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Lyle's lates blog:
http://energy.biofuels.coop/2006/08/08/small-is-possible/

Small is Possible

Rachel and I are in Virginia tonight. Tomorrow we are both on for a Clean Cities conference in Suffolk.

This is what I intend to say:

I need to tip my hat the E.F. Schumacher, the coal industry economist from Britain who wrote Small is Beautiful, and again to Armory Lovins who recently published Small is Profitable. I’m a big fan of both works, and I am a big fan of approaching sustainability from a small perspective.

I’m not sure why the human animal likes “big.” We seemed to be hardwired to think that if we can make a gallon of fuel, we would be better off with a hundred, and if we can make a hundred gallons of fuel we would be better off with a million. And so on.

This is certainly true of the commercial biodiesel industry. When you run off to commission your feasibility study for commercial production, the first thing the consultants will tell you is that you need to be ten million gallons, and you will find out that doesn’t cash flow very well, fifteen is better, and from there you really should be doing a thirty million gallon continuous flow plant, and from there perhaps 100 million gallons would be a better start point.

Having been through this process, I often find myself saying, “Wait, how did I get from my fifty five gallon drum to 100 million gallons again?”

Just because we can make fuel, let’s not lose our way.

For me the start point is to figure out what sort of fuel needs you are trying to meet. If you want to power your farm—that’s easy. Want to add some neighboring onroad vehicles? That’s a little tougher. And if you want to power a small community, that’s a little tougher still—but it can be done in biodiesel.

Right now Rachel, Leif and I are spearheading the construction of a million gallon facility in Pittsboro, North Carolina, and we have a handful of similar sized projects underway in our state. Here in Virginia, Doug Faulkner put up a million gallon plant, and liked it so much that he was adding another million gallons of capacity in the side yard before he died.

If you are just coming off your first “blender batch,” a million gallons might seem like a long ways away, but we are attempting to meet the fuel needs of a narrow, and intense community of B100 users. Our coop has over 300 members, and a million gallon plant would meet the need of a mere 1800 families.

We want to power a small community, within a one hundred mile radius of our facility, and our design will do just that.

Prior to that objective, we set our sights on smaller targets. I started out trying to power my tractor. As a gentleman farmer, I maintain a country lane and mow a couple of small fields. As someone who heats with wood, I use my tractor to skid logs up to the house for splitting and stacking. It’s not a lot of fuel. It seemed reasonable enough.

Once Rachel and I went out and bought thirsty Dodge pickup trucks, our demand went up a notch. And when Leif showed up looking for some fuel for his car, we had to crank production up some.

Can you make high quality fuel in the backyard? Yup.
Can you do it safely? Yup.

Chelsea has asked me to dig into safety issues for a bit—and so I am going to give that a try. Many of the safety lessons of small scale biodiesel are identical to those which are practiced in other trades.

Let’s take welding, for instance. Don’t weld or cut on old tanks. This was the first thing told to me when I brought home my first oxy-fuel rig and strapped it to a pine tree. Petroleum fumes can get trapped in metals and released with heat or spark and “boom,” up you go.

By the way, don’t use old tanks in general. You’ll never be able to get them clean enough for biodiesel. If you drop your precious fuel in the old home heating tank that Grandma had on the side of her house—and was free of charge—you will find biodiesel does a wonderful job of cleaning it out. And your fuel filters will forever clog. Which means you get to spend the money you saved on “free” on filters and downtime.

One of the first deaths in the biodiesel industry was a guy who fired up his grinder inside a glycerin storage tank. Don’t blame biodiesel for that one. That’s a metal worker (probably a welder) who should have known better.

Clearly one of our dangers is methanol. Methanol is a lot like gasoline. And many farmers, and homeowners handle gasoline routinely. Let’s remember that the average American garage is full of dangerous, toxic, explosive, noxious stuff. And let’s be careful when we add our homebrewing materials to the list.

Methanol can also permeate the skin. So wear gloves and eye protection when handling it.

Caustic is the same way. Lye, or KOH can burn you right out of the container. Once you have your successful methoxide reaction, you basically have furniture stripper on your hands. Best not to touch—or get it in your eyes.

