Diary of a Mad Scientist

I got bit by another tick a couple of weeks ago, and I’m seriously fighting off something or another, probably as a result. I’m back to having exhaustion, sleep problems, brainfog, air hunger, and this absolutely excruciating Lyme-type neck pain that is supposedly a form of meningitis caused by the disease. For me, the neck pain came with my initial Lyme infection, and it still sometimes flares up when I have a relapse or when something mercury-poisoning-related happens, so I’m not sure that it’s a sign that my latest bite is specifically a Lyme reinfection (which I don’t really think is likely based on my other symptoms) or just an infection with something else. My immune system has been absolutely TRASHED all winter- so even if the tick only had staph or something rather than Lyme and it’s common coinfections, I’m sure my system is just stresssed fighting it, and the standard ‘relapse’ symptoms are what I’m feeling. The standard medical cliche is that “ticks are sewers"- they carry a bazillion pathogens from mammal to mammal, and this one was an adult, meaning it had had a few life cycles and previous blood meals in which to pick up various nasty things before getting me.

Right before this happened my doctor suggested putting me on low dose naltrexone, an experimental therapy for immune function sometimes used for AIDS and cancer patients, so I’m hoping to start improving things this summer as I’m sick of fighting off colds and flu and other issues every three weeks. LDN is kind of exciting stuff- I didn’t know there was anything that western medicine really had for generalized immune function- and LDN works by regulating brain hormones that regulate the immune system. I had just spent the winter reading a large number of books about the biochemistry of the brain, so it was quite interesting to learn that there’s actually a practical application of that theory that seems to work some of the time (incidentally, I’ve heard on the internet that it doesn’t help all Lyme patients, but my particular issues seemed to be specifically immune system problems, not active infection)

I found the tick on my hip, just like when I got Lyme the first time, and now have a local skin infection around the bite and swollen lymph nodes just on that side (the doc put me back on antibiotics by the way). I’m starting to think about getting a tick tattooed on my hip- I’ve never wanted to commemorate anything before via tattoos, but this damn disease has been such a defining crisis in my life that I think it’s going to make it onto my skin.

re-posting this because it got buried in my Lyme posts the last few days:

Biodiesel Essentials class in Marietta, OH May 17-18, 10-5 each day
With Maria ‘Mark’ Alovert, author, Biodiesel Homebrew Guide and co-founder of www.biodieselcommunity.org

at Washington State Community College Auto/Diesel Truck Systems department, room 121.
$120, no one turned away for lack of funds

Biodiesel fuel, which runs in any diesel engine and some heating equipment, can be made in your backyard or garage for under $1 a gallon with common ingredients, using very inexpensive equipment. Relatively little chemistry knowledge is needed to produce quality fuel that will run in any diesel engine, and thousands of people around the country have discovered homebrewing fuel to be an addictive hobby. Come learn what it takes to produce your own clean-burning biodiesel fuel, and to build the equipment to do so.

These classes are hands-on and fast-paced - you’ll be making test batches of fuel, titrating and testing oil, and assessing quality of the finished product throughout the two day class. There will be a full-scale home biodiesel reactor and system at the class site, and we will make a batch of fuel in it to demonstrate the process, and will discuss equipment design for larger systems. This class is a good preparation for the Chicago-area advanced ‘farm-scale biodiesel production’ class happening at the end of May (see www.girlmark.com/tour for details).

To register for the class, please go to www.girlmark.com/tour and register online, or simply show up on the morning of the first day.

The class is held at Washington State Community College in Marietta, OH:

here’s a map of campus, you’ll be looking for Auto/Diesel Truck Systems department, room 121:
http://www.wscc.edu/Main/maps.asp

Biodiesel Essentials is a two-day class for either beginners or those who want a refresher on quality control. I also teach a series that includes more advanced topics, for more of those workshops please see www.girlmark.com/tour.

Some topics covered in the Biodiesel Essentials class:

biodiesel/SVO/solvent thinning options and history, biodiesel chemistry, testing oil (titration and water testing), (hands-on), making test batches (hands-on), an overview of equipment, a tour of the full Appleseed-type processor and some more sophisticated wash systems than usually seen in homebrewing, long discussion of quality control factors, quality testing (hands-on), mistwashing and other water washing options, breaking emulsion (hands-on), two-stage base biodiesel (hands-on), waste water and glycerine disposal, glycerine burners for process heat, water reuse and uses for glycerine, common pitfalls, hands-on experience recovering from failed batches, safety

contact: classinformation@girlmark.com

There have been a couple of good articles (and many bad ones) recently about the IDSA/Connecticut Attorney General Blumenthal settlement regarding Lyme treatment guidelines.
Below are two good ones, and some of the comments from the publications:

Medical groups differ on courses of treatment
By Robert Miller Staff Writer

http://www.newstimes.com/ci_9231161
05/12/2008

In the battle over how best to treat Lyme disease, a new settlement between Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and a major medical group might seem to offer at least a little hope of expanded treatment for those with the tick-borne disease.

That, however, would involve a change in the lines of debate over the disease, and it’s not clear there will be any yielding.

The settlement, reached this month between Blumenthal and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, provides for a review of the IDSA’s guidelines for treating Lyme disease – guidelines that a second group of doctors, the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, say are strict and inflexible to the point of harming some patients.

But the IDSA’s guidelines will remain unchanged until that review ends. And while the review process will include the participation of an ombudsman, the guarantee that opposing voices will get their say, and hearings that will be broadcast on the Internet, they may not yield a single change, said Dr. Eugene Shapiro, a pediatrician, epidemiologist and professor of investigative medicine with the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven.

Asked last week if the IDSA guidelines could remained unchanged after the review, Shapiro said flatly, “Yes.”

“If the scientific data recommends a change, we’ll be happy to change,” Shapiro said. “But we have 25 years of research on Lyme disease. We feel very comfortable the guidelines will stand up to any scientific scrutiny.”

Doctors who are opposed to the IDSA guidelines said they believe there’s at least a chance their position – that infection from the Lyme disease bacteria Borrellia burgdorferi can create a chronic illness that needs long-term treatment with antibiotics – will gain some credence with the review panel.

“I hope it will lead to an improvement to patient care,” said Dr. Steven Phillips of Wilton, who has been one of the doctors opposing the strict guidelines in favor of those in which doctors can tailor treatment to individual patients.

Phillips is a past president of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, which believes there is ample scientific evidence to treat people for chronic Lyme disease.

“We’ve looked at the same evidence as IDSA and come up with significantly different conclusions,” said Dr. Daniel Cameron of Mount Kisco, N.Y., the current president of the group.

This isn’t a merely a spat between two opposing medical groups.

In a press release, Blumenthal’s office pointed out that insurance companies now use the IDSA guidelines to restrict care for patients and refuse to pay for long-term antibiotic care.

“It’s a good way to have people denied insurance,” said Maggie Shaw of Newtown, a member of that town’s Lyme Disease Task Force. “It also puts the fear factor in doctors.

“Here are two standards of care, but only one gets recognized,” Shaw said. “It’s because of the stranglehold the IDSA has on this.”

The settlement between Blumenthal and the IDSA came after Blumenthal sued the group – which represents about 8,000 infectious disease specialists in the United States – in 2006 for antitrust violations.

Blumenthal said his investigation discovered many examples of conflicts of interest among the doctors who wrote the IDSA guidelines. He also said they refused to “accept or meaningfully consider” any evidence concerning chronic Lyme disease in writing the 2006 guidelines and blocked the appointments of scientists and physicians who differed with the IDSA view that all Lyme disease can be treated with two to four weeks of antibiotics and that chronic Lyme disease does not exist.

“Our focus has not been on medicine but the process,” Blumenthal said. “There may have been violation of the law and it’s my job to enforce the law.”

Dr. Sam Donta, a Massachusetts-based infectious disease specialist, was on the panel that drew up the IDSA guidelines. Donta said he refused to sign off on the guidelines when the group refused to acknowledge that chronic Lyme disease is a problem.

–The issue should not be whether there’s chronic Lyme disease, but why we’re seeing these patients,” he said

The review process established in the settlement, Blumenthal said, will be “fair, open and free of conflict.” Donta said Friday he hopes to serve on the panel.

But in its own press release on the settlement, the IDSA emphatically denies there was any “significant” conflict of interest on the part of any of the doctors who wrote the 2006 guidelines, or that they excluded conflicting points of view while writing them.

In fact, Shapiro said, having stricter guidelines means doctors who follow the IDSA protocols see patients fewer times and prescribe only short-term regimens of generic antibiotics.

