Autumn, can we just call it Windmill season?

I've been at it at approximately 3/4 throttle with the gang at Pika over the past couple weeks. Last weekend was spent entirely at Common Ground Fair. Most of that time was hanging out at the Pika booth and talking with people who want one of our sexy wind turbines (I hope google catches onto that phrase and this blog comes up in search results for "sexy wind turbines", maybe I'll over use it in this post just to give us a fighting chance). I was pleasantly surprised to speak with some very informed customers on Saturday. Of course there were a few folks who didn't know how energy works but they were fairly few and far between. One point of discontent was that we had the wind turbine braked because in order to run we need an inverter and our inverter outputs "split phase 240V" which is what is at the entrance to your house.... however we only had a 120V extension cord. Most people understood why this was an issue but there was one man who simply did not understand that and was convinced that we were giving him some sort of BS. Next year we'll bring a transformer.

In the off times I hung out with Blandrea Jarrett (not actually bland at all) and her associated compadres. I have to say that after staying there all weekend, you really don't get the common ground experience until you camp there. The "volunteer" campground is the loosest run hassle free camping experience. I showed up too late to "get a permit" so I just pitched my tent anyways and no one bothered us the entire weekend, turns out that is what all of our neighbors did too. I just got a sweet new tent so I was excited to try it out, it worked great and despite wind, rain and uneven ground it kept me and my stuff bone dry. We did some contra dancing saturday night and witnessed a man playing guitar on hallucinogenics on Friday. Yup that's Common Ground.

That's right kids, it's a double rainbow over a wind turbine. Can you get anymore Common Ground than that!?!?! 

I didn't get to see much of the fair really but I did see a sweet booth with a bunch of bonsai trees. I nearly bought one because ever since visiting the national National Arboretum, I have thought they are awesome. There was some guy there who seemed to know everything about them too, unfortunately he was engaged in a Bonsai geek conversation when I was there and I didn't get to pick his brain. Overall a good time. On the way home my car started skipping, I put some "drygas" (moisture remover) in the tank and it ran fine the rest of the way home (more on this later).

Taking down our booth @ Common Ground

This past week we've been going great guns at work and installed two wind turbines and a bunch of solar stuff too. The two sites each have a turbine and 3kW of PV installed (or nearly installed at the time of this writing). We're not technically installers but we have been working with electricians and installers of other wind turbines to train them on our equipment. We had an out of state installer come up and walk through our manual during one of the installs with us. One of the sites has a sweet fiberglass monopole tower that comes in sections that slide over each other and glue together. The whole rig goes up with a winch so it doesn't require a crane, it's pretty sweet. We all take turns winching the towers up, not only is it a workout but it feels pretty BAMF to be part of the tower raising. 

I'll eventually get a picture of the monopole installed, I hope. My phone died part way through the install. 

In other news the Subaru is down with a clogged catalytic converter. After racking my brain to figure out why my car was loosing power, I decided to just play the uninformed idiot and drive it until it became obvious. After a painful 5 miles from my house to Josh's place (my car squealing and riding the struggle bus the whole way) I parked it and looked underneath. My catalytic converter was straight up about to be on fire. It was bright bright orange all over  and did NOT look pleased at all. A few months ago I had my friend scan the OBD2 port on the car with his fancy scan tool. The code read "efficiency of emissions tank 2 low", being an elitist cheapskate fuck I said "Oh it's probably just some sensor." Now I think that is probably directly related to the recent failure. Screw you hindsight, screw you! Also there really isn't much of a way around the expense of replacing one of these because the catalyst inside the part makes them $$$. Additionally it would be very difficult to replace with one person and no lift. 

So, this weekend I've been tooling around on my motorcycle which discouraged me from driving around at night much. It's kind of unsafe to ride when it is too dark, even though it is pretty awesome feeling to ride down the road surrounded by darkness with only a small headlight leading you home. 

I'm taking tomorrow off to spend the day with my pops at Fryeburg Fair for woodsmans day! It's where all the "big name" lumberjacks (is that even a thing?) come to participate in events like the springboard chop, two-man saw, underhand chop and various other lumberjack things. My dad and grandfather used to go fairly regularly but I could never make it because school. Should be a wicked good Maineahbubguy time! 

Slingin' Planks

Goodly evening unto you Gentlemen. You'll be happy to know that I have shirked the beast of apathy and have really begun to develop myself as a person during my free time. Been working on several projects, keeping up an exercise routine and really been using my time effectively.

