Diary of a Mad Scientist

Usually I get at least a few guys in each class who’ve been suckered by JTF and they’re all excited about it’s claims and we spend some time answering questions spawned by JTF bunk. In fact, the NC class last weekend felt a bit like ‘debunking Journeytoforever’ as one person had brought a failed two-stage base-base process batch and an even more ugly failed Foolproof Method batch with him. People asked about all the JTF bugaboos.

Today in Atlanta no one cared about saving the world with ethanol, twostage process, or anything other than a ‘well if it’s too gross for biodiesel can I mix it with diesel and put it in my tank direct?’ kinda thing . They all knew about Diesel Secret. They were real sharp. I"ve never had a class NOT be interested when I ask them if they want to make an optional ethanol batch- these folks just weren’t interested when they heard it wasn’t as practical on waste oil.

Lots of jokes about whether my hair was dyed to match the phenolpthaleine.

Rob from Vegenergy who was the main host for the workshop brought his reactor in the back of his truck and Diesel Tim from Gabiodiesel.com did the same thing later in the afternoon- very educational for all, I think.

Both reactors/trucks were equally greasy- I like being able to show people a realistic view of what oil collection/processing is like. Not that it can’t be done neatly, but still. Most of us end up with spills on the truckbed sooner or later. Rob was telling people to collect oil with a trash pump if they were planning on handling large amounts, and Tim had one of those AWESOME NOrthern Tool 120V diesel pumps and a foot valve and was recommending those. I"d bought a teeny Northern pony pump to demo ($50 and selfpriming) and it paled by comparison.

None of my ‘engineered failures’ minibatches failed on cue. Dang. KOH is really tolerant of oil quality and you can really get away with some massive mistakes. I might go dumpsterdive some Church’s Fried Chicken grease tonight to save face- I don’t want the students to get the idea
that none of the quality parameters stuff matters..

I was incredibly sick with a cold all last week and this morning in the class I had a moment called Dial Tone of the Brain- the class started and the mind went blank. Sentences didn’t really form. Eventually I started talking The Biodiesel Speech and it came back. Last weekend one of the students said that watching me answer questions at one point was like watching me flip through a mental Rolodex and pull out the answer card- I’ve heard most of the questions before. This morning was kinda the opposite for a few minutes there.

This morning I was at the building before anyone had gotten there. I walked out to the parking lot at one point and could tell that my own students had arrived because there in the parking lot was a gaggle of men standing around a pickup truck excitedly pointing and smiling at a stainless steel tank that was strapped to the truckbed.

Rick from B100supply.com brought a rented van loaded with equipment for the class, which was a lot easier than me buying it at hardware stores. The Santa Claus of biodiesel homebrewing had arrived- it was Christmas under the biodiesel tree. The classroom has a packed corner full of kits, and even some water heaters. There’s a really good set of directions with this one.

I got out of the class and buried myself in email and class registrations and other entanglements- I’d been too sick for several days to focus on email and it’s grown to avalanche proportions. Two major emails from various quarters came through about the farm plant- I’ve picked up a ton of consulting work , paid and unpaid, for the next few months. My ‘inner Republican’ is getting quite excited about the business creativity involved with this project (I don’t think I"ve written about the Inner Republican, but he’s in there somewhere…). I"ve gotten to talk to a lot of people about the small producer plant design(s) while on this trip, looks like lots of collaborating is about to take place. I was completely dazed after the 6 hours of nonstop talking during the class, still slightly sick, and got on the phone for an hour conversation about the farm plant. I think I somehow managed to make sense. Not sure if I still am making sense in writing though…

Atlanta has springtime weather. I’m getting the memory-feeling of the South in the spring- humidity, the promise of swelter. The short days sure seem weird contrasted with the spring feeling. There’s a gorgeous view of downtown at night from Rob’s building. I grew up in New York- I"m a sucker for colored lights in the sky. There’s an equally appealing freightyard in the backyard, but that’s another story.

