Category: science kits

09:59 – Barbara hates to let the weather alter her plans. So this morning she headed to work in the Trooper. She called when she arrived to say that the residential streets were a complete mess, but the main roads were in pretty good shape. The high today is forecast to be well above freezing, so some of the mess on the roads will begin to melt. But tonight is to be very cold, so the mush will refreeze into solid sheets of ice with deep ruts. Tomorrow morning is likely to be a worse mess than this morning.

We’re shipping kits steadily. February is always the slowest month for us, but at least we’re on track this month to more than double last February’s sales. For the first half of the month we’re at about 1.2 times last February’s total sales. Our kit inventory is in pretty good shape for biology and forensic kits, but we’re down to less than a dozen chemistry kits. Getting more of those built is a high priority.

08:16 – Winter is supposed to return this week, with snow and freezing rain in the forecast for Tuesday through Thursday. At least tomorrow is supposed to be decent weather for Barbara and Frances to take their mom home from the hospital.

We’re building the subassemblies we need to get more kits built for inventory.

09:01 – Barbara stopped by to visit her mom yesterday afternoon. As it turns out, they’re not expecting to release Sankie until Monday. At least Barbara’s replacement phone arrived yesterday. It’s the same model as the one whose screen broke when she dropped it. I swapped in her charged battery and the SIM card, so she now has her old phone number back. Interestingly, she’s going to have to re-enter all her contacts. I assumed they’d be stored on the SIM card in some standardized format, but apparently not.

Kit sales are disturbingly slow, but February is always our slowest month. Slow as sales are, they’re still on track to double over last February’s.

08:05 – They finally transferred Barbara’s mom from the emergency room to a regular room late yesterday. Sankie is doing, if not well, at least better than she had been. Frances stayed with her through the evening. Barbara is stopping on the way home from work to see Sankie. Frances stopped by Homestead Hills to put down a deposit to get Sankie in their queue, but we’re hoping that she’ll recover sufficiently that she’ll be able to return to her apartment at Creekside once she’s released from the hospital.

I boxed up another batch of biology kits yesterday. February and March are by far our slowest months, so for now we’re in good shape on finished-goods inventory of all kits. Not that we’ll rest on our laurels, because things will start ramping up again in April and by July we’ll be shipping kits faster than we can build them. That means we have to have a reasonable inventory built up by then, which means getting the labor-intensive stuff like labeling and filling bottles out of the way while things are slow.

10:19 – Last May, I commented that, other than the 15 year difference in ages, Michelle Burke (Little Men) and Leighton Meester (Gossip Girl) could be not just sisters, but identical twins. Well, with Minka Kelly (Friday Night Lights) that doppelgänger is now a dreifachgänger. They could be identical triplets. In fact, when I first saw Minka Kelley, I thought she *was* Leighton Meester. So much for eyewitness identifications.

09:55 – Barbara got home about 10:00 last night from visiting her mom in the hospital. Sankie is not doing well. Barbara and Frances are convinced that she has a better chance to recover if she’s at home, so they’re going down to Thomasville again this morning to meet with representatives of the home-health company that they’re hiring to provide someone to sit at home with Sankie around-the-clock. They’ll bring her back to her apartment Monday, and hope to get her re-engaged with her normal daily activities. As it is, Sankie is pretty much non-responsive, and being in the hospital is not addressing that. I think the fundamental problem is that Sankie can’t face life without Dutch, and unfortunately there’s nothing anyone can do to bring Dutch back.

Although sales tailed off late in the month we still had a good January, with kit sales more than twice those of January 2013. February has historically been by far our slowest month, so it’ll be interesting to see how we do this month.

We do only 20% to 30% of the year’s business in the first half of the year, so we need to use these slow first six months to prepare for the July through December period and in particular the August/September rush. That means getting as much as possible of the labor-intensive stuff out of the way now, things like labeling containers. The chemistry kit, for example, has something like 50 bottles, vials, and envelopes, so being prepared to ship 500 chemistry kits means having about 25,000 labeled containers prepared ahead of time. And that’s just for chemistry kits.

14:39 – Here’s something we’re going to see a lot more of in the coming years: California cuts off water to agencies serving millions amid drought

And not just California. Any area that depends on the Colorado River for its water as well as other semi-arid Mountain states are in severe danger of running out of water in the near future. Recycling and conserving may help short-term, but it’s not a real solution. The problem is that there are too many people, too many farms and ranches, and too many industries for the available water to support. And much of the Southwest has been eating its seed corn for decades by pumping fossil water out of the ground at rates literally 1,000 times or more the rates at which it’s replenished. In the Eastern states, no one thinks much about water rights. In the West, water rights are increasingly becoming a matter of life and death, sometimes literally.

09:44 – Barbara is picking up her sister this afternoon and heading down to the hospital in Thomasville to visit their mom. Sankie is not doing very well, and they’ve decided she’ll be better off at home. Barbara and Frances are going down to Thomasville again tomorrow morning to meet with a home health care provider that will be providing sitters to stay with Sankie around the clock when she returns home Monday. Barbara and Frances think she’ll do better if she’s surrounded by her own stuff in her own apartment and can get back into her regular routine. I hope they’re right.

I’m still making up and bottling chemicals for kits. I’m trying to take some time to work on the two new kits we plan to introduce this year, Earth & Space Science and AP Chemistry. We’ll produce the latter kit in two forms, a standard kit for homeschoolers and a classroom kit designed to support four workgroups–eight to twelve students–in a formal public or private school setting. The classroom kit will be consumables only, assuming that standard lab equipment–balance, glassware, etc.–is already available.

Derek Lowe has posted the first decent write-up I’ve seen about the chemical spill in West Virginia. It’s worth a read, particularly if you’re not a chemist.