Lyle writes here: http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000356.html

December 28, 2005
Reading List

Sitting at the gate at RDU airport, I'm about to begin Micheal Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon; The Decline of the American Empire at the end of the Age of Oil.

On my recent trip to Guatemala I read Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce, which quickly became one of my all time favorite books. I wish everyone on our project would read it.

Hawken writes of a "restorative" economy, one which mimics nature, in which each of our transactions, and indeed interactions with one another have a restorative value.

In his preface Hawken reflects on a moment he had at the podium, when he was receiving a distinctive award for his company's environmental leadership. He says he looked out at the crowd and was struck by the fact that he and his company didn't actually deserve the award at all. In essence, despite their best attempts to "green" their operations, they were simply a junk mailing firm. It is not clear which of his companies he was talking about-Smith and Hawken perhaps?

As one who has received a bunch of rewards for my business practices, I completely identified with his sentiment. His moment at the podium inspired The Ecology of Commerce, and it was a fantastic book. Unlike Natural Capitalism, in which Hawken had a hand along with Hunter and Armory Lovins, The Ecology of Commerce is a light read. It is a simple"declaration of sustainability," that left me inspired and wishing more people would read it.

Tes and I took a load of trash to the transfer station in Siler City shortly after our return from Guatemala. She is new on the project, and is doing construction, and landscaping, and janitorial, and odd jobs at Industrial. We grabbed a lunch at San Felipe and she delved into questions she had about our project at the plant.

I bemoaned the fact that not everyone on our project reads. She had the brilliant idea of putting together an annotated booklist on our website so that newcomers, and veterans alike could avail themselves of titles that have influenced the project.

She is so right. We need to build a library somewhere on the project. And we need to make "reading time" part of each person's job description. I want to work at a place where everyone can be drawing from a common body of work, so that we can see where various inspirations come from.

Some of this happens now. I put a bunch of my books in the office of the coop, and it was not unusual to see a copy of Jeremy Rifkin's Hydrogen Economy in the back seat of Pedro's car, or to see Bob Hunter's Thermagaedon on Forest's beside table.

Rachel was recently inspired by John Perkin's Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and it is currently on its way to Canada in Tami's book bag. Often when I mention books in the blog, Scott shows up and snags them from my shelf. So while it is true that ideas from these books get some traction in our community, it is also true that they do not always circulate widely enough.

Tes's idea of a virtual bookshelf is now on the list.

I think the project is strengthened when we are pulling from a common literature. Marc Dreyfors over at Bull City Biodiesel is a voracious reader of energy books, and that common ground has vastly helped my interactions with him. We were both reading Jared Diamond's "Collapse" at the same time, for instance, which allowed us to make small talk on the diets of the Norse Vikings-for instance.

Before dropping out of the University of Missouri, I had an intense year in the dorm with a friend who was migrating from accounting to the arts. Along the way we snapped up and consumed many fiction titles from my shelf-from Salinger to Kotzwinkle. After awhile he claimed to "completely understand me," simply by having read the books that I treasured. And I think he was right about that. In those days I was writing fiction, and had no interest in the truth.

Nowadays my reading diet comes exclusively from the "Current Affairs" section of the bookstore-although Rachel has complained that my own book, Biodiesel Power really belongs in the "Sci-Fi Fantasy" department.

I need to work up the book list. And we need a library. With a couch. And a perfect reading light. It needs to be a quiet spot, where each of us can retreat from the daily grind to read, or nap, or both.
Posted by Lyle at December 28, 2005 02:04 PM

I only posted Lyles reading list entry (I can barely read these days, myself, due to atrophy of the brain)- because I liked Leif's comment to it:

Comments
I'd like to see one of the old vacuum furnaces (huge steel tanks) that came with the plant transformed into a cozy reading/napping nook. The only catch would be scoring a confined space permit everytime you wanted to enter.

Posted by: leif

I was going to write a blog entry called "gateway drug", inspired by something WayneThomas posted recently at this forum about how we got him into the idea of conservation. I've been telling people for ages that I do what I do because biodiesel's a 'gateway drug' that sometimes gets people to think about their energy use. Anyway, Lyle wrote about it before I did:

December 30, 2005
Gateway Drug
http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000358.html#comments


I'm not really into cars or trucks. I never would have bought the Dodge out of some guy's yard had I not had Rachel's backup and mechanical support.

But it is hard to confess such a thing now that I am completely submerged in transportation and fuel issues. Many of the people that I hang with know body types and makes and models and subtle changes introduced to different cars and trucks by the year. I always feel bad when my eyes glaze over during such conversations.

I have a vague sense of vendors and brands, but I am not really into what's turbo charged and what's not, and which engine maker has how many liters of this or that. I couldn't care less, and I always a little bit guilty about this.

I first confessed this to Girl Mark when we were in Asheville together, and she shrugged.

"Cars are the gateway drug," she said, before moving on to the next item in the conversation.

DSC00251-1.jpg
At that moment I was absolved of all guilt about not really caring about cars. I took her comment to mean that for many people their love of vehicles leads them into the sustainability conversation.

I believe the essence of the gateway drug is that you start the kid on tobacco, and it leads to alcohol, which leads to marijuana, which somehow leads to heroin. Or something like that. I've never really subscribed to that theory when it comes to drugs, but I think it has a lot of merit when it comes to biodiesel.

