09:40 – Five weeks until the election, and the pot is bubbling. I suspect we’re going to see a lot of nasty stuff on both sides as the election gets closer. Barbara brought home a sample ballot yesterday. The front side lists partisan races; the reverse lists non-partisan races. That seemed normal, until I noticed that most of the “non-partisan” races listed two candidates, one labeled “Republican” and the other “Democrat”. I may, for the first time in my life, vote straight-ticket Republican. I remember my mother telling me, fifty years or more ago, “A Republican will never steal as much as a Democrat will give away.” That’s as true now as it was then.
The guys finished pouring the driveway yesterday. It took four full concrete mixers and a partial load on a fifth. We were able to walk on it last night, but they told us not to allow any vehicles on it for 10 days. The weather was ideal for concrete work yesterday and overnight, cool and dampish. I was going to go out periodically and spray the surface to keep it damp, but it looks like that won’t be necessary.
We had a bulk order yesterday that wiped out our inventory of the smaller CK01B chemistry kits, so it’s a high priority to get more of those built. We also have an order likely for a dozen full forensic science kits that we’ll need to ship as soon as we get the purchase order. Our stock on those is reasonable, but if that order comes through we’ll need to get started on building more of them. I also got a query yesterday from the editor of a magazine targeted at high-school and college forensic science teachers, asking for permission to reprint a couple of the labs from the forensic science book in their next issue. I of course granted permission, which really wasn’t even necessary since the book is published under a creative-commons license. The magazine has 18,000 subscribers, so we’re likely to see increased order volumes on the forensic science kits.
With everything else going on, prepping still continues. We have 45 three-liter bottles that I rescued when we moved up here from Winston. Those need to be cleaned and sanitized before we fill them. The 3-liter bottles are good for flour and other fluffy stuff, which is a PITA to get into the narrower-mouth 2-liter bottles. Each 3-liter bottle will hold about five pounds of flour, so the 45 we have on hand are enough for more than 200 pounds of flour.
Preparing them for use is pretty straight-forward. We’ll fill both sides of the kitchen sink with sudsy water with some chlorine bleach added. After a quick run through both sides of the sink, we’ll invert the bottles to let them drain. We can air-dry them or use silica gel beads or dry white rice to get rid of the last vestiges of moisture in them and then use a funnel we’ll make from the top half of a 2-liter bottle to fill them. After labeling them, we’ll stick them on the LTS pantry shelves.