Diary of a Mad Scientist

I’m in Fiji working on ethyl esters and GL’s one-day process (I haven’t started the GL process stuff, I don’t think it’ll work with ethanol, and we immediately discovered that our venturi wasn’t working properly).

I thought I was coming here primarily for a regular methanol process/waste oil/acid-base process sort of setup, but they make their own ethanol and are doing such a spectacular job of it that it costs them about 45 Fijian cents a liter, versus nearly $3 dollars per liter methanol, so we absolutely have to make some of this stuff work with at least partial ethanol.

They are using solar thermal to provide some of the ethanol boiler heat, and zeolite to dehydrate it to high purity, with more solar (basically a large solar box cooker) to dehydrate the zeolite. You gotta love the proximity to the equator, the solar thermal works so well that they often overheat the boiler water in their manually-controlled solar setup, and make steam by accident.

Anyway, I’ve had a lot of success running small ethyl batches (I’ve done a lot with this in the distant past also), including with impure ethanol, and have done some two-stage base-base biodiesel this way, which I didnt’ think was going to be easy.

I’ve been posting like mad on the Infopop ethanol-based biodiesel forum because I’m exploring some new territory, I have lots of questions, and I have limited internet time to research whether others have done some of this before. If you’re interested in the subject, please go check out my recent posts at the ethanol section of the forum:

http://biodiesel.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/frm/f/9601000031

I’m going to try acid-base two stage with it as well, not sure if that’ll get me anywhere with the home brew acid-base process, I kinda doubt it, but it’s worth trying.

Today my job is to sit in airports.

Thanks to the slow-boat methanol delaying my original trip, I was stuck getting whatever flights I could get on this extremely busy travel weekend- which meant getting on an 7:30 flight just to sit in the Chicago airport in the US for 5 hours, followed by another 5-hour sit in the LA airport later tonight. I feel like I’m in suspended animation of some sort.

It’s really disorienting to be in such limbo. I stayed up all night to catch the 5:30 am ride out to the airport- I haven’t been staying up late since I’ve lived out in the woods- then slept deeply on the plane with earplugs in and a jacket over my head, and it’s adding to the total disorientation I’m feeling to suddenly find myself in the grey concrete of the Chicago airport.

I finally started getting excited about the half-way-round-the-world travel disorientation when I walked outside in the middle of last night to a near-full moon, glittery stars, and a mild winter night (Thanksgiving was t-shirt weather-warm). It was 2 am but the sky nearly seemed as light as dawn, throwing my time perception off entirely. I’ve been living here in the house in the woods for a month and was gone for the previous bright-moon nights. I had to remind myself that all of this near-daylit glory was indeed happening in the deepest, deadest moment of night.

At dawn my driver and I walked half-asleep through the woods to my car and the not-quite-fallen autumn leaves shimmered silvery in the bright moonlight like a heavy snowfall had somehow come after the t-shirt spring bliss the day before.

This bizarre day in airport purgatory is going to end with a nighttime flight over the Pacific. Am I going to see the full moon from there?

ooh, I’m burned out. I’ve had too much travel in the last few months I guess, and since I just moved into a new place I’m all ready for this trip to be over. It hasn’t even started yet. It should be a lot of fun, the job is a ‘get a commercial operation started’ sort of troubleshooting/iron-out-the-kinks gig that I want to do more of. The methanol boat has finally arrived and all is set to go. They’re all excited to get started, I’m excited, and it’s going to be great once I get over the extreme agony of airports and air travel, sometime next week.

We had impromptou Loser Thanksgiving yesterday- about 10 people who didn’t have a family Thanksgiving to go to all congregated at my new place (where most of the roommates were gone) and brought or made enough food for 50. It reminded me again of why I’m psyched to be on the East Coast. I’m not sure why it’s so much easier for me to feel at home here, but I do.

Life is intense, life is good, life is hard, life is overwhelming at the moment.

Life is:
‘too-much-travel’ insecurity
personal issues with having moved away from the East Coast
personal issues, good and bad, with The Boyfriend
trying to figure out what I want to do for a living that doesn’t involve the workshops, whether biodiesel or not
getting excited about music again for the first time in years
getting into shape for the first time in years, running everywhere, working out, being in good pain every day from the running for the first time since Lyme. I never walk from building to building anymore at the new place- I always sprint the distance, I’m ecstatic about what I can suddenly do and about getting my health back and being athletic again. Joy…
ironing out my new home logistics
playing catch-up on what Tom calls ‘life maintenance’
struggling with my computer and my disorganized digital life
biodiesel experiments

Agh. I’m ready for December to be here.

Wow, tour is over. It’s exciting. I’m living in the woods and it’s been a great day catching up on email and listening to the wind in the trees. I kept thinking I was hearing a car drive up. It was just trees.