There are tons of folks who adore the TDI technology, purely for technology's sake, and it incidentally leads to biodiesel, which gets them hooked, and leads them into looking at their ecological footprint, and their carbon consumption in general.

Which is to say there are lovers of Mercedes and Volkswagen who incidentally come to biodiesel, and the vehicles are the gateway drugs.

Having said that I should also say that I have been working for the past couple of years on getting a late model Mercedes on the road. I once had a helper who effortlessly collected sedans, which piled up at Summer Shop. He spun off into the stratosphere, and I kept working on the idea of parts cars, and donor vehicles with the idea of getting a single "Creampuff" on the road.

One of my obstacles to doing this was having the right mechanic. I didn't have the time, or the tools, or the skills or the passion to pull it off. And the local mechanic community repeatedly brushed me off.

I started with Kevin from Chatham Alignment. He can do anything with any diesel. He looked at my project cars and said, "**** can them," and walked away. Although he was watching our biodiesel progress with mild curiosity at the time, his idea of a good time is to load a cement mixer with gravel, drop it on a car, and then figure out how to get it off again without hurting anybody.

He has put a lot of energy into our tank truck, and he has saved Tami's Jetta on more than one occasion, and the Dodge as well, but when it came to restoring a late model Mercedes he basically invited me to jump in the very same lake that he generally tows wrecks out of.

So I tried a group of folks in Bear Creek. They were enthusiastic, claimed to know diesels, and claimed they could help me out. They didn't. Rather, they returned my non-working "Creampuffs" in markedly worse shape than I delivered them in.

I tried to interest the Bus Farm crowd, but although they are mechanical geniuses, they had trouble getting compression on a diesel once, and swore off diesels for life.

Enter Diaz. I don't even know his first name. He is a colorful Brazilian who Rachel used to work for, who initially took no interest in our biodiesel fantasies.

One night early in the project, I bumped into him at the Pitt Stop, a local racecar restaurant, and I was excited about the prospects of buying the Dodge. He waived me off.

"I hate diesels," he said. "I sold all my diesel tools, and I don't work on diesels anymore," was his curmudgeonly answer.

We have been trying to interest the skilled diesel mechanics in this community from the get go, including Rachel's recruitment of Johnny, who now runs the Diesel Technology Program down at the College and who sold me the Silver Ghost. Unlike the others, Johnny is an import who understood biofuels from the get go. He routinely whacks dysfunctional starters at just the right place, and helps people pull injection pumps, and offers support to those who are converting to straight vegetable oil.

Rachel set the hook in Diaz. She understood that his passion was creating masterpieces out of cars, and so we went to him with a concept that doesn't normally exist in nature: make a diesel convertible.

I called it Operation Creampuff to keep it a secret from Tami, which failed dismally in this small town. The idea was to rip the gasoline engine out of a convertible and replace it with a diesel.

He dove in headlong. He found a Mercedes 380 SL on Ebay in Maryland, found a home for its working motor (I think it went to Billy and Kathie's 380 SL that had a blown head gasket and now belongs to Diaz's son?)

He found a diesel motor that would barely fit, and went to work. It needed a custom transmission mount, a custom drive shaft, some modified gauges on the dash, and a whole bunch of engineering.

DSC02683.jpgI stopped in to check on things from time to time, and Diaz appeared to be relishing the project. The car became like a child to him, and I have to say that my "love of cars" may have moved up a notch as the project progressed.

One of the standard questions we get in biodiesel is "What do I have to do to convert my engine?" We always reply "nothing," until we figure out that the caller has a gasoline vehicle, at which point we try to convince them not to replace their gasoline engine with a diesel. I even talked Forrest out of doing that back in the day.

And here I am. Driving around in a car that should not exist. With a "converted" engine. Here I am, pushing a gateway drug. If I "couldn't care less," how do I explain the ear to ear grin whenever I am driving Creampuff?

I can't wait until Triangle Clean Cities calls, as they sometimes do, looking for "a biodiesel vehicle" to park in front of the MacKimmon Center for their next energy conference. Instead of running Tami's Jetta through the carwash, we might run Creampuff to Raleigh instead.

Oh. And the ownership? That's unclear at this point. Since it was not really given to Tami for her 40th birthday, one could argue that it is still my car. She seems to believe it is hers. Next week Evan and I are jumping into Creampuff and heading to Florida for a book tour/coop conversation.

I'm thinking some folks down there will be way more interested in the car than in what we have to say-but I suppose drugs are like that.

Night Owls and Mobile Office
http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=72


Its 2:30 am. I’m sitting in my room with one of my wonderful roommates, with laptops and the space heater on. There's a raging Pacific storm lashing the city outside. We’re working on our websites and listening to vintage rockabilly and eating cake and being extremely productive. No, life doesnt’ suck.

It’s actually mid-day for me- my sleep schedule got quite thrown off today after pulling an all-nighter at my metal shop yesterday, and taking a couple of long naps to compensate this afternoon. I had coffee at 8 pm and started my writing workday in earnest. It’s good to have other night owls to work with though. Days like that are surreal. Last night ended with a phone call from Graydon who was up and checking email at 7 am his time and noticed that I was posting. He’s a normal person and was quite shocked to hear that I was ’still up’ from the night before.

