Diary of a Mad Scientist

note: no RSVP needed, just show up:

Algae Bioenergy and local biofuels efforts presentation and lecture
Tuesday, January 9th, 6-9 pm
at Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia Street (at 21st), San Francisco
admission free, donations accepted

for more information: classregistration@girlmark.com
transit directions and info: http://www.atasite.org/about/
(please don’t call ATA, they wont’ be able to answer questions about the
talk as we’re just renting from them)

Speakers:
Karri Ving and/or Ben Jordan, San Francisco Biofuels Co-op (http://sfbiofuels.org/)
will present about the SF co-op and City of San Francisco biodiesel initiatives

Kari Lemons of Biodiesel Council of California (http://biodieselcouncil.org/) will present about the BCC’s statewide efforts to support sustainable feedstock production in California

featured speaker: algae researcher Jon Meuser, Ph.D. Candidate - Division of Environmental Science and Engineering, Colorado School of Mines , presenting about algae as a bioenergy feedstock:

Jon’s talk description:

Our society’s inevitable transition to real-time solar energy will
require a symposium of technologies that capture solar energy and
transform it into useable forms, including biofuels. Many biofuels
depend on residues of existing industries like agriculture or forestry
and are generally geographically dependent. However, major
displacement of fossil fuels will require the development of
fuel-specific crops suitable to many regions. Biodiesel is a
renewable, easily mobilized biofuel high in solar-derived energy
density that already represents about 1% of the U.S. diesel market.
Total displacement of the petrodiesel market by biodiesel will require
increases in oil availability not possible with traditional
agricultural crops or byproducts of existing industries. It is
estimated that algae can produce 100x more oil per acre than soy. As
current technical barriers are overcome, biodiesel from algae and
other non-traditional crops will likely alleviate the problem of
feedstock availability and global dependence on petrodiesel.

speaker bio:

A native of California’s central valley, Jonathan Meuser is currently
a graduate student at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) in Golden,
Colorado studying biological fuel production and identifying organisms
with ideal properties for fuel production. His current research
focuses on the natural biodiversity of photosynthetic fuel production
by algae, including hydrogen and lipids. When he can get out of the
lab, Jon also enjoys teaching the fine art of biodiesel homebrewing
with his mobile biodiesel processor and is a co-organizer of the
Biodiesel Coops Conference (http://www.b100.org) held in July at CSM .

For more information about biodiesel algae, see topics in the
biodieselnow forum: http://www.biodieselnow.com/forums/13/ShowForum.aspx

for more information about this event: classregistration@girlmark.com
**** NO need to RSVP **

ack, I spoke too soon about the Lyme symptoms. I got clobbered today with the exhaustion again. I couldn’t even drive back from the doctor’s office today without pulling over on the side of the road and going to sleep for 2 hours.

Hmmm, what to do, what to do. I have most of January free, so I’m probably going to stay off the antiotics and bombard it with ‘the other stuff’ for a few weeks, and see if I can get it under control without bringing out the antibiotics side effects.

In other news, I’m going in for a session with an IV today- a mercury (and other metals) challenge test. The’ll put me on an IV and inject chelators, chemicals that bind mercury, lead, and other nasty metals that aren’t supposed to be in my body but probably are, then I get a urinalysis to see how much mercury/lead/etc comes out due to the chelating agents.

I’m quite freaked out about it- I did breathe/drink New Jersey for a whole lot of years growing up. I was always aware that our poisonous air and tap water and ghetto food could be poisoning me. I lived downwind of some really intense, grandfathered-in, under-regulated heavy industry, and spent a good chunk of my childhood aware of it, and scared. Today is something like the moment of truth when it comes to that fear.

The point is to figure out why it is I got so sick with Lyme to begin with, and to help figure out how to clear up my remaining Lyme-related problems. My doctor subscribes to the theory that metals, mold, allergies, or other immune system-wreckers have something to do with why some patients get so ill when infected with Lyme, and some don’t. It makes sense, since some people clear Lyme just fine without antibiotics and some don’t , and some people respond to short-term antibiotics and some (like me) don’t.

I’m not scared easily but the thought of what I might learn is flat-out terrifying.

