10:41 – Barbara just headed over to meet her sister and parents at one of the retirement facilities on the short list. Barbara’s mom is doing much better. The doctor prescribed antibiotics for the UTI and Xanax for her panic attacks. The combination has worked very well. Barbara says her mom is now back to normal and is actually excited about moving to an independent living facility. Frankly, I hope they like the one they’re visiting today enough to sign up for it. Barbara’s parents really need to be in such a facility, and it’d be best to get things rolling before anything else happens.
Yesterday was a first. We’ve sold kits to customers in nearly all the 50 states, but yesterday we sold the first one to a customer in Puerto Rico. It started with a query email asking if we could sell kits to someone in Puerto Rico. I replied that I thought so but I wasn’t sure, and asked the woman to send me her address so that I could try running a dummy postage label and make sure the USPS would accept the package. She replied that she had three possible shipping addresses. The first was her home address, but she said they’d had problems in their neighborhood with the mailman leaving a package on the porch and someone stealing it. So that was out. Her second address was her work address, which was the US Federal Courthouse. I could just imagine what might happen if we shipped a box full of chemical bottles to a federal building, so that was obviously out. Fortunately, she has a PO box, which the USPS happily delivers to, so that’s where we shipped it.
We also added yet another country to our list of disappointed would-be customers. I got a query asking if we could ship a biology kit to Switzerland, and was forced to tell the man that we couldn’t. That makes more than 20 countries now.
We’re full speed ahead on building forensic science kits. My original goal was to be shipping them by August 28th, which was originally the date the book was to be published, but it looks like that may slip a bit. We’re accepting pre-orders on the web site, where we say that the kits will ship in “late August”, and I’m determined to start shipping on or before 31 August to meet that promise. We still have a lot of work remaining, but we should have at least enough kits finished by the 31st to ship outstanding pre-orders, with at least a few in reserve.
13:51 – Wow. NYPD cops got into a shootout with a man who’d just murdered another man by shooting him five times. The two NYPD cops fired 17 shots and managed to hit 10 people, of whom nine were innocent bystanders. NYPD says there’s nothing else the cops could have done. Really? I thought cops were trained to avoid firing their weapons when there were innocent bystanders in the line of fire unless the criminal was about to fire on those bystanders. I wasn’t there, and I realize that at times it may be unavoidable to fire when there’s risk of hitting an innocent bystander, but hitting nine(!) innocent bystanders in an eight-second shootout seems a bit excessive. Assuming each cop fired roughly half of the 17 rounds, that’s about one round per second each. That’s not quite Timed Fire, but it’s certainly leisurely. Fortunately, none of the innocent bystanders who were shot suffered life-threatening injuries.