Oh, but here in San Francisco we are far from normal, and it’s quite easy to find others as abnormal as oneself. On the other side of town, Tom’s busy at his job, a contract position involving circuit design. He chooses to do it at night quite often. His Tribe profile includes 'avoiding an office' as one of his goals in life (important if your career is normally done in offices). He’ll probably be working till 5 or 6 am, as will I if I don’t watch out. Exchanging emails at 4 am is amusing. Tom sets his computer’s clock ‘forward’ a few hours when mailing out work emails at that hour so they dont’ look so strange to his boss.

I’m a 24 hour person these days- the awake hours, and the work hours, can fall at any point of day or night. I don’t have a set schedule so the last few days this week i"d been at the metal shop in the morning welding, and now I’m up all night, all in the same week. But after 10 pm it obviously becomes a lot more solitary. When Tom and I started dating it was such a novelty for both of us to find another night owl to be ’social’ with. Yes, the having of no life and the having of no sleep is one of the central tenets of our nerdy relationship. Im really happy to find that there’s another productive night person at my house, too, and more importantly, to be able to do ‘work social’ gettogethers, nocturnal or daytime. I’m not much of a partier or social person these days, and the ‘work social’ is a way of getting my ‘people’ kick without having the nagging feeling like there’s something else I should be doing because the To-Do List is whipping me.

My house is an owner-builder renovation. We’ve got one room with gas heat, and it’s been really cold for the area, at least for a house with no central heating (yet). It makes me feel good to walk into the dining room (where the heat is) and see someone hard at work at the ‘home office’. Sitting around and being productive with others participating (but not interfering), is really important to me. Being around self-directed people is important to me. It all started when I started working on biodiesel projects about 6 years ago- I had a girlfriend at the time whom I absolutely adored because she was extremely focused and self-directed and could take care of herself and half the world too (she’s now a medic, which is great for the community she’s in…) We got into this great pattern one winter called ‘work date’- where a date consisted of me coming over, cooking up some sort of obscenely rich dessert, and then us spending a few hours in her room, writing or doing research or something equally productive. It was during a few weeks of extreme blizzard weather in our town, and I’ve got some fond memories of being snowed-in and emerging with some tangible work to point to, both of us…

I’ve been trying to rediscover the same dynamic in my other friendships ever since. Being around all these computer programmer geeks who work at home has made that more possible than it was when everyone I knew worked in construction and socializing pretty much meant drinking. Last year, me and Tom and another couple of guys were doing ‘Mobile Office’ social get-togethers, whereby several folks who telecommuted, headed to one nice warm room with laptops (and McMaster-Carr and Cole-Parmer, in my case) and worked ‘together’ for the afternoon. It’s almost like a social life, at least for us nerds.

couple-a Berkeley biodiesel stories
http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=73

… 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.

January 02, 2006
High Energy Day
more by Lyle:
http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000359.html

I wasn't that stoked for work this morning. We are still cramped up in an abandoned control room without a speck of daylight. It is cold and dreary, and the only improvement to the place is that Tes has hung a blanket over the Hobbit Hollow to keep the heat in.

The Hobbit Hollow is the name we use for Rachel's part of the office. When she joined Industrial last August she needed space. I fired up the torch and cut a narrow arch in the solid metal wall of the control room, so that her space could be joined with ours. Matt and I hung a ceiling and insulated it, but the Hobbit Hollow has holes in its metal floor, and the cold breezes blow thoughout.

The Control Room has a proper floor, but does not have an insulated ceiling. Which means both parts are cold and draughty and nasty places to work. Evan sits at a table with an ancient Mac. I'm next to him on a board that rests on a frame, with two old fashioned phones and my I Book. Leif sits next to me at a cramped table on his old Mac notebook. And Rachel sits next to him, with her own bookshelf and a Power Book.

When the energy is down in the control room-for whatever reason-because it is cold, or the fuel is not flowing, or the taxman is against us, or petroleum is carrying the day-what ever the reason, the place can be misery incarnate.

But today the energy was up. And when the energy is up there is no finer place to be.

Today Leif mapped out a time line for our new purchasing/construction phase, and we all squirreled away our own individual chunks of responsibility. Rachel is on sprinklers. I'm on road construction. Leif is on code interpretation. Bruce is on Waukesha generator. Matt and his crew are on office/lab. Tami is on kitchen.

Today we got clear on what the next six months of work should look like and everyone dug in hard. Evan made a delivery run, and worked out coop membership stuff.

There is going to be a film crew about the place on Thursday, looking for sound bites on renewable energy. I was asked to go address a panel of legislators about a proposed gasoline tax increase. And it looks like our road building crew will show up the same day.

Which brought "priorities" into focus.

What if the road building dump trucks and equipment spoil things for the camera crew? Oops. Which gets us open quicker? While we have had plenty of time on camera, we actually need a road so that we can shoot a cement spill containment area and take delivery of the tanks and reactors that are currently being ordered.

I would love to go to Raleigh to rail on the idiotic legislators. Careful now. In three minutes at the panel's microphone I could cover Peak Oil, offer some calculations on the estimated number of dead Iraqi children per mile that our current legislative fleet requires, advocate a ten dollar per gallon tax and suggest that the largesse be invested in renewable fuels.

But such an appearance doesn't get us open. Unlike the technocrats and experts that generally appear at such things, all it really does to us is bite off another day.

Instead of lining up pipefitters, which we need to open, I would be recruiting politicians to our side of the equation (or turning them off completely with wisecracks about the myriad Hummers in the NC Legislature lot).

What to do, what to do?