Also beware of weights. There is a lot of heavy lifting in backyard biodiesel. Whether you use a chain hoist, a tractor, a forklift, or a pump, hundreds of gallons of reactants can weigh thousands of pounds, so be careful not only on the lift (shed your Birkenstocks for some steel toed boots), but also on the stands you use to hold tanks and totes and drums etc.

And add spills to your list of safety concerns. Sure, biodiesel is non-toxic and biodegradable, but anything in enough quantity is pollution. Go double walled, dike your tanks, and think spill containment.

If you have a spill, you would rather have your methanol in the air—it evaporates quickly, than in your well water.

Which kinda leaves fire. The last time I was in Virginia, at a biodiesel conference like this at James Madison University, there was a remarkable panel of reactor designers on stage. A commercial biodiesel plant in California had just burned to the ground, and the forensic details were pointing to plastic. Plastic can store a charge. And unless it’s expensive, fancy plastic infused with metal particles, plastic cannot be grounded. At that conference I was in the back row, and I asked the panelists what they thought of eliminating plastics from all reactor designs, and the panel was in universal agreement.

I’ve designed plastic reactors. I’ve made fuel in plastic reactors. But that doesn’t make it right. As an industry, and as backyarders, and as evangelists for this new fuel, let’s start preaching from the gospel of metal.

I think plastic is fine for fuel storage—maybe even for water wash—but here’s a better idea—let’s get rid of it all together. It’s cheap, but cheap doesn’t help when your place burns down.

I’ve learned a lot from our local fire marshal along the way. He likes to say that you can’t play percentages with fire—and he’s right about that.

Buy explosion proof pumps, and get fire extinguishers by the doors—even if you are on a farm and not subject to local fire inspection—pretend that you are. And get the expensive extinguishers—the kind that work on vegetable oil.

Keep your visitors from smoking and forbid drinks in your reaction area. It only takes a few drops of lye water in your coffee cup to spoil your whole weekend.

The idea that small scale producers cannot be as safe as commercial producers is hogwash. We are dealing with human beings, after all. Some will cut corners and push limits, play percentages and have problems. It is true that people have burned their houses to the ground boiling water out of veggie on the radar range. And I know of a small production plant that burned to the ground when thermostatic controls failed, but it is also true that biodiesel can be safely made in small quantities. If you want to be a small producer, make the appropriate investments, pay attention, and attend to safety.

Small is possible. Forget about what you read in the industry magazines. They are all published by big money folks for which the word sustainability is not in their vocabulary. They are generally the same people who are trying to sell you a feasibility study.

As is the case with safety, large producers have no corner on fuel quality. Commercial players are just as capable of making goo as you are. And sometimes, they are perfectly capable of shipping off spec. product. Many of the cries for fuel quality policing have echoed from the grassroots biodiesel side of the street. Once again, there are humans involved. Some of the quality conscious ones are making fuel in the backyard, and some are running large plants. And those who cut corners on quality can be found on both sides of the street.

I was also asked to address sidestreams in this talk, and sidestreams are a critical component of making biodiesel.

Item one is glycerin. The glycerin that comes out of the biodiesel process is extremely crude and tends to be of no interest to the folks who buy food or pharmaceutical grade glycerin. And refining crude glycerin is an order of magnitude harder than making biodiesel—I think there is a single commercial producer on the eastern seaboard that refines glycerin, and last we spoke they were looking to sell off that part of their operation.

At the commercial level glycerin is routinely traded by the tanker and rail car load. It is shipped off to boiler fuel markets, and animal feed markets, and I’ve heard that in West Virginia they use it for dust suppression in the coal mines. Academics are searching for new uses for crude biodiesel glycerin as we speak. A hundred million pound antifreeze plant was just announced in Georgia, and you hear of crude glycerin going into everything from renewable Saran Wrap to airplane de-icer. Our own land grant college, North Carolina State, just received 1.5 million for crude biodiesel glycerin research from the USDA. I’d like to think I played a role in that—after all, I was trying to rent them some space at our facility—where they would have a nice stream of glycerin to play with…

But the commercialization of crude biodiesel glycerin doesn’t really help the backyard much, since the quantities are often too small for market. Too small for market—but something that can be as high as twenty percent of your operation—is large enough to cause problems. As Rachel indicated this morning, you can get it to go in an aerobic compost heap, and you can feed it to worms. When you dump it into a vermiculture system, it is readily available carbon, which heats things up considerably—and it is not a preferred foodstuff for worms.

