It’s weird to be back to the regular old grind of school and pretending to be looking for an after-school job. I wish someone would pay me for that. Or better. I wish Jerry would pay me to look after his stupid truck, which I have to do all the time for free.

However, it is cool to know all about making biofuel and running a biodiesel vehicle. The conversion isn’t actually hard, because you can put biodiesel through a regular diesel engine. In fact, the guy who invented the engine, Rudolf Diesel, ran his original prototype off peanut oil.

Rumor has it that Diesel, the man, was killed by Big Oil to keep his engine from catching on, and after his death, the oil companies made a petroleum derivative, called it diesel fuel, and hushed the whole thing about biofuels up.

If you are switching the engine out of an old vehicle, the important thing is to convert your fuel lines and filters, too, because biofuel will react differently with them, as I recently discovered.

In terms of the fuel itself, there’s all this controversy right now, because people are saying that we’re in the middle of a food crisis, and turning crops and land that are needed to feed people into fuel for vehicles is not the solution.

But, uh, hello, who ever told you to use food crops to make biofuel? The way most people, like Jerry, have been doing it since the sixties, is by recycling used vegetable oil, of which there is tons and tons going to waste in landfills every year.

What Jerry did was go around Ring City and strike deals with restaurants that normally throw out a buttload of used cooking oil. Some of them let him pick it up for free, some of them charge like their deep fryers are crapping gold.

Either way, the whole point is to take something that would normally be waste and turn it into something useful again.

The idea is not to turn corn crops into fuel. That is totally insane. Oh, the media. You so crazy.

Anyway, once you’ve got your fuel, you just need a processor set up in your backyard so that you can clean and thin your dirty old vegetable oil and make it into fuel. This process is called transesterification. One of the best resources online for learning how to do this here.

Just be careful. You’re going to be working with flammable materials and fumes, so explosions are possible.

On a brighter note, you’ll be sending about 60% less CO2 into the air with your fuel, and you won’t be supporting Big Oil – one of the most destructive forces on the planet.

Didn’t get a chance to go check out the recycling center last night, because, get this, at 10 o’clock at night, Aurora shows up with New Guy! And he wants to have a look at my car! Which I just mentioned to Aurora that I was thinking of selling!

Of course he thinks he’s being all friendly, all “hey buddy” and “wow, where did you get a classic car like this?” and “wow, absolutely no restoration work has been done, huh?”

What a jerk.

Anyway, at least Aurora looked embarrassed, that made me feel a bit better, but long story short, I ended up staying home and being depressed all night. Wasn’t a total loss though, because I got to toonify some pics, and I got reading all about this guy.

Chad Pregracke is this regular dude who grew up on the banks of the Mississippi River. He got sick of seeing all the garbage polluting the river, so one day, he started to clean it up.

That was fifteen years ago, and now Chad has boats, garbage barges, a team of helpers, and donations coming in from all over the world to help fund the clean-up of a bunch of major rivers in the U.S.

But the best part is that Chad hasn’t gone all corporate. He still just organizes community-based clean-ups, and pulls junk like bowling balls, major appliances, tires, mattresses, trash, and Styrofoam out of the rivers, trying to get them just a bit cleaner.

Fav quote from Chad: “I read in a book once that the earth is not destroyed as a whole, it’s piece by piece, and I think that’s the same way it needs to be fixed…little by little, it’s the little things that really do add up.”

And I think he’s exactly right. If you look at a big company like JoyTech, or a place like Ring City that’s just so massive it’s overwhelming, you feel like a bug that could never do anything but get squished. But if you look at the world the way Chad looks at it, you see that just plugging away, bit by bit, day by day, can change things.

As far as I’m concerned, Chad is a superhero, minus the secret identity.