Shapiro said the IDSA agreed to the settlement simply to end any attempt by Blumenthal to take the case to court.

“The alternative was spending a lot of money in an expensive lawsuit,” he said.

Shapiro said all the scientific evidence on long-term treatment of Lyme disease, including five double-blind studies in which some patients got antibiotics and others a placebo, show that long-term antibiotics did not cure the symptoms that people include in the diagnoses of Lyme disease.

“It’s not that data isn’t there. It is,” he said, pointing out that 95 percent of all Lyme cases are successfully treated with only two or three weeks of standard antibiotics.

But Cameron said the double-blind studies, all with a small number of patients, only show that Lyme disease is complicated.

“The evidence is quite mixed,” he said.

And the trials often look at the effect of just one type of antibiotic on patients, Donta said.

“If one doesn’t work, do you say all antibiotics don’t work?,” he asked. “If one cancer drug stops working, do you not try and find another? There’s insufficient information in the guidelines for physicians to make a decision.”

Phillips of Wilton said many peer-reviewed articles published in medical and scientific journals make the case that chronic Lyme disease does exist.

What they hope the new review of the IDSA guidelines do, they said, is take all this into account and give doctors a chance to treat each case individually, rather than with a one-size-fits-all approach.

“Let the doctors have some flexibility,” Cameron said.

Contact Robert Miller at bmiller@newstimes.com

Some good comments from newstimes.com site:

first of all, my own comments:

For an example of a very flawed double-blind study often cited by the IDSA guidelines authors to back up their allegation that long-term antibiotics don’t help chronic lyme patients, see this analysis (by a firm that specializes in analyzing medical studies for hidden bias for use in court cases):
http://www.verimresearch.com/Verim%20Research…

In brief: the often-cited Klempner study took a very small number of patients who had already had treatment failures with antibiotics (meaning they were difficult cases for whom antibiotics don’t work well), then treated them for only 30 days with an IV antibiotic and for only two months with oral doxycycline, and then did a subjective symptom survey of the patients and other subjects who received placebo instead of antibiotics.

The study’s authors then proclaimed that because the survey results didn’t differ between the treated patients and those who received placebo, this proves that long-term antibiotics don’t do anything for Lyme.

In reality, the study didn’t really treat it’s patients with anything remotely resembling ‘long-term antibiotics’, and picked an oral antibiotic that frequently fails to show results in those patients who experience antibiotic treatment failures. There were many other flaws- the Verim Research analysis summarizes some of them on page 6 and 7 of the PDF, which are a good introduction to the entire issue of Lyme treatment controversy.

Chronic Lyme patients who are lucky enough to have access to a lyme-literate doctor are often treated with 6 months to many years of antibiotics. For those for whom simple treatment doesn’t work (and for some people it’s specifically doxycycline or amoxycillin that don’t work), doctors may progress to using combinations of antibiotics, or longer treatment with IV. Doxycycline is a first step for many patients but when it doesn’t work more expensive antibiotics, and combinations of antibiotics, are usually prescribed by knowledgeable doctors such as members of International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (www.ilads.org ).

The Klempner study was designed with many built-in conditions that seem designed to predispose it’s small sample size of subjects to treatment failure, and the IDSA guidelines authors seemed to base their guidelines literature review on similar studies, hand-picked to prove their extreme position.

When the 2006 guidelines were announced, the ILADS president produced a statement that there were something like 1800 good studies on Lyme treatment in existence, but that the IDSA guidelines authors had hand-picked the worst 400 to prove their point.

*****************
Phillis Mervine from CALDA commenting on the article:

Your article quotes Dr. Eugene Shapiro as saying that having stricter guidelines means doctors who follow the IDSA protocols see patients fewer times. That’s because IDSA’s treatment protocol has a 50% failure rate. No intelligent patient with any resources would continue such a self-defeating course when alternatives are available.

What IDSA says, in effect, is that persistent infection can’t be proven to cause symptoms. In early March, the American Society of Microbiology published research that proved that one month of treatment with the IV drug ceftriaxone did not **** all the Lyme spirochetes in infected mice. This is the most recent research to prove persistence of infection.

A few weeks later, IDSA President Donald Poretz sent a letter to members of Congress, saying, “[T]here are no convincing published scientific data that support the existence of chronic Lyme disease.” We wonder what type of evidence the IDSA would accept, if any.

According to previous IDSA statements, equally meaningless are positive Lyme antibody tests plus symptoms; positive Lyme bacteria DNA plus symptoms; post-treatment symptoms; positive brain SPECT scans plus symptoms; tick bite in a known endemic area followed by symptoms.

In case anyone has missed the message, there is no justification for extended antibiotic treatment in the IDSA belief system. Although numerous studies have shown benefit of longer and/or more aggressive treatments, IDSA’s position is that ‘enough is enough’ They oppose treating for longer than two weeks, even when people improve on treatment and relapse when treatment is stopped. Where would people with cancer be today if we treated them like that?

CALDA and other patient advocacy groups tell people to look for a doctor who belongs to the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (www.ilads.org ), whose guidelines allow clinical discretion and are flexible. We also refer patients to their local online support group, which in Connecticut may be found at http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/connecti…

Phyllis Mervine
California Lyme Disease Association
www.lymedisease.org

*************************
and another good comment:
Thank you, Mr. Miller, for your fair and balanced reporting of this issue. And thank you, News-Times, for showing the integrity to support Mr. Miller’s journalistic efforts. Not all of the newspapers in CT have been fair in reporting the results of AG Blumenthal’s investigation, and I am proud of the News-Times for having done so.
As a psychotherapist who sees children and adults suffering from the effects of chronic, persistent, Lyme disease and coinfections, I have seen the damage that is done to the patients and their families by untreated or undertreated Lyme. I have also seen them recover, and be able to resume work and school, when treated efficaciously, comprehensively, by their courageous doctors, who do not give up on them, or put them on paliative care, when they fail to get better in 30 days of abx. I have seen them resume full lives, after months or years of anti-microbial treatment, by doctors who understand chronic Lyme.
By denying the magnitude of the Attorney General’s findings (http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp… ), the IDSA is announcing that they are not accepting responsibility for the corruption in the process found by the Attorney General. By not acknowledging the points made by the AG, they are failing the patients once again, and sustaining the suspicion held by many that they, in fact, do have something to hide.
The attorney general emphasized that his findings were about the PROCESS of developing the guidelines, and this PROCESS was seriously flawed. I urge the readers to check out the text of the AG’s press release on the website. It will clearly show who, in fact, can be believed.
Sandy Berenbaum, LCSW, BCD
Southbury, CT and Brewster, NY

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Here’s another good article(from a Maryland newspaper) that just came out:

http://www.stardem.com/articles/2008/05/11/news/32096.txt

Society to review Lyme disease guidelines
By STEVE NERY News Editor
Published: Sunday, May 11, 2008 5:24 PM CDT
The Infectious Diseases Society of America has agreed to reassess its controversial Lyme disease diagnostic and treatment guidelines after an antitrust investigation uncovered serious flaws with them, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced May 1.

The IDSA guidelines were under fire from Lyme disease patient advocacy groups, including vocal groups in Maryland, for restricting long-term care and denying the existence of chronic Lyme disease. Blumenthal’s move also could affect Congressional bills, now stuck in committees, that aim to develop better testing and treatment for the tick-borne ailment.

“My office uncovered undisclosed financial interests held by several of the most powerful IDSA panelists,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “The IDSA’s guidelines improperly ignored or minimized consideration of alternative medical opinion and evidence regarding chronic Lyme disease, potentially raising relevant questions about whether the recommendations reflected all relevant science.”
According to the IDSA guidelines, patients should receive antibiotics for no more than four weeks.

“United Healthcare, Health Net, Blue Cross of California, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and other insurers have used the guidelines as justification to deny reimbursement for long-term antibiotic treatment,” according to Blumenthal’s release.

Blumenthal’s investigation resulted in several findings, including:

The IDSA failed to conduct a conflict of interest review for any of the panelists on the 2006 panel. Several of them had conflicts of interest, involving relationships with drug companies, diagnostic tests, patents and consulting arrangements with insurance companies.

• The chairman, who had a bias against the existence of chronic Lyme, was allowed to handpick the other members of the panel.

• In 2000, the group removed a panelist who dissented from the position of the others on chronic Lyme disease to achieve consensus.

• The panel blocked the appointments of others by saying was it was already fully staffed, even though more members were later added.

• The IDSA portrayed the American Academy of Neurology’s guidelines as corroborating its own even though it knew both groups shared several authors.

