Lorena planted tulip and daffodil bulbs both in front of the house and in the planter in our back patio. As you can see, they are fabulous!

Lorena's tulips in the front entry

There are more pictures over in the gallery here.

Christian’s crystal radio set came yesterday so Christian and I started putting it together last night. I taught Christian how to solder and he did a great job. We got a great little kit from the Xtal Set Society. It features a printed circuit board with wide solder pads that are not too close to each other for people who have never soldered before. I will try to get some pictures of Christian and I working on it to post in the gallery next week. We might have broken the diode when we bent the leads, but it should not be too hard to get another one. For $14.95, the kit was a real buy. We might try another, more difficult one later on.


We hope they will be able to ship it to us next week. Quality Corners is going extremely well right now. Our sales have jumped so much, we are starting to have a little bit of a cash flow problem again. That is a good thing. We have adjusted our payment terms to industry standards (we were better than that up until now) and we have a good credit line, so we should be able to deal with it pretty easily. Our fully automated routing system is now in production, so that will help us with the quarter million rosettes we have to make per month. We were planning on hooking the automatic trim machine to the automatic router, but will not be able to do that until Dad and Mom get back from a week of vacation on the island of Maui. After that, we just need a transition between the auto routing machine and the rosette target cutter and a transition between the target cutter and the edge painting troughs and we will have a fully automatic machining process. Then it will be on to a fully automatic face painting line.

The CNC router we had custom made for Quality Corners is just about finished. As soon as that comes in, we should be able to attract a whole new category of business. We hope to get an order for a good amount of parts so that we can afford to purchase two or three additional machines. It takes long enough to get these machines that we will have to ask for a first order lead time that is at least eight or twelve weeks so we can get the equipment in that we need, add feeders, and program the patterns properly before we start production.