11:03 – We’re shipping our first chemistry kit to Canada today. I’ll haul it out to the local post office and ask them to take a look at it and the paperwork, and to weigh it just to make sure what it actually weighs. Then I’ll haul it back here, print the Click-and-Ship postage label and hand it to the letter carrier this afternoon.
I also need to stop by the lawn and garden store and pick two or three bags of vermiculite. One bag is four cubic feet (100+ liters). To meet shipping regulations, we pack chemicals in gallon (3.79 L) ziplock bags with a liter scoop of vermiculite added to serve as cushioning and absorbent, so one bag suffices for about 100 kits.
I spent most of yesterday making up solutions for chemistry kits. Barbara spent the day labeling, finishing 1,590 containers, which gave us 30 forensics kits’ worth. That’s one set of 30 labels for a 125 mL bottle, 20 sets for 15 mL bottles, 15 sets for 30 mL bottles, six sets for 30 mL widemouth bottles, and 11 sets for envelopes. She’d previously labeled a dozen sets of envelopes, so that means the forensics kits total 65 containers each.
And I just got off the phone with Crucial. Apparently, someone attempted to use my credit card number to place a $585 order on Tuesday. The Crucial rep said their internal security flagged the transaction immediately. They hadn’t actually run the charge through, but had only placed a query with AmEx to verify the card was valid and place a $585 reduction in our available credit. The rep said that they didn’t actually charge a card until the order shipped, which it obviously never will, so AmEx would automatically remove that $585 placeholder.
I wish our legal system would begin dealing with thieves as they used to be dealt with; at least as severely as murderers. Britain used to hang thieves, which unquestionably had a deterrent effect on the particular thief being hanged as well as on other would-be thieves. I’ve always thought Winston-Salem would be a much better place if, one weekend, we had a mass execution and hanged, say, the worst 1,000 people in Winston. Thieves, rapists, child molesters, politicians who lie or steal, scammers (particularly those who focus on the elderly), spammers, and so on.