But think small. Do you have any neighboring horse barns or practice tracks that need dust suppression? Is there a local composter that would welcome your glycerin? You can make soap out of it, but you will get out of the shower smelling like fries.

Wash water is another important sidestream that comes off the biodiesel manufacturing process. You can recycle it to reduce the overall amounts, but at the end of the day, no matter how large your facility, you will end up with some waste water to treat. It’s going to come out high in biological oxygen demand, and you need to figure out a way to break that down before the water is suitable for disposal. Your municipal treatment plant may do that for you. Or you can do it yourself with massive dilution, or aeration, or both—but be prepared to deal with wash water.

And by the way—for you Magnesol fans, while that is a sound way of reducing wash water, used Magensol is a waste stream in itself, and I keep waiting to hear about a sustainable way of treating it. One of our fuel makers, David from Virginia, is a big Magensol advocate, and one night his dog devoured a pile off it he left lying on the ground. The poor animal downed a dozen bowls of water and needed to be let out an equal number of times that night, leaving David without any sleep and the newfound conviction that “Magnesol will not kill your pet.”

And while I find that an encouraging andecdote, the only thing I have heard thus far is that “it’s good for the landfill.” I find that sort of concession to be a confession that there is no good way to deal with the stuff at this point, which is one of the reasons I’m suspicious.
I’m also open. So if anyone figures out a way to get it to go in their compost pile, or can feed it to their swans, by all means let me know.

Lurking behind the idea that small scale biodiesel production is possible—that it can be safe, and produce high quality fuel—and that it can devise ways of dealing with its sidestreams effectively—is a much bigger concept.

That concept is a regime of micro nodal energy production in which the fuel is made where it is consumed. In that energy regime conservation is at the fore. And the fuel maker, no longer at the mercy of an oppressive top-down energy infrastructure that declares war, or shortage, or record profits with impunity, is free. Free to make fuel to meet his or her needs.

So go ahead. Fuel your farm. Or your neighborhood. Or your coop. You can do it with biodiesel.

Location: Pittsboro, North Carolina | Registered: 07 March 2001

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Jumped Ship to GMC’s
http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=113

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 the van not-so-legally 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.

Location: Pittsboro, North Carolina | Registered: 07 March 2001

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8/25/2006
Anywhere, USA
http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php

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.

Location: Pittsboro, North Carolina | Registered: 07 March 2001

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Good blog from Lyle Estill:
Final Resting Place

http://energy.biofuels.coop/2006/08/28/final-resting-place/

Today we moved into our last “Control Room,” and have taken up residence in “Building Two.”

Upstairs we have an office and a conference room. Downstairs we have a lab.

In this remarkable photo from Tami we can see the sawtooth edges of solar thermal panels on the roof to the left. That’s what keeps our B100 warm in winter. And beneath the porch we can see the bike rack. To the right we get a glimpse of the soccer field. And there is, of course, the screen porch which is where we will meet for many months of the year in this climate.

And the best part is, that we have been issued a “Certificate of Occupancy” that allows us to be there legally.

This is our fourth CO on this project. Each one demands a series of inspections—from concrete footing holes to insulation to electrical and plumbing, followed by a fire inspection.

Here is the recipe:

Office and Laboratory in Seven Easy Steps

Step One: get an architect or engineer to stamp a plan so that the building inspectors have a fall back if anything goes wrong.

Step Two: apply for a permit with the plans. Have checkbook handy.

Step Three: sit down with Building Inspections and the Office of the Fire Marshall to review the plans. Provide a liberal dose of biodiesel education.

Step Four: do the build out—get a series of inspections along the way.