Last night I was out at a Christmas Tree burn, AKA a ‘Loser Christmas’ or ‘Orphan Christmas’ party where we were burning dozens of newly thrown-out Christmas trees in a 300-gallon burn barrel while the THERM crew (I think) ran some sculpture that produced rhythmic stacatto propane explosions laced with color-producing chemicals.

I was being social- I haven’t made it to a Christmas or New Year’s party in years due to the health problems. I was hanging out with various drunken motherless orphan freaks when the spririt came down and told me to make plans to go to Slab City for New Year’s.

It’s a squatter encampment on an abandoned military base in Southern California:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_City

The spirit that touched me was in the form of the SPAZ crew, a bunch of ex-roommates of mine from the warehouse on the railroad tracks where I lived in ‘02, who’ve been doing the hippie bus thing for a while (they’re actually not at all hippies- electronic music raver types with a serious DIY bent, but who cares about distinctions?).

I’m not sure what we’re doing in Slab City but there’ll be a few hundred freaks (and apparently tons of retirees camping nearby, weird idea!) for New Year’s, drinking and cooking and doing music, and I haven’t done anything for New Year’s or gone anywhere for anything unrelated to work in quite a while.

Getting out to a gathering is kinda exciting- part of getting over Lyme, and having the energy to get out and be social. Of course the people might turn out to be total idiots. SPAZ is a fun bunch but they’re not “my people". They’re a really eclectic mix of freaky kids with some really intelligent minds among them, and a real family feel to their crew- and a few of them with screws loose as a result of a bit too much drugs or other oddities. I was always amazed at how much the ‘intelligent’ ones managed to tolerate the loose screw people, through thick and thin.

I moved in with them in 2002, to a warehouse of 14 people (one toilet- which actually wasn’t a problem, somehow), because I was drawn to all the creativity and their ability to work together and stick together through thick and thin, which I think they picked up from doing a lot of traveling and doing their own Rainbow Gathering-style, Burning Man-style (they’d roll in their graves to see that comparison!) festival in the woods every summer. I eventually got way, way too sick to live there- I didnt’ know it was ‘just’ Lyme at that point, which was frightening- and moved away (to live with a boyfriend who offered to take care of me) because of this, accompanied by much crying on my part, feeling like I was losing my ability to fend for myself.

Tonight meeting back up with some of the kids was a bit of a cathartic feeling, since I"m doing so much better. About a year ago a bunch of them sent several busloads of volunteers to Louisiana to do Katrina rebuild, and I gave them tools and money and made 150 gallons of fuel for their trip, and I’m hoping to re-start some of the friendships I let slip when I got so ill 4 years ago.

We’ve had about 3 small earthquakes in the past two days, originating about 2 miles from my house, near the Hayward Fault. Everyone’s a bit on edge wondering if this is a precursor to The Big One, or just tension-relieving slippage (which would be nice as it puts The Big One a bit further off in time…)

This morning, one hit while I was deeply asleep after some bad dream about shooting bad guys with a shiny stainless steel gun- in the dream I was shooting with the wrong hand and had started to wonder about it… Last night’s unfortunately timed espresso didn’t help my dreams.

The quake was tiny - our washing machine and the passing trains make more of a racket than the quake. Yet I managed to leap out of bed and was pulling my street clothes on before I actually awoke. When we got a small quake the night before, The Boyfriend had an equally automatic, instinctive reaction- leaping out of his seat to save our roommate’s wobbling bottle of whiskey from atop the shelf where every other, cheaper glass container was wobbling equally.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but I seem to put Lyme Disease into remission with just 6 months of treatment. I got off the antibiotics a few weeks ago and once the azithromycin side effects went away, I realized that I feel ‘back to normal’ for the first time.

I’ve been really sick for about 6 years, though what I had wasn’t nearly as bad as what many people with long-term Lyme experience- many of whom end up in wheelchairs or dead of heart disorders brought about by Lyme. In my case, I spent 6 years with extreme exhaustion, feeling exactly like I had the flu (minus the sinus or respiratory symptoms of flu)- extreme exhaustion, sore neck from what was probably Lyme meningitis, roving joint pains, burning sensation on skin, inability to concentrate, a very flu-like feeling of sore eyes, a need to sleep 12 or more hours a day, interlaced with total insomnia occasionally. Ick.

