Category: science kits

08:40 – It’s been a week since Barbara’s dad died, and things are gradually returning to some semblance of normal. Barbara went out to dinner with a couple of her friends from the library last night. Colin and I stayed home and watched Heartland re-runs.

I got another kit order from the UK yesterday, the second this week. I always explain that we can ship kits only within the US and then refund their entire payment. We take a $0.30 loss on each refund, but it’s not worth trying to explain to the would-be buyer why we’re refunding them $0.30 less than their original payment.

I’ve actually thought about using Bongo to handle foreign shipments, but it’s unclear to me how (or if) that would work since our kits include materials that the IATA defines as dangerous goods for shipping purposes. If it worked, it’d be ideal. I could simply accept orders as usual and ship kits as usual to Bongo’s Connecticut facility. They would then forward the package to the buyer in whatever country, charging the buyer for the shipping and handling fees and taking care of all the customs stuff.

We’re also getting an increasing number of queries and orders from schools, public and private, as well as virtual schools and distance-learning programs. I got us set up yesterday as an approved vendor for a virtual school program run by a small-town school system that supports 200 to 300 distance-learning families. The interesting thing about this arrangement is that the school system coordinates things, but which curricula/kits to use is up to the individual families. Each family decides which curricula/kits they want to use, and lets the school system know. The school system then orders and pays for the materials, which are shipped to them. On a specified day, the families all show up at the school to pick up their materials. So at this point I have no idea of how many kits we’ll sell to that group. It could be 20 or 30, or 2 or 3, or even none at all.

Work continues on building more science kits.

10:16 – Barbara went back to work this morning, although she’d used only two days of the five days’ funeral leave she had available. She said she just couldn’t afford to miss any more work with everything that’s going on there. In addition to her usual duties, they’re in process of training for the changeover to a new “paperless office” system, and Barbara doesn’t want to fall behind on learning that.

Today will be a tough day for Colin. He’s had Barbara home more than usual for the last couple of weeks, so he’ll have to get used to having just boring old me around during the day. This morning, I heard Colin barking. Nothing unusual about that, but the barking usually occurs either near the front door or from back in our bedroom, where Colin lies on the bed and looks out the window for things to bark at. This time, the barking sounded like it was coming from the hallway. So I got up and walked out to the hall, where I saw the rear half of Colin sticking of of Barbara’s office. He was bounce-barking and growling, obviously at something in Barbara’s office. The mystery was solved when I walked back and looked in the door. Barbara had brought home the poster-size picture of Dutch from the memorial service, and stood it up against the bookshelves on the far side of her office. Colin apparently thought the picture of Dutch was an intruder.

Science kit sales this month have been much lower than I expected. As Barbara said, in one sense that’s a good thing, because we’ve been otherwise occupied. I suspect the slowdown in sales is just a blip. As I told Barbara, last month we had a four-day stretch with no kit orders at all. The following day, we sold seven kits to seven different customers. And June is part of our historically slow time anyway. The first six months of 2012 accounted for something like 17% of the year’s total business. So we’re still filling bottles and making up subassemblies like mad to build stock for the coming rush.

10:14 – Barbara visited her dad twice yesterday, morning and afternoon. Then she came home to make dinner and we passed a relatively ordinary evening and night. Frances just called to give us an update. At the nurses suggestion, no one stayed overnight with Dutch, who’s refusing to talk to anyone. Barbara plans to head over to Hospice this afternoon to visit Dutch, although it may be pointless if he continues to refuse to talk.

Work on science kits continues. Barbara is downstairs now building 120 solids bags for chemistry kits. I’ve already built 60 of the small parts bags that are used in both chemistry kits, so the next step will be to build 30 sets of chemicals bags for each of the two chemistry kits and assemble 30 each of the final kits. With what’s already in stock, that’ll give us sufficient finished-goods inventory of both chemistry kits, the biology kit, and the life science kit.

I’m concentrating on filling bottles. Barbara had already labeled 60 sets of each for the chemistry, biology, and forensics kits, but I decided to do batches of 120+. The reservoir on our automated dispensers holds two liters. We slightly overfill bottles, which means one reservoir filling is sufficient for 120+ 15 mL bottles, usually 125 or so. So I’ve been filling the 60 labeled bottles and then filling 60+ more unlabeled bottles. That much more efficient than filling batches of 60, because it halves the time needed for setup and teardown/cleanup between batches.

