Diary of a Mad Scientist

… 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.