Category: science kits

08:10 – We’ve sold six kits so far this month, so things are definitely picking up. They should pick up even more later in the month as we approach the start of the autumn semester. For the rest of this month and well into September my time will be fully occupied with building and shipping kits.

I noticed this headline yesterday and was immediately struck with a Cunning Plan: North Carolina restaurant offers a 15 percent discount to pray in public The restaurant happens to be in Winston-Salem, so I suggested to Barbara that we have dinner there one night. She’d never heard of it, and said she had no interest in going there. I protested that we could get 15% off if we publicly prayed. They don’t specify that any specific cult is required, so I figured we could do an atheist prayer. As Barbara pointed out, there’s no such thing as an atheist prayer. Oh, well. I suppose we could do a satanist prayer or even a prayer to Thor or Ishtar.

09:16 – In the rush to build science kits this time of year, one thing I keep forgetting is to hold back enough chemical bags to make up refill kits. For example, when I made up another batch of chemistry kits over the weekend, I held back two sets of the regulated and non-regulated chemical bags. I shipped one of those yesterday and the other this morning, taking me down to zero available. That means to fill the next order I get for a refill kit I’ll have to remove those bags from a completed chemistry kit. Same deal on biology kits. I held back four sets of chemical bags for those, of which I have only one left.

For many years, I’ve been the official maintainer of the Cutieness Index (CI), a list of women ranked numerically by cutieness. Officially, the scores ran from 0.000 to 0.999, until Amber Marshall completely blew away the top score by earning more than 0.999. (My ranking spreadsheet ran out of room on Amber’s entry, so I have no idea how much higher she actually scored.) I suspect the other cuties may be annoyed with Amber for messing up the curve.

Until Amber arrived on the scene, Emily VanCamp had held the top position for several years, at 0.983. But Barbara and I are now up to series five of Dawson’s Creek, and Katie Holmes is now at 0.979 and gaining on Emily.

10:08 – The crew just finished pouring and leveling the concrete walk. We may get some rain today, but it looks like it’ll hold off long enough not to damage the new concrete. If necessary, they’ll cover it with plastic sheeting before they leave. They said they avoid doing that whenever possible because it can cause the surface to dry unevenly, affecting the color/texture in patches.

I’m building chemistry kits today, and getting started on another batch of biology kits.

07:54 – We had a crew out Friday to rip out the sidewalk from the street to our house. They’re supposed to pour concrete today, but they may not be able to. It looks like rain.

Barbara and I binge-watched all ten episodes of Hell on Wheels series three over the weekend. I thought it was a lot better than series two. I particularly liked one of the new characters, an atheist lesbian newspaper reporter. The actress who portrays her, Jennifer Ferrin, is a hometown girl. Well, she was actually born in Lawrenceville, Georgia, but she graduated from North Carolina School of the Arts, so I count her as a hometown girl.

Kit sales are very slow. 2014Q1 revenues were about 175% of 2013Q1 and 2014Q2 about 145% of 2013Q2. As of today, our MTD revenues just matched those for July 2011. If this pace holds up for the last ten days of this month, we’ll do only half the revenue for July 2014 that we did last July. Oh, well. Things are always up and down, and we could easily end up getting a bulk order or two that take us well above last July’s numbers.

10:33 – I think I forgot to mention that while our walk was being ripped out Friday I noticed an AT&T survey crew checking phone poles. I walked out to talk to them to verify what I suspected, which turns out to be true. They’re surveying for installing fiber-to-the-home, which means that before long we’ll have gigabit broadband available. If gigabit isn’t outrageously priced, we’ll sign up for it, but I suspect we’ll end up with something closer to 50 or 100 megabit. Still, that’ll be a nice improvement on the 15 megabit we currently get from TWC, particularly if the AT&T service is symmetrical or at least something close. Currently, we get nominally 15 megabit down, but only 1 megabit up.