The new panel, which will consist of eight to 12 members, will reassess the 2006 guidelines individually to determine if they are justified, according to Blumenthal’s release. The panelists will all be screened for conflicts of interest and cannot have served on the last panel. At least 75 percent of the members will have to vote in favor of recommendation from 2006 for it to be affirmed.

“We congratulate Attorney General Blumenthal for exposing the IDSA’s conflicts of interest and helping reduce the suffering of Lyme patients everywhere,” said Pat Smith, president of the national Lyme Disease Association.

Lucy Barnes, director of the Lyme Disease Education and Support Groups of Maryland, said it’s terrible that so many people have suffered as a result of the IDSA’s restrictive guidelines. She pointed to the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society’s guidelines, available online at www.ilads.org, as a better alternative.

Barnes and other members of Lyme disease support groups hope the move will prompt the U.S. Congress to give hearings to bills designed to develop better testing and treatment of the disease. Both introduced in early 2007, Senate Bill 1708 now awaits a hearing by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, while House Bill 741 awaits a hearing from the House Subcommittee on Health.

All of Maryland’s Congressional members, including U.S. Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest, R-Md.-1st, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., signed onto the bills. Local Lyme disease groups have been urging Mikulski, a member of the health committee, to help get SB1708 a hearing. Melissa Schwartz, a spokesman for Mikulski, said only Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Ma., the chairman of the committee, can get the bill a hearing.

The only member from Maryland on the House committee, U.S. Rep. Albert Wynn, D-Md.-4th, removed himself from all his committee assignments weeks ago as he’s resigning from Congress effective in June.

The legislation would provide $20 million annually for five years to help develop better diagnostic testing and treatment, as well as $250,000 annually to fund a tick-borne diseases advisory committee. The committee, to be made up of members of the scientific committee, volunteer organizations, health-care providers, patient representatives and health department representatives, would also work to develop better reporting and enhance prevention efforts.

If not acted upon, the legislation will die at the end of the year, as a similar measure did in 2006. Volunteer groups are planning on showing up at the office of U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J.-6th, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. this Wednesday. For more information, visit www.LymeRights.org.

IDSA President Donald Poretz wrote the committee members in March opposing passage of the bills and questioning the existence of chronic Lyme disease.

“The premise for prolonged antibiotic therapy for Lyme disease is the notion that some spirochetes can persist despite conventional treatment courses, thereby giving rise to the vague symptoms ascribed to chronic Lyme disease. Not only is this assertion microbiologically implausible, there are no convincing published scientific data that support the existence of chronic Lyme disease,” Poretz wrote.

Poretz’s letter was dated March 21, meaning it was written after a University of California at Davis Center for Comparative Medicine study concluded that the maximum treatment recommended by the IDSA did not kill all Borrelia burgdorferi spirochetes, the tiny organisms responsible for Lyme disease, in mice in lab tests.

Instead of a federal advisory committee, Poretz proposed the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies conduct a review of Lyme disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention methods, adequacy of current treatment guidelines, treatment options for “post-Lyme disease disorder,” effectiveness of current prevention methods and controversies associated with chronic Lyme disease.

Barnes also wrote the committee members, fearing that if the bills are not passed, “we are going to lose more chronically ill patients to a treatable but very serious infectious disease.”

“The IDSA is so distressed by the possibility that researchers outside their tight-knit group will be allowed to sit at a table and present scientific evidence and recommendations that could prove them wrong, they are willing to fight bills and forfeit the much-needed $100,000,000 in research funding they would provide over five years, just to keep from being exposed,” Barnes wrote.

Barnes cited several passages from the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control which refer to the chronic Lyme disease that the IDSA denies exists.

“No patient wants to have antibiotic treatment without good reason and good science backing the protocols; and no doctor wants to prescribe treatment if it is not needed, as the IDSA would have you believe,” Barnes wrote. “That deduction is as absurd and preposterous as a person wanting to have chemotherapy if they didn’t need it.”

Barnes also pointed out that the IDSA recommends against using several antibiotics that produce an anti-inflammatory effect except for Doxycycline, the cheapest of them all.

Biodiesel Essentials class in Marietta, OH May 17-18, 10-5 each day
at Washington State Community College Auto/Diesel Truck Systems department, room 121.
$120, no one turned away for lack of funds

This two-day class will teach you everything you need to know to get started making high-quality biodiesel fuel out of waste vegetable oil. We will also have a full ‘home-scale’ biodiesel system on a trailer on site, and will discuss equipment design for larger systems. This class is a good preparation for the Chicago-area advanced ‘farm-scale biodiesel production’ class happening at the end of May (see www.girlmark.com/tour for details).

To register for the class, please go to www.girlmark.com/tour or simply show up on the morning of the first day.
map of campus, you’ll be looking for Auto/Diesel Truck Systems department, room 121:
http://www.wscc.edu/Main/maps.asp

For the past few months I’ve been slowly working on the van. I have two biodiesel classes coming up in the Midwest, one in Ohio next weekend, and one in Chicago after Memorial Day. Earlier this winter, I replaced the computer and parts of the the glow plug system, and the only real problem left has been that my vacuum pump is starting to go and I didn’t want to mess with the incredible hassle of working inside the cramped engine compartment of my van. My friend Gimpy calls working on van components “ship in a bottle” work because of the lack of access.

I’ve been planning on getting North Carolina license plates this week but had temporarily misplaced my second ID when it took a nap in my lab notebook by accident, so I was stymied a few days ago when I’d planned on turning in the California plates.

I rented a car so that I could still do a whole bunch of errands while the van is out of commission, and a few days ago, Matt and I went down to Chatham Alignment to leave them the van. Chatham Alignment is a heavy truck shop 10 minutes south of town, and for years they have been the default repair shop for all of the co-ops horrible and abused old trucks. The co-op is really hard on trucks. I think I may have presided over the last days of the janky dodge last month when it, on my watch, it developed an inexplicable electrical problem that no one can find. The Janky Dodge now shuts off on it’s own, but only when in the midst of a drive around the traffic circle in town. Last month Matt nearly lost his brakes in the (1989 model) BioDually, which has already received a new engine and transmission on the co-op’s shift. I believe that the BioBox, which burned up this fall after burning up an enormous amount of co-op dollars, it is still sitting somewhere on the property while Matt tries to sell the remnants on Craigslist. I hear that someone at Chatham Alignment once called it the BioJunk. As we drove away I made comments to Matt on how huge their lifts and bays were. He made fun of me mercilessly for liking big lifts. I can’t help it. Mechanic girls like big tools even more than mechanic boys do, we need them more.

Today I remembered that they still hadn’t called me and that this was surprising, considering that a vacuum pump doesn’t take that long. I was a little bit concerned that perhaps this meant that something else was wrong with the vehicle. Oh well, no matter, I don’t really need it until next week.

One of my rental car errands took me down to Sanford, an industrial town 20 miles south of Pittsboro. I was down there to take a look at the community college, and more importantly, the drive, as I’m considering taking some classes next fall. I’m 99% sure that I can’t handle the drive down to Sanford everyday- I don’t have any other reason to ever go to Sanford, the school is on the other side of town meaning I’d have to deal with extra traffic on local roads, and my martial arts school is 40 miles from there, in the opposite direction from Pittsboro. The branch of Central Carolina Community College that’s down in Sanford has an excellent ‘mechanical engineering’ program-that’s mechanical engineering as in machining, boiler and plant maintenance, not as in ‘practicing engineer’. I’m trying to figure out where I’m going to learn machining- and this sounds like actually the perfect school for the skills I want to learn next, but one of the things I hate the most about living here is having to drive 20 miles to get to anything that’s not available in Pittsboro. I don’t think I can handle a drive south, followed by a drive north in the same day for kung fu, so I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing in the fall.

On the way back, it was after work hours, and I didn’t think that Chatham Alignment was going to be open. I kept my eyes peeled for their driveway just in case it looks like someone was working late.

In the driveway was a sheriff car. And police tape. My eyes followed the tape, straight up to the building, and saw- each of the big truck bays boarded up with fresh plywood, topped with big streaks of black smoke damage. The shop that had a serious fire. I screeched the car to a halt and ran in to the driveway, frantically looking for my van. No van. Oh shit. No wonder they didn’t call today.

The sheriff let me through, as Kevin, the owner, was sitting on his truck in the middle of the damage. As I walked around the cop car, the van came into view. I had missed it in my initial panic. Phew! I ran across the yard, hoping that my vehicle was unhurt. Things still looked good.

