Category: science kits

09:30 – No kit sales for December so far, although I do have three kits ordered yesterday boxed up and ready to ship. Those are credited to November.

I just ordered another five of these flashlights for $3.44 each, including shipping. I’ve compared these Ultrafires side-by-side with similar Fenix and Streamlight models, and I can see absolutely no reason to pay 10 to 20 times as much for a Fenix or Streamlight. If you do that, you’re paying for the name. The Ultrafires appear to be just as well built, including the switches. The Ultrafires are, if anything, brighter than the name brands. They use standard AA alkalines, NiMH rechargeables, or 14500 lithiums. I’ve never bothered to use lithiums, because standard cheap AAs from Costco provide 1 to 1.5 hours of continuous light–much longer used intermittently–and are more than bright enough.

I bought one of these two or three years ago and have carried and used it ever since, with zero problems. It even went into the washing machine once, with no apparent damage. A year ago, I ordered a couple more and gave one of them to Barbara to carry in her purse. Six months ago, I ordered four more, two for each of our car emergency kits.

I’d suggest people buy a bunch of them as stocking stuffers, but it’s probably too late for that. The $3.44 price is for product shipped directly from China or Hong Kong, which probably won’t arrive until after the 25th. You can order them via Amazon Prime, but you’ll have to pay two or three times as much.

10:23 – Science kit sales remain steady. Earlier this month we passed total 2013 revenue. November has been good and December is usually a pretty heavy month, so 2014 revenue should comfortably exceed 2013 revenue. I expect 2015 to be better still, especially once I have time to get some of our new kits available.

I’ve never seen anything like the prepping book phenomenon on Amazon. There are scores if not hundreds of titles available. KEbooks.com, the site I get a daily free-book email from, even has a prepping book of the day now. Almost without exception, these “books” are complete garbage. They remind me of a restaurant review I once read (or perhaps wrote): “The food was terrible and the portions were so small.”

These so-called books usually contain a few thousand words spread over 30 to 50 “pages” that are mostly white space. The text itself is often illiterate, and usually obviously stolen from various Internet sites, sometimes without even an attempt to file off the serial numbers. The advice is almost uniformly bad.

For example, I just downloaded a free copy of The Beginning Prepper’s Guide to Firearms, which is actually better than most of the garbage prepping books I’ve seen. At least it appears that the guy actually wrote it rather than just stealing stuff and pasting it into a “book”. But “better” is very much relative. This author, for example, recommends a shotgun as a home defense weapon. So far, so good. But he lost me when he recommended loading that shotgun with blanks. Seriously. He’s under the impression that blanks are as effective a load as buckshot at in-home distances. No, they’re not. It’s true that the wad in a blank shotshell can cause injury at very close range, but across the room it’ll be no more effective than a paint ball gun, if that.

Many of these garbage prepping books have mostly or all five-star reviews. Oddly, usually six of them. It’s pretty obvious that the “authors” are using one of those “five-stars-for-five-dollars” review services, and apparently $30 is their advertising/promotion limit. I can’t believe that Amazon.com hasn’t stomped all over this paid-review abuse.

09:08 – As expected, we sold a lot of biology kits in August, many of them with the prepared slide set option. By the end of that month, I became concerned about our inventory level of prepared slide sets, so I ordered another batch the first of September. Enough, I hoped, to last another year. The vendor informed me that the slides were back-ordered for 90 days, through the end of November. Ruh-roh. All I could do was hope that existing stock would last that long.

So, yesterday morning we got an order for a biology kit with slide set, which was the last slide set we had in stock. Then a second biology kit order came in, this one fortunately not including the slide set. Then a third order came in, and this one included a slide set, taking our inventory to -1. Then a fourth order came in, again with a slide set, taking our inventory to -2. I called the vendor to make sure I’d have more by the end of the month, and they told me the slides were to arrive next week, sooner than expected. So it looks like I’ll be able to ship back-ordered slide sets the week of the 17th, which isn’t too bad. Still, I hate having to tell people that something is back-ordered.

Barbara doesn’t bake, other than stuff like prepared brownie mix, and it’s been a long, long time since I did so much as bake a loaf of bread from scratch. Barbara’s sister, Frances, however, frequently bakes and otherwise cooks from scratch. In fact, Frances has run commercial food service operations. I told Barbara that I needed expert advice on how to turn cases and cases of #10 (institutional-size) cans of dry-packed flour, wheat, oats, beans, sugar and so on into appealing meals. Which spices and seasonings do we need, and how much of each? How much baking soda, baking powder, and yeast? How well does gelatin powder substitute for fresh eggs in baked goods? And so on. So I asked Barbara to invite Frances over for dinner one evening so that I could ask Frances all of these questions and more. I’m looking forward to this.

08:28 – The good news is that an effective vaccine against Ebola may be available in the next few months. It’s unclear to me whether this vaccine is prophylactic, therapeutic, or both.

Building more science kits continues, as does work on the prepping book, as does work on the new Earth Science and AP Chemistry kits. When I get tired of working on one thing, I always have several others that I can switch to.

08:21 – I’m taking some time off writing today to do kit stuff. We’re low on biology kits, and I need to bottle another 60 sets of a dozen or so chemicals.

The good news is that Ebola has been stopped in Nigeria, no thanks to either CDC or WHO, but due entirely to Doctors Without Borders and local doctors and nurses. The bad news is that Ebola continues to rage in the three countries at the heart of this outbreak, with the best estimates forecasting a peak in the next few months of 10,000+ new cases per week. And the federal authorities continue to insist that Ebola is not airborne-transmissible, despite the fact that it’s been known for 25 years to be transmitted via the droplets expelled when an infected person sneezes or coughs. See the Reston Monkey Virus incident in 1989, which involved the original Zaire strain of Ebola.