I got to eat real East Coast pizza yesterday. And it didn’t cost $35 a pie. California just can’t make the stuff. Atlanta is filled with interesting-looking hipsters, snazzily dressed hip-hop guys, I realized on this trip I"m seeing another thing I don’t get much of in my SF -area circles : everywhere I go my friends here are playing SONGS on the stereo. Not whiny electronic New Age lameness. I realized a while back that I never hear any real songs in my circles in SF. Recently I felt almost bad for inflicting rock on the shop stereo, where they usually play electronic music of some type.

Here, I"m hearing the stereo playing actual words, voices, rhythm.

Mark

I"m blazing around the Southeast in between classes, revisiting my old life. Or , as Rachel from Piedmont calls is, ‘the other life’. You know, the life you lead, back when you had one, prior to biodiesel or a career or an obsession or a bookwriting immersion project or a job that takes up all your time.

Tonight of course I’m in Atlanta sitting around with Rob from Vegenergy talking shop about filtration and Magnesol and business practices and fueling rock tours and Southeastern poultry fat availability and stuff like that. Fun. If Lyle Estill was here he’d probably give us a hard time for the painfully geeky conversation and point out that there is a life to be had out there in the real world. We already scared off Rob’s girlfriend with a discussion of the finer points of AOCS Ca 14-56 total and free glycerol test.

Amusingly enough Rob is friends with some guy with whom I was in a silly band with back when we were 18-19- which brought back some amusing memories (like the fact that the only time I"ve ever driven drunk was one night after seeing Rob’s former rock band, when B. got even more wasted than I was- and that driving drunk AND driving an automatic transmission car for the first time scared the bejeezus out of me at the time). I still have no idea how B. figured out who I was long enough to ask Rob if he knew me- I was certainly not using the name Mark back then, I have no idea what mutual friend told “B.” to look for me in the biodiesel corner of the universe. Tomorrow we’re allegedly going to try and track down B, who was one of my Georgia connections back when Asheville had only a ghost downtown and no social life to speak of, and ‘getting social’ used to mean packing up and driving to Athens or Atlanta because Asheville had no young people who weren’t hippies.

Last night in NC I went on the obligatory gay date with an ‘other life’ Asheville ex-girlfriend to see the Hollywood tearjerker gay cowboy movie- in fact, I had about three days of ‘no biodiesel discussion’ due to hanging out with her- a record of ‘no biodiesel discussion’ for me. I think that’s a good thing to do. Later that night I ran into someone from a totally different part of my life there- one of the older folks who’d inadvertently brought me to Asheville and convinced me to settle there initially in ‘89- people from the traditional fiddle music crowd. Since I"d been sick for about 5 years now, and dropped everything from ‘the other life’ other than biodiesel, I had completely gotten out of touch with those folks, some of whom treated me as adoptive parents when I first came to town and whom I still greatly love and admire. John was at the fiddle band session at a local bar where the girl and I headed for it’s late-night wireless service, and at one point I caught myself feeling mildly sad as he told me that a lot more people like me joined the movement after I left. I was about 5 years ahead of my time in that music movement - I spent the first few years out of high school following 38-year-old musicians around, having about two friends my age- Rob’s friend B. and one other guy whom I"d recently gotten in touch with as part of my current pursuit of the Complete Circle, of searching out and finding everybody all of a sudden. Now, the old-time-music scene nationwide is full of young rocker types who have traded instruments to pursue the high lonesome sound, and I"m on the West Coast making oily messes instead of music.

Then, another snapshot from a completely different phase- the day before yesterday, me and the girl ran into ‘The Love of My Life’, a working-class New Jersey environmentalist (they exist) whom I once considered a perfect soulmate- who once completely broke my heart out of the blue, then sent me an out-of-nowhere apology for all the alcoholic misbehavior, many years later. Looking up from my computer at a cafe and seeing him TLOML walk into the room was an unexpected and awkward moment- since he was supposed to be living on the other side of the East Coast right now, and I had no expectation of running into him THERE and had to look twice to make sure it was the right person.

