How to make a virge

In the Episcopal church, the verger is sort of like the drum major for the procession - they get everybody lined up, make sure everybody knows what to do, and lead the march. During the service they make sure everybody is doing what they're supposed to do in the right order.
The virge is the stick they carry that has a cross on the end of it.
When my wife became a verger it was a great opportunity to get into the ritual and learn about why they do what they do. But all the stuff you have to wear comes from England and it starts to add up real quick.
We figured the virge could be a home made job - so here's how I did it.
I started out by sawing a piece of nice wood (we're using cherry for the pictures) about 1 3/4 by 1 3/4 and 36 inches long. In the top two inches I drew a picture of what I wanted the cross to look like. I made it wide-footed so it wouldn't break off or anything if it got bumped around. Then I used a coping saw to saw the lines almost to where they met, but not quite. I didn't want to chip off the parts with the lines on them so that when I sawed the adjacent side the lines would still be there to work with.
Once I had all those lines cut I sawed in at the base and cut away the parts I didn't need. Here's what it looked like at that stage:
That's actually the hard part. After that all you do is neaten it up. I used a shurform tool (like a grater) and a plane to make the handle round and taper it down to the end. Then I used a file and sandpaper to smooth out the whole thing and finished it with fine sandpaper. I used tung oil and no stain to coat it. It came out pretty good looking.
The purple thing in the background is a shroud for Lent.
At the opposite end I screwed on a solid brass cabinet knob ($3.99 from Home Depot), to give it some heft and twinkle. On the occasions when the verger wants to start a silent procession, they'll rap the floor with the tail end of the virge.
I think if I were going to do it over i would select perfectly clear wood - my wife likes the knots and natural flaws in the wood but they stand out when you don't use a stain. Also it might be nice to make one out of red oak or ash.

Tracy and I got married - after 16 years

Tracy and I met 16 years ago when I was waiting for a Peace Corps assignment and she was about to put in an application to Peace Corps. So we had a great initial conversation and hit it off pretty well. We were both sponsors for a church youth group, which is where we first ran into each other. She was a successful sales manager and I had a new MBA that I wanted to use in some poor country to do small business development and be like the Ugly American in the book.
Since then a lot has happened. I did the Peace Corps, did hurricane relief after Mitch, trained Peace Corps volunteers, then went to work for a relief and development NGO. Tracy moved to Texas and became a school teacher. She got more liberal and I got more conservative. Not a modern-day conservative but more of an old-fashioned pay-off-your-fiscal-debt, invest-in-infrastructure, leave-some- for-the-grandchildren and only-start-wars-you-absolutely-have-to kind of conservative.
Last year some of Tracy's students started reading about Darfur and wanted to learn what they could do about it, so she remembered she knew somebody who used to do stuff like that and gave me a call.
My mother answered the phone. My mother has COPD and so I'm looking after her these days. They were both glad to reconnect but my mother didn't have enough breath to stay on the phone long. She told Tracy to call back later.
Anyhow, blah blah blah. We eloped to Arkansas two weeks ago. We told everybody we were eloping instead of inviting family and friends from all over the country and elsewhere to get together, especially with both of us having parents and other family members who are no longer so mobile as they once were. We tallied up what everybody would have spent getting together plus what we would have spent on a big wedding and it added up to about what a small house is worth. We decided we'd rather not ask everybody to blow their money.While we were taking pictures in the haunted Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, a ghostly orb posed with us in this picture. We took it as a friendly gesture and are not sure yet if it followed us home. We already have two cats and two big dogs. The more the merrier.


Jo and her husband Dave helped us elope.

Cleaning the air by driving your car

Hey, I'm into soil carbon. I don't get emotional about much, but this kind of stuff make me wax rapturous.
This is such a beautiful solution to global warming I hope to God they can make it practical (and profitable) on a humongous scale. The people at Carbon Scientific have figured out how to suck carbon out of the air while producing hydrogen to drive your car with. The more you drive, the cleaner the air gets.

