spring plans
This is from the original infopop blogs thread also..
OBB co-op… been working for about 6-8 months on starting up a largish scale homebrewing coop- largish meaning plant volume, not largish meaning lots of people. Been there, done that- Berkeley Biodiesl Coop had 12 people trying to make fuel in a small sea container and that took a ridiculous level of organizing (and we werent’ very successful at it, hence Berkeley coop no longer has a worksite).
I’ve been in about three of these co-op things now and keep finding the same frustrating problems with organizing volunteers, the huge array of things that people have to learn before they can really be useful as part of a team running a ‘plant’, the importance of everybody being at a similar point in their learning curve at the same time. The huge teaching load involved in bringing everybody up to speed, unless the students run a selfstudy course/curriculum.
It’s been interesting seeing how different people learn. But that little plant took over my life, very little for me to learn from this experience at this point since I’ve been doing it for the past few years. It’s hardly left me time for experiments or working with interesting feedstock, and it’s frustrating seeing the same people mistakes/difficulties repeat. Like figuring out who has big vehicles that can be used for the volunteer biodiesel cause- oil getting, who will do it, how, who can pick up that huge tank that’s been sitting in san leandro for weeks, etc.
waah.
This gruntwork of volunteer organizing isn’t exactly rewarding, and somehow the OBB’s in a rut where the volunteers aren’t organizing themselves (we’ve been building infrastructure for 6-8 months, and I’m the only one who makes or gets fuel out of the experience). Tom finally called off our weekly workdays last week out of the same frustration that we are not going anywhere.
The coop is located at a site with a few interested residents, we’re now talking about restricting the coop membership to people who live there. It just doesn’t make sense to make fuel with people who’d have to travel 45 minutes across the Bay to your city to do it together, the basic tasks can’t get done unless you live nearby.
Getting better: I’ve had a serious chronic health problem for about three years now, and have been pretty seriously disabled for part of that time. Generally if you see me on the lists a lot, I’m sitting around the house being sick, and if I’m off some of the lists, I’m usually doing better (out doing jobs and being more active). Recently I’ve been doing a lot better. It’s been interesting watching ‘life’ come back. Been working about two days a week, which is a lot more income than the past year. Whooeee! I almost have enough energy to start looking up all my old friends and reexaming this ‘no life outside of biodiesel’ thing. Got hold of a couple of them already- I dropped out of the leftist activist scene about three years ago when I got sick, found it a lot easier to deal with new people than to keep explaining to my old friends what it is that I’m sick with. But that’s a whole other story. Anyhow, I’m planning a couple of trips (which revolve around teaching biodiesel classes) and have to look up my people all over. Getting some serious shivers thinking about it.
Of course the first thing I did when I felt like I had a lot more energy all of a sudden, was to start cramming my time even more full of plans and projects. sigh…
Starting to plan a tour of the Midwest to teach some classes next august… and going to Tucson in May. Hoping to do equipment builds at the different places, hopefully to inspire people to start… the same coops I’m complaining about here (smacks forehead).
I’m planning an incredibly complex processor building workshop in april, it’s two days of equipment class/workparty and we’ve got a lot of people driving up from LA even for it. I’ve done equipment builds as part of the three-month Biodiesel Internship course that me and Jennifer used to do, but this will be different- in the Internship people already knew what they were in for and what the gear is for. In the April class, folks are coming in who have never made biodiesel and they’re trying to hand me $250 to go buy them parts for one of everything. I really hope they all are successful with the systems and that it turns out to be what they need for their home setup.
Our lovely Team Canola Co-op- four people, a biodiesel homebrew plant and and a barbeque, has been on hiatus all winter but is now making noises about reforming now that the winter rains have stopped (our site is outdoors). Jeff and I went out to the Team Canola site one night last week to rebuild the reactor with some fancier plumbing (the tankenstein fluid transfer manifold I do now). We inaugurated the Biodiesel And Barbeque season by grilling a homemade sourdough pizza out at the rather industrial and abandoned Team Canola site while reassembling the reactor. Aaaah. Bliss. I do love working on biodiesel in groups, as long as they remember to have fun (and barbeque!) and everyone’s on the same page about what they need to know so it’s a work experience, not a teaching experience.
Been working for a couple who paid me to build a reactor and wire up the 220V power to it. They bought a generator and want to set up a generator/battery system to power their house. It’s an interesting puzzle for me to design the system- there’s a lot more riding on a system like that (generators have huge fuel consumption) than there is for someone with a small car who only needs to make fuel occasionally…
Fell into a new relationship with a wonderful guy from the OBB- the other person at that co-op who was always at the plant obsessively working, go figure. I couldn’t possibly date people outside of my biodiesel life- since I don’t have a non-biodiesel life.
But I’m not embarrassed about my lack of a social life since there are enough other people here who are just as badly ‘socially handicapped’ by their biodiesel pursuits. My friend Jennifer of Biofuel Oasis keeps joking about her imaginary personals ad: ‘lesbian with big tanks of biodiesel seeks woman with TDI’. And she’s not embarrassed to joke like that, I at least (usually) pretend I am not quite the biodiesel geek that I really am. I keep finding that people from our last Internship class are now also socially handicapped by their biodiesel knowledge, at least when there’s a few of them together somewhere- there have been a few times recently when some of our students and us have been out to parties (put on by normal people) and no matter how much we try to mix with the normal people, the students inevitably wind up in a corner in a nerdy little clique, talking about biodiesel like the wallflowers they are. I keep trying to enforce the ‘no talking about biodiesel after 8 pm’ rule on everyone I date, and failing. Damn. they didn’t warn us about these hazards of homebrewing.
Mark