Today it appeared that everyone focused on getting open, and the energy about the place was palpable. Who knows if we can sustain this energy until Thursday? It could be that by Thursday I will be begging to testify. It could be that Rachel will be in so much need of fresh air and daylight that she will silence the plant for the film crew.

It could be that Leif will be in such need of some "physical layer" activity-that which is away from his keyboard in the control room-that he will blow a gasket and set about mowing the yard.

And although all of this is possible, today it felt as if we were centered. Today everyone on site was focused on getting Industrial open. With fuel coming off the line.

It was a great buzz. It was a high energy day. And now we will see if we can maintain such energy into the year ahead.

book stories
http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=74


Having a high Internet presence makes for some fun ‘accidents’ in reconnecting with the many people I know around the country. I've had tons of AWESOME 'hi from your long lost friend' sorts of emails, just because they've run into my book page by accident.

so here's a few:

1… Last month I was ecstatically reading a new cookbook called ‘Wild Fermentation’ by Sandor Katz, which is all about fermented foods like sauerkraut, miso, sourdough, tamari, beer, wine, and other goodness. It brought back some memories. About 8 years ago I was standing around a kitchen in Asheville with Kerb and Jason, getting giddy and drunk on homebrewed sake that Jason had brewed 30 delicious gallons of. I was surreptitiously making eyes at Jason, whom I'd just discovered, trying not to be rude to Kerb in the process. Cooking turned out to be a safe topic. We’d all just met and figured out that the three of us all made bread and beer and other cultured and fermented things, and Jason said, man, it’s so rare to see that many fermentation experts in one room- we should do a cookbook!

Our cookbook never happened, though my biodiesel cookbook happened instead. And the next few years in our scene in Asheville saw lots more sake, sourdough, malted grain syrup, amazake, yogurt, goat cheese, tempeh, wine, kimchee, and hundreds of gallons of homebrew beer.

I recently saw Jason when I was doing the Tour De Ex-Boyfriends in the Northwest this fall- visiting people from my very distant past- and we got to talking about the fermented foods fetishes. And the cookbook idea came up in conversation. We should do a cookbook… yeah, I did one- on cooking up fuel… funny thing.

I continued on to Portland. Portland is heavenly for it has a cookbook store. There at the cookbook store… was something new, Wild Fermentations. Someone had done "our" cookbook finally. I grabbed it off the shelf, took a look at the table of contents, and hauled it home without reading more.

Finally got around to reading it- it was actually ‘a read’, not just a dry listing of recipes, but a story- and recognized some names. It turned out to be written by someone I’ve met, from the Tennessee queer intentional community Short Mountain Sanctuary. I remembered then that at all the eco- street theater events* I went to in the mountain South 7 or 8 years ago (*throwing rotten tomatoes at Klansmen at a KKK rally, anyone? fun for the whole family!), we’d always run into the Faeries from Short Mountain, who’d be late to the event, riotously funny, and armed with giant jars of sauerkraut to share with us.

I spent a couple of weeks raving about the book to anyone who would listen, and was planning to write a fan letter to the author. One night in the midst of this, I was sitting around in Tom’s kitchen with the book on the table next to my laptop, and a huge jar of gorgeous red cabbage/beet kimchee* (*kimchee is sorta like kraut but spicy) culturing away on the counter next to me. I checked email, and there was an order for my own biodiesel book. And it happened to be from the author of the Fermentation book I’d been raving about…

2. It got me thinking about another friend with whom I’d gone to visit one of the rural Tennessee queer intentional communities for a party sometime around Y2K. She lived in Georgia and I was thinking about Georgia cause I’m headed there for a class… I haven't been in touch with her since then but there were some great memories of cooking up a storm at the awesome Faerie party.

well, yesterday I opened up email for a moment and there was one of those ‘hi from your long lost friend’ kind of emails- and it happened to be from that same lady from Georgia. She’d found me because of stumbling onto the book link online, though it wasn’t at all related to my upcoming Georgia class.

3. It's not always sweetness and light.

One day last spring, I checked the book orders emails, and got someone’s name stuck in my head a bit. I headed out for the Mercey Hot Springs biofuels weekend, and walked around all weekend with a little black cloud brewing over me- because of this name that kept running through my head. No, it’s not him, I thought, the first name’s wrong, it must be common enough somewhere, why would he be interested in biodiesel, I just imagined seeing that name.

I got home and started filling orders- and the book was indeed going to a name I recognized. I got on Google. Started looking up NYS Department of Corrections. Had trouble finding anything current. Found a transcript of a court appeal hearing. Could he be working for the Department of Corrections as part of parole? Finally did a reverse lookup on the address- yes, prison.

The guy who’d ordered my book was the killer of a friend of mine in NY. The manslaughter trial happened several years after the killing. One of the charges was something like ‘aggravated manslaughter with depraved indifference to human life’, which very much describes the defendant’s attitude around the time. I"d moved out West by then, and I flew back to sit in the courtroom and support my friend’s family during the trial, and it was one of the most intense, conflicting, enraging things to experience- again. And now, with the book order coming in, I went through it- again. I was at the Foothills job at the time, with no one around to talk to about it. I got on the email to Dana Linscott and Graydon and a few other people whom I barely know, and bawled my eyes out in 2-dimensional email.

needless to say I canceled the sale.

Mark

FIRE!
http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=75


well, I finally had a fire in the line of biodiesel duty. A little one.