The process takes any kind of biomass (peanut shells, kudzu, leaves, twigs, weeds, whatever you got) and turns it into 2 extremely useful products:
1. Hydrogen - that you can use to generate electricity. The only pollution produced by turning hydrogen into electricity is water. Can you imagine every car in LA running on hydrogen? That big brown cloud over it would be a rain cloud instead.
2. Carbon granules made out of the carbon that the plants pulled out of the air and is never going back again. Mix these granules in the ground and you can turn infertile soil fertile - permanently. You can grow crops in the desert.

The process is exothermic - meaning once you get it started, it runs itself as long as you keep pouring leaves and twigs in. Unlike other ways of producing hydrogen, this process does not consume petroleum.

What's so great about that? Plenty.

• Energy would be a renewable resource, and could be produced wherever anything grows - the jungles of the Amazon Basin, Central Africa, Nebraska, Canada - anywhere. Farmers all over the world would be competing in the energy market - not just oil cartels.
  
• Hydrogen could be produced locally, right on the farm - and pipelined to neighborhood fuel stations for sale. Not shipped around the world in tankers. Terrorists could not disable an entire city with one bomb to a power plant because energy production is distributed all over the place.
• Instead of piping hydrogen, farmers could use fuel cells to produce electricity and sell it into the grid - reducing the need for giant smoky power plants. Everywhere electricity gets produced, greenhouse gases get pulled out of the air, not pumped into it.
• Carbon granules, when mixed in the soil, make a permanent fertilizer that holds nutrients at the root level until plants use it - nothing gets leached out, nothing gets wasted. Meaning that farmers could cut their use of P,N,K fertilizer to about 1/10 of what they use now. Terra Preta soil created by inhabitants of the Amazon basin over 500 years ago by mixing charcoal in the soil is still amazingly fertile after half a millennium. They sell the stuff by the bag. Here is a BBC special that was done on it. They think that the legend of El Dorado came about from DeSoto observing enormous civilizations based on the tremendous wealth that the soil produced. He assumed it must have been because they had piles of gold somewhere.

What comes next? They get this thing down to the size of a combine and cheap enough that a large farm could buy one. Biotech companies could produce crops with phenomenally high hydrogen content to kick up energy productivity. Since hydrogen comes from lots of sources (solar, wind, geothermal, biomass and petroleum) prices would be more stable than oil. OPEC countries would not be left out of the hydrogen market - they could break down petroleum, pipeline the hydrogen and keep the carbon. Farmers would not be dependent on food prices alone. You could expect people to start growing fuel crops where land is barren now. The air would gradually start getting cleaner. Soil would start getting blacker. Streams would run cleaner.

It's nice to know that while the bad guys are bilking us and fouling the environment, other people are quietly figuring out ways to fix things. I hope that an elegant solution like this ends up making somebody filthy rich.

Soapmaking part 2 - scenting and forming

Now that the giant slabs of soap have solidified and mellowed some, it's time to scent it and form it into bars. We're going to grate it with a cheese grater, mix in scent and use a home-made soap press to make bars out of it. These look like they're carved out of stone.
Why not just add scent when you're first mixing it? Because scented oil is expensive and is not the best soap making oil. Chemically, soap is a salt formed from fatty acids and a strong base (lye) bound up together. Essential oil is volatile - meaning it floats around in the air until it hits your nose and you can smell it. If you bind up the essential oil as soap, it's not floating in the air and you don't smell it as much. You wasted your money. We are waiting until the soap is already formed and all the lye is tied up before we add the oil so it sits on top where you can smell it.


The soap press is basically some 2x4s hinged together. The two parallel boards have 3-inch diameter plastic disks (made from a polyethylene cutting board) screwed to them to act as pistons that will push from opposite directions into a piece of 3-inch diameter PVC pipe (the Compression Cylinder) to form a 3-inch diameter puck out of a ball of grated soft soap. I also have cut two thin 3-inch teflon inserts (you can use milk carton plastic for this if you want) to keep the soap from sticking to the pistons. When you remove the soap puck, just peel off the plastic inserts for re-use.

