{"id":324,"date":"2011-12-05T09:52:50","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T13:52:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/?p=324"},"modified":"2011-12-05T12:51:46","modified_gmt":"2011-12-05T16:51:46","slug":"monday-5-december-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2011\/12\/05\/monday-5-december-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday, 5 December 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

08:52 –<\/span> Costco run and dinner yesterday with Mary and Paul. It was a nice break. Barbara and I had just finished building the final sub-assemblies for a new batch of chemistry kits<\/a>, which’ll start shipping this week.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

11:51 –<\/span> I started the morning intending to write all day, but as usual I got sidetracked. I was writing a lab session that involved germinating carrot seeds, and I realized I might as well include carrot seeds in the kit. So, I went off in search of on-line wholesale seed vendors.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, carrot seeds are tiny, really tiny. Maybe an average of a milligram each, literally. Incredibly, one place was selling carrot seeds by number rather than weight. I could have ordered, 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, or 325,000 carrot seeds. Do they really count them, I wonder? Perhaps they count out a thousand, weigh them on a milligram-class analytical balance and then fill containers by mass.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

At any rate, I found a place that looked to be a good source, and put half a pound (~225 g, or something like 200,000+ seeds) in my shopping cart. Then I got to thinking. I also need bush lima bean seeds for another lab, so I looked at that company’s offerings and added a pound (454 g) of bush lima seeds to my cart. But the lab with the lima beans also requires rhizobium inoculum, which this company didn’t offer. So I put my order on hold and went off to find another company that offered the rhizobium, thinking it might also have the seeds I needed. It did, but their prices were much higher, so I went ahead and completed the order with the first company.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Ah, but not all rhizobium inoculum is the same. Some works with clover or alfalfa, but not lima beans, or vice versa. In fact, there are a bunch of different varieties of rhizobium, each of which is optimized for a particular species or group of species, and works poorly if at all with other species. So I called the second company to tell them I needed a rhizobium inoculum to use with bush limas. They told me which of their products were suitable, so I placed my second order of the morning.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, it’s not worth jumping through hoops to get wholesale prices, tax exemptions, etc. for small quantities, so I just put the orders on credit cards. But despite the fact that these were charged as “personal” purchases, they are of course actually business purchases. So that meant I had to go back and generate and print purchase orders and invoices for both orders so I didn’t lose track of them.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

At least I’m finally back to writing.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

08:52 – Costco run and dinner yesterday with Mary and Paul. It was a nice break. Barbara and I had just finished building the final sub-assemblies for a new batch of chemistry kits<\/a>, which’ll start shipping this week.\n<\/p>\n

11:51 – I started the morning intending to write all day, but as usual I got sidetracked. I was writing a lab session that involved germinating carrot seeds, and I realized I might as well include carrot seeds in the kit.<\/p>\n

 » Read more about: Monday, 5 December 2011  »<\/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":[11,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-kits","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324","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=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}