you like it, wait until the free offer expires and pay for the others. (H/T to OFD)

The latest in the Greek farce is that Greece and the Troika may come to an agreement that allows Greece to pretend a bit longer not to be bankrupt and in default. This agreement, if it comes to pass, won’t help Greece a bit, but of course that’s not the intention. By lending Greece enough to make payments on its existing debts for a while longer, the “institutions” can continue to carry that debt on their balance sheets as good debt rather than writing it off. That provides a political fig leaf to allow Merkel and the rest to pretend to their voters that all is well. All is anything but well.

More work on science kit stuff today.

11:03 – I’ve been doing purchase orders this morning for the stuff we’re running short of, especially stuff that is often backordered. Things like slide sets, thick cavity slides, and so on. I’m trying to keep parts inventory down as much as possible to minimize the amount of stuff we’ll need to move to West Jefferson. The only item I ordered multiple cases of was splash goggles. I ordered three cases of those because they only come 100 to a case. With what we already have on hand, 300 more should be enough to get us through the autumn rush.

Goggles are another of the items that do double duty as prepping items. I’m always surprised by how few preppers keep goggles on hand for everyone. Their use for shooting is obvious. Anyone who’s done a lot of shooting with autoloaders (let alone automatic weapons) has probably been hit in the face by an ejected case at least once. Guns that eject upwards are notorious for this, but even those that eject to the side occasionally throw an empty in your face. I even talked to a guy once who’d taken one in the face from a bottom-ejector. Then there’s always the possibility of a blown primer or split case blowing hot gas and particulates in your face. That’s why I always wear goggles rather than just shooting glasses. Goggles are also essential if it’s very cold outside or if you’re dealing with smoke and particulates from a fire or other event.

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Saturday, 6 June 2015

07:24 – Happy birthday to me. I turn 3E today. Only two more years until I hit the Big Four-Oh.

Barbara has some yard stuff to do this weekend and we have the usual weekend chores, but we’ll spend most of the weekend on kit stuff and prepping.

16:08 – I didn’t mention it for obvious reasons, but our prepping work today included a trip up to West Jefferson. We left at 0821 and got back around 1510. The net mileage on Barbara’s trip odometer was about 240. That 85 miles up, 85 miles back, and about 70 miles of driving around looking at different areas. Driving time is about 100 minutes each way.

Colin rode with us and was a very good dog the whole time. He did throw up, but only after we got up to West Jefferson and let him out of the car. He rode along with us the whole time we were looking at different areas. The upshot is that it looks like we won’t have any problem finding a place we like and can afford. We both love the area, and in more than three hours of driving around it looking at neighborhoods we didn’t spot a single underclass person.

Chicken farms aren’t going to be a problem. Ashe County used to produce something like 800 trillion chickens a year, but last year the total was down to almost nothing. Like most mountain towns, or indeed most towns anywhere, the economy is not great, but neither is it even remotely moribund. Barbara found out that she can even continue getting the Winston-Salem paper delivered to our door every morning. Internet service is better there than it is here. Fiber is everywhere. Home prices seem pretty reasonable. There are many areas where nice 3,000 SF homes sell for $500,000 and up, but that usually because their property has magnificent mountain views. There are many other areas where equally nice homes sell for $200,000 and under. Neither Barbara nor I are willing to pay extra for the views.

Before we started driving around, Sherman (the agent/broker) told us not to be surprised when people waved at us. Indeed, there was a lot of that. We were driving Barbara’s car, so it couldn’t have been that people were recognizing Sherman’s. They’re just naturally friendly up there.

Some of the roads in areas we visited weren’t immediately obvious as roads. I thought a couple of them were someone’s driveway. There are a lot of very nice homes up in the hills surrounding the town itself, and many of them are on narrow, twisting roads, some of which are gravel. I mentioned to Sherman that when we spoke with Amy, his colleague, she mentioned that getting in and out could sometimes be problem, and that I’d told her that we wouldn’t need to get in or out when the weather was bad. We’d just stay home and since we’d have at least a year’s supply of food and other stuff in the basement we wouldn’t have any need of leaving home unless we wanted to. He didn’t even blink. I suspect he’s sold a lot of homes to preppers. He also said we’d fit in just fine. The culture in mountain towns is much more self-reliant.

