|
|
|
scrap borosilicate glass
Wednesday, May 28 2008
As I was cleaning out my French press after my morning urn of coffee, the thing slipped out of my hand in the sink and smashed into exactly three pieces. Normally I don't clean out my French press until before I make my coffee, and evidently this slight change of ritual was just enough to jinx the whole delicate system. Now I needed a new French press, since without one I'd have to reeducate my morning auto pilot on the operation of a coffee machine (which, by the way, produces noticeably inferior coffee, one richer in bitter oxide byproducts).
Since a Bodum French Press is made out of borosilicate glass (the same material as Pyrex), I kept the shards for future use and experients, one of which I performed immediately. I tied a hemp string around the unshattered part of the urn and soaked it in paint thinner, lit it, and plunged it into water. With hollow cyllnders of normal glass, this the way to get a clean segmentation perpendicular to the axis. But, as I learned from this experiment, borosilicate glass is too resistant to heat shock for this trick to work.
Later I dropped Gretchen off at the Hurley Avenue traffic light in Kingston so she could catch a ride with a friend up to Troy for a lunchtime business meeting (writing that, a scene from of Romy and Michele's High School Reunion popped into my mind).
Among the errands I ran today was another to the DMV in Kingston to attempt, yet again, to register the car. Again I failed because I failed to bring the title; the thing I'd brought was just the latest in a long line of title reassignment forms, one of which I know to be null and void because I'd accidentally signed it. This was going to mean we'd have to communicate some more with the shady cast of characters from the car's past, a part of history Gretchen and I had thought we'd managed to get behind us.
While I was out, I stopped at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. A replacement Bodum French press cost $40, which seemed a little excessive, but I wanted an exact replacement, allowing me to use the metal hardware from the old one should I need to. (I'd actually had to fix a broken brass coupling on the old one, and had done so by arcwelding it, a technique whose success had surprise me.)
This afternoon, I did a bunch of work in the garden, first expanding it by ten or twelve square feet westward into a lower area with shallow clay-rich soil. To improve and deepen the soil, I gathered 55 gallons of top soil from a large pile across Wynkoop from the Hurley Mountain Inn. I planted six corn plants in this new part of the garden, which will mean that we won't be stealing as much corn from the Esopus Valley fields, and also that the corn we do eat won't be saturated with chemicals. (Among the many petrochemical management techniques used by the big corn farming families, the Gills and the Davenports, the most spectacularly-horrible is crop dusting by airplane.)
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?080528 feedback
previous | next |
