Thursday April 3, 2014

Yesterday (Thursday) was a good day.  I took water quality, read my senior project book, met with my project advisor (Mr. Meleo), and played phone tag with Isaac Perry, Marion’s Shellfish Officer.

I’m actually quite proud of myself, because I have gotten much more efficient now that I know my way around the lab and have repeated the process several times.  The first time I tested the water quality, which was Tuesday, it took me almost double the time, since I had to reacquaint myself with the spectrophotometer and cell density counting.  It took me about 30 minutes to finish water quality, which meant I had some time left over to feed the oysters that are in the lab.  (These oysters were going to be used by the Aquaculture classes and then by me, but now they are waiting to go back into the harbor with the others.)

Reading my Managerial Accounting For Dummies yesterday (Thursday) had its successes and failures.  I was able to read two chapters, the first about figuring the cost of goods manufactured and sold and the second about allocating overhead.  While I completely understood how overhead is calculated and allocated, I had a lot of trouble separating (in my mind) cost of goods manufactured and cost of goods sold.  To me they seemed to be the same thing.  

Luckily I have a mother who is also an accountant, so I called her to ask.  It was really nice to call my mom for help and actually have her give me an answer, because usually when I have questions I get the “they didn’t teach things that way when I went to school” answer.  Her answer was actually pretty simple.  For my business (oyster farm) cost of goods manufactured and cost of goods sold would be the same.  However for businesses like consulting that do not manufacture goods, you would use costs of goods sold.  Her other answer was that the book was simply trying to demonstrate how inventory flows through a business.

My meeting with Mr. Meleo went well.  He made a very good point that I can find other scientific studies online; a resource I will now be looking into.  However the meeting gave me the distinct impression that Mrs. Crosby and he are worried about my having to change my senior project.  (I also saw them pow-wowing on the stairs after my meeting.)  While I was quite worried initially about not having that component of my senior project, I am not now.  I have discovered that I have more than enough work cut out for me in planning and budgeting for a start up business!

Finally I discovered the joys of trying to call people.  Yesterday I called Isaac Perry, who is the Marion Shellfish Officer, and Myron, who is one of the proprietors at Ketcham Traps.  Neither of them picked up, so I left messages.  Of course the moment I was at dance, Isaac Perry called and left a message.  And then when I saw the message the Harbormaster Office had already closed, so I had to wait till this morning.