I set a laundromat dryer on fire after drying a triple-washed load of formerly oily shop rags. It was really funny in that nervous funny sort of way.

I'm not sure whether it's really the oil or a defective dryer that caused the fire, as I'd actually washed the rags through three washer cycles and there really was no oil left on them that I could find.

I'd left the rags in the dryer for 45 minutes because the machines at the 24 hour laundromat tend to run too cool (reminds me of going into a laundromat on the Lower East Side in the 80's to discover that they'd set the dryers 'slider' to the coolest 'air fluff' setting, and then removed the levers- so that people would feed the machine an inordinate amount of quarters).

I went back to the shop (no one's going to steal a load of shop rags, right?), got a call from my mechanic friend saying that the car was ready, ran an errand in the truck that was replacing the car at the shop, went to West Oakland to pick up the car and drop off the truck, chatted with the mechanic, found myself hungry enough to eat a cow on the way back to Berkeley, picked up the boyfriend, went on a wild goose chase looking for noodle soup just to find all the Asian noodle places closed early. The dinner we did find just about slayed me and I had a massive food coma/energy crash. The whole time I had shop rags on the brain. I had to crawl into bed for an hour with a drafting textbook to recover enough energy to continue. By then it was midnight and I only got out of bed because of ... the rags... the rags... gotta go get the rags out of the dryer...

Well, my load of laundry was missing and there was a block of 4 dryers with fresh new 'out of order' signs on them where my laundry used to be. I poked around the laundromat figuring that they'd taken the rags out due to them being hours overdue and maybe smelly.

Finally found the attendant mopping floors in the bathrooms. He says, oh. Was they red rags? Did you have chemicals on them or something? well, they caught fire! He gave me the tour. little melted bits of shoprag in the dryer. Big black mess in the parking lot where they'd dumped the burning pile and hosed it down. trash bag in the dumpster with a wet, charred gooey mess that used to be my rag collection.

...oops.

We had some killer storms recently which did massive state-of-emergency level damage in Northern California. The East Bay didnt' get hit as hard as Napa/Sonoma/mendocino counties did.

My equipment did suffer a funny casualty. We're slowly setting up a large homebrew setup down near the Coliseum where the Machine Shop equipment has been moved. For the last couple of months we've stored a few really large steel tanks out on a disused loading dock at T's warehouse, which looks out onto an abandoned rail spur. They put some of the heavy units on carts and wheels so things could be moved around.

I got an email this weekend about some recently-discovered damage. Apparently our 300 gallon oil storage tank, which had been on a rolling cart on the loading dock, committed suicide and jumped off the dock onto the abandoned rail spur. Luckily it was empty (or it wouldn't have been on wheels, and would have been welded, bolted, and strapped to the building for quake safety...) . I can't imagine how exactly the winds whipped this object into motion, being as how it was up against a 2-story building and all.

Tom and I went over there today to assess the damage. Sure 'nuff, there was a cart in the grass upside-down, and a huge steel tank on it's side, undamaged. The loading dock was about 5 feet up. Since my hand's still unworkable, I excused myself and left the two dudes to deal with it (sorry, dudes). T. and Tom managed to muscle it up and over the ledge, lifting a foot or so at a time, sort of working their grips so that they eventually got it up to shoulder height.

Amazingly to me, thus proving the existence of Murphy of the Laws, the designers of the loading dock actually set it up to prevent rolling items from jumping over the side like that, and it had found the only chink in the safety armor. There's actually a 6-inch high, 3/8" thick angle iron 'lip' built in to the edge of the dock to prevent unattended pallet jacks and the like from falling onto the tracks and derailing the train. The lip runs the length of the building.

Unfortunately, there are about 3 feet of the lip missing in one little section.

Our co-op items, most of which aren't on wheels and like to stay firmly planted, are spaced out over about 12 feet of the loading dock. The suicidal tank on wheels happened to be positioned EXACTLY across from the three-foot-wide gap in the safety barrier, positioned just right to roll, pick up speed, and do a flying somersault to freedom.

their is a diesel 380 sl now?? what engine was shoved into it.. please say an om617 i bet the guys at mercedesshop would dig it

Pictures are here somewhere:

http://www.biofuels.coop/blog

Mark

another of Lyle's blogs:

January 09, 2006
Power Purchase Agreement
from: http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000362.html


Today I signed my Power Purchase Agreement with my local utility, and tomorrow I hope to drop off a copy in Raleigh so that it qualifies for NC Green Power.

Our utility is Central Electric Membership Corporation (CEMC), which is headquartered in Sanford, NC. It is a rural electric co-operative in which I have been a member for over a decade.

And I should say that when Tami and I dabbled in real estate, we worked with CEMC to electrify a small neighborhood. We also worked with them to bury the grid to our house, which was a hazardous run through many a rotting pine.

Membership in CEMC is not optional. If you want electricity at my house in Moncure, they are the provider. And membership brings voting rights, and a copy of Carolina Country magazine. My limited understanding of this coop is that it simply distributes power. It basically runs its own grid, buying electricity wholesale from wherever it can get it, and retailing it to its members.

Today they agreed to buy the electricity generated by our solar array for 5.9 cents per kilowatt hour. And they have been watching the system from their end. I was delighted to learn that they have been monitoring it since New Year's Day.

We have two meters on the side of the house, one for production, and one for consumption, with a small battery bank for those rare occasions when the grid disappears.