I started antibiotic treatment for Lyme in late April and by Thanksgiving I seem to have gotten back to a 100% ‘normal’ level of functioning, something I haven’t felt in 6 years. It’s fairly unusual for long-term Lymies to respond to antibiotics as quickly as I did, which I credit partially to the vast amount of detoxifying and immune support herbs and drugs that I took at the same time as the antibiotics and the anti-Lyme herbs.

My lyme-literate medical doctor suggested I stay off the antibiotics for a few months and see if anything comes back (with Lyme Disease, it’s not likely to result in a real setback if it does). I’ll be continuing to take the herbal Buhner Protocol for quite a while to come, and there are a couple of blood tests that we’re doing so as to be able to monitor the status of the part of my immune system affected by Lyme.

I wrote up my experience here at this Lyme Disease forum:

http://flash.lymenet.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=050189

(note: some terminology:
Buhner Protocol/Buhner herbs :
A treatment regimen described by Stephen Harrold Buhner in the book Healing Lyme. This book is an excellent primer on Lyme Disease or associated tick-borne illnesses, even if you’re not planning on treating the disease herbally (wikipedia.com also has a good primer on Lyme Disease these days).

The herbs in the Buhner book include ones used traditionally in malaria treatment, others studied for their effect on spirochetal bacteria such as gum disease, syphilis, and various tropical relapsing fevers, and immune support herbs that affect the parts of the immune sustem that are impacted by Lyme. Read some of the reader reviews at Amazon for more info on what the book covers:
http://www.amazon.com/Healing-Lyme-Prevention-Borreliosis-Coinfections/dp/0970869630

LLMD= lyme literate medical doctor

CDC Guidelines= the centers for disease control reporting guidelines for Lyme Disease, which prescribe an inadequately short course of antibiotics for controlling Lyme Disease, which are unfortunately responsible for many patients being under-treated today, including my own experience with my original Lyme infection

coinfections= many Lyme patients also have babesia or bartonella or ehrlichia infection, which is difficult to eradicate with antibiotics and produces AWFUL symptoms even worse than Lyme, which luckily I don’t seem to have experienced

brainfog= a common Lyme symptom, meaning an inability to concentrate. It feels exactly like what you feel when you have the flu

Also, we haven’t made an official announcement yet, but the Biodiesel Co-ops Conference is scheduled for the same weekend next summer- mid-July (sorry I dont’ have the calendar dates yet). We’re still waiting for a bit of additional confirmation but it looks like it’s definitely happening at the same location- Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO.

see http://b100.org for info on last year’s conference, and some presentations from last year

Advanced biodiesel homebrewing class

Feb 24-25, Berkeley, CA, $120

To register: www.girlmark.com/tour

This two-day class presents advanced biodiesel production techniques for those who are already proficient at basic transesterification, or those who have already taken a one- or two-day hands-on class from me or another teacher working from the http://biodieselcommunity.org ‘curriculum’ (such as Jennifer Radtke, John Bush, Steve Fugate, “BioLyle” Rudensey, Piedmont Biofuels, Matt Steiman, and others)

In addition to presenting some of the more ‘advanced’ techniques, this class focuses on teaching better quality control and safer practices, with a focus on the scientific process that goes along with better troubleshooting. We focus on better understanding the variables that affect biodiesel quality, and how to design experiments and troubleshooting protocols to isolate those variables when something goes wrong with your production quality.

Topics covered:

quality control, two-stage acid-base and 80/20 base-base processes, other processes for free fatty acid reduction and quality improvements, advanced dewatering options, some discussion of methanol recovery, ethanol for biodiesel production, advanced equipment topics such as solar heating, larger batches, ‘balance of system’ equipment tricks to make your processing neater, magnesol, etc. There is a hands-on lab component to this class which covers setting up careful experiments, as well as covering advanced topics in testing- soap tests, soap neutralisation, testing recovered methanol for purity and various methods of increasing purity of methanol or ethanol, dealing with unknown strengths of methoxide or other common mistakes, safer mixing of KOH and methanol, fire safety, glycerine acidulation and purification, glycerine burning for process heat, proper composting tricks, better handling of wash water.

