09:18 – We’re having our deck replaced. Yesterday, a truck showed up with the framing lumber. This morning, the work crew showed up to tear down the old deck. We had just under five inches (~12.5 cm) of rain last night, but our back yard is on a grade so it’s drained well enough for them to start work.
We’re nearly ready to start shipping forensic science kits. I have a couple more chemicals to bottle and then we’ll start building subassemblies. Until we get all of the subassemblies ready to go, we won’t know what size box we’ll need. I’m sure everything will fit in a USPS Priority Mail large flat-rate box, but I’m hoping it’ll fit a PM regional rate box instead. If so, that’ll cut our postage costs by an average of maybe $3.
I’d intended to drop our wired phone service and go 100% cell. But thinking about it this morning, I decided to sign up for a third-party VoIP service. I looked at Vonage, but I decided to reactivate our service with PhonePower, which we had before we went to TWC VoIP service. PhonePower service was great for a few months, but then it started hanging unpredictably. I think the problem was the terminal adapter. The one we had back then had to be on the local side of the router. The TA we’re getting this time sits between the cable modem and the router, so there shouldn’t be any problems with hangs.
16:39 – When we’re making up chemicals for kits, I invariably save the most obnoxious chemicals for last. This time was no exception. I just finished making up a batch of Kastle-Meyer reagent, which is used as a presumptive blood test. Actually, K-M reagent isn’t as obnoxious as some. It has no odor. The obnoxious part is having to reflux a 40% potassium hydroxide solution, which literally eats glass.
I originally intended to make up a 2-liter batch, but I decided one liter was sufficient for this pass. That’s enough for 30 forensic science kits, which is the batch size we have in progress. So I halved the recipe, transferring 500 mL of DI water to a 2 L Erlenmeyer flask, dissolving 200 g of potassium hydroxide in the water, adding 20 g of phenolphthalein powder and 200 g of zinc powder, and then refluxing it for an hour or so, until the bright pink solution turned colorless. That’s cooling down now. When it’s at room temperature, I’ll make it up to 1 L with 70% ethanol and bottle it. Some sources say that K-M reagent is good for months stored in a sealed bottle, or years if it’s refrigerated. My experience has been better than that. I have some K-M reagent I made up in 2007. It’s been stored at room temperature, and it still works the same way it always did.