Step Five: pass final inspection. This is not always simple, since the electrician can get blamed by the HVAC contractor, and the carpenter blames the plumber and the plumber is confident that it is entirely the fault of the architect. And across the board there are as many opinions as the plan will allow. Sometimes we call for a final inspection just to get clarity from Building Inspections. When we fail “final inspection” we emerge with a succinct little punch list. Plumber does this piece. Carpenter does that piece. Painter required for this, etc. Pass final inspection again.

Step Six: pass fire inspection. Normally this entails having up-to-date fire extinguishers in place, along with emergency lighting, no extension cords to trip over, and clear access to the electrical panel. Sometimes it also requires the correct placards, a change of street address, a lock box on the gate full of MSDS materials, the removal of various tanks, etc.—but in general it is the easy part. Again, have checkbook at the ready.

Step Seven: Make a special trip to Building Inspections to have a hard copy of your CO in hand.

Having completed our Seven Easy steps on Friday, today we moved to our final resting place. We had expected it to be sooner than this—although we crashed and burned on our last fire inspection.

We were missing a fire extinguisher. Drat. Rachel and I remedied that in less than an hour.

Our building did not match the plan. Dammit. When it was determined that our occupancy would not be H3, and was in fact F1 for office and lab, we dropped an HVAC equipment room from our build out list. (See Step 4 above). It wasn’t necessary according to code, so we didn’t build it.

Since our air handling equipment is behind a steel girder, and in a room full of non flammable materials (biodiesel and water), it does not need its own room. Once we got the engineer to confirm and stamp that plan change, we were good.

Oh. And our HVAC contractor left off the required smoke detector inside the air return. It was on the plan. But they forgot it. These smoke detectors need to be tested with real smoke—rather than the smoke you can get in a can. Which means the HVAC contractor, who has a handle on the real smoke generating devices, is a good companion to have around for final fire inspection.

Once we remedied the three simple things necessary to pass fire inspection, we were permitted to move into our new Control Room.

And today’s move went like clockwork. Scott from Blast had re-wired our internet and VOIP over the weekend while we were jitneying around Asheville. Matt, Willie and Emily showed up from the coop for our usual Monday morning soiree, and Amanda showed up to pitch in. We worked liked ants, in the hot sun, moving desks and chairs and bookshelves back into Building Two.

Today on the way to lunch, Rachel and Leif and I recounted the record. We moved from Chessworks to Summer Shop, from Summer Shop to our current Coop, from our Coop to the abandoned Control Room at Industrial, from the Control Room to Building One, and now to our final resting place.

We have been saddled with various deficiencies along the way. We’ve survived “no phone,” “no water,” “no bathroom,” “no desk,” “no CO,” “no heat,” “no cool,” “no daylight,” “no fresh air,” and “no clue” along the way.

But our new office and lab have everything a human could want to thrive in a work environment. Our only current deficiency is “no vacation.”

To get open we need one more CO. We are 4/5 of the way there. We need to pass a pressure test, and dig a trench, and add a sewer hookup, and a couple of catwalks, and get rid of some tanks, and bring the lab online, and a number of other things, but once we knock out the list, we will be shipping fuel from Industrial.

We are pretty much plumbed, and wired with pumps—we have all the vessels we need, and they will soon all be in place. The day will come when we can say goodbye to our current suppliers from faraway. Today we buy fuel in Iowa. And Cincinnati. And Florida. Soon we will be making fuel in Pittsboro, and we will be able to say goodbye to those long freight hauls of biodiesel—most of which are done with petroleum as the fuel.

We are close. Getting clearance to move into our final office space is huge. It will help us with our new “laser focus” on getting fuel coming off the line…

Location: Pittsboro, North Carolina | Registered: 07 March 2001

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8/29/2006
Meet Me In St Louis, Luggage…
http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=116

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 www.http://b100supply.com 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.

Location: Pittsboro, North Carolina | Registered: 07 March 2001

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This thread has grown to 11 pages and 23,000something views, I think it's time to put it to rest. Stay tuned for blogs and Bio-Diaries 4

Location: Pittsboro, North Carolina | Registered: 07 March 2001

Ignored post by girl mark posted