We’d originally planned to introduce an AP Chemistry kit next year, but we may do it sooner than that. I was just contacted by a state department of distance education that wants us to produce kits for their students who are taking AP Chemistry at home. They actually want two types of kits, an equipment kit and a consumables kit. The state organization will purchase equipment kits, which they’ll lend to students’ families for the duration of the course, after which the families will return those kits. The families will purchase the consumables kits. The problem is, the course starts in mid-August, which doesn’t leave much time to get components ordered and in stock, build the kits, and ship them to the students. This time of year particularly, components are often back-ordered, so it’s possible we won’t be able to meet their schedule.

09:54 – Barbara’s dad is still rallying. As of this morning, he was awake, sitting up in bed, and eating breakfast. He’s also talking, but he’s not making much sense. His urine output is still nil, so I’m not sure how he’s still even conscious let alone behaving comparatively normally. Al stayed with him overnight. Frances took Sankie home with her, where they were both able to get some sleep. France dropped Sankie off at Hospice on her way to work. Barbara and I stayed home last night. Today, Barbara is working on science kit stuff while waiting for a phone call. She’s going to run down to Hospice this afternoon to check on her mom and dad, but we simply can’t sustain the 24-hour thing any more. Someone, usually Sankie during the days, will be with Dutch, but we’re no longer going to try to have several or all family members there until the final crisis hits.

And we simply have to keep up with business here. For the last week we’ve been out of the CK01B chemistry kits, which sell two or three a week. So I’ve been tearing down CK01A kits and using the subset of the components that go into the CK01B kits to build more CK01B kits on the fly. We simply can’t keep doing that, if only because I’ll run us out of stock on the CK01A kits, so we’re working today on building a new batch of 30 of the CK01B kits. Then we’ll turn around and build a new batch of 30 or 60 CK01A kits to replenish stock on them.

09:13 – Barbara is cleaning house and ironing this morning before she heads over to have lunch with her mom.

Amongst everything else keeping us busy, we’re still working hard to build more science kits. Fortunately, Barbara has a sense of humor about the business taking over the house. The basement–both the finished and garage areas–is full of boxes, as is the living room, my work room, and part of the den. And I just keep ordering stuff. Yesterday, I ordered a case of 500 Petri dishes.

Speaking of which, we’re constantly working to improve the kits, both from the customer’s point of view and to make it faster and more efficient for us to build them. Our first batches of biology kits included a sleeve of 10 disposable polystyrene 90mm Petri dishes. From our point of view, the downside to those was that they took up a lot of cubic in the kit boxes. From the customers’ point of view, the downsides were that, first, although the disposable Petri dishes were conveniently pre-sterilized, they are one-use, so once they’re used you have to buy more. Second, the dishes weren’t individually wrapped but supplied in one sterile plastic sleeve, so it was very easy to contaminate the whole sleeve if you weren’t very careful.

So we switched to providing a three-pack of 75mm glass Petri dishes. The upside from the customers’ point of view is that glass dishes can be washed and sterilized, allow them to be reused indefinitely. The downside is that they’re fragile and easily broken. The downside for us is that a pretty high percentage of the dishes arrive here broken. Our wholesaler credits us for breakage, of course, but it’s still a pain in the butt to deal with all that broken glass. Also, it’s time-consuming to bubble-wrap the dishes into three packs to make sure they survive shipment to the customer.

So, although we’ll continue using those 75mm glass Petri dishes until we run out of them, I decided yesterday to switch back to plastic Petri dishes. However, rather than use the polystyrene (non-autoclavable) dishes, we’re going to start providing a six-pack of 50mm polypropylene Petri dishes with the biology kits. Polypropylene is autoclavable, so the PP dishes can be washed, sterilized, and re-used repeatedly, and we’ll no longer have to deal with the breakage issue.

12:15 – It’s still spring, but the heat is starting to get nasty. It’s 86F (30C) out there right now, and the humidity must be 70% or more. It’s bearable in the shade, but of course Colin wants to walk where he wants to walk, and that’s often in the sun. I half-seriously thought about wearing shorts, which I haven’t done more than a couple of times in the 30 years Barbara and I have been married. But I do have a pair or two of tennis shorts in one of my drawers. (Yes, despite the fact that I’m a guy, I actually do have more than one drawer.)

I’m not sure where the tennis shorts came from. I think Barbara must have bought them for me before she realized that I never wear shorts. I never wore them even when I was playing long serve-and-volley tennis matches in high summer. Mainly because I fell down a lot, usually lunging for volleys. If you’re wearing shorts, that’s bad on grass, worse on clay, and horrible on hard courts.