If you have ever experienced that sort of mis-recognition of a loved one (I haven’t before- aging is just beginning to hit my age group)- it’s absolutely shocking. The first thing that came to mind ended up bypassing my filters and came right out at the poor man: ‘dude, that moustache looks makes you look pretty damn scary- is that intentional?’ Nope, not a good way to restart an awkward conversation. Some sober part of my brain looked at the half-brain that had just blurted that out, laughed at myself inside my head, and giggled internally, ‘what the fuck made you say THAT?’

The other life rages on, and moves on, and grows and adapts and changes, and shifts, and comes back to Asheville or New York, year after year …Without me… Tomorrow is, no doubt, back to my regularly scheduled biodiesel programming….

Holee smokes,

NC class, got overfull, we had 33 people and an intern or two in a classroom and laboratory at the community college in Pittsboro. People were beating down the email doors and getting really upset that it was full and that I wouldn’t make one more exception for them. that’s way bigger than I"m used to doing. Atlanta will be the same way (30 students). I turned away another 25 probably for the Pittsboro class. My last two classes in Seattle experienced the same problem (one person who was turned away in Seattle got upset that my ad hadn’t mentioned that there would be a cutoff number for attendance…)

To deal with the ridiculous demand for those two classes, ‘we’ scheduled a class at the community college in Wilmington NC for Febuary 24-25 (’we’ is Cape Fear Biofuels and I), and a second one in Atlanta for March 25-26 (’we’ is Vegenergy and I).

I"ll be coming back here to the East Coast over and over again it looks like. Which is good cause I"m actually managing to do ‘fun’ things here in between classes, like hiking (today, near Boone) and socializing (Asheville) and staying off the computer (not so good except for my hands enjoying it).

I’m going to cut off attendance at a slightly more reasonable figure for those two classes. Same thing happened in Seattle - I tried to accommodate everyone for the first class, got 30 on the menu before we finally had to schedule an overflow class there- and of course a high percentage of the first 30 didn’t show up. This time around I"m making people pre-pay and so far if any of them are canceling for personal reasons, they’re all doing so with reasonable notice.

The Friday night session with the NC biofuels groups looked amazing. I missed most of the talks though since I was setting up in the lab down the hall, mixing up turmeric and phenolpthaleine and acid-base ingredients and such, listening to the audience applaud the speakers in the background. They really have an incredible biofuels initiative here, many groups approaching the distribution/production/education picture from many different angles.

here’s Lyle’s blog about the evening:

http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000370.html

Mark

I’ve been in excruciating pain for the past 10 days or so with my right hand, which typing seems to exacerbate.. I finally set up left-handed Dvorak keyboard layout on the computer, but havent’ gotten proficient yet (it takes a while, and I"m on two-hand QUERTY typing right now) . A friend had given me his copy of a voice recognition program that he no longer uses- and sadly, it won’t work on Windoze XP. Ugh.

I got insanely busy, and went offline for a few days- and looky, the hand pain improved dramatically, in time for me to have to do massive crap-moving at the shop and use my hands all over again. But boy does the shop look good, and usable, and I know where my stuff is, and I took care of a bunch of emergencies…

Every few hours now if I open my email I have something like 15 emails related to the classes I"m about to teach- hence the massive typing marathons. I took on teaching the classes because I cant’ do my normal jobs right now (electrical work). I didn’t expect I"d be hurting my hands anyway. Yes, something to complain about everywhere.

I think I"ll go back to the hospital on Monday and ask to have my right hand put in a cast- immobilization really helps, but I dont’ have the self-control to keep my removable ’splint’ on all day, and seem to reinjure it regularly. We’ll see how that goes.

*********************
class updates:

New:
a. North Carolina and Atlanta homebrew classes are full, no more registrants possible.