After our first trip, I’d say that Barbara and I were about 95% sure we wanted to move to the West Jefferson area. I think today’s trip bumped that up to 100%. Now it’s just a question of getting it done.

And, to top off a good day, we got home early enough to process orders and get a couple of science kits ready to be picked up.

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Wednesday, 3 June 2015

09:01 – Colin worked like a dog yesterday to get the house cleaned up and build a new batch of chemistry kits. Just in time, too, because yesterday afternoon someone ordered the last chemistry kit we had in stock. When Barbara got home, she was pleased to see that Colin had cleaned all the science kit stuff out of the den and living room and gotten a good start on cleaning it out of the kitchen and tidying up the workroom. She gave Colin a hug, and he’s now a happy dog again. Oh, and Colin found that partial box of 96-well plates sitting on the kitchen table, so our inventory of those just jumped from the 400 that arrived this week to 427, less the ones that Colin used to make up kits yesterday.

Barbara is having dinner out with friends after work, so Colin and I are on our own. I’m planning to have a dinner made from all shelf-stable ingredients, AKA PB&J sandwiches. Colin is all in favor. He loves PB&J.

The can of Nestle Nido Fortificado dry whole milk arrived from Walmart yesterday, and I need to do some experimenting with it. Unlike most powdered milk, which is no-fat, this stuff is full-fat whole milk. The best-by date is 12 months out, but many people have told me that they’ve drunk this stuff from sealed cans that were stored at room temperature and were three, four, or five years past the best-by date and found it indistinguishable from fresh product. Frozen, this powder would certainly stay good for 30 years or more.

My Spanish isn’t good, but my Latin tells me that the product name translates as something like “Fortified Nest (or Beehive)”, so I assumed the product contains honey. That’s reinforced by a warning on the can that says the product should not be consumed by infants one year or younger. But the ingredients label does not list honey, so I’m not sure what’s going on.

The 3.52 pound (1.6 kilo) can sells for $15.38 and reconstitutes to 3.3 gallons (12.5 liters) of “whole milk”, which I assume means 3.25% butterfat. On that basis, this can would reconstitute to about 5.4 gallons of the 2% milk that Barbara drinks, at a price of about $2.68/gallon. Of course, diluted that way, it’d be lower on milk solids than store-bought 2% milk, but that’d be easy to address by adding a couple quarts worth of non-fat dry milk powder. As I said, some experimenting is needed.

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Monday, 1 June 2015

09:11 – I just read an interesting article about hurricanes: The flip side of years of no hurricanes: Good luck runs out

The point of the article is that we have been extraordinarily lucky over the past century. Katrina and other memorable hurricanes notwithstanding, we’ve suffered only a small fraction of the loss of life and property damage we might have expected based on historical norms. People tend to underestimate hurricanes. Even a small hurricane is gigantic, and dissipates enough energy to make a hydrogen bomb look like a BIC lighter in comparison. The real nightmare would be a Cat 5 hurricane striking Houston, not just because tens of thousands of people might die, but because the damage to our petroleum and gas infrastructure would be devastating and take years to replace.

Another email from Jen. She, her husband, her brother, his wife, and their two kids had a different kind of Memorial Day get-together. First thing Saturday morning, they declared a test emergency. Her brother and his family evacuated to Jen’s house, where they hunkered down in emergency mode. Jen’s husband turned off the electric power at the main breaker, as well as the natural gas and water. They spent the three-day weekend using only their emergency supplies. They did grill out Saturday, but as Jen said they’d also be doing that in a real emergency before their frozen meat spoiled. Jen said that things went pretty smoothly, but they did encounter a few unexpected issues, which they treated as learning experiences. They’re planning another emergency simulation over the July 4th three-day holiday.

More kit stuff today.

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Thursday, 28 May 2015

09:18 – Work on science kits continues, as does work on the prepping book, AKA The Book That Wouldn’t Die. I’m still jumping around in the book, writing a section here and a paragraph there as I think of things to add.