Kevin, and his other mechanic, didn’t look so good. I spent an hour talking to him about the fire, his business, his life, and every single retarded little problem that the co-op vehicles had ever suffered, most of which he had had to deal with. After he found out that I was associated with biodiesel, he just unloaded all kinds of well-deserved ridicule on my friends’ mechanical skills and general judgement. In his defense, he did warn me that he was about to talk trash right before the flood of stories started.

Oh, and, the van. I am so blessedly lucky.

Turns out the fire had started right after they had left for the day yesterday. Somebody drove by on their way home from work and saw it, and called 911. This is where I get lucky and my charmed life kicks in. ‘They’ turned out to be a construction crew with several men in a truck.

They dove into heroics. They started trying to push vehicles away from the burning building. They only managed to save two of us. They got one of Kevin’s tow trucks, which was unlocked, pushed down the hill away from the building. The other tow truck that was left behind near the front of the building ended up destroyed. (And, unfortunately, Rachel Burton’s lemon of a diesel motorcycle is still inside some corner of the building, completely unhurt)

My van was parked directly in front of one of the burning bays. It was locked at the time. The construction workers saw my California license plates, and realized that I was a customer and prioritized saving my van, over Kevins stuff. Although it was locked and in gear, they had chain or tow rope with them, somehow tied my van to their truck, and dragged it 50 feet away from the fire to safety.

I begged and pleaded with Kevin to tell me who did the saving, as those people deserve several massive cases of beer, or a fruit basket, or something in between.

oh my god, I’m actually crying about this I’m so happy. If this investigation, or something like it, had happened in the 90’s I would’ve gotten proper treatment the first time and wouldn’t still be sick. Perhaps I’ll post an explanation once I recover my senses. (incidentally while the specific IDSA guidelines that are the subject of the attorney general’s investigation are from 2006, the same players involved have been involved in trying to block chronic Lyme treatment for decades)

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Attorney General’s Investigation Reveals Flawed Lyme Disease Guideline Process, IDSA Agrees To Reassess Guidelines, Install Independent Arbiter

May 1, 2008
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal today announced that his antitrust investigation has uncovered serious flaws in the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s (IDSA) process for writing its 2006 Lyme disease guidelines and the IDSA has agreed to reassess them with the assistance of an outside arbiter.

The IDSA guidelines have sweeping and significant impacts on Lyme disease medical care. They are commonly applied by insurance companies in restricting coverage for long-term antibiotic treatment or other medical care and also strongly influence physician treatment decisions.

Insurance companies have denied coverage for long-term antibiotic treatment relying on these guidelines as justification. The guidelines are also widely cited for conclusions that chronic Lyme disease is nonexistent.

“This agreement vindicates my investigation – finding undisclosed financial interests and forcing a reassessment of IDSA guidelines,” Blumenthal said. “My office uncovered undisclosed financial interests held by several of the most powerful IDSA panelists. The IDSA’s guideline panel improperly ignored or minimized consideration of alternative medical opinion and evidence regarding chronic Lyme disease, potentially raising serious questions about whether the recommendations reflected all relevant science.

“The IDSA’s Lyme guideline process lacked important procedural safeguards requiring complete reevaluation of the 2006 Lyme disease guidelines – in effect a comprehensive reassessment through a new panel. The new panel will accept and analyze all evidence, including divergent opinion. An independent neutral ombudsman – expert in medical ethics and conflicts of interest, selected by both the IDSA and my office – will assess the new panel for conflicts of interests and ensure its integrity.”

Blumenthal’s findings include the following:

* The IDSA failed to conduct a conflicts of interest review for any of the panelists prior to their appointment to the 2006 Lyme disease guideline panel;

* Subsequent disclosures demonstrate that several of the 2006 Lyme disease panelists had conflicts of interest;

* The IDSA failed to follow its own procedures for appointing the 2006 panel chairman and members, enabling the chairman, who held a bias regarding the existence of chronic Lyme, to handpick a likeminded panel without scrutiny by or formal approval of the IDSA’s oversight committee;

* The IDSA’s 2000 and 2006 Lyme disease panels refused to accept or meaningfully consider information regarding the existence of chronic Lyme disease, once removing a panelist from the 2000 panel who dissented from the group’s position on chronic Lyme disease to achieve “consensus";

* The IDSA blocked appointment of scientists and physicians with divergent views on chronic Lyme who sought to serve on the 2006 guidelines panel by informing them that the panel was fully staffed, even though it was later expanded;

* The IDSA portrayed another medical association’s Lyme disease guidelines as corroborating its own when it knew that the two panels shared several authors, including the chairmen of both groups, and were working on guidelines at the same time. In allowing its panelists to serve on both groups at the same time, IDSA violated its own conflicts of interest policy.

IDSA has reached an agreement with Blumenthal’s office calling for creation of a review panel to thoroughly scrutinize the 2006 Lyme disease guidelines and update or revise them if necessary. The panel – comprised of individuals without conflicts of interest – will comprehensively review medical and scientific evidence and hold a scientific hearing to provide a forum for additional evidence. It will then determine whether each recommendation in the 2006 Lyme disease guidelines is justified by the evidence or needs revision or updating.

Blumenthal added, “The IDSA’s 2006 Lyme disease guideline panel undercut its credibility by allowing individuals with financial interests – in drug companies, Lyme disease diagnostic tests, patents and consulting arrangements with insurance companies – to exclude divergent medical evidence and opinion. In today’s healthcare system, clinical practice guidelines have tremendous influence on the marketing of medical services and products, insurance reimbursements and treatment decisions. As a result, medical societies that publish such guidelines have a legal and moral duty to use exacting safeguards and scientific standards.

“Our investigation was always about the IDSA’s guidelines process – not the science. IDSA should be recognized for its cooperation and agreement to address the serious concerns raised by my office. Our agreement with IDSA ensures that a new, conflicts-free panel will collect and review all pertinent information, reassess each recommendation and make necessary changes.

“This Action Plan – incorporating a conflicts screen by an independent neutral expert and a public hearing to receive additional evidence – can serve as a model for all medical organizations and societies that publish medical guidelines. This review should strengthen the public’s confidence in such critical standards.”

THE GUIDELINE REVIEW PROCESS

Under its agreement with the Attorney General’s Office, the IDSA will create a review panel of eight to 12 members, none of whom served on the 2006 IDSA guideline panel. The IDSA must conduct an open application process and consider all applicants.

The agreement calls for the ombudsman selected by Blumenthal’s office and the IDSA to ensure that the review panel and its chairperson are free of conflicts of interest.

Blumenthal and IDSA agreed to appoint Dr. Howard A. Brody as the ombudsman. Dr. Brody is a recognized expert and author on medical ethics and conflicts of interest and the director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Brody authored the book, “Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession and the Pharmaceutical Industry.”

To assure that the review panel obtains divergent information, the panel will conduct an open scientific hearing at which it will hear scientific and medical presentations from interested parties. The agreement requires the hearing to be broadcast live to the public on the Internet via the IDSA’s website. The Attorney General’s Office, Dr. Brody and the review panel will together finalize the list of presenters at the hearing.

Once it has collected information from its review and open hearing, the panel will assess the information and determine whether the data and evidence supports each of the recommendations in the 2006 Lyme disease guidelines.

The panel will then vote on each recommendation in the IDSA’s 2006 Lyme disease guidelines on whether it is supported by the scientific evidence. At least 75 percent of panel members must vote to sustain each recommendation or it will be revised.

Once the panel has acted on each recommendation, it will have three options: make no changes, modify the guidelines in part or replace them entirely.

The panel’s final report will be published on the IDSA’s website.

ADDITIONAL FINDINGS OF BLUMENTHAL’S INVESTIGATION

IDSA convened panels in 2000 and 2006 to research and publish guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease. Blumenthal’s office found that the IDSA disregarded a 2000 panel member who argued that chronic and persistent Lyme disease exists. The 2000 panel pressured the panelist to conform to the group consensus and removed him as an author when he refused.

IDSA sought to portray a second set of Lyme disease guidelines issued by the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) as independently corroborating its findings. In fact, IDSA knew that the two panels shared key members, including the respective panel chairmen and were working on both sets of guidelines a the same time – a violation of IDSA’s conflicts of interest policy.

The resulting IDSA and AAN guidelines not only reached the same conclusions regarding the non-existence of chronic Lyme disease, their reasoning at times used strikingly similar language. Both entities, for example, dubbed symptoms persisting after treatment “Post-Lyme Syndrome” and defined it the same way.