Nah I'm just kidding. I've been playing Minecraft about eight hours a day with my other underemployed Alfred alumni.

One of the several projects I've built. This is the Port of Hawkbeard's
very own Comedy Cellar. I need to go outside.

I've also cemented my status as an unemployed drain on the system and bought myself a bass guitar. Overarching logic being that if I'm going to be home, I might as well develop a skill. It's been super fun actually and I'm getting to the point I can begin to jam with my brother in a rudimentary fashion, so that's like bonding and shit, good stuff. Also the diet continues to go well, down 18 pounds now. I know I'm a nerd, because my diet started with a new Excel worksheet. From the data of the past month and a half it is estimated I could reach a healthy weight for my height and age by St. Patricks day with an R² value of 0.8!

That upswing last week can be directly correlated with Bradd
Gustafson coming home from Army Basic and offering to buy
all the beers. And wings. And Chinese buffet. And gas station
microwave chicken sandwiches at 4 AM. It was good night.

But I shouldn't be unemployed for long. I have an orientation lined up now for a plywood factory as a piler. Basically I'm at the end of the line, I check the planks for quality and then put them in the corresponding pile. I was a little hesitant but then I heard it was 40 hours a week, on weekdays with $12-14 an hour pay. That sold me. My plan has been to work somewhere until after New Years, living at home with zero expenses and then basically go on, take the money and run. Woo, hoo oooh. In the meantime, having money and weekends off will hopefully allow me to travel a bit on weekends. I like long drives and I miss doing them all the time.

In the meantime I'm halfway done painting the garage for a cool $200 which will pay for my trip to the Alfred Civil War this weekend. Currently we have 86 people fighting for Alfred State and 61 people fighting for Alfred University. Both sides are hell bent on bringing a solid 100. I'm amazed how well they're doing recruiting. Last year we had 75 people fighting, total, for all armies involved. We have doubled that and they are still recruiting. They are running into a problem with lack of weapons, going for a massive build-a-thon tomorrow night I guess is their plan. 

Funniest part. They were complaining how much it was all costing. I asked how much of the budget they had spent. They asked, "What budget?". Apparently the treasurer fucked off and none of them knew that the former officer corps fought tooth and nail for a $250 budget just for the war. They've been buying out of pocket. I asked if they had receipts and thank god they do so they can get reimbursed. They also paid for a sword workshop out of pocket, for which they had a $100 budget granted to them. Grumble grumble. They've already curtailed some of the events due to money concerns and if they'd of known three weeks ago this wouldn't have been a problem. Oh well, what can a graduate do?

Anywho, I'm sure I'll have pictures of all that shit. It's going to be crazy.

Just to start thing blag rollin' again

So, I haven't posted in a while and I have a bunch of pictures from my awesome adventure to the big city, NYC, to see my sister. So here is the basic run down of the trip, but I think I'm going to make an album on the facebooks for all the pictures.

We drove from Maine to NYC on a wednesday night and I took thursday and Friday off. It's the only time I've taken off from work thus far and I feel like it was definitely well spent. Anyways, we stopped in Portsmith, NH at the Portsmith Brewery which was pretty decent. A big part of this trip was good food so I kicked it off right with a Chorizo burger which kicked ass but lacked some sort of delicious sauce. We got into NYC late that night and Chris had to work in the morning (poor Chris).

Morgan and I had to do some much needed grocery shopping but then kicked it into full-blown tourist mode by walking across the Manhattan bridge. K, I lied about all the pictures...

Checkout all the GODDAMN CHEESE!!!!!

Seriously though, that place had a massive amount of cheese that picture doesn't even capture it all or do it justice.

Here you can see the Freedom Tower (also know as America's middle finger) and the brooklyn bridge. 

NYC skyline

We checked out all kind of things in Manhattan including a sweet clothing store where the prices aren't bad and they fit your clothing for free. We walked about 9-10 miles that day so we covered some serious ground. Checked out Times square where there were about 6 different people dressed as Elmo. I also saw Iron Man, Batman and Spider-man hanging out there...I dunno... they seemed legit. Basically anyone in costume tries to take a picture with you and then tries to get you to pay for it, tricksy super heros. We checked out part of the NYU campus where there were these BAMF guys who had these huge steel rings that were large enough to stand in and they would ride them around on flat ground and do sweet tricks. Also, they were jacked.