There will be some pre-requisite reading required for the class (about 50 pages).

The Biodiesel Homebrew Guide Version 11 should be available shortly and will include some of the material to be covered in the class. This book will be available for sale at the class for $15 or online at www.localb100.com/book.html

Other advanced workshops offered by others:

My class is strictly about small-scale production and does not cover activist topics (such as ‘how to start a co-op’) or business topics (such as permitting). For activist biodiesel presentations, please attend the July 2007 Biodiesel Co-ops Conference in Colorado (http://b100.org should have information soon), and for permitting and larger-scale production topics, please see the Iowa State University course at http://www.me.iastate.edu/biodiesel .

This Berkeley class is also scheduled to follow an unrelated five-day Intensive course taught by owners of the Biofuel Oasis fueling station, called ‘How to Start Your Own Biodiesel Station’ . For more information about the Oasis distribution class, please see www.backyardbiodiesel.org/classes.html. The Oasis Intensive is a separate project, please apply to the two classes separately. For info on my advanced production class, please see www.girlmark.com/tour

I’m doing somewhat of a survey, trying to figure out if there’s interest in an advanced topics homebrewing class, just for people who are no longer beginners. This class will most likely be in Berkeley, CA.

I’m also considering a 4-day class- the first two days being my normal beginners class, followed by two days of the proposed new ‘advanced’ class. The second half of this proposed two-day class would be open to folks who no longer need the first two-day beginners’ portion.

Please weigh in if youre interested, over at INfopop:

http://biodiesel.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/419605551/m/8671046871?r=8671046871

A couple of days with old friends in Florida at the end of my three week outing to the East Coast turned my world upside down and inside out. I got home last night and I’m not sure I’m really back on dry land yet. My brain is still stuck in tour mode and my subconscious is still wondering what time I need to be at that goddamn airport or where tonight’s motel is. Thank God it’s over, it’s been literally months of instability, and it’s all over, and my life is mine again, all mine, mine, mine.

The timeline is that I left in early August, taught classes and traveled till mid September, got back home just in time to move out of my house on Oct 15th, which was a ‘just in time’ to prepare for the November trip. I got a month+ sublet near the airport, far from where everything else I do is located, which just added to the feeling of disconnectedness. Yesterday I got back from three long weeks on the road, the last outing on my 11-month touring phase, and, again, I cant believe it’s all over. I swear, I’ve been saying for years on this blog that all I really want out of life is a desk, and the stint in the sublet followed by this wonderful but way-too-long East Coast trip was a nasty disruption in my stable relationship to a desk.

So now that I’m back, I’m moving in with The Boyfriend this week, as soon as another roommate clears out completely and a massive roommate shuffling/re-painting/moving of stuff takes place, which means I soon get to set up a proper home office again, and not in the middle of my bedroom for that matter. And in the midst of this major change I’m not really back from orbit and feel like I’m still not really there because it’s been so many weeks of instability and floating and traveling. I’ve shut off voicemail and told everyone I"d be back in contact and working on projects again on the 15th.

It’s also been almost a year that I’ve been almost constantly on the road. I had a dysfunctional injured hand most of that time so teaching was a job that made sense. Now that I can type again I’m dropping the crazy travel and going back to consulting and a few other biodiesel tricks I have up my sleeve.

So, this last weekend in Florida was the last of the traveling classes for a while- I’m teaching in Houston at the end of January and am talking to folks about a class in Seattle sometime later in the winter, but otherwise I’m done with the ridiculous amount of traveling and flying for the moment. I"m hoping that the next installment of ‘traveling to teach elsewhere’ will take place in The Van, not via airports, and not till the end of the spring, which of course means that I get to take a desk on the road with me and can function better.

Let me repeat- I’ve been ‘touring’ for almost a year, where I’ve barely seen my home life and couldn’t sit still long enough to do anything but teach. For a while last winter/spring I was going out every 10 days, sometimes for 2 weeks at a time, with just a few days at home in between. Fuck I hope I never do THAT foolishness again.