However, the North Carolina Jan 20th evening presentation in Pittsboro is still open to anyone to attend (and free) . The lineup includes speakers from biodiesel co-ops and groups from throughout the state. More info at www.biofuels.coop/events

b. we’re discussing adding a second Atlanta class in late March
c. Utah class postponed to Friday night-Saturday day May 12 and 13th due to almost complete lack of response. Mid-winter in Utah certainly slows everybody down.
d. Denver class is now scheduled- March 18-19, with a possible workshop in Colo. Springs or Puebla somewhere around the same time. Phew!
I might drive to the East Coast at that point rather than fly out. I"m going to a medical training in NC for two weeks in April, then have a
e. Berlin MD class on Easter weekend, April 15-16
f. At some point I’ve got a Northern Michigan class for a farming community and a school district which are interested in a homebrew-type biodiesel demonstration project
g. Folks in Colorado are fired up about having a biodiesel co-op conference in early June, still trying to get a host facility to be ‘fired up’ about it also
h. At some point I"m probably heading to NY State to do some work for some small farmers who’ve been in one of my classes, which means a NY State class is in the works.

i. I was trying out a new print shop and I had a miscommunication with them, and have 100 spanking new copies of the book PRINTED SINGLE SIDED by accident. I’ll drag some of these misprints to NC with me and will sell others at a discount (like $9 plus shipping) soon. Let me know if you want one. I’ll put up a web page shortly for this deal. Ugh.

A big thanks goes out to everyone who’s hosting the workshops so far!

Mark

We had some killer storms recently which did massive state-of-emergency level damage in Northern California. The East Bay didnt’ get hit as hard as Napa/Sonoma/mendocino counties did.

My equipment did suffer a funny casualty. We’re slowly setting up a large homebrew setup down near the Coliseum where the Machine Shop equipment has been moved. For the last couple of months we’ve stored a few really large steel tanks out on a disused loading dock at T’s warehouse, which looks out onto an abandoned rail spur. They put some of the heavy units on carts and wheels so things could be moved around.

I got an email this weekend about some recently-discovered damage. Apparently our 300 gallon oil storage tank, which had been on a rolling cart on the loading dock, committed suicide and jumped off the dock onto the abandoned rail spur. Luckily it was empty (or it wouldn’t have been on wheels, and would have been welded, bolted, and strapped to the building for quake safety…) . I can’t imagine how exactly the winds whipped this object into motion, being as how it was up against a 2-story building and all.

Tom and I went over there today to assess the damage. Sure ’nuff, there was a cart in the grass upside-down, and a huge steel tank on it’s side, undamaged. The loading dock was about 5 feet up. Since my hand’s still unworkable, I excused myself and left the two dudes to deal with it (sorry, dudes). T. and Tom managed to muscle it up and over the ledge, lifting a foot or so at a time, sort of working their grips so that they eventually got it up to shoulder height.

Amazingly to me, thus proving the existence of Murphy of the Laws, the designers of the loading dock actually set it up to prevent rolling items from jumping over the side like that, and it had found the only chink in the safety armor. There’s actually a 6-inch high, 3/8″ thick angle iron ‘lip’ built in to the edge of the dock to prevent unattended pallet jacks and the like from falling onto the tracks and derailing the train. The lip runs the length of the building.

Unfortunately, there are about 3 feet of the lip missing in one little section.

Our co-op items, most of which aren’t on wheels and like to stay firmly planted, are spaced out over about 12 feet of the loading dock. The suicidal tank on wheels happened to be positioned EXACTLY across from the three-foot-wide gap in the safety barrier, positioned just right to roll, pick up speed, and do a flying somersault to freedom.

well, I finally had a fire in the line of biodiesel duty. A little one.

I set a laundromat dryer on fire after drying a triple-washed load of formerly oily shop rags. It was really funny in that nervous funny sort of way.

I’m not sure whether it’s really the oil or a defective dryer that caused the fire, as I’d actually washed the rags through three washer cycles and there really was no oil left on them that I could find.