Morgan brought lobster back with her from Maine so we cooked those that night but a bunch of them had actually died. If you know anything about lobster, you know that it is risky business to cook an already dead lobster. So, after deferring to the internet which basically said that as long as they haven't been dead for more than 24 hrs we would be fine. Since they probably had died within the past 12 we went for it and let me tell you..... Dead lobster is damn, damn, damnnnnnn delicious. I would almost consider killing it before I cook it next time. There were no ill effects whatsoever except that we ate more than our fair share of lobster that night. NOM.

The next day we went to the American Museum of Natural History, which was amazing. If you are ever in NYC and have a day to burn you should definitely check it out, it was sweet. It's also enormous. Protip: all admission (as far as I understand) is actually a suggested donation so when they say "That'll be $25," you can hand them a $10 and they won't bat an eye at you. Just saying. That being said I ended up paying full price, but that is beside the point! 

Narwhal!

So, one of the most hilarious parts of the museum (for me) was the plaque underneath this Narwhal skeleton that said something like "Obviously the Narwhal's sleek body was meant for swimming quickly through the ocean." That's all it said. No mention of the GIGANTIC FUCKING TUSK on it's head, nope no mention at all. What about the tusk man? We wanna know about the tusk, did it cross-breed with a unicorn? Are there any documented cases of Narwhals poking out each other's eyes on accident? If a Narwhal plunged headfirst into the sea floor would it be able to swim backwards to get it's self unstuck? THESE ARE THE QUESTIONS KEEPING THE WORLD AWAKE AT NIGHT PEOPLE!

After the museum we hit central park which was pretty cool. Lots of people running/biking and just a bunch of tourists. NYC is full of em for sure. That evening we went to this placed called BonChon to get their famous doubly fried wings, which were delicious and spicy as all hell. I don't know how Chris hasn't blown an O-ring or something because he ate them like he didn't want to live. We went to a comedy show that had this dude from 30 Rock as a headliner. It was hilarious and it was also just awesome how many comedy shows are happening at any given time in NYC. It's crazy and the selection of everything was just mindblowing. You've got options to see all of these comedy groups where really famous people came from for not that much money and it's awesome. 

The next day we went to this awesome food festival which was insane and had like every food known to man and unknown to me. On the way I got the stroke of brilliance to call Renee because her and Toby recently moved to the Bronx in pursuit of their various degrees in higher education. As luck would have it, Renee was actually in the area (quite a ways from where she lives). So, we met up with her and ended up going to the Bronx to check out their place and see Toby. We played some Munchkin and ate some animals crackers, you know... adult stuff. Apparently Renee is training to do roller derby and was doing the same course thing my sister had done earlier. That night we actually went to a legit roller derby which was BADASS. Chicks on roller skate beating the crap out of each other. I have to say one of the best parts about the whole thing is the names of the skaters. They choose their own witty names like "Puss and Glutes", "Donna Matrix", "OMG WTF", etc.

Then, on Sunday we went to this homebrew beer festival. We sampled 30 beers (equivalent to 5-6ish beers), the tasting started at like 1PM and we were there until like 4PM. They give you a card to write comments on and then vote for the best one at the end and let me tell you... my comment card is hilarious! At least I thought it was by the end of the time I was there, I kept it because at the time I was pretty convinced that it was an entire standup routine by its self. After all that day drinking, Mo and Chris took a nap. I went on a little city adventure by myself and just walked around Brooklyn. Cool town, too bad nobody knows about it... Anyways, that night I hopped the plane back to Maine (which was extremely empty) and landed with a bakers dozen of the finest bagels I've ever had. I brought them to work that morning and was the hero of the day. This concludes my awesome recap of my trip to NYC.

More recently (last weekend), I finally made good on something I'd been promising myself I would do since the beginning of the summer. I rode my motorcycle to the ocean and just dicked around. It was awesome and I highly recommend the many therapeutic benefits of a long motorcycle ride.

Yup, I should've done this more often...

This week it is back to business and preparation for Common Ground fair. Pika will have a booth there and I'll be there for a good portion of the fair. Hoping to camp out and meet up with some fun people. In the meantime I'll be salivating over cafe racer builds on the internet.

... Well that's just the cat's nuts!

So our kitten Remy had his manhood removed recently. This was him the morning after the procedure.

Considering...I mean that's pretty good honestly.

Been doing a lot of stuff at work recently (not like that is unusual...) but Friday we got to pour concrete for another site (relatively local). We needed two trucks to fill the hole for a 75 ft. monopole and a pole for a solar panel rack. In the morning I was running a concrete vibrator and in the afternoon I was programming stuff cause that's how we roll. Cool fact, this concrete has metal fibers in it which allows the foundation to be poured without rebar, pretty slick.

