09:22 – We’re under a blizzard warning for tonight. Well, a blizzard by our standards. Temperatures in the 20’s (~ -5C), with winds of 25 MPH (40 KPH), and two to four inches (5 to 10 cm) of snow.
We got a lot done yesterday on the biology kits. We now have 60 sets of the solids–thirteen of them–packaged, labeled, and bagged into subassemblies. We also started making up 100 sets of tube subassemblies. Those are six glass test tubes individually packaged inside 50 mL polypropylene centrifuge tubes (for shipping protection), with six 15 mL polypropylene centrifuge tubes, all inside a quart ziplock bag. I’ve made up all six of the stains included in the kit–Eosin Y, Gram’s Iodine, Hucker’s Crystal Violet, Methylene Blue, Safranin O, and Sudan III–and today we’ll bottle and label 60 sets of those.
11:47 – I’ve often complained that one can’t buy real chemistry sets nowadays. The kinds of chemistry sets I grew up with have been extinct for close to 40 years. Until now.
John Farrell Kuhns of H.M.S. Beagle is now offering a real chemistry set, the kind I drooled over back in the 1960’s. The hand-built H.M.S. Beagle Master Chemistry Set echoes a bygone era, when millions of boys hoped to find something just like this under the Christmas tree.