When you construct the press, make the dimensions so that when the pistons are fully pressed all the way into the disk, the faces of the pistons will be parallel to each other, about an inch apart. It takes about 125 grams of grated soap to form a 1-inch thick soap puck.



For this batch I am going to color the soap with powdered sandalwood and add Himalayan cedar oil and Chinese cedar oil for scent - this is guy soap. The process is pretty simple. Just grate the soap first, being careful not to mush it together. Sprinkle on the sandalwood, dribble on your oil and toss lightly. It will take on the texture of buttered noodles. With parmesan.


At this point it is helpful to engage the services of one's 13-year old niece, who is SO not a brat, to help with the totally awesome part where you form the soap into balls in order to grate them a second time. I do this because if you shred it only once and form it the first time, it comes out looking like hamburger. If you grate it twice it has more of a granite texture, which is what I am trying for. Have your niece play with it and mush it and stuff until it's the way you like it.



Then weigh out 125-gram balls of it. Rub the inside of the PVC pipe and the plastic inserts with emollient oil to keep it from sticking. Put the PVC pipe over the bottom piston, drop in a plastic insert - oiled side up, drop in a ball of soap, put the other insert on top - oiled side toward the soap, and push the top piston down into it by putting your weight on the top board for a few seconds.

Open it up, take off the tube and push out the soap. Peel off the inserts. The forming and pressing process takes about a minute or two per bar once you get the system going.

Da-daaa.

I press a Chinese seal into it as kind of a signature while the soap is still oily and soft. You can get a stone (soapstone, actually) seal with a kind of Chinese phonetic transcription of your name hand-made by stone carvers in Hong Kong by going to fun alliance.

Use a potato peeler to champfer the edges of the soap bars.


Let the bars dry for a month or two at least. They are oily when you first make them but after a few days that oil will just become part of the superfatting of the soap and they will dry up.




I wrap them in wrapping tissue so they can keep drying out some more while waiting to be given away. I put the list of ingredients on the label in case somebody's allergic or vegan or something.

Soap making, part 1

Making Soap, Part One - the mixing and pouring part

I learned to make soap when I sponsored a Junior Achivement group in Guatemala. We made really soft soap then (so soft it had to be packaged in tubs), but the kids made money with it. The technique you see here is improved through years of trial and error and makes really excellent bar soap.
I kind of have a peculiar way of doing it but unlike most soapmaking I've read about, this is really foolproof if you use quality ingredients and follow the directions. I've never had a batch turn out bad doing it this way.

In this first stage we are going to make a giant slab of unscented soap. In the next stage we will scent it, form it into bars and package it.

I make up my formulas so they're heavy in emollients and about 5% superfatted, meaning that after all the lye molecules have attached to fat molecules there are still additional fat molecules to soften skin. Here's a typical recipe:
150 g. beeswax
1200 g. Olive Oil
800 g. Coconut oil
600 g. Palm oil
600 g. Palm kernel oil
200 g. Cocoa butter
200 g. Lanolin
200 g. Castor Oil
225 g. Sweet Almond oil
1 oz/28,000 I.U. vitamin E oil (don't count this in lye calculation)
1700 ml water
565 g. lye (NaOH)
You can make up your own formula and calculate the amount of lye to use. Play around with the proportions and use different stuff. If you're coloring it with ultramarine or other mineral pigment, add that during this stage too. If you're using organic coloring agents, like turmeric, carrot powder, green tea, etc., save it for the next stage. The extremely high pH of the lye in this stage will turn it brown - most of that color will come back later though.

The amount of lye to use is specific to the amount and type of oil used. Each oil has its own SAP value, the amount of lye it takes to make soap out of, or saponify it. I used to have an Excel spreadsheet I made to calculate SAP values but now I just go online to Pine Meadows and use their lye calculator. It's easy and accurate.


Use an electronic balance that measures in grams. That is nearly three times as accurate as measuring in tenths of an ounce. I use a My Weigh that costs about $30 - $45.


Weigh out and melt the beeswax first since it requires pretty high temperature to melt. If you had it all mixed together you would ruin some of the other ingredients like lanolin by the time you got it hot enough to melt the wax.
Olive oil takes heat pretty well too so I gradually add that to the melted wax. It will partially re-solidify with each addition of cold oil but just stir it until it re-melts.


