Category: science kits

09:25 – It was 41F (5C) when I took Colin out at 0715 this morning, cloudy and with a stiff breeze. We have cooler weather forecast for the next couple of days, with highs in the 40’s and 50’s (~ 8C to 15C) and lows just above freezing, rain, and winds gusting to 40+ MPH (64 KPH). Nice days to stay inside.

Barbara is cleaning house today and I’ll probably do a load of sheets. Otherwise, we’ll be making up chemicals, filling and labeling bottles, and so on.

I’ve read several disturbing articles recently about how cops are withdrawing from proactive policing. In the wake of Ferguson and the follow-on violence, many departments as well as individual cops are taking a hands-off approach to serious crime. They’re just standing by while they watch crimes happening because they don’t want to end up being villified on the news, charged with unnecesary force, and so on. In other words, they’re just letting the bad guys act as they want without any fear of apprehension or punishment. This is a harbinger of civilization on its way out.

Back in the olden days, cops–all cops, black, white, or orange with purple stripes–divided the world into three classes: cops, civilians, and scumbags. Cops were all part of a fraternity, and it was still largely a fraternity; no women to speak of. Civilians were the people who paid their salaries, and were to be protected and treated with respect at all times. Scumbags deserved no respect, and were treated with whatever ferocity was needed to keep them in their place, up to and including shooting the SOBs. And everyone just accepted this as the normal course of things.

No more. Now cops divide the world into just two classes: cops and everyone else. And who can blame them? They’re second-guessed every time they need to draw their weapons, and often face charges or dismissal. The federal government is their enemy, and even their local government will drop them like a hot potato to avoid even embarrassment. Middle-class people, who used to support the police unquestioningly, now treat them with suspicion. The days of Officer Friendly are gone, on both sides. So much for that thin blue line that used to stand between us normals and the underclass scumbags.

And the worst part is that with the cops increasingly not protecting normal people from the underclass, normal people are eventually going to start doing it themselves. If things continue on the current trajectory, it may not be much longer before we start seeing armed neighborhood vigilante groups protecting their neighborhoods from anyone they don’t like the looks of. Where the government fails, the free market eventually steps in.

08:53 – It was 64.5F (18C) when I took Colin out at 0645 this morning, sunny and calm. There were half a dozen cows up near the back fence. Colin and the cows just looked at each other. When I checked the thermometer yesterday mid-afternoon, it was up to 82.2F (28C), the first time we’ve hit 80F this year.

I’m closing out the books for April. Barring any more orders coming in today, we’ll finish April slightly above April of last year. YTD, we’re roughly 33% above last year’s numbers for kit units and revenue, and slightly above the 2015 YTD numbers. We’re still well behind the 2014 numbers, but even so we’ll have a pretty decent year if the current trend continues.

We had barbecue chicken for dinner last night, using a can of Costco chicken and a pint of our homemade barbecue sauce. It tasted fine. As I commented to Barbara, the flavor of the sauce is strong enough that it doesn’t really matter what kind of meat we use with it. I’d even try barbecue diced-Spam if Barbara would let me get away with it. She’s not a big fan of Spam, although I have a couple of cases of it in our LTS pantry.

We have a quiet day planned.

10:23 – It was 51.7F (11C) when I took Colin out at 0645 this morning, sunny and breezy. The rain is finally over. We have almost 8 inches (20 cm) over the three day period starting Saturday. Barbara is off to the gym this morning. We’re working on kit stuff this afternoon. She’s making a flying visit to Winston tomorrow, leaving around 0800 and returning home in the afternoon.

Science kit sales are holding up better than I expected. We’re in our slowest period of the year–February through June–but units and revenues for each month of 2017, including April, are noticeably higher than same-month 2016 numbers. As we do every year, we’re using this slow time to build inventory of non-perishable kit components in anticipation of the rush that starts in July. By August, we’ll be shipping kits faster than we can build them, so we want to have enough subassemblies already built to let us just assemble kits on the fly.

When Barbara read my page the other day about Sam’s/Walmart versus Costco/Amazon, she said she really, really didn’t want to start going to Sam’s. She just doesn’t like it, and she doesn’t care about the politics. She says Costco stuff is better quality other than name-brand canned goods and so on, and the staff is much friendlier. I understand her position. I even agree with it. It just annoys me to support businesses that take political positions that oppose everything I stand for. Barbara is going to make a Costco run when she’s down in Winston, so I’m doing a shopping list for her that includes more dry and canned foods.

Pat McLene has an interesting article up, What do you have in your prepper radio shack?

I agree with most of what he says, with a couple of exceptions. He recommends the BaoFeng UV-5 VHF/UHF handi-talkies, which I don’t think are the optimum choice. Pat has bought a 20 pack of them, and I wish him the best. But I think he’d have been far better off standardizing on the BaoFeng/Pofung UV-82. The UV-82 is very similar to the UV-5, but it’s more robustly built. Even more important, its receiver’s sensitivity and particularly selectivity is noticeably better. The price is about the same, $30 give or take. I standardized on the UV-82 in part because I can buy five or six of them for the price of one comparable Yaesu unit. And the Yaesu is hard-wired to transmit only on the amateur bands, while the UV-82 can be programmed to transmit on any frequency within its range (136 to 174 MHz VHF and 400 to 520 MHz UHF). I have similar issues with his choice of Yaesu mobile units, which are also limited to transmitting in the amateur bands. BaoFeng/Pofung/BTech make similar mobile units with no such restrictions, and again they sell for a small fraction of the price of comparable Yaesu/Icom units.

If you do buy any of the BaoFeng HT’s, do yourself a favor and order real name-brand Nagoya 771 whip antennas for them. The supplied rubber duckie antennas are what we used to call radial dummy loads. Their performance is pathetic.

