09:34 – It’s back to spring-like weather. It was 52F (11C) when I got up this morning, gray and damp but not raining.
We’re building science kits today and tomorrow. We’re in decent shape on biology kits, but down to one on forensic kits and -2 on chemistry kits. Bulk orders Thursday wiped out our stock on both of those. Oh, well. USPS doesn’t run Monday, and we’ll have plenty of time to get kits built to fill outstanding orders. Yesterday, we finished making up chemicals for a custom order from a state distance learning program, so we’ll get that boxed up today and ready to ship Tuesday.
Email overnight from Cassie, another new prepper. She had told me earlier that she and her husband are mid- to late-20’s. She works as a supermarket checker, and her husband has his own plumbing business. Friday, he cut his dominant hand badly while working on a job. The ER doc glued and stitched it back together again, and said he’ll recover fully, but for the next week or two he’ll be very limited in what he can do. He can still supervise work and approve it, but otherwise he’ll have to depend entirely on his assistant to do the actual wrench-turning. He’ll still be able to get work done, but everything will take longer. That means their income will take a significant hit over the next couple of weeks, and he may have to farm out some jobs to the other local plumber. They won’t be hurting financially, because between her pay check, his (smaller) pay check, and what they have saved, they can meet routine expenses without any problem. But, as Cassie says, it’s a comfort to know that they can eat from their stored food, cutting their grocery bill down to nothing. She cooked dinner last night from their deep pantry, and intends to keep doing so until her husband is fully recovered. As she said, this is a good excuse to get more experience cooking from LTS, and it just goes to prove that their preps aren’t just for an end-of-the-world scenario.