Day 7

First official day in Mountain Top C building!!! The hype is real. It looks like an old airplane hanger, with ceiling fans straight out of the hovercraft in The Avengers movie. (no jokes, where's iron man?? calling Robert Downy Jr). Despite how awesome they look, they blow an annoyingly cold breeze onto all of the helpless victims below. Note to Self: dress for the tundra. The hanger is set up with 29 different sectioned off work stations, using rolling white boards as dividers. Strips of outlets are provided, along with four chairs and a table for each. It looks moderately like a classroom environment, that is, if classrooms were in giant loading bays for spaceships and other aircrafts. They added metal mesh over the railings of the "observation deck" I'm assuming so we don't jump off or fall through? I couldn't decide. They built a "pantry" which includes two tables and chairs, and a vending machine with actual food in it, like.. Fage yogurt. There is an outside seating area on a cement patio with a few tables surrounded by chairs, which I sought refuge from the cold today several times. They are in the midst of building two workshops, one being a woodshop, and a room full of fish tanks for the aquaponics project. Cannot wait to make friends with them. The building is not quite finished, but it's come along way from a week ago.

 Our day began with our daily deliverables in Alec's tiny handwriting that we've all grown to love. To properly "move in" we decided Alec's enormous speakers would be a logical addition. We made ourselves comfortable at a section with Wheely-chairs (the best kind of chairs) and got to work. Lots of sticky notes and white board writing, per usual. Our song choice of the day was 8 days a week by the Beatles.

Now that all formal business is taken care of, I can begin to talk to you about sciencey stuff. We took the initiative to create a collaborative list of the Steps to Composting. Since we realized we would soon be composting for realsies, and we need to seem adequately educated on what we're doing. Here's what we came up with..

Steps to Composting:

1.) Prepare the site

     a. flat land

     b. drainage ditches

2.) Making the Pile 

     a. start with bulking agents (woodchips/hay)

     b. layer food waste/dirt/bulking agents

3.) Manage the Pile

     a. keep track of necessary data

     b. add food waste and bulking agents as needed

     c. turning the pile

     d. covering with dirt and a tarp

4.) Curing and Starting a New Pile

That's a streamlined but expandable list that seems moderately appropriate for beginners to start composting. Crossing our fingers that we know what we're doing when the time comes, but a piece of me knows that we'll be just winging it out there by ourselves. Advisors are great guidelines, but that's just it, they are guiding us and nothing more. We are coming up with the "assignment" on our own. It's our project. It's our baby, and there are no limitations to where it can go besides ourselves. We are our own limits. Which is sweet and scary at the same time. "Blessing and a curse" Alec had said to a reporter today. Seeing as we were one of 3 groups out of the 29 total that actually showed up today, and we had a week of project under our belt, the journalists were on us like white on rice. They all wanted pictures of our boards and they stood there, four in a row, all taking down the same notes as we spoke about our project. One guy said he worked for national media, like Philadelphia and New York.

After our composting steps lists, we talked a bit about Leachate, which is compost run-off water that mixes with drinking water sources making them unhealthy for the users. We came up with possible ways to avoid leachate, keeping track of them and deciding which ones we were going to implement for our Alpha Test Phase.

Today Alec also proposed something that really got our gears going. He suggested we create some sort of robotic sensor system to measure temperature, soil moisture and oxygen levels. Upon further research, we saw that this could be done using an Arduino (which I was completely unfamiliar with at first). It's gonna take a lot more research and experimenting and testing, but I think it adds a whole other aspect to our project and I'm looking forward to where it takes us.

We visited Bill Best, our favorite man to bother during the week, and bounced some ideas off of him. He likes our work, and thinks our "ideas" have finally become a "project". According to his definition anyway. That man has never once told me I couldn't do something. He's given me helpful suggestions on where to take something that wasn't fully developed, but he has never told me No. He truly believes in people, and well, ideas. Which makes sense, because he's our IDEAS advisor/dean.

We split for lunch and independent research, learning as much as we could stand about Arduinos and robotic sensors. Meeting up again at 3:30, shared our findings, made some plans for tomorrow, and called it a day. I also learned that Hot and Spicy Cheez-Its are the way to be. Always. Well, Looking forward to actually composting soon, and toying with some Arduinos. For now, that's about it.