"It looks like you are making about 6 kilowatts a day, and using about 1.5" said Wes, last week when I called. He mailed me a copy of the power purchase agreement the same day.

I must say that I entered into this project with some trepidation. I had heard horror stories about PV systems that went live, and were mired down in power company negotiations for years before arriving at a Power Purchase Agreement.

This was the first of its kind for CEMC, and that fact that it is in hand nine days after going live is a testament to their cooperation on this project. I had heard good things about the Piedmont Electric Cooperative, which is a member of the same "rural electric family," and I am delighted to report that Central Electric was a breeze to work with.

The start point, of course, was a professional installation. That was provided by Tom Honey and Rebekah. CEMC engineers came out here to peruse the installation, got clear with Tom about their technical requirements, and Tom delivered it just the way they wanted it.

That was permission to tie to the grid. It was followed by an inspection by Chatham County Inspections, and once those two items were taken care of, all we needed was to throw the switch and to wait for some sunshine.

We threw the switch at 12:01 on January 1, in order for the system to qualify for tax credits. And as soon as the sun came up the next day, we were shipping electricity to the grid.

6 kilowatt hours a day is not a lot. This system should be able to double that. But these are the short days of winter. The cold weather is to our advantage right now, but the short days cost us. Because the array is air cooled, mounted in the field instead of on a roof, the efficiency of the panels will be somewhat improved. But the long days of summer also bring haze, and in this polluted Triangle, panels sometimes drop to below their rated output.

But back to CEMC. When NC Green Power first came out I called up CEMC to indicate my desire to participate. They were not familiar with it. NC Green Power is a voluntary, tax deductible contribution program that North Carolinians can join by asking for an increased electric bill. Each 4.00 block of "Green Power" buys 100 Kilowatt hours of "Green" electricity.

When I learned my electric coop was not participating in the program, I went up and down the road to get neighbors to call and write and in no time CEMC started accepting Green Power contributions. I have been contributing ever since.

Today when you walk into the lobby of CEMC, you will see advertisements for NC Green Power.

Today when I walked in to get my Power Purchase Agreement signed, I was invited into the board room, and had a chance to meet Morris McClelion, the CEO of the utility.

He seemed genuinely glad to have another tiny source of power contributing to his grid, and I left inspired to tell everyone in the neighborhood about how easy and satisfying it was.

Here's hoping that this is merely the first of many PV systems that will one day contribute to North Carolina's electrical mix...
Posted by Lyle at January 9, 2006 08:52 PM

Class Updates
by me:
http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=77

I’ve been in excruciating pain for the past 10 days or so with my right hand, which typing seems to exacerbate.. I finally set up left-handed Dvorak keyboard layout on the computer, but havent’ gotten proficient yet (it takes a while, and I"m on two-hand QUERTY typing right now) . A friend had given me his copy of a voice recognition program that he no longer uses- and sadly, it won’t work on Windoze XP. Ugh.

I got insanely busy, and went offline for a few days- and looky, the hand pain improved dramatically, in time for me to have to do massive crap-moving at the shop and use my hands all over again. But boy does the shop look good, and usable, and I know where my stuff is, and I took care of a bunch of emergencies…

Every few hours now if I open my email I have something like 15 emails related to the classes I"m about to teach- hence the massive typing marathons. I took on teaching the classes because I cant’ do my normal jobs right now (electrical work). I didn’t expect I"d be hurting my hands anyway. Yes, something to complain about everywhere.

I think I"ll go back to the hospital on Monday and ask to have my right hand put in a cast- immobilization really helps, but I dont’ have the self-control to keep my removable ’splint’ on all day, and seem to reinjure it regularly. We’ll see how that goes.

*********************
class updates:

New:
a. North Carolina and Atlanta homebrew classes are full, no more registrants possible.

However, the North Carolina Jan 20th evening presentation in Pittsboro is still open to anyone to attend (and free) . The lineup includes speakers from biodiesel co-ops and groups from throughout the state. More info at http://www.biofuels.coop/events

b. we’re discussing adding a second Atlanta class in late March
c. Utah class postponed to Friday night-Saturday day May 12 and 13th due to almost complete lack of response. Mid-winter in Utah certainly slows everybody down.
d. Denver class is now scheduled- March 18-19, with a possible workshop in Colo. Springs or Puebla somewhere around the same time. Phew!
I might drive to the East Coast at that point rather than fly out. I"m going to a medical training in NC for two weeks in April, then have a
e. Berlin MD class on Easter weekend, April 15-16
f. At some point I’ve got a Northern Michigan class for a farming community and a school district which are interested in a homebrew-type biodiesel demonstration project
g. Folks in Colorado are fired up about having a biodiesel co-op conference in early June, still trying to get a host facility to be ‘fired up’ about it also
h. At some point I"m probably heading to NY State to do some work for some small farmers who’ve been in one of my classes. This means a NY State class may be in the works.
i. I was trying out a new print shop and I had a miscommunication with them, and have 100 spanking new copies of the book PRINTED SINGLE SIDED by accident. I’ll drag some of these misprints to NC with me and will sell others at a discount (like $9 plus shipping) soon. Let me know if you want one. I’ll put up a web page shortly for this deal. Ugh.

A big thanks goes out to everyone who’s hosting the workshops so far!

