Day 12

I picked up Ben this morning with two 5-lb buckets full of food waste from Brodhead. Difficult to explain my excitement. Alec was twenty minutes late because he was picking up a second arduino from a friend, so Tori, Ben and I spent those twenty (well.. twelve, because let's face it I was late) minutes playing with remote controlled helicopters. We got down to business working on rules, regulations, and an overall game plan for the upcoming weeks. Not that we were discouraged from Tuesday's meeting, the opposite actually, we knew we needed to step our game up to play in the big leagues. We took a visit to our main support system, Bill Best. He let us stay and chat for upwards of 45 minutes before parting with a few inspiring words, "just have fun with it" and "don't stop what you were doing just because they told you to". He's one of my favorite people on the planet.

We had a 12:30 meeting with Jason at the garden, and a 1pm appointment at Wilbur Powerhouse to use the soldering equipment. Being short for time, we figured we would skip lunch and leave early. How wrong we were. Worst decision our group has ever made in hindsight. But, after our meeting with Best, we set off to the garden for a rousing hour of composting. Unloading, dumping, turning, pitchforks, wild rats, ants, garbage, mold, dirt, hay, shovels, garbage, woodchips, oh and did I mention other people's garabage?! I'll be amazed when I see this pile of junk and food waste and paper plates turn into usable fertilizer. After turning the pile and adding our new food waste, we removed all of the non-compostable utensils by hand and put them in a bucket. We piled it high, and put the tarp back on, leaving the wild rats to come and go as they please in peace. We waited for Jase, the garden guy, to come show us how to use the generator to power the water supply. It was nifty to see, and cool they let us use all their facilities on our own. Adult problems. Once we were through there, we headed to Wilbur.

Stomachs grumbling, we hit the ground running, not knowing a single thing about soldering. Two hours later, we had some pretty wicked setups going on. Soldering little teeny tiny temperature sensors to 20-ft wires and have them still work and give accurate readings is very promising for the upcoming steps of creating SUSAN. I can't wait until tomorrow where hopefully we make a functioning prototype model using the PVC and caulk again. Still working on waterproofing it.

I edited an entire video of what we did today, but due to youtube copyright issues, I couldn't upload it without it being muted. I'm not sure how to avoid this problem, but it's very, very frustrating. So, instead, here are some pictures from today.