08:04 – Barbara just left to pick up her parents and head down to the beach for a few days. Colin and I are bereft. She’ll be back Sunday. Colin and I will watch Heartland reruns and play ball while she’s gone. We made it through all but the final three episodes of series five while Barbara was at dinner last night. We’ll watch those three episodes tonight and then start again on series one.
I got email from Cathy Duffy last night. She runs the most popular homeschool curriculum review site on the web. I’d sent her a copy of Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments a few months ago, and she added it to her to-be-reviewed queue. Here’s her review.
We have everything we need to put together 30 more biology kits, except one thing: thirty 125 mL polypropylene bottles. I know we have 60 of those in inventory; I just can’t find them. So I issued a PO yesterday to one of our wholesalers that included, among other things, 60 more of those bottles. They should arrive early next week, and we can start assembling another batch of biology kits.
I spent some time yesterday prototyping a couple of the new kits that we’ll be shipping at the end of this year and into 2013. It’s important to know what size box the kits will require. The biology, chemistry, and forensics kits all fit into a USPS Priority Mail Regional Rate Box B, which costs anything from about $6 to $15 to ship, with the average being about $11. If possible, I wanted the new kits to fit a RR Box A, which costs from about $5 to about $10 to ship, with the average being about $7. That difference means we can price the kits $4 less than we would have if they required a RR Box B.