Don't fall in! That's a big hole.

My sister is home visiting from NYC, so I am hanging out back home with her and the family. She went wedding dress shopping today so I was left to my own devices at home.... where I realized I don't actually have a bed anymore. Kind of strange to not have a bed at your family's house, luckily we have a couch. Sleeping in strange places seems to be a common theme for me on the weekends recently, so the couch isn't too bad. 

I got the chance to sandblast my heat exchangers and paint them with some high temperature engine enamel. They look pretty decent, there was one spot that could possibly need some attention. I might eventually braze a little gap in the sheet metal closed but I might also just not worry about it. Hopefully the paint will preserve the metal for years to come.

It's weird all these people are going back to college, gives me a strange grown-up feeling. Things are kind of slowing down now that the college kids are leaving but I'm honestly feeling pretty OK with that. I made a list of stuff to do once I moved to Westbrook and I recently reviewed it... well let's just say I've got some stuff to do and I think this will give me a chance to get myself realigned to a more consistent schedule.  

I'll be off to NYC the middle of next week with Morgan and Chris. Looking for sweet things to do while I'm there so if you guys have any suggestions, let me know! Also, I miss you wankers!

Coffee

Today was a steak and eggs kind of day. So today, I had steak and eggs for breakfast. There are really three important points that make a steak and eggs breakfast.

1. Don't do it too often, you'll ruin the magic.
2. Remember, this is an occasion.
3. Always make like wayyyyyy more steak than eggs.

So right now I'm waiting to hear back about a job as a Potato Scientist. I don't know the official title but I'm sticking with that because that is what the description sounded like. Basically driving around picking up potatoes and then testing them for quality and stuff. I'm hopeful, since it's a good paying job near home that ends around December, so exactly what I was look for. Also, I'd get to put Potato Scientist on Facebook, and that's important.

That doesn't start for a week or so, so in the meantime it's same old unemployed crapola. A lot of spending all day really really tired and having difficulty doing stuff because I'm so tired and just wanting to go to bed. Then I crawl into bed when I just can't take it anymore and suddenly a carnival pops into my head that no amount of melatonin seems to be able to shut the hell up. The next day I wake up and I'm really really tired and having difficulty doing stuff because I'm so tired and I just want to go to bed. Then I crawl into bed when I just can't take it anymore and suddenly a carnival pops into my head that no amount of melatonin seems to be able to shut the hell up and so I wake up the next day and I'm really really tired....

This is literally the only problem I'm dealing with on any level right now. Twenty four hour days, seven day weeks, over three months now spent almost exclusively just trying to tackle a basic insomnia problem and no dice. The thing is I know what's causing it. I'm not doing anything and apparently when I don't do anything, I absolutely cannot justify sleeping. My brain starts looking over the day and goes "Really? That's what we did. Fuck that you need to learn a skill or something Jesus Christ!".

Oh well, I'm going to try the bed thing again. Maybe it'll work this time. It won't, but a man has to dream.

I Got Elon All Figured Out

Okay, so we're all big time fans of the Musk around here. He does a lot of neat stuff what with the rockets and the cars and the tubes.

So it's no surprise that he's been working on a gesture based rocket design program that prints in titanium, you know, just like in Iron Man. He admits he doesn't have the hologram bit down yet, but you know he's got a guy on it.

To me, Elon has always seemed like a man who is infuriated with how slow the future is getting here and took matters into his own hands. He wants to get rid of our fossil fuel dependence and put us in space again. His personal stated goal is to not just put man on Mars, but to put his own rocket designing ass on Mars.

Now let's review the facts here. Elon is an unrepentant futurist nerd who has been compared to Tony Stark so many times that he appeared in Iron Man 2 as an intellectual equal to Mr. Stark. We know he likes Iron Man. Hell, he's apparently built the computer that builds Iron Man.

Bearing all of these iron clad facts in mind, lets jump back to the fact that his stated goal and intention is to take his glorious entrepreneurial ass and place it firmly on another planet. So there are a lot things he needs to work on to accomplish that goal. One of those things he will need, would definitely be a space suit.

Now, if he has to build a space suit from scratch, well...

Let's just say I have a strange feeling I might be privy to some of the features and color choices for that particular project. I mean just ask yourself this, if you were him, you would, wouldn't you? I mean of course you would.

Fuckin' duh.

Canadians, Canadians Everywhere!

