{"id":1598,"date":"2014-01-03T08:54:18","date_gmt":"2014-01-03T12:54:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/?p=1598"},"modified":"2014-01-03T15:56:48","modified_gmt":"2014-01-03T19:56:48","slug":"friday-3-january-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2014\/01\/03\/friday-3-january-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, 3 January 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold; color: #000099; font-family: Arial;\">07:54 &#8211;<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\"> Winter has returned to Winston-Salem. It&#8217;s currently 21F (-6C), with a stiff breeze. The forecast calls for freezing rain over the weekend and lows next week as low as 14F (-10C). For around here, that&#8217;s really cold. Colin doesn&#8217;t appear to care about cold. He wants to go out and sniff regardless.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\">The deadline for the S.P.A.R.K. competition is the 7th, but I want to have our entry submitted today if possible, and if not over the weekend. Come Monday, I want to be back at work on the earth science manual and on building more kits.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\">I got email from PayPal late yesterday afternoon to let me know that that complaint for non-delivery had been resolved in our favor. I checked the account and sure enough the money they&#8217;d held was again showing as available.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"width: 65%; height: 3px; font-family: Arial;\" \/>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold; color: #000099; font-family: Arial;\">10:59 &#8211;<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\"> Barbara just called to say she&#8217;d changed her plans. She was going to head over to her mom&#8217;s place after work and take her mom out to dinner and to run errands. With the weather forecast as it is, I wondered at the time if that was a good idea. Barbara said she and her sister had talked about it and decided not to do it. By the time Barbara got over to her mom&#8217;s place, it&#8217;d be well below freeezing with a stiff wind. That&#8217;s no weather for a woman in her 80&#8217;s to be out in.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\">I know that a lot of Northerners scoff at our piddly little cold spells, but it&#8217;s really no joke. Northern homes are equipped to deal with really cold weather, with heavy insulation and high-capacity furnaces. Many Southern homes aren&#8217;t equipped to deal with temperatures much below freezing because they seldom experience weather that cold. When we replaced our furnace a few years ago, I intentionally chose a model large enough to keep us warm when outside temperatures are below zero Fahrenheit (-18C). And then we have our natural gas logs, which on high put out another 60,000 BTUs per hour. Even during a power failure when the furnace can&#8217;t run, those natural gas logs put out enough heat to keep the whole house reasonably warm and to keep any pipes from freezing. Many of our neighbors aren&#8217;t so well equipped.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"width: 65%; height: 3px; font-family: Arial;\" \/>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold; color: #000099; font-family: Arial;\">14:56 &#8211;<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\"> We&#8217;ve had a busy start to the new year. Through this afternoon, we&#8217;ve sold a third as many kits as we did in all of January 2013, which itself showed a six- or seven-fold increase over January 2012. Or, another way of looking at it, we&#8217;ve already sold twice as many kits so far this month as we did the entire month of January 2012.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\">The only problem is, we&#8217;re backordered on the CK01B chemistry kits. One customer ordered four of them this afternoon. I shipped her the two we had in stock and told her the other two will ship Monday. So, I&#8217;m madly building CK01B kits. I actually plan to ship her the two backordered kits tomorrow if at all possible. And I really, really need to build more forensic kits as well.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>07:54 &#8211; Winter has returned to Winston-Salem. It&#8217;s currently 21F (-6C), with a stiff breeze. The forecast calls for freezing rain over the weekend and lows next week as low as 14F (-10C). For around here, that&#8217;s really cold. Colin doesn&#8217;t appear to care about cold. He wants to go out and sniff regardless.\n<\/p>\n<p>The deadline for the S.P.A.R.K. competition is the 7th, but I want to have our entry submitted today if possible,<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2014\/01\/03\/friday-3-january-2013\/\">&nbsp;&raquo;&nbsp;Read more about: Friday, 3 January 2013 &nbsp;&raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-science-kits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}