08:23 – Every time I think we’re going to run out of good stuff to watch on Netflix streaming, we find another new series or three. We’re now well into Rescue Me, which has first-rate writing. Barbara likes it, but finds it a bit intense, so she asked me to find something else to alternate with it. Yesterday, I came across Wild at Heart, a British series about a veterinarian and his family who relocate from Bristol to South Africa. We watched a couple of episodes of it last night, and Barbara gives it her seal of approval.
I’m still using the panic-level inventory method, but “panic level” varies by time of year. Back in the July through September crazy time, I started to get nervous if the finished goods inventory of chemistry kits fell below a couple dozen, and got seriously worried when it hit about 15. Of course, back then we were routinely shipping three to six chemistry kits a day. December is much slower, but as of this morning we’re down to four of the CK01A kits in stock. Four might last a week, but more likely it’s only a two or three days’ supply. Fortunately, we have everything we need to quickly assemble another half dozen, but after that the well runs dry. So one of our tasks this weekend is to put together another 60 each of the small parts bags and solids bags for the CK01 kits.
15:38 – Barbara and I just finished putting up six 6-foot 1×12 shelves in the inventory/work room, three on each side of the room. It’s amazing how much floor space we cleared. We store a lot of small components in shoebox-size plastic boxes. We put up the shelves with two feet of vertical separation, which allows stacking those boxes four high. There’s room for nine or ten per shelf horizontally, so all told we have room for 200+ of those boxes. Plus the room under the bottom shelves, where we’ll store stuff like cases of empty bottles and so on.
Until this morning, there were two dressers and two chests of drawers in that room. We moved one of the chests of drawers downstairs into the finished area today, and we’ll move one more of each tomorrow, leaving only the one dresser upon which I stack finished goods inventory ready to ship. We’ll also move a work table up from downstairs to use as a small assembly area. The main goal of all this was to do what was necessary so Barbara could have her kitchen table back permanently, which she will as of tomorrow.
15:51 – Okay, this is interesting in a perverse kind of way. Netflix has emailed me exactly twice to tell me that new seasons were available streaming for series that we’d been watching. The first time, it was Grey’s Anatomy, which I’d rated one star. Just a few minutes ago, they emailed me to say that season 7 of Bones was available. I’d rated Bones–you guessed it–one star. One star as in “Hated It”.
Actually, to be fair, I originally rated Bones three or four stars, but that was only for the first series or two. Even then, I found it annoying in some respects, particularly the imaginary science and occasional meaningless sciency jargon. That and the fact that they had each of their Ph.D. characters doing jobs that in reality would be distributed among several Ph.D.’s in different specialties, not to mention a bunch of technicians. But, okay, I can understand they have to do some bogus stuff to make the program flow and keep the cast size manageable. But as the seasons progressed, the science got more and more imaginary and the plots made less and less sense. So somewhere around series three I dropped my rating to one star. So, of course Netflix just had to tell me that there were new episodes available of a series I’d rated one star. Geez. What’s worse is that we’ll probably watch them. Double geez.