Category: science kits

08:31 – It was 64.4F (18C) when I took Colin out around 0615 this morning, overcast and drizzling.

After a miserable May, science kit sales are kicking into high gear this month. It may be just a blip, but my guess is that things are just speeding up a month or so earlier this year than usual. As of this morning, with June about 14% gone, we’re at 55% of revenues for all of June 2016, and we’ve already matched revenues for all of last month.

I hope this keeps up, but the downside is that we’re quickly drawing down our finished goods inventory of kits. We’re in reasonably good shape on our flagship biology and chemistry kits, but we’re getting low on forensics kits and are completely out of the smaller basic chemistry kits, for which I have an outstanding order that came in overnight. So we need to get another batch of those made up immediately and start building stock on the others.

I have the amateur radio license exam coming up in a couple of weeks, and I haven’t yet done much to prepare for it. I’m taking the Technician Class exam, which is all I really care about, but as long as I’m taking that I decided I might as well take the General Class exam as well.

I’ve flipped through the ARRL General Class exam manual, and it all seems pretty straightforward. I read through the review questions and answers, which are all published. Both tests are 35 multiple-guess questions from a pool of something over 400 questions. Correct answers on 26 of the 35 questions is sufficient to pass the exam. I also have the ARRL Technician Class exam manual on order, due to arrive tomorrow.

I’ll just brute-force the exams, memorizing the answers to all 900 or so questions. Old-school hams consider that “cheating”, but of course it’s perfectly acceptable. And I start with a big advantage, having held a general class licence, albeit 40+ years ago. I don’t expect to have much problem. I’ll just spend the couple evenings before the test going through the questions and answers.

09:12 – It was 62.7F (17C) when I took Colin out at about 0650 this morning, foggy and with a mist just short of a drizzle. When I looked at the thermometer an hour or so later, it’d dropped to 59F. We have cool temperatures, rain, and thunderstorms in the forecast for most of this week.

We got a lot of bottles filled yesterday, with several hundred more to fill today. With the downstairs unfinished area crammed full of furniture, books, etc., we’re short of space to put the completed bags of bottles, so they’re just sitting on the dining room table for now.

With a few exceptions, notably herbs, the stuff Barbara planted in the garden and in containers out on the deck is thriving. She did a row of turnips in the garden, which she thinned yesterday. We’re going to have lots of turnips. And Barbara has named herself “Weeding Wench”. I made no comment; having been married for 30+ years, I know better.

When she came in from the garden, she said she needed to put in trellises for some of the plants. She plans to use metal fence posts and twine. So I ordered her 1.3 miles (2 km) of twine on Amazon, which should be a lifetime supply.

08:58 – It was 59F (15C) when I took Colin out at about 0640 this morning, sunny and calm. It’s already up to 76F. We did have thunder and lightning yesterday afternoon and overnight, but only about 0.2″ (0.5cm) of rain.

We filled bottles yesterday, including 142 bottles of starch indicator solution for chemistry kits. That presents an interesting problem, because starch solution is an ideal growth medium for molds, and the polyethylene bottles can’t be autoclaved or they’ll melt. Boiling the solution kills all of the microorganisms in it, but it doesn’t kill mold spores. Once the bottled solution cools, the mold spores germinate. We do add a small amount of thymol to the solution, which helps but isn’t a complete solution.

So we use a process invented in the 19th century by a scientist named Tyndal. That process, called Tyndallization, involves submerging the bottles in boiling water to kill all the live microorganisms (but not the mold spores). We then allow the bottles to sit for several days at room temperature, whereupon any spores present germinate into live mold organisms. When all the spores have had a chance to germinate, we again submerge the bottles in boiling water to kill the new live mold.

Back when Tyndal developed his process, autoclaves and home-size pressure cookers weren’t yet available. Pressure canning was done, but only on a commercial scale. Tyndallization was the only option for home- or lab-scale autoclaving. Interestingly, that process is still used today as an alternative to pressure canning or autoclaving to sterilize materials that won’t stand up to the temperatures used for those modern processes.

09:34 – It was 57.3F (14C) when I took Colin out at about 0645 this morning, again sunny and calm.

The insurance adjuster showed up yesterday about 10:30. We started in the master bathroom upstairs, where the hardwood floor had been flooded and warped. I expected him to say they’d pay for sanding it down and refinishing it, which he did. But then he started measuring the whole upstairs, saying that since the hardwood floor is continuous upstairs they’d pay to have all of it sanded down and refinished. The laundry room, kitchen, den, dining room, foyer and the large foyer closet, master bedroom, master bath, and master closet. Geez. That I didn’t expect. He said we’d have to have all the furniture moved out, which they’d pay for, and we’d have to stay in a hotel for a week to ten days, which they’d also pay for. I told him that I doubted that Barbara would go for that. He said it didn’t matter. They’d pay for it no matter how much or how little we decided to do. So what we’ll probably do is have the floor in the master bath replaced and refinished and just put a divider strip in the doorway.

Downstairs, they’re going to replace the sheetrock ceiling and pay to replace the carpeting in the major room, along with incidentals like repairing some wall damage, repainting, and so on. I told him that we planned to replace the ceiling with a drop ceiling, and he said that was fine. They’d pay to replace the sheetrock, and he said that’d cost more than installing a drop ceiling. He suggested that instead of replacing the carpet we install ceramic tile, which would cost more than carpet, but be much more durable, particularly if we ever had another leak. He said that’d cost more than reinstalling carpet and they would pay only the cost of the carpet, but that’s what he would do if this were his house. I told him we’d already discussed installing a ceramic tile floor, but the contractor had suggested instead installing plastic laminate fake-wood flooring. He said that was a good choice, and should cost about the same or perhaps a bit less than installing carpet.

I also gave him the pipe sections and fittings that the plumber had left with us. He was very interested in those, and said there’s no way this should have happened in a house built only ten years ago. He said this could work out to our benefit, because they’d make a subrogation claim with the pipe/fitting manufacturers, and any money they recovered from them would go first toward paying our deductible.

So the upshot is that we shouldn’t be much, if any, out of pocket on the repairs. We’re going to have the plastic laminate flooring installed downstairs and live with it for a while. If we like it, instead of refinishing the floors upstairs, which take a real beating from Colin’s claws, we’ll install the plastic laminate up here as well. Barbara is happy with the whole situation, other of course than the upheaval that we’ll be living amidst for the next few weeks.

Barbara made her first supermarket run to the new Grant’s place yesterday. She said she was very happy with it. The place is very clean, both in terms of organization and lack of dirt. The layout is pretty much the same as the old Lowes, and they carry much the same items. She said their prices were comparable.

Based on the flyer that came with last week’s newspaper, the prices look pretty good to me. There were a couple of odd items, though. My favorite was cartons of 18 eggs at ten for $10. Who the hell buys 180 eggs at a time? Well, I might, if I were comfortable dehydrating them myself, which I’m not. I suppose I could dehydrate them and then dry can them in the oven for an hour or two at 450F to sterilize them, but that’s more of a project than I’m ready to undertake at the moment.

Speaking of projects, I just mentioned to Barbara that I’d like to put up some shelf brackets and 1×10’s or 1×12’s in Frances’ and Al’s bedroom closet downstairs. Barbara calls it the water closet, because it currently has something like 500 liters of bottled water stacked in it. I need to measure the heights and widths of our standard containers–#10 cans, 2-liter soft drink bottles, and so forth–to decide how wide the shelves need to be and the optimum vertical spacing.

More work on science kit stuff today.