Mark

Pittsboro class

http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=78

Holee smokes,

NC class, got overfull, we had 33 people and an intern or two in a classroom and laboratory at the community college in Pittsboro. People were beating down the email doors and getting really upset that it was full and that I wouldn’t make one more exception for them. that’s way bigger than I"m used to doing. Atlanta will be the same way (30 students). I turned away another 25 probably for the Pittsboro class. My last two classes in Seattle experienced the same problem (one person who was turned away in Seattle got upset that my ad hadn’t mentioned that there would be a cutoff number for attendance…)

To deal with the ridiculous demand for those two classes, ‘we’ scheduled a class at the community college in Wilmington NC for Febuary 24-25 (’we’ is Cape Fear Biofuels and I), and a second one in Atlanta for March 25-26 (’we’ is Vegenergy and I).

I"ll be coming back here to the East Coast over and over again it looks like. Which is good cause I"m actually managing to do ‘fun’ things here in between classes, like hiking (today, near Boone) and socializing (Asheville) and staying off the computer (not so good except for my hands enjoying it).

I’m going to cut off attendance at a slightly more reasonable figure for those two classes. Same thing happened in Seattle - I tried to accommodate everyone for the first class, got 30 on the menu before we finally had to schedule an overflow class there- and of course a high percentage of the first 30 didn’t show up. This time around I"m making people pre-pay and so far if any of them are canceling for personal reasons, they’re all doing so with reasonable notice.

The Friday night session with the NC biofuels groups looked amazing. I missed most of the talks though since I was setting up in the lab down the hall, mixing up turmeric and phenolpthaleine and acid-base ingredients and such, listening to the audience applaud the speakers in the background. They really have an incredible biofuels initiative here, many groups approaching the distribution/production/education picture from many different angles.

here’s Lyle’s blog about the evening:

http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000370.html

Mark

Glad to hear that the tour is going well . I have not yet decided if I can spare the cash to attend when you make your way here next month . I really hate to miss it , but you have managed to catch us at a really bad time . Chances are I will be there anyway , unless you have already sold out . I really look forward to being able to meet you and discuss a few ideas I have bouncing around in my head lately .
Shannon

Speaking of overflow and lots of interest, how many pre-paid attendees would it take to get you to come up to Fayetteville Tennessee (15 miles from the Jack Daniel's distillery) and do a class?
Say, after the 18th of February? (By then I will have my incompletes turned into grades, be caught up on my current classes, and be back from a week of climbing around on a gas turbine, HRSG, and steam turbine in Mankato Minnesota.)

Shannon, please come down to the Houston class- I'd love to see you there and there's no reason you should be paying a fee to attend since you know all this stuff already.

Jim D,

I have a bunch of Southeast workshops scheduled, and want to lay off of scheduling any more until I see how these work out . Sorry!

Mark

No problem. I'm drinking from a fire hose right now anyway. I'll keep an informal list of people interested and their contact info. See if you can squeeze us in later this year/next year. There are 3-4 people that live within 2-3 hours of me that want to come up the next time I run a batch. I think they already know how to make it, they are just like the rest of us spread out over the country-side. They just don't have anyone to talk biodiesel to! (My wife doesn't want to hear another word about it.)
-Jim

http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?cat=1

The Other Life
I"m blazing around the Southeast in between classes, revisiting my old life. Or , as Rachel from Piedmont calls is, 'the other life'. You know, the life you lead, back when you had one, prior to biodiesel or a career or an obsession or a bookwriting immersion project or a job that takes up all your time.

Tonight of course I'm in Atlanta sitting around with Rob from Vegenergy talking shop about filtration and Magnesol and business practices and fueling rock tours and Southeastern poultry fat availability and stuff like that. Fun. If Lyle Estill was here he'd probably give us a hard time for the painfully geeky conversation and point out that there is a life to be had out there in the real world. We already scared off Rob's girlfriend with a discussion of the finer points of AOCS Ca 14-56 total and free glycerol test.

Amusingly enough Rob is friends with some guy with whom I was in a silly band with back when we were 18-19- which brought back some amusing memories (like the fact that the only time I"ve ever driven drunk was one night after seeing Rob's former rock band, when B. got even more wasted than I was- and that driving drunk AND driving an automatic transmission car for the first time scared the bejeezus out of me at the time). I still have no idea how B. figured out who I was long enough to ask Rob if he knew me- I was certainly not using the name Mark back then, I have no idea what mutual friend told "B." to look for me in the biodiesel corner of the universe. Tomorrow we're allegedly going to try and track down B, who was one of my Georgia connections back when Asheville had only a ghost downtown and no social life to speak of, and 'getting social' used to mean packing up and driving to Athens or Atlanta because Asheville had no young people who weren't hippies.

Last night in NC I went on the obligatory gay date with an 'other life' Asheville ex-girlfriend to see the Hollywood tearjerker gay cowboy movie- in fact, I had about three days of 'no biodiesel discussion' due to hanging out with her- a record of 'no biodiesel discussion' for me. I think that's a good thing to do. Later that night I ran into someone from a totally different part of my life there- one of the older folks who'd inadvertently brought me to Asheville and convinced me to settle there initially in '89- people from the traditional fiddle music crowd. Since I"d been sick for about 5 years now, and dropped everything from 'the other life' other than biodiesel, I had completely gotten out of touch with those folks, some of whom treated me as adoptive parents when I first came to town and whom I still greatly love and admire. John was at the fiddle band session at a local bar where the girl and I headed for it's late-night wireless service, and at one point I caught myself feeling mildly sad as he told me that a lot more people like me joined the movement after I left. I was about 5 years ahead of my time in that music movement - I spent the first few years out of high school following 38-year-old musicians around, having about two friends my age- Rob's friend B. and one other guy whom I"d recently gotten in touch with as part of my current pursuit of the Complete Circle, of searching out and finding everybody all of a sudden. Now, the old-time-music scene nationwide is full of young rocker types who have traded instruments to pursue the high lonesome sound, and I"m on the West Coast making oily messes instead of music.

