11:55 – Barbara will arrive home this evening, and be greeted by Colin and me barking and doing our happy dance.
It’s fortunate that I got another 30 biology kits built yesterday, because yesterday and today we sold the last half dozen from the previous batch. We came within one day of running dry. Today I’m working on chemistry kits. We’re down to four of those in stock, and I’m going to try to get 30 more assembled today. Well, 25 actually, because we have only 25 small parts bags in stock. I have the components to build another hundred small-parts bags, so I’ll just go ahead and assemble 30 chemistry kits and set five of them aside until we’ve built more small-parts bags.
I’ve been thinking.* RBT said at least once that he and Barbara could mix up and bag up stuff for the kits in larger batches and that it would be more efficient to do it that way, but they don’t have room to store the materials, in-progress components, and finished kits.
Well, that’s where ol’ Steve and his outside-of-the-box thinking comes to the rescue. I’ll bet you’ve got *all kinds* of inefficiently used room in your house. Take the bedroom. You live in the South, where it’s warm. You can sleep outside. I’ll bet you could store hundreds of ready-to-ship boxes in that formerly wasted space.
Then there’s the kitchen. You can get rid of almost all of the dishes, eat out of the pot when you cook something, and use the formerly wasted space to hold test tubes and other non-hazardous equipment.
I would suggest lining all of the rooms’ walls with shelves at just above head height, but you’re tall, so I don’t know if that would leave enough space below the ceiling to be of any use.
No no. No need to thank me. I offer up my ideas as a service to the world.
* People who know me in meatspace take that as a cue to start edging toward the exit. Y’all haven’t been graced with my in-person aura** so you don’t know the warning signs.
** Or maybe aroma. I get them mixed up sometimes.
{snip} Then there’s the kitchen. {snip}
That’s a violation of one of the basic lab safety rules. Thou shalt not ingest around chemicals, it becomes too easy to take a drink of something that you really really really shouldn’t drink.
And I know a guy who did that with a nice flask of Hg. 🙁
The only solution for the kits that I prepare in our actual kitchen is starch indicator, which contains only soluble starch and about 0.001% thymol (as a preservative to prevent mold growth). Although of course none of our chemicals are intended for anything other than lab work, I wouldn’t hesitate to drink some of the starch indicator. It’s just a semi-viscous starch solution with a hint of thyme for flavoring.