One of the reasons I look forward to Barbara retiring is that she’ll be able to do much of the work on science kits that I have to do now. I’ll still do things like designing new kits, making up reagents, and so on, but she’ll be able to do the repetitive things that take up my time now. Things like filling chemical bottles, building subassemblies, assembling finished kits, keeping inventory and cutting purchase orders, shipping kits, and all of the other stuff that eats my time. She’s good at this kind of stuff, and I’m not. Freeing up my time will allow me to do more of the stuff that requires my knowledge and abilities. Not that I plan to work Barbara to death by any means. She can do part-time what takes me nearly full time, and she’ll have the other half of her time free to do personal stuff. Including travel, although I’m very nervous when she’s far from home.

10:29 – The US Postal Service and Swiss Post have really outdone themselves. On Saturday the 23rd at 4:12 p.m., the USPS picked up a kit here that was destined for Switzerland. I just got an email update telling me that the kit has arrived at the local post office in Switzerland. I believe that’s the fastest any of our international shipments has arrived, including kits shipped to Canada.

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Tuesday, 26 May 2015

09:13 – Thanks to Barbara’s efforts over the last few weekends, I have something like 3,000 labeled chemical bottles that need to be filled and capped. I’ll get started on that today, along with building another batch of chemistry kits.

I got an interesting email the other day, asking about long-term food storage for dogs. I replied that canned dog food should store as well as any canned food, which is to say indefinitely. As to dry food, I have no data on long-term storage, and no good idea of how to go about making it shelf-stable, if that indeed is even possible. As to Colin, if food supplies are disrupted because of a transportation shutdown, crop failures, or other large-scale problem, he’ll just eat what we eat. For planning purposes, I count Colin as half a person, so I figure 1,400 calories per day, and half a gallon of water minimum. Dogs thrived for millennia eating human food, and Colin would be, if anything, a lot happier eating what we eat.

10:22 – I really do have to keep my bloody-mindedness under control while writing this prepping book. Here’s a Note as I wrote it originally, before I decided to delete the second paragraph. Given the need, I’d still do it, mind you. I just don’t feel comfortable saying that in the book.

One advantage of packing your own dry staples in foil-laminate Mylar bags also holds true for home-canned goods: in a long-term emergency, the “authorities” are much less likely to confiscate them, as often happens in major emergencies. They want commercially-packaged products, and the food industry has spent a lot of money to brainwash people into believing that food past its best-by date has gone bad. You can make confiscation even less likely by labeling your home-packaged food properly. For example, the next time you repackage dry staples, instead of labeling them “Rice, 7 pounds, Packed March 2016″, label them “Rice, 7 pounds, Expires March 1986″ and so on. Who would confiscate food that “expired” 30 or more years ago?

In fact, in case things really go pear-shaped, it’s a good idea to keep the bulk of your food supplies well hidden, with a reasonable amount of bait food stored in plain sight. You can even turn your bait food supply into part of your defenses by making it a trick-or-treat food supply, stuff that’s intended to be passed out to armed goblins who show up at your door. We keep a stock of arsenic trioxide on hand for that purpose. It’s an odorless, tasteless white powder that mixes well with white flour, sugar, and similar foods. It’s lethal in small amounts but doesn’t kill instantly. Anyone who robs you of this food probably won’t be coming back for more.

13:49 – Well, crap. I was sure I had a partial box of 50 96-well plates, but I sure can’t find them. I just ordered another eight boxes, or 400 total, but they won’t be here until late this week. For now, my kit-building is on hold unless I find that box.

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Wednesday, 20 May 2015

09:05 – The Greek situation is coming to a head, and we’re starting to hear rumbles from Portugal. Greece is flat out of money. The only way they were able to make a small loan repayment to the IMF last week was by borrowing the money from the IMF to repay the IMF. But their SDR balance is now exhausted and they have nowhere to turn for additional funds to repay the loans that are coming due this month and next. And every month thereafter. That’s what happens when you borrow hundreds of billions of dollars with no prospect of being able to repay it. The next couple of months are going to be very interesting times, in the Chinese proverb sense. If Greeks think they’ve suffered under so-called “austerity” so far, they ain’t seen nothing yet.