I’d left the rags in the dryer for 45 minutes because the machines at the 24 hour laundromat tend to run too cool (reminds me of going into a laundromat on the Lower East Side in the 80’s to discover that they’d set the dryers ’slider’ to the coolest ‘air fluff’ setting, and had removed the levers so they couldn’t be adjusted back to hot- so that people would feed the machine an inordinate amount of quarters).

I went back to the shop (no one’s going to steal a load of shop rags, right?), got a call from my mechanic friend saying that the car was ready, ran an errand in the truck that was replacing the car at the shop, went to West Oakland to pick up the car and drop off the truck, chatted with the mechanic, found myself hungry enough to eat a cow on the way back to Berkeley, picked up the boyfriend, went on a wild goose chase looking for noodle soup just to find all the Asian noodle places closed early. The dinner we did find just about slayed me and I had a massive food coma/energy crash. The whole time I had shop rags on the brain. I had to crawl into bed for an hour with a drafting textbook to recover enough energy to continue. By then it was midnight and I only got out of bed because of … the rags… the rags… gotta go get the rags out of the dryer…

Well, my load of laundry was missing and there was a block of 4 dryers with fresh new ‘out of order’ signs on them where my laundry used to be. I poked around the laundromat figuring that they’d taken the rags out due to them being hours overdue and maybe smelly.

Finally found the attendant mopping floors in the bathrooms. He says, oh. Was they red rags? Did you have chemicals on them or something? well, they caught fire! He gave me the tour. little melted bits of shoprag in the dryer. Big black mess in the parking lot where they’d dumped the burning pile and hosed it down. trash bag in the dumpster with a wet, charred gooey mess that used to be my rag collection.

…oops.

Having a high Internet presence makes for some fun ‘accidents’ in reconnecting with the many people I know around the country. I’ve had tons of AWESOME ‘hi from your long lost friend’ sorts of emails, just because they’ve run into my book page by accident.

so here’s a few:

1… Last month I was ecstatically reading a new cookbook called ‘Wild Fermentation’ by Sandor Katz, which is all about fermented foods like sauerkraut, miso, sourdough, tamari, beer, wine, and other goodness , which brought back some memories. About 8 years ago I was standing around a kitchen in Asheville with Kerb and Jason, getting giddy and drunk on homebrewed sake that Jason had brewed 30 gallons of. I was surreptitiously making eyes at Jason, whom I’d just discovered, trying not to be rude to Kerb in the process. Cooking turned out to be a safe topic. We’d all just met and figured out that the three of us all made bread and beer and other cultured and fermented things, and Jason said, man, it’s so rare to see that many fermentation experts in one room- we should do a cookbook!

Our cookbook never happened, though my biodiesel cookbook happened instead. And the next few years in our scene in Asheville saw lots more sake, sourdough, malted grain syrup, amazake, yogurt, goat cheese, tempeh, wine, kimchee, and hundreds of gallons of homebrew beer.

I recently saw Jason when I was doing the Tour De Ex-Boyfriends in the Northwest this fall- visiting people from my very distant past- and we got to talking about the fermented foods fetishes. And the cookbook idea came up in conversation. We should do a cookbook… yeah, I did one- on cooking up fuel… funny thing.

I continued on to Portland. Portland is heavenly for it has a cookbook store. There at the cookbook store… was something new, Wild Fermentations. Someone had done “our” cookbook finally. I grabbed it off the shelf, took a look at the table of contents, and hauled it home without reading more.

Finally got around to reading it- it was actually ‘a read’, not just a dry listing of recipes, but a story- and recognized some names. It turned out to be written by someone I’ve met, from the Tennessee queer intentional community Short Mountain Sanctuary. I remembered then that at all the eco- street theater* events I went to in the mountain South 7 or 8 years ago (*throwing rotten tomatoes at Klansmen at a KKK rally, anyone? fun for the whole family!), we’d always run into the Faeries from Short Mountain, who’d be late to the event, riotously funny, and armed with giant jars of sauerkraut to share with us.

