As I Xi It

The other day, I found a few boxes of stroopwafels which I brought the last time I went through Schipol (in 2009 when returning from Cape Town). They still looked fine, a nice golden brown, caramelly colour and seemed to smell fine too. There were no obvious signs of spoilage that I could see.

This morning I had one of these “vintage” stroopwafels with my coffee and I’ve got to say, it tasted as good if not better than some of the more recent variants! I wonder if perhaps they’re the dutch version of Twinkies.

Expiry date

Breakfast

No problems here

Anything’s worth a shot right?

I’m chewing away and it feel like a Holland & Barretts just opened up in my mouth. On the back of the pack, it says it contains Bacopa monnieri, which for those who know their planted aquariums, is a submerged aquatic macrophyte. Perhaps once I’ve finished the pack, I’ll have a nibble on a few leaves out of my fishtank.

Academic doping

Since the post about my impromptu stove, I seem to have developed a bit of an obsession with testing out different hand sanitizing gels and built up a mini stove kit.

That delightful Aladdins cave also known as Poundland, tend to have a veritable selection of hand sanitizers at low low prices. I picked up a few bottles and also some small stainless steel pots.

It seems that the runnier the gel, the easier it is to ignite and leaves less of a gooey deposit behind.

A visit to Blacks turned up a solo cookset and I also ordered a Ti stove off eBay for a few quid. It claims to be 13.5g and seems mighty small and light to me. I also managed to dig out a small metal tin which used to contain mints that I had picked up from one of the many careers fairs back the in day. It made an ideal recepticle to hold the gel and once used, I could pop the lid back on to stop the residual goo from dripping all over my bag.

Since it was snowing today, I tested it out in the garden and noticed a few things -

1) You can’t tell if the gel’s lit or not, you just cannot see the flames, unless you stick your hand over the top to feel the heat. A bit dangerous really, not for the accident prone. To solve this, I sprinkled a few grains of coarse sea salt (NaCl) onto the gel. The sodium when burnt gives off a yellow flame indicating whether it’s “on” or not, a bit of GCSE Chem for you there. It doesn’t leave any soot behind. Addition of salt also separates out the ethanol from the water and seems to enhance the performance of the gel. I actually saw larger and more vigorous bubbles in the pot.

2) Making a windshield from the snow without gloves leads to very cold hands.

3) It takes longer for the water to heat up while in the cold outdoors than on my desk. Not surprising as there was a bit of a breeze outside this morning.

4) It’s pretty good at making boiled eggs and heating up baked beans. As this set up isn’t that hot, food tends not to get burnt onto the pan which makes cleaning a lot easier.

5) I miss real camping.

The whole kit packed together is quite compact for what it is. I could easily take it with me out photographying out in the wildness for a quick hot brew.

So, I was thinking about disaster preparedness this afternoon. What to do if I needed hot water and there was no kettle or cooker about. This is what I came up with -

Yes, I am that resourceful!

Heats galvanised steel mesh red hot.

Hot choc.

It’s basically the metal casing from a used tealight, a tealight holder and some bent galvanised wire mesh. I used some ethanol based handgel which I’d had for some years (it’s de-gelled and gone liquidy now, that’s how old it is). The metal casing was filled up to just under 1 mm from the top.

I never got a vigorous rolling boil, the heat output just wasn’t all that much. It took around 10 minutes to get to a gentle simmer with 300 mls of water in.

The handgel burnt pretty cleanly, no sooty residue left on the underside of my mug. Despite the handgel itself having a slight perfume aroma to it, it was more or less odourless when burnt.

In an emergency situation where you needed a quick fix, it gets the job done.

On Sunday I came across a pond with some Lemna minor (duckweed) and Riccia (crystalwort). Being the biologist (& fishkeeper) that I am, I scooped up a sample and took it home.

Once at home, I filled up my tiny tank and floated my newly collected specimen. When I dropped it in, there were all these teeny tiny worms (possibly flatworms of some sort) which dropped to the bottom. They were very thin and about 1 mm long. Then there were some tiny worms, perhaps nematodes or some of annelid thrashing about. Of course, there were the obligatory Daphnia and some isopods and coepepods.

I stirred it with one of my ice lolly sticks and a leech dropped out! Further disturbance made some more drop out. Anyway, here’s a vid of two of them in motion. Perhaps I’ll do some photomicroscopy later. No doubt there’ll be some algae in the sample.

It was another Lee Valley afternoon yesterday. We went to some of the private hides and well, it was slim pickings. We put food out in the hope of getting some birds, but it just attracted the squirrels. A few birds did pop along for an afternoon snack, but I think the hides are over untill the autumn/winter. I really wanted a pic of a blue Jay. Anyway, there’s a montage of some of the squirrel shots.

Also a few stills. In the last photo, we trialed our floating camera platform. There are still some logistical issues to work out.

After an interview this morning, I strolled on over to Tottenham Court Road and popped into Paperchase to have a browse. They had some nice diaries, I quite liked the Moleskine and National Geographics ones. One of the other things I saw was a Travel Accessories kit. I looked at it and instantly thought “ooh, that looks ideal for collecting specimens!” There’s two dropper bottles which could hold C₂H₅OH and H₂O₂ for specimen preservation in the field and lichen ID; two round, flat containers to hold specimens or samples; a spray bottle for some other liquid (distilled H₂O) as well as a pipette and a spatula! It’s all held in a nice transparent zip bag so you can easily find things and there’s space for a x10 handlens too.

Wednesday and Thursday were quite busy days. I zonked out pretty quickly on Thursday night. Got up at 8.40 am Friday morning, but didn’t sleep till around 3.00 am in the wee hours of Saturday. But this morning I did get out of bed at 10.00 am.

I’m doubtful that this uberman sleep schedule works for me. There are plenty others out there in the blogosphere that have written about their experiences, I for one will be calling it quits here. I know its just shy of a week into a two week “adaptation period”, but I’m better off with one chunk of sleep (monophasic sleep) rather than a mix.

Day 1 was a bit of a flop. I’ve come to realise that I can’t take naps. All I do is have my eyes shut for half an hour, when I almost fall asleep, it’s time to get back up. So really, I only had 5 hours sleep.

Day 2 I had to head into uni so there were no times for naps. I got home and didn’t feel like much napping. There’s much yawning, but no napping. Probably had a fragmented 4 hours or so.

At the moment, I don’t feel as tired as I thought I’d be. I don’t think this whole uberman sleep schedule will work with me. In the past, I’ve managed to survive fine with just 6 hours of sleep each night for 8 years or so.

I intended to start off with a core 4 hours sleep but this morning I slept for 5 hours (6 – 11am), its now almost 3pm and I’m feeling rather sleepy. The thing is if I have a nap now, I’m likely to go past my 30 minutes.  Perhaps if I have a snooze in my easy chair rather than go to bed.