When IDSA learned of the improper links between its panel and the AAN’s panel, instead of enforcing its conflict of interest policy, it aggressively sought the AAN’s endorsement to “strengthen” its guidelines’ impact. The AAN panel – particularly members who also served on the IDSA panel – worked equally hard to win AAN’s backing of IDSA’s conclusions.

The two entities sought to portray each other’s guidelines as separate and independent when the facts call into question that contention.

The IDSA subsequently cited AAN’s supposed independent corroboration of its findings as part of its attempts to defeat federal legislation to create a Lyme disease advisory committee and state legislation supporting antibiotic therapy for chronic Lyme disease.

In a step that the British Medical Journal deemed “unusual,” the IDSA included in its Lyme guidelines a statement calling them “voluntary” with “the ultimate determination of their application to be made by the physician in light of each patient’s individual circumstances.” In fact, United Healthcare, Health Net, Blue Cross of California, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and other insurers have used the guidelines as justification to deny reimbursement for long-term antibiotic treatment.

Blumenthal thanked members his office who worked on the investigation – Assistant Attorney General Thomas Ryan, former Assistant Attorney General Steven Rutstein and Paralegal Lorraine Measer under the direction of Assistant Attorney General Michael Cole, Chief of the Attorney General’s Antitrust Department.

To view the entire IDSA agreement, go to the Attorney General’s website.

http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?a=2795&q=414284

Today I had one of those interminable airport days, starting with getting a ride to the airport 5 hours ahead of schedule (I slept in the lobby for a while). My second flight involved a guy next to me fiddling loudly with a Rubik’s Cube (which was actually kind of cute, he was friendly and at one point was entertaining the other woman in our row with the solution, which I haven’t thought about for at least 12 years) while my feet fell asleep and my brain just wanted this limbo to end. I have started on a new strategy with the last few flights- getting up and walking around. Yep, not much new news to report in my life!

I’d loaded my laptop with about 100 web pages and forum threads, and waded into the intricacies of the Dieselcraft and Spinner centrifuge threads, info on commodities pricing and what it’s done to commercial biodiesel in this country, and a bunch of oddball permaculture stuff from my hippie social networking site. Eventually this was all read, and my new laptop has awesome battery life, so I was just sitting there noodling away on a piece of workshop syllabus. I was trying to write down every single possible trick there was to teach in the next System Tricks class, when I got slammo’d by a bright new idea for how to caveman-automate the Appleseed process using only timers, Rick’s heater controller, and a couple of extra pumps. I think I can actually make this thing compete with the BioPro for something like $600 of controllers/timers/pumps or $700 more in auxiliary heating equipment, and, no welding needed yet. I started fidgeting in my tiny airline seat and had to fight down the massive urge to get on the internet up there in the air and yell at all my biodieseler friends about the grand new discovery.

I needed to build one here for some future classes anyway, might be doing that this weekend.

I’m so fricking excited.

Marc Franke from Iowa Renewable Energy Association has been quietly putting together a fantastic web site about biofuels and renewable energy sustainability. Before you run out and scream that ethanol is a scam, read his debunking of all the anti-ethanol propaganda we’ve been assaulted with. Apparently petroleum buys a lot of propaganda per gallon…

http://www.itsgood4.us/Renewables.htm

I just had a cool conversation with Jennifer Radtke from Biofuel Oasis about pricing, and their involvement, or lack thereof, in the petroleum market. There had been a raging debate on one semi-local biodiesel forum about pricing of diesel, and we were all speculating that Oasis will soon raise their price, as they’re currently selling B99 lower than the price of diesel.

At the moment, they’re getting their fuel from Bentley Biofuels in Minden NV (200 miles away) and Yokayo Biofuels in Ukiah (100 miles away), and like everyone else in town, they’re hoping, praying, and crossing their fingers that Oakland-based Blue Sky Biodiesel starts producing fuel for sale soon. Yokayo and Bentley both make recycled-restaurant-oil fuel, which makes sense for Yokayo since there’s no oilseed farming to speak of in California (OK, maybe cottonseed oil, but it’s not a major player). Both of those producers fuel all their vehicles with biodiesel, and pick up restaurant oil using biodiesel-fueled collections trucks. Bentley uses solar hot water in part of their process, further insulating them from the global energy market.

Jennifer said that the producers indicated they’re not raising prices (at the moment anyway) and that this means that Biofuel Oasis has ‘arrived’ at the success story of being independent of the diesel supply pricing. They’re currently selling B99 below the price of petrodiesel. Obviously two things can go wrong:

1) a distributor can get ’sucked dry’ by customers who are only interested in biodiesel temporarily, while the price is low. Business like this is terrible for planning- you can’t build a distributorship or a production plant with large capacity for these temporary ‘rush’ customers, who will vaporize as soon as market forces raise the price again. Running out of fuel is even more terrible for your loyal regular customers. Most biodiesel vendors have dealt with this before at times of diesel price surge, and this means that biodiesel prices are almost always kept higher than diesel to prevent the ‘rush’ on the biodiesel. Piedmont Biofuels is struggling with this terribly right now.

2) the other concern is of course that customers who shop only for price, ie those who don’t regularly use biodiesel, will fill up without getting properly educated about the special needs of biodiesel, such as filter clogging or cold weather use. Here in the Bay Area there’s no real concern about cold weather at this time, but drive 200 miles to Nevada and you’re in serious trouble this time of year. Of course the whole point of distributorships like Biofuel Oasis is that they do the new customer education and hand-holding that you can’t possibly get by just selling biodiesel via a regular petroleum company convenience store, where the minimum-wage kids working behind the counter can’t possibly provide that service, and you’re stuck hoping that the customer reads the brochure or warning signs that you put up. In 2005 there was a serious problem with cold weather-related issues catching new biofuel drivers unaware due to the fact that gas prices spiked in the fall.

While we don’t know that problem #1 won’t surface once word gets out that Oasis has cheaper fuel, and force Oasis/the producers to raise prices, for the moment, we’re certainly dealing with one really nice thing here. By working with local/distributed sources of biodiesel feedstock and because the producers and distributors have tried hard to be independent of the petroleum supply markets, we’re temporarily seeing them be insulated from the recent price spikes. The money being spent on this biodiesel stays almost entirely local.

My Wilmington ‘biodiesel crash course’ next weekend is nearly full. If it fills up before you get in, please consider coming to one of the many Pittsboro classes I’m teaching this summer:

No experience required:
Biodiesel Essentials- May 3-4
just added- another session of Biodiesel Essentials repeats June 7-8
Biodiesel Equipment Intensive June 14-15

The following two classes are for students with prior experience, or for those who have attended a Biodiesel Essentials class or something similar taught by others:

Biodiesel System Tricks June 28-29
Biodiesel Production Advanced Topics July 26-27

To register for these classes, please see www.girlmark.com/tour

All proceeds from the Pittsboro classes are a benefit for the Piedmont Biofuels summer internship program, and will pay for things like intern stipends, supplies to build an outdoor shower and tent platforms for interns and future visitors, improvements to an on-site classroom, supplies for biodiesel equipment the interns will build, and more. The internship runs from June through August and will involve intensive instruction in biodiesel chemistry and production practices, lab work, experiments, and some work for the co-op and it’s associated farm site. It will be taught by myself and many of the local biodiesel and sustainable homesteading skills experts involved in the Piedmont Biofuels community. For more information about the Piedmont Biofuels summer internship please see www.biofuels.coop

I finally have my computer act more or less together, to the point where the machine is a tool and not an adversary. The brain is also still working normally a month after my chelation therapy (which I repeated a couple of weeks ago). It’s been an uphill battle to get the digital life organized. I’m still installing new software but I feel like I have my tools mostly organized. I blew out my arm injury again last week, but I’m in a position to stop typing if I need to.

More little things, going well.

I drove past a diesel pump in San Francisco this morning- $4.69 a gallon.

I’ll be in Oakland again in May, and we scheduled another System Tricks class at my ‘home’ system:

Thursday, May 22 Introduction to Biodiesel Homebrewing
Friday or Saturday May 23 and 24, two sessions of Biodiesel System Tricks class:

www.girlmark.com/tour has the details…

I haven’t been on the biodiesel forums in so long, I forgot my Infopop login… not to mention the other gazillion forums I frequented less frequently.

sheesh.

in other news, I’m soooo excited about being reunited with my Tankenstein system in Oakland, it’s unbelievable how much an ugly hunk of metal makes me happy.