I now have one very long trip from here to Fiji and back, with a stop in California on the way home (I tried to look it up on Google Maps to see if it was possible to get mileage. I got an error message saying, sorry, we can’t find driving directions from the East Coast to Fiji)

After the Fiji consulting madness, I get a month off, or something like a month. Then in theory this madness starts up again, if I let it. At this point I get to decide what I’m doing- I’m in a new place with room for an office for once, a good shop, and… do I want to venture out into consulting full-time, give up doing these classes for the moment, or do something completely unrelated to biodiesel? Assorted ‘North American Appropriate Technology’ projects beckon.

I got the go-ahead from The Boyfriend to stay out East permanently. He made an emergency trip out here to check out the place, got to see what I was so excited about, and is making plans to move out next fall sometime. It’s a long-distance relationship till then, luckily he’s working a telecommute job and can do things like travel out here pretty frequently.

I was supposed to leave for Fiji in three days, which is about four days after I got back from the Tennessee class, and an absolutely awful idea from the stress perspective.

Luckily for me, there was an email right after we confirmed my plane ticket- unluckily for our project, the methanol supply to Fiji is coming from New Zealand by cargo ship, and it’s delayed some as-yet-unknown number of days. My German client there keeps referring to it as ‘boat’, which makes me think of someone rowing a barrel of methanol to Fiji, very slowly. I get to sit here and play with GL’s Process and figure out other fun stuff for them with some more leisure time while we wait to hear on the methanol.

Just looked at the calendar and it’s my birthday tomorrow, which I’d more or less forgotten about. I guess that fits the definition of ‘busy’.

Biodiesel Essentials class
Jan 5th-6th

Riverhead, NY

Class registration fee:
$120

No one turned away for lack of funds.
Register at www.girlmark.com/tour

You may build an Appleseed biodiesel processor at this class if you buy
a kit from http://b100supply.com in advance.

B100supply gives a discount
to those who attend this workshop and other people’s workshops- $50 off
the cost of the basic or deluxe processor kit.

This class teaches you everything you need to know to make high quality
biodiesel, use your system more efficiently, and make informed decisions
about shortcuts. We cover the following topics, but also tailor the
class to more advanced students or different questions, as appropriate.
There are extensive hands-on lab portions in the class during which you
will get individual attention to make sure you understand the topics
fully and can do the techniques on your own at home.

Some topics:
biodiesel/SVO/solvent thinning (ie DSE etc) options and history,
biodiesel chemistry, testing oil (titration and water testing), making
test batches, an overview of equipment, a chance to build your own
reactor at the end of Sunday’s class, quality control factors, quality
testing, mistwashing and other water washing options, breaking emulsion,
two-stage base biodiesel, waste water and glycerine disposal, reuse,
waterless soap removal with Amberlite and GL’s process, common pitfalls,
hands-on experience recovering from failed batches and emulsion, safety

Tonight after class Will from MSbiofuels.com and I explored the rumor of deep-fried possum. Sort of like Lyle’s ‘I can make fuel out of a dead squirrel‘ comment a while back.

Of course, the rumor turned out to be false. The restaurant was this great barbeque joint called Leatha’s, run by a lady who’s a gazillion years young.

Apparently some TV cooking show did a segment on them, for which the restaurant cooked up armadillo, squirrel, chitlins, and some other typically depression-era food.

It’s now turned into an endless rumor that ‘Leatha’s has possum, not on the menu, you have to ask for it’.

That’s what you get for talking to the press for a day- your waitresses have to endlessly answer questions about the possum in the back room forevermore. Of course our biodiesel-influenced version of the rumor said that the possum was deep-fried, too.

I think I rant about the press nearly as much as how libertarians rant about hating the government.

We took our place in the long line of idiots that have asked a server about the armadillo (luckily Will had remembered on the drive over that the rumor was all about armadillo, not possum, which is slightly less insulting and makes a LOT more sense, since possums make their living being deeply disgusting and supposedly taste awful as a result of eating carrion).

She sweetly told us that they’d only done it for the TV show, but also that they couldn’t serve it or squirrel right now anyway because it’s not hunting season. The thought of the government protecting squirrel from hungry people is kinda funny.

I never can sleep the night before a class. The next few weeks my life enters an even more insane fever pitch of travel taking me around the Southeast… and abroad. I get December off, though. It starts again in Febuary. Somewhere in the meantime I get to do a biodiesel training for a project in the South Pacific, further confusing my brain that’s already addled by the constantly changing scenery.