I’m still out in orbit somewhere, not quite back to reality, I haven’t plugged into my so-called normal Bay Area life and I’m still spinning in the stories from the last week in Florida. Some funny things happened here at home today, as I try and attempt my splashdown back in the Bay Area and reacquaint myself with stability, home, and Having a Life.

The Boyfriend and I went grocery shopping this evening, and the mundane act of being in a grocery store shopping was so alien, like I"d forgotten what it is that Im supposed to eat. I found myself staring at everything in the store like I was seeing it for the first time. I know there are some poor souls out there who find themselves feeling lost and confused when they enter a grocery store, but I’m a major foodie and therefore this shouldn’t be my problem.

Later on, we were talking about cooking a large batch of stew that should last us till Tuesday or Wednesday, and I realized that somewhere in the back of my head, some part of me was already automatically leafing through an internal calendar, trying to remember if I’d still be in town then to eat it then. No, no , no, I’m back, I’m home, I’m not going anywhere. I’m in town. I’m done.

When you cross the Georgia/Florida state line , I believe you leave the South and re-enter New Jersey, which you may have left 800 miles ago, just north of the Mason-Dixon line.

At the invisible cultural line between Georgia and Florida, they stop putting sugar into the iced tea. (For those unfortunate enough to live outside the South, Sweet Tea is an important cultural innovation which the South ought to share with the rest of the country- iced tea was absolutely nasty until the Southerners discovered that you could make it into a syrup to flavor ice with.) Italians and Jews appear in large numbers, which means real Italian restaurants and real bagel shops. Fried chicken diminishes in prominence, and fried seafood takes it’s place as the state’s official Deepfried Breaded Food Item. Bizarrely, the New Jersey accent re-appears with it’s absurd lack of r’s and the substitution of short a’s for that vowel which the rest of the country thinks should be pronounced as ’short O’. Both Jersey and Florida share a similarly deranged degree of sprawl and development, with ‘dead malls’ (now housing discount stores where the anchor supermarket used to be, for instance) encircled by the newer, larger, outer ring of recent malls. There is a similar Springsteenish back-country rot that’s mostly unseen from the interstate.

But, the weather… I hit I-95 on Thursday, and turned on my ex-band’s recent music (which happens to be full of New Jersey references), and felt a certain euphoria that only overtakes me when I’m on the road and the weather changes for the better. I’m suddenly realizing that I really miss being a snowbird- several times I’ve moved to Tucson for part of the winter, and at the beginning of the 90’s I spent two winters in New Orleans- I think it’s time to try something like that again next winter.

My friend Lu had a great comment about cold and traveling- that your energy balance and ‘food miles’ get much better if you just leave the cold places and hitchhike south for the winter instead of trying to heat your house and spending all winter eating food grown thousands of miles away because it’s too cold to grow a modern diet in the winter where you live.

I can’t say I have the ‘out of season food’ problem where I live in NorCal, but we still can’t grow oranges or avocadoes as well as the Floridians can, not to mention bananas, pineapples, or other subtropical goodies.

Lu has a tendency to shut down the house and hitchike/bum his way to the Carribean (he’s a sailor) or Central America in the winter. Lu’s a crotchety, opinionated young fart from New England who can’t stand cold- as evidence, he once said that all he wants in a girlfriend is “that she own a sleeping bag that zips to his so he can be warm while camping".

When we expressed incredulity that his standards could possibly be that low, he related his experience attending Harvard and living in an unheated basement room in Boston in the winter- ‘I would always try to get a girlfriend starting in November, so that I had someone to warm my bed at night, or who had a room that actually had heat’.

My smartass friends and I turned this story into the phrase ‘November Girlfriend’, meaning someone who gets dated out of convenience, which is a direct correlary to the concept ‘what’s a punk rock guy without a girlfriend? HOMELESS’.

Lu’s joked about calculating the energy balance of hitchiking south for the winter. I’m starting to think of going to a good, local avocado diet someplace warm next winter, someplace subtropical, myself.