After that the rest of the oils and waxes can be added - except the vitamin E.
Heat gradually.
It should take about an hour to melt the whole thing. While it's melting, get the other stuff ready.



I use cold (refrigerated) water to dissolve the lye in. It is going to heat up. This way it heats up less and makes less fumes. Measure the water into a Pyrex pitcher in a cold water bath.



The fun, dangerous, tricky part with the lye.
This is what makes soapmaking an extreme sport and earns soapmakers their daring reputation for living life on the edge.
Put on your rubber gloves now. Wear glasses or goggles. Long sleeves. If you happen to own a lab coat, put it on. Or an old shirt. Keep a bottle of vinegar handy. If you should get a bit of lye on your skin, go over to the sink and pour vinegar on it.
Open a window and turn on an exhaust vent. This is going to make fumes that are irritating to inhale. Tell everybody in the house what you are about to do so there are no interruptions to deal with. Put the cats outside because this process is about to get enormously fascinating to them for some reason. No multitasking during this part. Pay lots of attention when you're working with lye.


Weigh out the lye into a plastic containter then take it over to the cold water. Start stirring the water and pour in the lye. Keep stirring until the lye is dissolved, about 2 minutes. The mixture will heat up. Keep your face out of the fumes. When you're finished stirring, rinse off the stirrer - don't just set it down.



Pour the oil into a mixing bucket and start checking the temperature of both the oil and the lye as they cool down. Use a meat thermometer. You are looking for them both to come into the 100 - 120 degree Fahrenheit range at the same time. They don't have to be precisely the same temperature - despite what the experts tell you. They're wrong and I'm right on this.


Meanwhile start getting your soap mold and insulator ready.
Line your mold with plastic sheeting (the kind you get from Home Depot to cover the doors and windows against t3rr0r!st attacks). Tape the corners to hold it in place. The mold I use is a food container about 10 by 16 inches and 3 inches deep. Cut another piece of plastic film to cover the soap once it's poured. These can be washed and re-used.


Your insulator is a box or trunk containing two plastic trash bags, each about half filled with foam peanuts like you get when you mail-order something. Lay one in the bottom. Form a nest in it using the soap mold.



Get your mixing area ready. I spread out plastic sheeting on the floor and pull up a chair. Set the mixing container with the oil on it and get an electric hand mixer plugged in. Make sure it reaches the bucket. Get your vitamin E ready - it will go in at the end of the mixing. Get comfortable - this will take from 20 to 40 minutes of mixing.


When both the oil and the lye are between 100 - 120 degrees F, start the mixer going in the oil on high speed. Pour the lye into the oil in a steady stream - it should take about a minute to pour all the lye in. Keep mixing the oil for at least the next 20 minutes or so, until it is thick like pudding - not just where you can draw a trace on the surface but where you can pile it up. It does not hurt to over mix it - again, I differ with the experts on this. But again I'm right.

Add the vitamin E and mix for another 5 minutes. Scrape down the sides and mix it all in. The vitamin E is going in at the end because it is not only good for skin, it also keeps any unbound oil (remember this is superfatted soap) from going rancid. There's less unbound oil at the end of the mixing so the Vitamin E can be more effective on it.

Then pour the soap into the mold and spread it out even with a spatula. Lay the smaller piece of plastic sheeting directly on top of it and smooth out the bubbles. This will keep it from forming a crust.

Set the soap in the insulation nest and cover with the other bag of styrofoam peanuts. Close the lid and don't open it again for 48 hours. It is going to heat up and accelerate the saponification process then cool down on its own. You want to let it go through this without letting the heat out. That heat makes molecules move around. The more they move around the more likely fat and lye molecules are to find each other and the more thorough the saponification is.
Keep your gloves on while you clean the bucket and utensils you just used. The stuff is not soap yet - just emulsified oil and lye. So it's still real caustic.


