Diary of a Mad Scientist

To add insult to injury, not only was my Friday-afternoon-before-my-class flight delayed, but they (Northwest Airlines) lost my luggage.

My class teaching props were all in the lost luggage (sorry, the new TSA War On Liquids wouldn’t let me take a vial of pHlip test in my carry-on… just kidding).

I got to St Louis on Saturday morning and got to spend a frantic hour in Wal-Mart, re-assembling everything that didn’t make it to Missouri with me, and we started class on time anyway.

Luckily I had just ordered some new credit-card-sized scales from B100supply, and had him ship the scales to St Louis for the class, so I didn’t get stuck without a scale!

Other than scales, I was able to find everything else at Wal-Mart/Lowes, and, also very fortunately, I had previously asked Maud to loan me some of the non-walmart items (like graduated cylinders) that I normally bring. Even more luckily, we’d asked the students to bring their own safety glasses, which I normally provide myself, and which I couldn’t have easily found that many pairs of at the hardware store.

I’ve taught some other classes in the past where we would have been screwed if all this stuff didnt’ arrive.

It really is mind boggling how much time I spent up in the air last spring and winter. There was about five months where I just didn’t have a life because I was in another part of the country every weekend, or, at best, every 10 days. I didn’t feel too much remorse about charging people a decent amount of money for the workshops (they used to be sliding scale), because there was just no way for me to do absolutely anything else with my life while keeping that kind of travel schedule. Even when I was home for a week or 10 days in between, it was indescribably disorienting.

Ever since I did the truck tour in 2004, what I’ve really wished for has been… a desk. With me at all times. I think I mentioned the mythical mobile desk in the beginning of the blog, when I was first contemplating the tour- I almost bought a van-based short bus at that point, and the image that drove that fantasy was the idea that I would have my very comfortable desk along, and even a bed. In that order of importance.

Instead, I drove the truck I’d already had, which was fine because I really didn’t have any money to start with when I went on tour that time (having been particularly ill that year). I spent two months sleeping in the front seat of the single cab ‘83 Ford and dreaming about that damn portable desk that I can drag along with me in a van of the future.

Well, right now, I am on tour, I have a van, and am in fact sitting at a desk. Unfortunately, the desk comes to me in the form of a hotel room. In the middle of Anywhere, USA.

I have a class in St. Louis tomorrow, and there was no way to make everyone’s schedule work so that the class happened during my drive home- so I’m doing a last hurrah of unpleasant airline flying. Oh wait, that’s wishful thinking. I’ll to be flying right back out to East Coast in September, drat.

Anyway, today I fought traffic to the airport in Boston, leaving the van in the Northeast while I visit Airline Limbo again… and… a storm delayed everything leaving Boston so they couldn’t get me to St Louis tonight.

I got to spend the night in Detroit. Which, from what I can tell here at the hotel, may as well be Houston, Texas, or Charlotte, North Carolina, or the general vicinity of Southgate Mall, Anytown, USA, because I only got as far as the airport hotels strip that’s sandwiched between the off airport parking and the car rentals, out the middle of no-man’s-land, and there’s no sense that I am in any place with a discernible geography or climate..

I’m so happy that I managed to get done with the flying tour this spring before the new airline security rules kicked in. Right now getting through check-in and then security takes twice as long because everybody’s checking things that would previously have been carryon luggage, so that their shaving cream doesn’t get confiscated, and then after waiting in that queue, you get to wait even longer because apparently the security guys have to stop every brown person on the flight (I swear this happened tonight in Boston) and search them which slows down the line even further.

I, and I’m sure, everyone else shuffling in line around me, feel this sense of hopeless rage at how senseless all of this is -I’ve minimally read some Internet punditry about the chemistry involved in the liquid bomb plot, and, although I’m not a chemist, it seems pretty far-fetched that there would be able to concoct this stuff in a bathroom of a jetliner (one of the paranoid government conspiracy sites claims it takes hours of dehydrating the solvents out of the explosive after mixing it up, under controlled conditions, while chilling the mixture and raising a royal stench, before it’s actually usable as directed. Maybe I"m just passing an internet rumor without checking it out- at all- first, take this with a grain of Google).