Been hitting up the hot spots in Maine recently and you know what that means.... Canadian tourists galore! Went to OOB last weekend and was surprised at the low quality of the actual beach. Seriously, the waves just pound you. It's actually kind of dangerous, we saw an older lady get cleaned out and suck up a lung full of water... she was NOT having it. Really the main attraction to OOB is for people watching, it ranks quite high for the state.

Then this weekend I trekked it up to Baxter State park with some of my ECE buddies and Chris in hopes of climbing glorious Mt. Katahdin. However despite our 4:30AM departure from Orono, we were too late to claim a spot to climb the mountain. Basically, you can reserve a spot to climb or you can forgo that, put your nuts on the table and just show up. Well that didn't work out very well. Gates open at 6AM, we showed up at 6:20AM and found ourselves in a long line of cars. Apparently people show up way before 6 to wait in line to claim their spots. Honestly, we shouldn't have been surprised as this was probably one of the best days of the year at Baxter state park. After being somewhat disappointed, we actually had a pretty awesome time! I am very sore. We essentially did the Marston Loop (one-minute hike my ass!), which involved a couple of cool peaks and some pretty sketchy awesome rocks to climb.

We landed at this parking lot about 4 miles from where we were parked but luckily a nice dude we met on the trail gave one of us a lift back to our car. I got stung by a bee and got a little banged up otherwise but managed to not roll an ankle or sustain any other injury which was pretty good because there were certainly plenty of chances! We got off the mountain around 3:30-4PM ish and started around 7:30-8AM so it was a pretty full day of hiking. We were all quite beat when we got off the mountain, everyone who wasn't driving promptly fell asleep due to pure exhaustion during the car ride home.

View of the backside of Katahdin

Those dark patches are shadows from the clouds, not lakes. It's so beautiful Lance has to avert his eyes. 

It was cool to see the shadows of the clouds move across the forests, it was a beautiful day and very clear. I should've taken more pictures. Oh, and don't pay any attention to Lance who was caught in a moment of struggle bus riding. 

After eating a Wendy's pretzel burger and making it back to Litchfield later that evening, I promptly slept for 12.5 hrs. Solid. Today, I painted some of my VW engine tins and helped my dad splitting some gigantic wood. Also, I made contact with one of the legendary VW enthusiasts in Maine by the name of Charlie Jordan. Like all BAMF Maine VW guys he is an old gearhead who has been working on aircooled motors for half a bazillion years and during that time has amassed a pretty awesome collection himself. I was looking for certain style heat exchangers for the bus and he responded to me with a better deal than I could've gotten basically anywhere else. That is one thing I really enjoy about VW stuff is the people I've met. I'm kind of digging into this really niche community of people and putting together the pieces of who has what and knows stuff. Between Charlie and Steve (guy who is doing my engine) they're responsible for rebuilding a good deal of the air cooled vehicles in the state but I don't think anyone quite realizes that. 

Anyways, Charlie has been restoring (slowly I might add) a Notchback. Which is a pretty sweet looking ride and very rare in Maine. Despite being an enthusiast and attending several VW shows in Maine I have yet to see one in person or even on craigslist (Maine)... and trust me I have my radar on. As luck would have it, Charlie's Notchback is in the body shop getting a minor detail on the paint job finished... so I didn't get to drool over it. I did, however buy his heat exchangers and chat with him a bit. He has been all over the place in old school VWs. He did Rt. 66 in his split window bus and he spent a bunch of time in Europe hiking and doing some car related things. That is the one thing about VW enthusiasts, they tend to have similar interests and personality traits. They're very detail oriented and by the book folks when it comes to anything technical. At the same time though they wear tie dye and draw naked women on their vehicles. It makes for interesting conversations. That's another thing.. they love to talk. Which is good because so do I and I am trying to trick them into giving me their years of VW knowledge.

This bus has been basically everywhere

3.5 bugs, 1 squareback, two vanagons and a split window bus

A few minutes after I arrived Charlie rolled up in a 72 bus (from California I might add) which he basically stole off some dude and has been running for the past several years with a rebuilt engine. Inside his garage are another few bugs, a Porsche or two and some other air-cooled car that I didn't recognize the name of. Charlie has all indicators of being a complete boss. 

Things at work have been cool, we're building some sweet test equipment that I probably won't talk about on the internet but if you're down my way I can show you what we've been up to. 

Anyways, hoping to possibly work on the engine next weekend but we'll see how that goes. For now I will keep myself occupied by trying to figure out why my motorcycle wants to run sometimes but not other times....