After at least 48 hours (you can even leave it in there a week or two if you want), take the soap out, peel off the plastic sheeting, and cut it into smaller chunks. Place them in a box with some air circulation (like a file storage box) so they can dry out for a few more weeks. The saponification process is still going on, but at a much slower rate now. It's 95 - 98% done but that 2 - 5% free lye has not found its fat molecule to latch onto yet so it will still be caustic. Give it a few more weeks to finish off. You don't want to use soap until at least 2 months after it's made so be patient.

We'll come back and finish the soap after it's aged a few weeks.

Composting for fun and revenge

Just about everything rots eventually. Besides three compost bins I use for gardening, I am composting just about everything I can get my hands on. I figure, why not make a hobby of letting stuff rot? Some people spend their non-working hours drinking, some like collecting NASCAR memorabilia. Composting makes just as much sense as anything else and it's cheaper.
My back yard is on a slope and subject to erosion caused by runoff from an apartment complex next door. In a combination of techniques I learned in the Peace Corps, I have built several terraces to slow down the water and let it filter into the ground. One of the terraces is made by digging a trench along the contour of the land and overfilling it with anything I can find, both mineral and organic, that will eventually turn into soil. It holds back the eroding soil and makes a great deposit for stuff I want to get rid of.
Among the stuff that has gone into the composting terrace: most of my old college textbooks; the old doorframes, sheetrock, plywood paneling and carpet pads from the house renovations I'm doing; used cat litter; brush and branches cleared from the property; all the cardboard packaging from anything I buy or receive by mail or UPS; tons of raked up leaves; old phone books and newspapers. About the only things that don't go into it are recyclables like plastic, metal and glass and anything I would not put into a landfill. Since I'm not going to use it for vegetable gardening, this compost heap gets stuff I normally wouldn't put into the compost bins.
I planted bamboo on the terrace to keep the stuff in place and make it look nice. Once it's all covered in leaves it doesn't look half bad. The amazing thing is the enormous amount of stuff I have put in the ground over the past three or four years. It keeps breaking down and making room for more. It has saved me the cost of renting a dumpster to get rid of the stuff I've pulled out of the house in the process of renovation. Even with the large number of trees on the property I've never put leaves out for the city to pick up - in fact I get leaves from the neighbors and use them too.
The advantage of doing all this is that eventually I will end up adding carbon content to the rocky, clayey soil so it will not only be more fertile but will absorb and filter water better, helping the groundwater and reducing runoff. All that carbon came from the air and if it ends up in the soil it is another couple tons of carbon people don't have to breathe.
I'll take pictures of it and monitor the progress of some of the slower-rotting components (like my old Organic Chemistry lab guide) and let you know how it goes.


UPDATE March 2007: Here's what the Financial Accounting textbook looks like after a year. The stuff between the covers approximates the financial accounting content that I have retained between my ears after about 5 career changes, none of which involved any accounting. The worm is a bonus and goes to show that some good comes of everything.







Here's a foolproof method of figuring out what to compost and what won't compost: throw it all in the compost and after a year fish out what didn't rot and put it in the recycle bin. Let God sort it out then let the city sort out what's left. Not much doesn't rot. Here's what's left after a year, and I see some of it came from the gigantic bolus of Christmas wrapping that went in back in December.


Highly secure way to prevent fraudsters from raiding your credit card statements and bank statements: don't just shred them - ROT THEM! Keep your compost bin in the back yard with your untrained Doberman so scammers don't raid it.




Not many people like these things but they are gold to a gardener: Sweet Gum tree balls. Get your niece to rake 'em up out of the yard as a penalty for some concocted offense like using your cell phone to text message her friends without your permission, and then use them for mulch in the garden between rows. They drain water and you can walk on them and keep your feet clean. After a year they break down but if you dig them in before that they keep the soil aerated.

UPDATE March 2009: Last fall we had a "Green" reception where I work, and they used compostable cups and napkins and stuff. I brought all that home to compost. They have been in there for 6 months now and the cups look good as new:
I will check back after they've been in there a year and let you know how they look then. I'm very patient but if people are putting green labels on things that aren't, they need to be busted.