I spent a couple of weeks raving about the book to anyone who would listen, and was planning to write a fan letter to the author. One night in the midst of this, I was sitting around in Tom’s kitchen with the book on the table next to my laptop, and a huge jar of gorgeous red cabbage/beet kimchee* (*kimchee is sorta like kraut but spicy) culturing away on the counter next to me. I checked email, and there was an order for my own biodiesel book. And it happened to be from the author of the Fermentation book I’d been raving about…

2. It got me thinking about another friend with whom I’d gone to visit one of the rural Tennessee queer intentional communities for a party sometime around Y2K. She lived in Georgia and I was thinking about Georgia cause I’m headed there for a class… I haven’t been in touch with her since then but there were some great memories of cooking up a storm at the awesome Faerie party.

well, yesterday I opened up email for a moment and there was one of those ‘hi from your long lost friend’ kind of emails- and it happened to be from that same lady from Georgia. She’d found me because of stumbling onto the book link online, though it wasn’t at all related to my upcoming Georgia class.

3. It’s not always sweetness and light.

One day last spring, I checked the book orders emails, and got someone’s name stuck in my head a bit. I headed out for the Mercey Hot Springs biofuels weekend, and walked around all weekend with a little black cloud brewing over me- because of this name that kept running through my head. No, it’s not him, I thought, the first name’s wrong, it must be common enough somewhere, why would he be interested in biodiesel, I just imagined seeing that name.

I got home and started filling orders- and the book was indeed going to a name I recognized. I got on Google. Started looking up NYS Department of Corrections. Had trouble finding anything current. Found a transcript of a court appeal hearing. Could he be working for the Department of Corrections as part of parole? Finally did a reverse lookup on the address- yes, prison.

The guy who’d ordered my book was the killer of a friend of mine in NY. The manslaughter trial happened several years after the killing. One of the charges was something like ‘aggravated manslaughter with depraved indifference to human life’, which very much describes the defendant’s attitude around the time. I"d moved out West by then, and I flew back to sit in the courtroom and support my friend’s family during the trial, and it was one of the most intense, conflicting, enraging things to experience- again. And now, with the book order coming in, I went through it- again. I was at the Foothills job at the time, with no one around to talk to about it. I got on the email to Dana Linscott and Graydon and a few other people whom I barely know, and bawled my eyes out in 2-dimensional email.

needless to say I canceled the sale.

Mark

… couple of funny anecdotes from last month, so very Berkeley:

… There was a knock on the door at the boyfriend’s house and one of the roommates answered to see a couple of little girls selling these biodiesel T-shirts that someone in our community made. We’re about a block from Biofuel Oasis, and one of their parents must have just been shopping at Oasis and sent the kids off to entertain themselves for a few minutes and they just so happened to knock on the door at ‘my’ home away from home. I wonder which customer the little kids “belonged” to.

…We’re in a town where everybody’s on a gas line, so there are no electric water heaters for the homebrewers. They occasinally turn up on Craigslist or at the dump and we practically fight over them. So I and Jeff Biosmell and others have pointed out to each other that we’re always ‘looking’ expectantly whenever we see a water heater in the garbage, or when we see one being taken to the dump, unconsciously hoping it’s an electric that we can grab.

So one day I"m sitting in my van in a parking spot, looking in the rearview mirrow, waiting for a break in the traffic so I can open the door. A brown flatbed truck is barreling down the lane with a water heater on the back. I notice there’s an orange cord sticking out of the top- my electrician brain figures it’s a 10 gauge orange Romex, and I automatically turn my head to get a better look as the truck passes.

Turns out that not only is it an electric water heater, but it is in fact an actual used-looking Appleseed processor getting moved somewhere with some typical orange ‘power tool cord’ trailing out of the top, along with a truckbed full of blue gas cans and other obvious biodiesel crap.