Biodiesel Production Classes with Maria ‘girl Mark’ Alovert
Spring-summer 2008
www.girlmark.com/tour

Detailed class descriptions at bottom of this post:

Wilmington, NC:
Biodiesel Production Crash Course

April 4: Introduction To Biodiesel Homebrewing
April 5-6 Biodiesel Production System Tricks (must have prior experience or attend Friday class first)

These are two separate classes, you may take both or just one depending on your level of experience and interest.
Sponsored by Cape Fear Biofuels
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Brooksville, FL
April 26-27

Advanced Topics biodiesel class
(must have prior experience or have attended an introductory class- some of my recent students are offering a class in Tampa on March 30, see www.groups.yahoo.com/group/FloridaBiodiesel):

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Marietta, OH
May 17-18
Biodiesel Essentials class
no experience required

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Oklahoma City, OK area
June 21-22
Biodiesel Essentials class
no experience required

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Grayslake, IL
May 30-June 1:

Introduction To Biodiesel Homebrewing:
May 30
Outgrowing The Appleseed: Larger Batch System Considerations (must have prior experience or attend introductory class)
May 31-June 1

The May 31-June 1 class is similar to Advanced Topics, but with a special focus on larger batches and farm/fleet/co-op production falling below true commercial scale.

Sponsored by The Biodiesel Co-op at Prairie Crossing

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Biodiesel Production Series
Pittsboro, NC:
various dates. You may attend one of all of the classes depending on your experience and interest.

May 3-4 Biodiesel Essentials (no experience required)
June 14-15 Equipment Building Intensive (no experience required)
June 28-29 Biodiesel Production System Tricks (must have prior experience or Essentials/Introduction class)
July 26-27 Advanced Topics (must have prior experience or Essentials/Introduction class)

All proceeds from Pittsboro classes benefit Piedmont Biofuels biodiesel internship program

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Central New Mexico
August 9-10

Biodiesel Essentials
no experience required

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Class Descriptions:
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These classes are half of a four-part series:

-Biodiesel Essentials (2 days including ‘Appleseed’ reactor build and more lab time) or Introduction to Homebrewing (one day, more rushed)
-System Tricks- hands-on reactor operations and tricks class for those with some experience or those who’ve taken any prior class
-Equipment Building Intensive (two days, includes building GL1 EcoSystem equipment, methanol recovery, advanced wash tanks, Turk Burners, pumps, and more). No experience necessary.
-Advanced Topics (two days, discussion-based advanced topics class for those with experience or those who’ve taken a prior class)

this spring I’m also offering a special class similar to Advanced Topics:
Outgrowing The Appleseed (similar to Advanced Topics, this is a class on larger processors such as farm-scale systems that do not necessarily use standard commercial technology. Must have prior experience with making small batches of biodiesel)
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Descriptions of classes:

One-day Introduction To Biodiesel Homebrewing
April 4, 9-5, Wilmington, NC
or
May 30, 9-5 Grayslake, IL
No Experience necessary
$75

Introduction class:
This is a one-day, sped-up version of my usual weekend Biodiesel Essentials class.

Biodiesel Essentials:
Pittsboro, NC May 3-4
Marietta, OH, May 17-18
Oklahoma City, OK area June 21-22
Central New Mexico (I’m still working out which town) August 9-10

$120, class is 10-4 each day Sat and Sunday

Two-day class for either beginners or those who want a refresher on quality control.
This is similar to Introduction To Homebrewing, but includes much more time to cover more information, more hands-on time, and a three-hour equipment building sesssion or ‘lab’ session to explore topics you’re interested in in more depth.

Some topics covered:
biodiesel/SVO/solvent thinning options and history, biodiesel chemistry, testing oil (titration and water testing), (hands-on), making test batches (hands-on), an overview of equipment, a tour of the full Appleseed-type for the Wilmington, Grayslake, and Pittsboro classes, long discussion of quality control factors, quality testing (hands-on), mistwashing and other water washing options, breaking emulsion (hands-on), two-stage base biodiesel, waste water and glycerine disposal, water reuse and uses for glycerine, common pitfalls, hands-on experience recovering from failed batches and emulsion, safety

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Two-day Reactor Mechanics and System Tricks Class
10-4 each day
Wilmington, NC, April 5-6
or
Pittsboro, NC, June 28-29
Must have prior exprience or attend the Introduction class on Friday April 4 or any Biodiesel Essentials class I offer
$120, 9-5

This class is geared to people who already know how to make biodiesel, either in a lab-scale or one-liter setting, or to who already homebrew but would like to compare notes with me on how I manage my system. You may also take this class if you are new to biodiesel but have attended a regular homebrewing class taught by someone else. We dont go into a lot of detail on titration and chemistry here so that’s the info you should have ‘down’ already on your own prior to taking this ’system tricks’ class. If you feel like you’ve researched biodiesel production heavily but have little practical experience this is probably the best of my classes for you if you can already titrate oil and make test batches, and understand the basic steps involved.

In the System Tricks class we make a full-size batches of biodiesel in the Appleseed processor, wash the batch in a heavily modified drum-based wash tank, discuss Graham Laming EcoSystem vapor recovery piping for safety, and discuss methanol recovery (and POSSIBLY run the still in the Wilmington class, depending on our site’s electrical availability, which currently has me limited to insufficient power to run all the equipment at once). We will cover a lot of the finer details that make the process efficient, safer, produce higher quality fuel, cheaper, and produce fewer messes. We will run a multifuel Turk Burner and discuss ways to safely heat using waste oil burners and glycerine-burning methods.

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Biodiesel Equipment Building Intensive:
Pittsboro, NC June 14-15

This class builds equipment and includes a heavy emphasis on system design and equipment theory.
This two-day class will build a reactor, including a possible Apple Turnover system, a methanol recovery condensor, inexpensive homebuilt pumps, wash tanks, other washing equipment, methanol/lye mixing equipment, and a Graham Laming-style EcoSystem vapor recovery system. Contact me if you’d like to purchase parts to build any of this for yourself. In addition, the Pittsboro class will include a tour of the Piedmont Biodiesel Co-op and we will discuss their equipment and it’s advantages and shortcomings. We will discuss experimental continuous process equipment as well.

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Advanced Topics Class
9-5 each day
April 26-27
Brooksville, FL

July 26-27
Pittsboro, NC

Must have prior experience or attend a beginners’ class. Florida folks, see www.groups.yahoo.com/group/FloridaBiodiesel for info on a March 30 class taught by three of my recent students. Pittsboro attendees without experience should attend any of my other Introduction or Essentials classes in the area first.

Topics covered:
Strong focus on quality control, analysis of real-world problems with offspec biodiesel, acid-base biodiesel process, advanced topics in dewatering, testing for soap, methanol recovery and equipment design, testing recovered methanol for purity, waterless washing with Amberlite, Magnesol, and Graham Laming’s process, larger-scale equipment design, ethanol-based and E-85-based biodiesel, treating wash water and glycerine for disposal, testing wash water and glycerine, real-world test results related to biodegradability, in-depth disposal/sidestreams discussion
burning glycerine safely for energy, hydronic applications for biodiesel and wash water heating, more advanced discussion of safety and disaster prevention scenarios for larger-scale processor systems, discussion of regulatory topics for non-commercial producers larger than homebrew, solar heating options, very through discussion/demonstration of several different options in washing, including drawbacks and advantages, greywater systems for wash water recycling.

Pittsboro Advanced Topics Class will include a tour of the Piedmont Biofuels Co-op site, a discussion of a continuous process used by the co-op, and a tour of the biodiesel analytical laboratory at Central Carolina Community College. The Brooksville Fl Advanced Topics Class will include attendees with a lot of experience with the BioPro processor and the GL1 (Eco-System) methanol recovery/waterless washing process.

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Outgrowing The Appleseed:
currently only offered in Grayslake, IL May 31-June 1 (with an optional Introduction class on May 30)

This class falls somewhere between System Tricks and Advanced Topics (with some information from both as well as new information), and focuses on what is often called ‘farm-scale’ and ‘fleet-scale’. This class covers production considerations for systems in the 250-gallon to 600-gallon range, with some information on continuous process alternatives to the batch system.

The concern with this scale of processing is about applying homebrew or hobby-scale techniques to larger production, which often brings about greater safety concerns and more complicated quality control considerations.

While homebrewing is a great way to become familiar with biodiesel production and a great way to go through ‘the learning curve’ with unparalleled support from the online homebrew community, the process becomes more complicated on a larger scale.

