400 lb rusty steel door.

Howdy kids! Here's a fun chemistry experiment you can try at home!

If you have a 400 pound steel door—say, from the Titanic—and it's seriously rusty from being submerged in the ocean's depths after an unforeseeable (well, unforeseen anyway) accident with an iceberg, here's how to clean it up!

Soak it in fresh water for, I don't know, weeks? months? until all of the salt has leached off/out of the metal. Hang it from chains in your driveway and power spray all the rust off the surface. Leave it overnight so that it "flash rusts," which means that it develops a thin, uniform layer of rust all over. The next morning, mix a pail of tannic acid* and water. Scrub this mix onto every inch of the door using a big brush whenever possible, and a toothbrush when you need to get into small spaces. The whole mess gets foamy and starts to turn purple-black.
(Here comes the chemistry part!)
Tannic acid reacts with the iron oxide—rust—to form iron tannate. Even though iron tannate turns the steel black, it's way more stable than rust, which means you've essentially halted the corrosion process!

How cool is that?

Now you can rub on a thin coat of wax to make the door look all shiny and new, in a really-old-and-messed-up-from-being-in-the-ocean kind of way!

So take that to your science fair and win a blue ribbon!**


* Tannic acid has a really distinctive smell. It's like a mix between balsalmic vinegar and molasses. Almost yummy in a weird way.

** I'm talking about adult chemicals and processes using cute language just to be funny. Please don't let young people use chemicals without adult supervision. Even adults should only use industrial chemicals with proper training.

Bad News/Good News

Alright, let's just get this bad news out of the way. I owe you the sad truth, gentle reader.

One of the coolest things I've seen at my work was that fingerprint on the pot from the Titanic, as mentioned in the Ghost's Fingerprint entry. Well, one of the women who does chemical analysis and testing was in the lab today. She was looking at the stock pot, so I excitedly asked, "Hey, have you seen the fingerprints?"
She said, "Oh, crap, did someone get fingerprints on this thing?"
I said, "No! Check it out, right over here you can see old fingerprints etched into the surface of the pot!"
She tipped the pot carefully in the light only briefly before saying off-handedly, "Nah, that's totally superficial. All this white haze—which looks like one stage of corrosion—is just on the surface. I'm about to clean it off. This fingerprint is from someone who handled the pot on it's way here, or it might even be from one of us. We'll have to be more careful with these."

And in a few quick wipes, one cotton ball soaked in solvent—to my horror and dismay—wiped away what I thought was the fingerprint of a cook on-board the titanic.


It's hard to be overly excited about good news after that disappointment, but at least you know I'm giving it to you straight. In any case, the good news is that the bosses and I negotiated a position and a salary for me today. We found a number we could both live with, and a plan for some—but hopefully not too much—travel. So I should be able to keep writing stories involving objects of some historic significance.

Vibrio vulnificus

Amber had a stomach ache all weekend, and a pretty high fever which gave her chills and body aches. We figured it was the flu, but it wasn't really like any flu she's had as long as we've been togther. Well, today she went to work and found out that all of her friends who went to a raw oyster party last Wednesday had similar symptoms! The bummer, for the oyster industry, is the "party" was actually an educational and awareness event put on by the seafood industry for Congressional members and their staff.

Oops!

I'm sure they're totally mortified since the emails I was Cc:d on contained thoughts like, "I think I'm going to steer clear of raw oysters for a couple of decades."

The likely culprit is a bacteria called Vibrio vulnificus.

First Snow!

So, we had our first big snow this weekend! I immediately learned a few things, which I would like to share with my warmer-climate friends.

–Gloves and scarves are necessary survival equipment, not quaint fashion statements.
–Thick socks aren't always thick enough.
–Waterproof boots have their limits, so it's best to walk where the sidewalk is already cleared instead of sloshing through the soggy slush. Even if it's fun, there's a reason the locals don't do it.
–Shoveling snow for three hours to clear the lot at your work really puts a damper on the "magic" of snow.
–If you don't shovel snow up ASAP because it looks so pretty you just don't want it to go away, then it will re-freeze into an icy, slippery, dangerous, uneven, mess, and your neighbors will think you're terribly inconsiderate.
–It turns out you'll end up shoveling your walkway and the sidewalk at that point anyway, but it will be much harder work.
–Folks on the East Coast are too busy to notice a Californian excitedly making his first city-snowman, even if that snowman is swimming thru the snow, mouth gaping in terror, stick arms paddling wildly, red-berry eyes wide, as a snow shark fin closes in from behind. (That idea was ripped off from the "Snowman House of Horror" in a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.)

A quick job update: I'm obviously back in DC. The bosses and I are spending a week thinking about uses for me in the company which don't involve living in Houston for three months. I'll keep you posted if something interesting happens.

Joe Rut

Two stories (and a bunch of links) about how sounds from the East Bay are making their way to the East Coast!

Just to get off on the right foot here; I'd be suprised to find out that anyone could know me well enough to be reading this blog and not know who Joe Rut is, but just in case... he is one of our closest and dearest friends who is also an amazingly talented musician. If you haven't heard his music, or you need a(nother) CD, his website is here at joerut.com!

The first story is actually a bit of news. I woke up this morning and turned on Boot Liquor Radio, which is a really great country radio station (it turns out there is such a thing!) on the internet. The very first thing out of our speakers was Joe's voice singing Our Days Are Numbered which he performed with the lovely and fertile ladies of Loretta Lynch. I'm really glad that my friends are invading internet radio stations—if everything goes according to my plan, they'll take over the world!

The second story, involves my new work. In addition to being pretty cool folks, they have fantastic taste! (Except for their fixation with Houston.) I was talking with a guy in the shop about music, and we ended up swapping a few discs. I gave him a two disc mix of music by my friends. A few days later he said, "There's a lot of good stuff on there! I really liked disc 2 track 11." As soon as I got home, I played my copy to see what that song was. It was Joe Rut's El Dorado! That was the song for our first dance at our wedding! How's that for good taste?

In addition to those I've already mentioned, some of the other music by friends from home which is keeping us company includes:
Joel Murach
86 (the band)
Val Esway
Ramona the Pest

Houston, we have a problem.

I've been shipped off to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The restoration company is cleaning up a Saturn V rocket which has been on display—outdoors—for almost thirty years. They've been working on cleaning it up for two years, and are hoping to be done in about three months.

I was originally scheduled to come down, work on-site for a few weeks, and then go back to working out of DC. This job was going to involve a fair amount of travel, but that has changed. Two people left the company, and now the job which is available to me is to be based out of Houston. They would fly me to DC for one weekend every two or three weeks.

I'm probably going to pass on the offer tomorrow when the owner flies down here to check on the rocket's progress. It's a total bummer, because there are some really cool things about this job, but the "Pros" list is getting it's ass kicked by the "Cons" list—particularly because "travel" means "live in a hotel in Houston for three months."

I'll try not to insult any Houstonians by bad-mouthing their city, but suffice to say that tonight, I'm looking forward to a second exciting evening of hotel-room army-man battles. Yesterday I had to stop at the drug store for laundry detergent. I walked through the toy isle, and saw army men. I picked up one pack of fifty in green, and one pack of fifty in orange, and they're locked in bloody combat on the tables which I pushed together. I took a couple of pictures just so y'all could make fun of me! (*achem!* I mean, just so you could all make fun of me.)