Meanwhile, some reports are saying that that shootout between motorcycle gangs in Waco was actually a police shooting. If the reports are true, the 9 dead and 18 wounded were all struck by police bullets rather than by bullets fired by gang members. It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.

I fired up the dehumidifier in the basement yesterday, and immediately noticed that I’d forgotten to clean the reservoir at the end of last season. The entire interior was covered with a black coating, presumably fungus. So I added a pint of chlorine bleach, which killed the fungus on contact, and let the dehumidifier run until the reservoir was full. Most of the black scum was gone, but not all, so I just rinsed out the reservoir with Lysol liquid and then stuck it in the dishwasher with the dirty dishes and ran it on pots-and-pans cycle with high temperature wash and “sani-rinse” with heated dry. That ought to kill anything that remains alive.

More kit stuff today. We’re down to three chemistry kits, so I’ll get another couple dozen built today.

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Tuesday, 19 May 2015

07:37 – The morning paper reports that state government plans to spend more than a billion dollars more next year than this year, part of which will go towards an across-the-board salary increase for teachers. That’s outrageous, considering that our public school teachers are already grossly overpaid. Many of them couldn’t get a job in a free market, and even they are paid at well above market rates. If you don’t believe that, just compare what they’re paid to what private school teachers are paid.

The solution is simple. Teachers are already contract employees, although like all things government, those contracts almost never lapse. Simply put them all on one-year contracts and require them to bid on specific teaching jobs at specific schools. Lowest bidder for each position wins. Those who don’t win a bid are unemployed, and cannot draw unemployment compensation. I suspect the average salary would end up being not much more than minimum wage, which is what public school teachers should be making. Most of the really good teachers would leave the public school system and go to work for private schools, which again is how it should be.

Eventually, public schools would die, as they should, and all students would attend whichever private schools they chose and could qualify for, as it should be. Public school buildings could be auctioned off to private businesses, and would continue to serve as schools. All students would be issued vouchers that could be used as they saw fit.

10:04 – I just ordered several more cases of bottles and caps, just under 7,000 total. I dithered about the shipping choices, but I eventually chose the free UPS ground rather than the $572.98 next-day option. If they ship today, UPS ground should get it here Thursday anyway. I’m off to build more science kit subassemblies.

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Sunday, 17 May 2015

08:13 – Here’s irony. I’ve been desperately hoping for an alternative to Time-Warner Cable ever since we’ve lived in this house. Yesterday, we got mail from AT&T announcing that their fiber Internet service is now available in our neighborhood, just as we’re preparing to move up to the North Carolina mountains. Ten years ago, five, even one year ago, I would have been first in line to sign up for the A&T fiber Internet service. Now it’s too late. Fortunately, the West Jefferson area already has fiber Internet service.

Barbara labeled several hundred bottles yesterday, in batches of 120 each, and will label several hundred more today. I’ll end up with something between 1,500 and 2,000 labeled bottles that I can fill this week. I’ll order another few cases of bottles today or tomorrow so she’ll have more to label this coming weekend. That’ll give us a good start on what we need to build kits for the summer/autumn rush.

Speaking of new services available in Winston-Salem, I just placed an order with Amazon on Friday and a message popped up to tell me that Winston-Salem is now one of the cities for which Amazon offers year-round Sunday delivery via US Postal Service. I’ll have to talk to the mailman and find out if that means we’ll also be getting Sunday pickup for kit shipments.

09:42 – When I converted to Linux more than a decade ago, I used a WYSIWYG HTML editor called N|Vu, which was a Linspire fork of Mozilla Composer. When N|Vu was orphaned, a community fork called KompoZer replaced it. Unfortunately, that project never really got off the ground, and it was last updated more than five years ago. The last version doesn’t work with “recent” Linux versions, which is to say any that use GTK ≥ 2.14.

So I went off looking for a WYSIWYG editor for Linux, but the cupboard appears to be bare. So I downloaded the last version of KompoZer, but in the Windows version. I hope it works there, or my only choice will be to bring up an e-commerce site, which I eventually intend to do anyway, but just not right now.

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