Then, another snapshot from a completely different phase- the day before yesterday, me and the girl ran into 'The Love of My Life', a working-class New Jersey environmentalist (they exist) whom I once considered a perfect soulmate- who once completely broke my heart out of the blue, then sent me an out-of-nowhere apology for all the alcoholic misbehavior, many years later. Looking up from my computer at a cafe and seeing him TLOML walk into the room was an unexpected and awkward moment- since he was supposed to be living on the other side of the East Coast right now, and I had no expectation of running into him THERE and had to look twice to make sure it was the right person.

If you have ever experienced that sort of mis-recognition of a loved one (I haven't before- aging is just beginning to hit my age group)- it's absolutely shocking. The first thing that came to mind ended up bypassing my filters and came right out at the poor man: 'dude, that moustache looks makes you look pretty damn scary- is that intentional?' Nope, not a good way to restart an awkward conversation. Some sober part of my brain looked at the half-brain that had just blurted that out, laughed at myself inside my head, and giggled internally, 'what the **** made you say THAT?'

The other life rages on, and moves on, and grows and adapts and changes, and shifts, and comes back to Asheville or New York, year after year ...Without me... Tomorrow is, no doubt, back to my regularly scheduled biodiesel programming....

January 19, 2006
Quail Ridge Reading
http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000369.html

We are just returning from a remarkable evening in Raleigh at Quail Ridge Books And Music. It was my sixth public reading from Biodiesel Power, and by far the most rewarding.

Raleigh is Tami's stomping ground, which meant her family showed up. That meant a kiss from Aunt Joyce during the book signing part of the evening. Melissa gets a point for filling a corner of the room with her cohorts.

The place was packed. They originally set out chairs for 20, and ended up seating sixty.
Some of the crowd was from my past lives. Ed, my former chess rival sat in the back row. I couldn't tell if he cared about biodiesel or not, but it was clear he was still pondering the Sicilian defense I pulled at Artsplosure three years ago-when we battled on the chess board for hours in front of a live audience.

The staff of Quail Ridge were remarkable. They had done their homework. And they had flexed their marketing muscle. Their efforts, combined with Tami's, packed the place. They were delighted with the evening and sent me away beaming.

There were folks from the Unitarian Fellowship of Raleigh present. I was once active there. And perhaps best of all, there were members of Piedmont Biofuels there. I was so glad to have Patrick in the audience that I tossed more than one car-expert question to him. One fellow flashed his membership card, and told me that he was a regular at the Durham pump. Tobin was there. She is our Clean Cities Coordinator. Having her in the audience raised the bar, and she helped out with some of the questions which followed.

Bob, the algae guy from the Grassroots conference was there. He helped answer questions. It was nice having him in the front row.

I spent the day on the chainsaw, dropping dead mimosa trees in the garden. It was a high stakes affair that I intended to hire an arborist to do. They are little trees-and they cut like hardwood although I am sure they are not. They are a funny kind of wood. The danger was that their dead limbs sprawled over artwork, and not all of them read in my favor.

Setting down the saw, I came in to prepare for the reading. I knew it had to be "Tami-centric" for this crowd. I was so taken by the quotations in Jay's review from Brevard Biodiesel that I wrote them in the book and read them aloud. Girl Mark called. She's in town, doing her frenetic pre-workshop dance. I invited her, which raised the stakes considerably.

Wardrobe remains a problem. Most of my clothes are now tattered, grease stained, wrinkled and unfit for a bookstore reading. I put on the tweed jacket Tarus gave me back when I was teaching Energy Class. It has leather elbow patches, and I believe he offered it up as a joke. I took it off thinking it was too pretentious. Tami insisted that I wear it.

"It's Raleigh," she said, "You can be as pretentious as you like..."

The strange mix of audience meant the questions were all over the map. They came fast and furious and lasted a long time. Fortunately six readings, blogosphere immersion, and many Sunday tours have prepared me for almost everything this group could throw out.

One that stumped me after the crowd had thinned was, "What is the embodied energy of my 1980 Volvo?"

Um. It only gets 21 miles to the gallon. But the guy works at home, seldom drives, and what are the energetic implications of him shedding it to get a new TDI? Um.

We poured into the parking lot and hit the Whole Foods next door. Tami and I were in the afterglow of a wonderful evening. I walked across the parking lot to the Silver Ghost with Zafer and Arlo.

"What did you think of the evening, Z?"
"Boring."
"I thought it was boring too, Dad," chimed in Arlo, then turning to his brother he added, "I transformed a King on level 3 of Super Mario,"

That was news to both of us. It was news to Zafer since he had never seen that particular transformation. And it was news to me since I had expressly requested that Arlo not bring his Game Boy into the bookstore...
Posted by Lyle at January 19, 2006 10:41 PM