10:17 – Barbara is off to meet her parents and sister at her parents’ house, where they’ll be cleaning out stuff, deciding what to move over to their new quarters, what to donate to charity, and what to discard. That’s a pretty massive project, so they won’t finish today, but they have to get it done before they can start getting the house ready to go on the market.
Meanwhile, I’m doing my usual Saturday tasks, starting with the laundry. The seasonal burst in science kit sales is starting to taper off, which gives us some breathing room. If the past is any indication, we’ll have another, smaller peak in sales at the end of this year and the beginning of next, as people buy kits for Christmas and the second semester. Then it’ll quiet down again until April, when people start ordering kits for summer session. And then around the first of July the craziness will start again, as people start ordering kits for the autumn semester.
During this slower period, we can go from building kits almost constantly to building batches once a month or so. Basically, we’ll build batches of 30 and start a new batch when we get down to a dozen or so. I’ll take advantage of that time to do things I haven’t had time to do since early summer, including designing a couple of new kits and writing the manuals for them. I’d like to have at least two new kits available for 2013. I may also take an occasional day off. Then, next March and April we’ll place large orders for components and start building inventory again for the crazy season.
13:37 – Wow. Will people never learn that when you’d prefer something be ignored, making a big deal about it isn’t the best way to accomplish your goal? So the British royal family threatens to sue the French newspaper that published images of Kate somebody or other, Duchess of something or other, topless. Big deal. If they’d just said “no comment”, no one would have paid any attention. The images are so blurry and indistinct that it’s difficult to say anything more than that they appear to be images of a dark haired woman with her boobs exposed. Incredibly, the spokesman for the royal family for all intents and purposes confirmed that the images were real and that Kate somebody or other, Duchess of something or other, was in fact the subject of those images. So now the world knows that the probable future Queen, if indeed the position still exists by then, has boobs. I was certainly shocked to learn that.