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09:19 – It was 57F (14C) when I took Colin out at 0645 this morning, sunny and with a slight breeze. Rain and thunderstorms are to move in this afternoon.

This is a slow time of year for kit sales. We can go a week or more without a single order, and then get a small flurry of orders over a day or two. Yesterday, for example, we shipped three kits and got orders for five more, including four to Canada. I just hope those don’t take a detour through Paris, France like the kit we shipped to Canada late last month.

We’ve been watching various stuff on Netflix and Amazon streaming, including Roman Empire: Reign of Blood and Father Brown on Netflix and The First World War on Amazon. All of those are reasonably well done, although the Roman one, set during the reign of Commodus, is rather odd. I suppose it would be classed as a docu-drama, with costumed actors playing the Romans, interspersed with short talking-head interviews with various Classics professors to explain what’s going on. I must say I’m a bit disappointed with those professors, all of whom apparently learned Church Latin rather than Classic Latin. It’s a bit jarring to hear them (mis)pronounce most Latin names: lew-sill-uh rather than luh-kill-uh, mar-see-uh rather than mar-kee-uh, and so on. Guys (and girl), the Romans ALWAYS pronounced the letter C hard, as in K. If they wanted a modern soft C, they used S. Same problem with the classic Roman I, which in short form was pronounced “ih” and in long form was pronounced “ee”. Almost without exception, a terminal “i” was pronounced “ee” and never “eye”. For the long eye sound, the Romans used “ae”. I wonder if anyone still teaches Classic Latin nowadays.

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08:54 – It was 55.4F (13C) when I took Colin out at 0700 this morning, bright and sunny. Barbara just left for the gym. Colin is barking like mad to let me know that the garbage truck just pulled up out front and is stealing our garbage.

We got all the science kit stuff that arrived Saturday checked in, inventoried, and packed away yesterday. Other big orders will be arriving this week and next week. I’m not sure where we’ll put it all. Yesterday, we pulled two cases of 500 15mL and 50mL centrifuge tubes and a case of 1,100 bottles down off the high storage shelves for use in building kits. The space that freed up on the shelves is now full again of the stuff that arrived Saturday.

The first class for the General Class ham radio license is coming up in a couple of weeks. I asked Barbara yesterday if she’d like to come along to meet everyone. She said she would, although I warned her that the class itself would probably not interest her. She pointed out that, in general, women attend such events with their husbands even if they have no interest in them, while husbands seldom attend such events with their wives if they’re not interested. I replied that that’s because women generally are social creatures while men generally are anti-social. That goes back to our hunter-gatherer days, when men were the hunters and women the gatherers. That’s also why men are tightly focused on the job at hand to the exclusion of all else and so don’t notice surrounding superficialities, while women are generally aware of their surrounding environments.

Or at least women used to be, due to genetic adaptations. A successful hunter had to maintain laser focus on finding and killing prey, while a successful gatherer had to be aware of the tiniest details in the area that surrounded her. Nowadays, most women have lost that situational awareness, although most men tend to maintain focus on the job at hand.

Although even men are changing. In times past, the vast majority of men were alphas, genetically, physically, and temperamentally suited to be hunters and warriors. There were a few betas, who became the artists and other wusses. Nowadays, that proportion is reversed. Alpha males are becoming rare, with betas, gammas, and even omegas commonplace. I suspect that very few young men nowadays have ever even thrown or taken a punch. Even our military men are becoming increasingly wussified.  All of that has resulted from 50 or 60 years’ worth of female teachers trying to convert little boys into little girls, unfortunately with a great deal of success.

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09:16 – It was 55.5F (13C) when I took Colin out at 0715 this morning.

I got the taxes finished and in the mail yesterday. All four of them: federal and state income, NC sales tax, and NC corporate annual report and filing fee. I was even two weeks early on the NC sales tax return, which wasn’t due until 4/30.

Barbara stopped up at Bonnie’s house the other day. Gene and Janice were up there clearing things out. Gene gave Barbara a bag of Bonnie’s potatoes, which Barbara intends to plant in the garden plot just to see how they do. She may also plant some sweet potatoes, along with the other root crops we’d already planned to plant: turnips, parsnips, carrots, onions, and so on.

The goal isn’t bulk food production. Our garden plot is only something like 500 square feet (50 square meters). All we’re doing at this point is learning what works and what doesn’t. Getting some fresh produce out of it is just a side benefit. We’re also planning to plant small test stands of a couple grains–probably amaranth, barley, and nude oats–and some sunflowers, which produce both seed protein and oil. For now, those are for the birds and small animals.

Besides finishing the taxes yesterday, I got in the last of the current group of bulk orders for science kit components. Once those arrive, we’ll have everything we need other than the chemicals to make up several hundred more science kits. We’ll get those done over the next two or three months in preparation for the autumn rush.

We’re taking a break from intensive prepping for now. We’re in pretty good shape on food, water, power, medical, comms, security, and so on. I’ll still have Barbara pick up another couple 50-pound bags each of sugar and flour at Costco when she goes down to Winston next week. That’s mainly to replace routine use, but also to continue gradually building our stocks of dry staples.

Just as we were running out of things to watch on streaming and DVD, a new crop has shown up. I have new seasons of Heartland, Murdoch Mysteries, and a couple of other series we follow ready to burn to DVD, and a bunch of other series has either just shown up on Netflix and Amazon streaming, or is about to. We just started the recent BBC version of Father Brown the other night. Five seasons and 65 episodes worth. I commented to Barbara that I was surprised. It goes almost without saying that recent BBC series are going to be diverse and politically-correct, but so far this series has no diversity and might have been made in the 60’s or 70’s.

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