Some homebrew-scale techniques and equipment scale up to larger batch sizes, while many do not. For those making biodiesel for fleet/business/farm use, serious concern has to be paid to efficiency and safety to make this scale of production make financial sense. Scaling up from hobby-scale to this size of production sometimes brings on regulatory issues that homebrew scale producers do not deal with, yet production on this scale is still typically a do-it-yourself effort where producers don’t tend to seek out engineering assistance and sometimes risk bigger messes and accidents than either homebrewers or commercial producers tend to experience. This class will cover some of the issues that have come up for fleets, co-ops, and farm production, from an equipment, safety, and quality control perspective.

This class is for people with past biodiesel experience, or those who attend the one-day Introduction class on Friday May 30, or a similar introductory hands-on biodiesel production class.

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Registration info and other classes info is at www.girlmark.com/tour

One of the first things I have to mess with while here is to figure out how my Crap is making it to the East Coast. I didn’t want to drive my van out here and do a round-trip, and moving vans are really expensive. My thought was that I could probably find a cheap diesel here in the Bay Area that I could duct-tape together well enough to make the 3000 mile trip to North Carolina and then sell after the trip, and increase the available onboard space by buying a cheap trailer. In theory I’d do a drive somewhere in mid-May, giving myself almost two weeks to get to the East Coast before I have a workshop in Chicago. Tom decided to loan me some cash for the process. We’ve been lending each other the same few hundred bucks for various largish purchases, passing it back and forth for the past few years, and had thought we were over that already, but here it is again.

An additional headache is figuring out what to do with my VW Rabbit, which I really want on the East Coast- I can’t seem to find a cheap small car there either- but is a pretty uncomfortable car to drive across country. I could trailer the poor thing but that takes up valueable space on the theoretical trailer and drastically constricts what kind of a trailer I can get away with.

I’m definitely starting to feel the ’small diesel vehicle shortage’ crunch, and desperately need to drive something that’s not my van when I go back and forth between Pittsboro and the ‘big city’ of Chapel Hill/Raleigh/Durham. I’m starting to think about something other than biodiesel- either an EV, or an ethanol gasser. The other day in Oakland I was behind an old Honda Civic that smelled sweet and had a ‘this car is on a low-carbon diet’ sticker on the back- presumably ethanol. I’m reading Dave Blume’s gigantic book on ethanol production, and have access to a still at the college I can do small-scale experiments with when I get back. I’ve started toying with the idea of getting a Civic or something and making my own ethanol. Ugh, permitting. I’ve heard mixed reports of how much of a pain in the butt the BATF permit is to get. Between what I know about solar thermal and waste oil burners and vacuum, I feel like I’m enough of a master of cheap BTU’s to make ethanol quite economically, and it’s of interest to me anyway for biodiesel production after my trip to Fiji. We’ll see how far that idea gets.

EV-wise, I don’t know, it’s a project I’ve been thinking about for a few years since I’ve shared shop space with the amazing Phil, an EV nut, but I’d be on my own getting into it in North Carolina. There’s the ‘around Pittsboro’ range of driving that I should be able to hit on a bicycle, though I’ve been too sick most of the winter to try it, and that’s probably where an EV makes a lot of sense. Most of the Piedmonters don’t bike around there (it’s about 9 miles between the co-op and the industrial plant, and shorter but slower on the woods trail), due to the high-speed-trucks-on-a-narrow-country-road mentality. I feel like quite a loser for not biking even though I had pretty good reasons. My other commute is the 20 mile one to Carrboro/Chapel Hill for kung fu, and that’s within EV range. Oh, country living. I haven’t started hitchiking around there yet, that ought to work as a one-way to Carrboro for days when I have a ride back at night. I’m also considering starting an online rideboard for others with the same problem. Surely this has been addressed in rural communities like ours in the past?

Last week I caught the sails of a 1980’s Ford truck that briefly appeared on Craigslist before being pulled down, and went to take a look. It’s pretty- the owner is a Japanese car mechanic with the most immaculate shop I’d ever seen, and the truck looks like he spent weekends polishing the engine or something. It’s got gremlins- some fuel cutting-out problem that looks like either a (best case scenario) air leak, or worst case scenario, injection pump. I’ve had the same sort of gremlins in past Fords for various reasons. The price was low enough, and the vehicle is nice enough, that I should be able to re-sell it even if I can’t get it fixed. If it’s what I think it is, I just scored a fairly nice moving truck. Friday I’m heading out to try to drive it to Oakland, with Andrew Morris running cover behind me in a car in case it breaks down, and some tow service phone numbers in my pocket. Wish me luck.

Oh, and did I ever mention that when I was a toddler, some of my favorite toys were toy trains, buses, ships, trucks and so forth? It’s like I was born to like transportation.

Tomorrow I start working in biodiesel again, or at least making motions towards getting this 300-gallon ‘plant’ built and advertising my 9 upcoming workshops, but for the past 7 days I’ve been having something like a martial arts vacation here in California. I’m amazed at how well my mercury detox process worked, and how much that seemed to have fixed everything. I can’t wait to do it again (not while couchsurfing here though) and see how much further it improves my world, but for the moment, I can pretty much say I’m symptom-free. That came just in time for this trip, of course, or at least just in time for this visit to involve a fever pitch of physical activity that I couldn’t have done last month.

I’m staying at my friends’ jujitsu/aikido school in Oakland. A bunch of the staff live in a large rambling communal appartment upstairs, and though I don’t really intend to pursue those arts, I feel somewhat obligated to attend some of their jujitsu classes because I’ve started to in the past and the schedule meshes well with the other school I’m attending. I’m here for a month training in the same style I’m doing in North Carolina- a Kajukenbo kung fu school- and the net effect is that for the past week I’ve been working out every single day at the highest peak level I could muster without tearing anything or holding anything back. Luckily there’s a 48 hour break on the weekend- at the end of 6 straight days of this I was the sorest I’ve been in 10 years.

It’s been an awesome immersion experience. I can roll out of bed on Saturday, drink water, and go downstairs to train- after having a 20-mile commute from Pittsboro to my school in Chapel Hill, it’s a total dream. 10 years ago when I started training in Kajukenbo I lived at my school- having a live-in student is sort of a tradition in some of the Japanese arts (which ours is not), I think, and it’s been GREAT for me to have that experience. It feels like a monastic experience to focus on this so much, and I feel like this month here is going to do a lot to help me recover from my 8-year break in training due to the Lyme tragedy.

The drawback is that I’m starting to feel like I have nothing intelligent to say (though I’m taking in a vast amount of information, it’s just happening faster than the speed of blog). As many of my friends know, I’m one of those people who’s prone to intensive, obsessive, immersion experiences with any new task/activity/hobby I’m involved with. I’ve been waiting all winter for the energy to do this with biodiesel, and feeling awful that I had so many opportunities where I live to do so and had no energy to take advantage of them. Now that I can act on my obsessive tendencies and work my ass off again, I can’t wait for this summer (Or tomorrow, for that matter) to kick biodiesel ass.

I’m having a pretty hedonistic Bay Area vacation in general, too- sort of realizing I’m single for the first time in years, going out to eat a lot, going on dates, messing around in girly clothes, and getting beautified. And all I can think about is my last workout. The effect is very much like I’m stuck halfway between being a dumb blonde and being a dumb jock. I fucking love it.

I did an intensive wrestling session in the jujitsu class on Thursday. Just by some fluke, only I and one other student showed up that day (usually they have about 15 in every class, the room’s bursting at the seams) , and I requested a grappling lesson, something I’m trying to learn a lot more about. The other student was a guy not too much bigger than me, so it was a good match, and we got to work on just one particular hold for over an hour, playing with the different ways to get out of it or counter any attempts to get out of it, then playing with trying the same thing on our teacher who outweighed us by about 90 pounds. Grappling is an amazing upper body workout. The next day we both found ourselves with sore muscles, including ones we never knew were involved in grappling (or even knew existed for that matter). The following day it got worse- I keep forgetting that everything is at it’s peak of soreness two days from the original workout. That night I was going out to dinner, and wore high heels (on top of my taped ankle). I haven’t worn high heels in about 5 years. It was shocking to feel the same wrestling-related upper body muscles get worked. Somehow the same ones that help you get out of a headlock also work to make it possible to walk in femmy high heels…

I just spent a few days in Pittsboro detoxing from my mercury toxicity load. Anyone who knows me well has probably heard me talk about how terrified I’d been to try chelation therapy again (I was talking about this on the blog about a year ago, with disasterour results). There are very things I’m afraid of, but chelation has caused me such major health crashes that I’ve been terrified to try it again. My doctor thinks that mercury toxicity is probably at the heart of my recurring Lyme issues or whatever it is I’ve experienced all winter (antibiotics didn’t seem to help, so I don’t even know for sure that it’s a Lyme relapse as opposed to something else related to mercury, antibiotic side effects, etc).

