11:19 – We made a quick trip out to Home Depot this morning to pick up some shelf brackets and 1X12 boards to put up some shelves in the stock room. When we got back, I climbed up on the roof to rake the accumulation of leaves out of the valleys. Barbara’s out there now with her Lawn Lamborghini® vacuuming them and the rest of the leaves in the yard.
Commenter JimC sent me a link to a fascinating site. While I was clicking around there, I came upon this article: What is the oldest audio recording of an expletive?
??? by inventors Sumner Tainter and H G Rogers. It’s the eleventh day of March, eighteen hundred and eighty five. [trilled “R”]. How is this for height? Mary had a little lamb, and its fleece was black as soot, and wherever Mary went … Oh, fuck! … [trilled “R”] Mary had a little lamb, and its fleece was black as soot, and wherever Mary went, the little lamb was sure to go. How is this for height? Over ???
13:15 – I just helped Barbara by blowing out a season’s accumulation of leaves in the back yard while she raked. I despise most yard work, but I don’t mind blowing leaves. There’s some interesting math involved, particularly when there’s a breeze and you’re blowing them into tall piles. Barbara is headed over now to her parents’ old house, where she’s meeting the movers. There are a few pieces of furniture there that the movers wanted for themselves, so Barbara offered to meet them there to get them.
We got an order this morning for a CK01A chemistry kit. I was about to ship the order when I realized that this customer might appreciate being given the option of buying our simpler, less expensive CK01B kit. So I emailed the customer about the availability of the CK01B kit. That got me to thinking. There’s no reason I couldn’t make the kit page live and start accepting orders, so I did. Here it is.
The part about the kits being in stock and ready to ship is even true, although we have only half a dozen of the kits boxed up and ready to ship. The hold-up is one item that’s been on backorder for a long time, a 12-position test tube rack.
We’ve been shipping chemistry kits with the 40-position PP test tube rack from the BK01 biology kit. It costs a few bucks more than the 12-position rack, but the alternative to not substituting the 40-position would have been to stop shipping chemistry kits. So we just ate the cost difference until the 12-position racks were back in stock.
The problem is, the CK01A kit ships in a USPS Priority Mail Regional Rate Box B, while the CK01B ships in a smaller RR Box A. The 40-position rack won’t fit in the smaller box, so we can’t build any more CK01B kits until we get the 12-position racks. (I’d put half a dozen of those aside to have available to build a small batch of the CK01B kits.)
Back in August, our wholesaler told us they’d have the 12-position racks back in stock on 30 November, so we planned around that and left 100 of them on backorder. I emailed them yesterday to ask about status of the 12-position racks, and learned that they’d shipped our backorder on Thursday. They should arrive Monday, so we’ll be ready to build more CK01B kits starting then.