11:12 – Colin promised yesterday that he wouldn’t do that any more. We’ll see. He was born on 12 February 2011, so in little more than a week he’ll have his first birthday. As an 11-month pup, I’m sure he’s looking forward to that, although I’ve explained to him that turning a year old entails new responsibilities, among them not shitting on the bathroom floor. Barbara says that on the 12th Colin will be an official dog. I’m thinking he’ll be a 12-month pup.
I’m doing my usual serve-and-volley with edits on the biology book. As usual, they’re pretty light. No one has flagged any errors yet, so it’s usually just incorporating suggestions, fixing typos, and so on. Meanwhile, I’ve started work on adapting the forensics lab book we completed three years ago to a kit-based version. I just sent my editor a revised proposal for it. If possible, I’d like to get the revisions complete by mid-May, which means if we move on this it may be an autumn title. One way or another, the forensics kits will be ready in time for autumn semester.
Speaking of kits, I just shipped the next-to-last chemistry kit we had in stock. Ordinarily, we don’t let stock get that low. We have a dozen more kits partially built, so we’ll probably finish those up this weekend. I need to do inventory anyway, so this’ll be an opportunity to get a count on all the components and figure out what to reorder, not just to build more chemistry kits but to build biology kits and a prototype forensics kit as well. After we get biology and forensics out of the way, I also want to do a second edition of the chemistry book, this one written around a kit. Two kits, actually. One for first-year only, and a second kit to supplement that for second-year. A lot of people use the chemistry book for home schooling, and with kits I can make it much more affordable for them to do so, which in turn should increase the number of people using the book for homeschooling.