And what that has to do with me not being able to bring my water bottle on board, or, worse yet, carry onboard a decent coffee from the Starbucks (that’s located inside the airport security perimeter, inside search zone)…

An overzealous gate attendant confiscated an empty (and lid-less) coffee cup that I was holding while boarding in Oakland a week after the bomb scare. All of this adds to the nasty wastefulness of airline travel, of course. The airport gate areas are stuffed with half drunk plastic bottles of water discarded in every corner, in fact, in Boston, the trash cans were absolutely overflowing with them tonight- since you’re not allowed to take anything they bought inside the gate area onto the plane. I didn’t know yuppies carried their own reusable water bottles around, until I got to see what happens when you couldn’t have those.

It’s funny, I spent a lot of time earlier today thinking about how happy I am to get the van, and about the desk, and about how much fun touring in the van will be compared to flying, and about how much I detest hotel rooms. And, a few hours later I end up in another one. The detestation came flooding back the moment I opened the hotel room door and smelled that nasty old chemical-ly carpet/regurgitated HVAC stale air odor. And this isn’t even a particularly old or cheap hotel, they just all smell like vacuum cleaner exhaust to me.

I went for a long walk to stretch my legs-basically ‘doing laps’ in this maze of industrial parks and truck yards behind the hotels, trying to get some exercise, thinking about all the different places I’ve slept in while traveling in the distant past, in the other life. I’ve slept relatively OK in abandoned buildings, under freeway overpasses, in freight train yards, on freight train grainers, inside boxcars, down in the hole on plenty of 48’s, and on the floor of a few train engines, behind bushes, on rooftops, in drainage culverts, in dozens of other people’s cars while hitchhiking, on the street, and of course in the front seat of my own car probably hundreds of times over the past 18 years. And just about all of this is psychologically preferable in some ways to shelling out the money to sleep in a crappy motel.

Also, I finally put up the next tour dates and their registration links at the website. I have a few more spots in the Chambersburg, Pennsylvania class, and I will also be speaking at the really cool renewable energy conference that they’re organizing there at Wilson College. That is all in mid-September.

Then I’ll be going out on the road in late November or early December, and going to the Southeast again. It should put me in Florida in December, at which I’m very excited about. It’s such a nice time to be there, weatherwise. That is, if hurricanes aren’t hitting.

Biodiesel Classes: www.girlmark.com/tour

Chambersburg, PA, September 17 and 18th,
Chambersburg PA ‘Life After Cheap Oil’ conference, Sept 15-16
Clemson, South Carolina, November 18 and 19th
Pittsboro NC, November 25-26
Ft Lauderdale, FL, December 1
Ft Lauderdale, FL, December 2-3

I got myself a new vehicle- a 1998 GMC Savana, same year as the boyfriend’s van, the problematic one that I drove across the country exactly two summers ago at the beginning of this blog. My new van is a passenger model, his was the more common cargo version.

Mine:

His: (before the stomper truck modifications)

I expect to have the same fun with Check Engine Light codes and transmission issues and touchy finicky fuel system sensors. These engines have many known drawbacks, but I’m getting it (and not another 1990s van) for one reason over a comparable 1990’s Ford Powerstroke- fuel economy is marginally better. I would imagine that emissions would be better also, just because it consumes much less fuel, although I haven’t looked at any numbers to compare.

My old van was a great deal, but it’s from 1987, and going down the road I can definitely smell french fries inside the vehicle. I started to get paranoid about what it meant to be getting gassed by exhaust particulates like that- diesel, or vegetable oil based, I would prefer not to smell it at all. It was really faint, and I think few people would even notice, but it’s just that 1980s van thing.

The GMC’s on the other hand, barely have an odor even when running on petroleum diesel. There been so many times over the past two years been so jealous of Tom’s 1998 van for all these reasons. And now I have one of my very own.

This one’s really high mileage, and I had to go out to the East Coast to get it. Supposedly it’s got a rebuilt engine, I’m hoping to track down the previous owner while I’m here and confirm that actually the case. I’m not holding my breath, there are absolute no mechanical records with this thing.

I bought it at the beginning of the summer, and spent a couple months, try to figure out how it was going to get to California. I really don’t need it in California, the whole point of this vehicle is to do a couple of East Coast tours, and to have it serve as an RV so my life would take less of a beating while traveling for the classes. I was originally going to register the paperwork in California, then mail the plates to someone in Boston who was going to borrow it until I went on a tour.