Today I drove the rest of the 800 miles to Mississippi with , made it in time for the pre-class social we’d organized, and nothing blew out in the process. I’m starting to trust this van (the trailer, not so much). The drive was a near-nonstop with, apparently, no stop for food (because, like, there’s really no “food” on the road between Atlanta and lower Mississippi- the convenience stores carry an amazing variety of inedibles)- when I got to within 15 miles of my destination the host mentioned on the phone that dinner would be in an hour, and I experienced a bizarre starvation meltdown.
I burst through the doors of a chicken place to get something to stave off disaster, and could barely place an order for a snack to the person behind the counter. She commented ‘wow, you’re THAT hungry, huh?’ with a tone of concern- I think it’s pretty obvious when I’m melting down.

Tonight I was ecstatic to see that I was going to bed at 9:30… and now it’s 1 am and I"m still wide awake, despite the grueling drive. It really amazes me that I just can’t EVER sleep before a class. Tomorrow morning I’ve got a full house, and I’m sure I’ll just hit the ‘play’ button and go on autopilot and somehow use complete sentences and teach the course without really being there.

I haven’t really been to this part of the Gulf Coast since 1992. I actually went to mechanic school in New Orleans when I was 18, which was quite the experience- it was a job training program run through the federal JTPA, which meant that most of the students were there due to a probation requirement or a welfare requirement and I was probably the only one there on my own. Needless to say, they were all men, most of whom had done a lot of time in prison. They were REALLY amused by me and what I was doing there wanting to learn to work on cars. I learned a lot about prison life and their, um, values, from their conversations.

Entering Mississippi reminded me visually that this is the poorest state in the country (I think?), and that a lot more rural areas elsewhere looked like this a few years ago. Crappy roads, few chain stores (that’s not exactly bad in some ways), fourth-rate supermarket that turned out to look like a bad truckstop convenience store on steroids- I had to look to find the produce section, and was absolutely amazed at the amount of packaged processed junkfood garbage that filled the shelves. Not surprisingly, looked like lots of unhealthy people (OK, this WAS definitely in a poor part of a city, maybe I’m extrapolating unfairly to the rest of the state which I shouldn’t).

One of the Piedmont Biofuels guys I was on the phone with pointed out that parts of NC looked like this once (actually I hung out with illiterate bikers in such a place in NC once, too, that also being part of my now-less-formal mechanic education). He felt that some of those NC towns were now just plain dead and empty, with the loss of crappy-job industry like chicken processing (which is what was going on in this part of MS). It’s kind of interesting- the Piedmont crew seems to be extraordinarily sensitive to what’s going on in chicken processing these days, since their feedstock is coming from that gigantic wastestream source primarily.

Monday I flee here with whatever trailer tires I can manage to wrangle out of the local economy, run 6 hours back to Atlanta, actually relax for a day (though that means doing biodiesel-ey stuff, for me). Next week is a class in western Tennessee. I have things to do 9 hours from there, first, however.

Partway through my drive down here the Boyfriend called. I’d just been in California for 8 days of hell, processing what the hell we’re going to do there. I don’t want to go back, I don’t wanna I don’t wanna. I’ve been working on him to get out to the East Coast for the winter, do some visiting and some projects, and try to deepen some of the relationships we have with friends up and down these states- the Piedmont crew, Matt Steiman and Jenn, Dorn and Sarah, and our buddies Lu and Dawn. The trip was hell, we spent a lot of time going ’round and ’round about various issues about my having decided to leave and not come back, and I was extremely relieved that a) we worked through them and b)I’m back East.

I’d returned from the flight from California, spent a near-delerious day getting the van together and dealing with emotional turmoil, more phone calls from the Boyfriend and more resolution, all in a good way though- and then immediately jumped in the van and drove the 800 miles to another world, Mississippi. In this alternate reality that’s definitely not the California I just escaped, my host claimed tonight that there’s a diner nearby that serves deep-fried possum. And I thought I had issues. Another local who was standing nearby agreed that in fact you can buy such a thing at that one restaurant, but it’s kind of hush-hush and not on the menu. I can’t tell if they’re pulling my leg, but I am determined to find out. I immediately insisted that I get to see (and presumably eat, and possibly even review) this scary thing. I wonder what fryer oil (or french fries for that matter) that have had possum fried in it is like?

After this I’m heading back 800 miles to where I came from. The Boyfriend just decided today that he’s going to get on a plane- we spent a few HOURS of my drive on the phone, all of which helped me deal with the horrendous drive- and follow me out there for a week while I"m in inter-class hell, the better to make the decision about whether to come spend the winter here with me or not. I’ll be picking him up on Wednesday, spending a few days trying to see what we think of my new situation here, then driving another 10 hours to another class. Then back, spending some more time processing what he’ll think of my new winter home, then dropping him at the airport. I have a birthday on the 16th which I’ll probably spend packing, then on the 17th I shift gears and fly out to Fiji for 10 days to do a training for a production startup. then… I’m back, I have free time (ie poverty), and I get to finally get to know the community I just joined out here.