Chelation consists of taking EDTA and a whole lot of binders (I take Metachel, chlorella, sodium alginate, and other products that purport to bind to the EDTA-mercury complex to ensure it’s eliminated rather than re-attaching in the body or brain somewhere). I seem to have some problems getting rid of toxins- I haven’t had genetic testing done, but one prevalent theory is that people who dont’ do well with chelation have a genetic susceptibility to various liver functions being disrupted, probably by Lyme in my case, and my doctor suggested a variety of ways to help overcome that, which I’d been doing over the past year.

Last week after I had a week of weird flu symptoms and a really bad memory day on Sunday, I decided to take the plunge into chelation somewhat on a whim before heading out on my california trip- I was tired of the memory/concentration problems- even though everything else- energy, sleep, etc was doing OK, I still had this frustrating inability to learn physical combinations in my martial arts class, was having word recall issues, etc. I decided that even if I crashed again, it really couldn’t get much worse than what I’ve been dealing with all winter, and my California trip involved few responsibilities, and I figured I could go be sick at a friend’s house, or delay the trip entirely, if things really went south.

The big news is that it worked much better than any time in the past. I’m overjoyed that I’m finally getting somewhere with this. In the past when I’ve disturbed my mercury load I’ve instantly crashed into the worst Lyme hell, had all my symptoms come back, gotten instant short-term memory and concentration issues, etc. This time around I went around relatively functional during the three days of chelation, other than needing to take some supplement or another every single hour, drink gallons of water, and have weird surges of unnatural energy followed by weird surges of dizziness and other strange stuff I normally associate with chelation.

The energy part was funny - I was wired and tired at the same time, a bit like when you have too much sleep deprivation and coffee to compensate, and act like a moron as a result. I ran around the homestead’s three households re-organizing and matching everyone’s Tupperware (several people I live with always bitch and moan about how their Tupperware gets ’stolen’ by the other housemates). I made a couple of cheesecakes and a half gallon of granola and a half gallon of yogurt for the housemates and did a big spread of low-carb baked goods for myself. I went jogging on my sprained ankle. I went down to the Chicken People’s place and cleaned out their chicken coop so as to use the manure for my future garden. I dumpstered a garbage bag of produce culls and built a big compost pile with the manure and other material. I prodded and nagged Bob and Camille about getting our collective garden project started. I went down to another farm and talked with the farmer about ordering medicinal herbs for my garden and his greenhouse. I ran around all over Pittsboro trying to find a source of bamboo to cut for garden deer fence (our garden’s not going to last very many years- Bob and Camille and I are all fans of container gardening, so that’s not going to be a waste of effort as we can just forklift the container to the next location when the land goes away). I went to the CSA and asked Doug to plant me an extra dozen cabbage for my sauerkraut making, which is starting to be really popular with the roommates and the Friday Local Lunch crowd. I was starting to feel like Little Miss Susie Homesteader in a big way. To counterbalance this lifestylism, I did a bunch of biodiesel experiments revolving around oil de-watering at the local college, and ran dozens of moisture tests on the Karl Fischer machine (newsflash- if the machine is calibrated right, which I"d still like to double-check, I got moisture down to 200 PPM, an unheard of low number for nasty waste oil, not that it needs to be that low for making biodiesel). My experimental record shows clearly that the experimenter is on drugs- the first five experiments last Tuesday all show ‘BOTCHED’ because I was having the ‘dizzy/disoriented’ sort of spell rather than the ‘dumb brute energy’ kind, and couldn’t seem to bring myself to push the buttons, and inject the sample and tare the syringe weight in the right order.

I eventually got myself on the plane to California with sanity semi-intact and everything I needed to enjoy myself for a month, including dresses to go swing dancing/tango dancing in, and other party clothes, all mixed up in my suitcase with tools and martial arts gear. My grinder, various measuring tools and squares, a bag full of hole saws, safety gear, welding jacket and gloves and a whole bunch of pumps and valves, were all mixed up for padding/packing reasons in the suitcases with my underwear and lacy tops and other girly stuff. Tee hee.

I feel like I really skated through with some good luck on the chelation this time around. I disobeyed a few of the rules (mostly diet ones) and still came out of it OK, should be more careful next time. Next time should be in a few weeks. I’m ecstatic that as the side effects (weird energy spells and dizziness/disorientation spells) faded in my first couple of days here in California, I started to feel 100% normal again for the first time all winter. Just in time.

Growing Out Of The Appleseed: Production Considerations Between Homebrew and Commercial Scales

Grayslake IL
May 30-June 1
to register, see www.girlmark.com/tour

This class falls somewhere between System Tricks and Advanced Topics (with some information from both as well as new information), and focuses on what is often called ‘farm-scale’ and ‘fleet-scale’. This class covers production considerations for systems in the 250-gallon to 600-gallon range, with some information on continuous process alternatives to the batch system.

The concern with this scale of processing is about applying homebrew or hobby-scale techniques to larger production, which often brings about greater safety concerns and more complicated quality control considerations.

While homebrewing is a great way to become familiar with biodiesel production and a great way to go through ‘the learning curve’ with unparalleled support from the online homebrew community, the process becomes more complicated on a larger scale.

Some homebrew-scale techniques and equipment scale up to larger batch sizes, while many do not. For those making biodiesel for fleet/business/farm use, serious concern has to be paid to efficiency and safety to make this scale of production make financial sense. Scaling up from hobby-scale to this size of production sometimes brings on regulatory issues that homebrew scale producers do not deal with, yet production on this scale is still typically a do-it-yourself effort where producers don’t tend to seek out engineering assistance and sometimes risk bigger messes and accidents than either homebrewers or commercial producers tend to experience. This class will cover some of the issues that have come up for fleets, co-ops, and farm production, from an equipment, safety, and quality control perspective.

This class is for people with past biodiesel experience, or those who attend the one-day Introduction class on Friday May 30.

to register, see www.girlmark.com/tour

While I’m a blogging frenzy, two more pieces of news:

-I’m teaching an advanced class in Northwest Illinois around May 30-June 1. This will be preceded by a one-day Friday Biodiesel Essentials class for beginners. The Advanced class this time is on 250-600 gallon per batch processors, called “Growing Out of the Appleseed"- it’s part of the endlessly-evolving ‘farm-scale’ curriculum I’ve been playing with for a while.

-I was toying around for a few months with the idea of starting some kind of East Coast knockoff of Aprovecho Research Institute or SEIt out here, a campus for researching/demonstrating/teaching what I call North American Appropriate Technology, meaning the solar/biomass good stuff that those places teach workshops on.

I pitched the idea around to various people in November and December, and it didn’t get much of a reception, and has been a sort of orphan project since. It’s massively off-topic to the biodiesel project here and there’s a competing facility going in (to some extent) at the local college, someday.

It didn’t help that both of my boyfriends (in other news- I have a new boyfriend) over the past few months both said ‘don’t do THAT, get into private industry instead, spending your life doing education of the masses is stupid’ or something like that.

Since the idea didn’t fly with anyone else, I decided to just start small and do bits of it incrementally- scheduling a few ‘benefit’ workshops to pay for at least building out a classroom (in an existing raw building that’s sitting around here underutilized) that can double as a solar demonstration site and a biodiesel co-op. Girl Mark Bliss- a classroom that has secondary containment built in. Basically, I figured there’s a need for various projects around here to have another classroom to use, and while I’m pouring a slab, (the building has dirt floors), I might as well put in secondary containment and a PEX loops for solar radiant heating and install some solar hot water someday.

Last week, my ideas apparently caught the appropriate people’s attention and now there’s likely to be a frenzy of grantwriting to make this into a much bigger project. Exciting, feels like a headlong rush into something I still haven’t 100% committed to, but at least it’s caught everyone else’s imagination in a big way and that’s good enough.

We were talking about what to call the thing. I’m historically TERRIBLE at naming projects with catchy names. Biodiesel Homebrew Guide. Biodiesel Co-ops Conference. California Biodiesel Community Conference. Do-it-yourself Skillshare. The $150 Weldless Processor (which thankfully became the Appleseed eventually). They don’t exactly roll off the tongue and I feel like I’m great at coming up with concepts and a dullard at naming them anything but the most generic descriptor.

So today someone was asking me what we should call our ‘SEI-copycat’ or ‘Aprovecho East’. I put out another yet terrible generic working title- it’s a renewable energy education campus, of course. They shot it down after pointing out that the acronym sounds like ‘Reek’. We’ll see where this goes. At least I know what I’m doing all summer.