And bureaucracy set in. It turns out that Massachusetts does not give temporary plates or trip permits. In California refuses to register anything from out-of-state without actually doing a physical VIN inspection first. Oops. Stuck between a rock and a hard place. Both states said ’surely the other state can do something, my hands are tied’. I really didn’t want to spend money on getting it towed out on a car carrier, just to register it, and promptly drive it right back.

And, of course, in the middle of the summer when I was trying to figure this out, I had a conference organized, and the van was the last thing on my mind at that point. At one point, a really good friend of mine who has been my partner in mystery illness (we got sick at the same time, and years later got diagnosed with chronic Lyme at the same exact time independently of each other and by different doctors - absolutely freaking weird), was moving cross country to Massachusetts, and we were trying to arrange how she could pick me up after the conference so that we could do a long gimpy drive to the East Coast and process everything we’ve learned in the past few years of being sick. That would’ve been a really good growth opportunity I think. Unfortunately, her schedule with school orientation didn’t allow her to wait till after the conference to get me, but the idea of definitely put the bug in my ear about driving across country for fun this time.

So I scheduled some classes for a month later, and gritted my teeth in anticipation of the new, stricter airport security hell, and flew out to teach in Boston, register it in another state, and then drive the vehicle back. I was able to convince the boyfriend to fly out and make a vacation of the drive back. Which is something I’ve been wanting to do the whole time we been together- a longish road trip. We’re going to start out in New England, then go down to the southeast, then try to ignore the Midwest on our way back.

I must say I’m so incredibly excited about having this thing. The fact that we have ‘his and hers vans’ (they’re the same year model) is really awesome- he hasn’t really converted his to an RV yet, although that’s the ultimate goal, and I’ll be starting on that this fall. So are passing these great e-mails back and forth (he’s not out here on the East Coast yet) talking about power systems, and auxiliary fuel tanks, and security, and making folding beds and counter space, and how best to arrange things. It’s going to be so fun doing the full conversion. Ultimately, it’s still not the vehicle and I want, but I can’t afford the Sprinter that I want.

The boyfriend has spent the last two years getting his van converted to four-wheel-drive (it can be done piece by piece, so it hasn’t been on blocks the whole time or anything). It started as a somewhat modest project, but he paid a mechanic/off-road enthusiast friend of his to do the work, and the friend has been trying to get into the business of doing these conversions and other custom four-wheel-drive work for a while now. In the process, the friend convinced Tom to let him turn the vehicle into a showcase project for the friend’s skills. At this point, it looks like a big monster redneck truck, cargo van edition- giant stomper Big Mud Tires, a lot more lift than Tom would have wanted originally, and all kinds of burly he-man suspension metal showing. And it’s now something like 10 feet tall. Tom is one of the most unassuming, non-show-offish guys you’ll meet, and the fact that he now drives his giant vehicle that turns heads left and right, really cracks me up. He doesn’t seem too comfortable with it. We were driving around the ghetto right before I left and guys were pointing and smiling (not as in laughing at, but as in really impressed, and smiling). It’s pretty funny.

Some of the Powerpoint presentations from the event are now up at the conference website:
http://www.b100.org/presentations/

Also, Jennifer Radtke and I spent several hours eating chocolate cake last week and writing a web page of advice on biodiesel co-ops, based on our experience together in Berkeley Biodiesel Coop, and Team Canola, our not-so-famous homebrew ‘cell’ a few years back, and her experience with Biofuel Oasis.

This page should be up at http://b100.org soon as I get it typed up.

It’s a month later and I"m finally recovering from the Local Biodiesel conference. Here are some other people’s writeups about it:

PICTURES:
Bob Armantrout’s Pictures:
http://www.troutsfarm.com/Biodiesel/BiodieselConference.htm

Graydon Blair’s Pictures:
http://www.utahbiodieselsupply.com/photos/events/denverconference06/

BLOGS:
Bob’s Writup:
http://troutsfarm.com/blog/comments.php?id=145_0_1_0_C

Piedmont’s Writeup
http://energy.biofuels.coop/2006/07/21/coop-conference/

Graydon’s Writeup:
http://www.utahbiodieselsupply.com/blog/2006/07/biodies…nference-report.html

David Erickson’s Writeup:
http://climateprotectioncampaign.typepad.com/cpc/2006/0…esel_confe.html#more

Lyle “BioLyle” Rudensey’s Writeup:
http://biolyle.blogspot.com/2006/07/biodiesel-coops-conference.html