09:50 – Barbara’s been gone 72 hours. So far, Colin and I are making do. Only four more days until she returns.
I called AmEP yesterday afternoon just to make sure that Katie was okay. She said she and her husband are fine, as is the business, but that much of Fort Collins and the surrounding area is a complete wreck. She was off Thursday and the business was closed Friday. She said it took her about two and half hours yesterday to drive the two or three miles from their house to the office. Almost all of the bridges are out, and the traffic was a bumper-to-bumper parking lot. But they’re still operating normally, taking orders, receiving shipments from their suppliers, and sending out shipments to their customers. Colin barked while were talking, and I told Katie that that was my Border Collie assistant. As it turns out, Katie also has a Border Collie. She got her when she was in college, and the BC is now 13 years old.
I told Katie that our next science kit would probably be earth science, and that I wanted to include rock and mineral specimens. AmEP has dozens of different rock/mineral kits in their catalog, but as I told Katie I fear single-sourcing anything. I’d hate to have a standard kit that requires a product that the vendor might discontinue without notice. She said that their rock/mineral kits are an “evergreen” product for them. They sell them in large numbers and have been doing so for years. They build the kits themselves rather than importing them from China or wherever. They actually employ a geologist and they own the quarries where they get their rock specimens. Katie said they’d be happy to do a custom kit for me, or if I preferred they’d sell me the stuff in bulk. So, for example, I could order 50 pounds each or whatever of 1″ chunks of 25 different rocks and minerals and build the kits ourselves.