Day 2: Detox Diet

Weight Lost: 2.0 lbs

Woke up this morning feeling kinda parched.

Had a breakfast shake, made with rice milk this time. And a banana. And some of last night's chili.

For lunch I discovered that I could eat some of the stuff at Chipotle as a shortcut! Had a rice bowl with chicken, tomatoes, and lettuce.

For dinner I grilled 1 lb of chicken breast, had a mixed greens salad, steamed carrots, and had some more chili with rice noodles.

Pear, Watermelon, and Apple for dessert.

-YvW

Day 1: Detox diet

Weight lost as of this morning: 0

I've decided to try a detox/cleansing diet for two weeks. Unfortunately there are a lot of things I'm not allowed to eat (eggs, red meat, sugar, anything with preservatives, potatoes, peanuts, gluten, etc), so we'll see what we can do to add taste to my diet.

Today's meals:

Breakfast: Protein shake, rice cake, and a banana.

Lunch: A very sad lunch of almonds, rice cakes, and carrot sticks

Dinner: 1 pound of alaskan cod, curry rice noodles, avocado salad.

Currently also making some organic chicken chili to store for eating during this week.

So far the food has been pretty sad...

-YvW

The Spodumene Experiment: Day 3

I left the spodumene in indirect sunlight for 6 more hours and 2 more hours in direct sun, here are the results today:





The pink / lavender color is definitely intensifying. Excellent.

- YvW

The Spodumene Experiment

I recently acquired a batch of green Afghan spodumene via Bangkok. After a few days I noticed it had started fading in color, which suggests it was likely irradiated to reach the color. So I decided to run this experiment to see how fast the color would change under exposure from sunlight.

Specimen started out a bit richer than this:

After an hour under the Texas sun, you can see the green is fading to clear:

The following day, after a few hours of indirect sunlight (my current location only gets about 2 hours of good sun):

After 3 more hours of indirect sun, I started noticing some pink an purple:

After another hour of direct sun, its definitely taking on some purple/pink.

After another hour of sun (roughly 4 hours total sunlight, 6 hours indirect):

We shall see how purple I can get this crystal just via sunlight. Here's a view down the C-Axis.

Spodumene is fun stuff!

-YvW

Project Tepui: Day 14

After 2 weeks, the plants are still alive and looking decent. They're taking to the artificial matrix splendidly and the liquid nutrients are working for now. The ferns and mosses seem to be doing better than the philodendrons. One of the philo's leaves have yellowed a bit, I hope it adapts to its current situation, or else...

For future indoor plant attempts I believe I'll do research into the various plants that grow near cave mouth or other not-so-well lit areas.

Project Tepui: Day 0

Project Tepui:

I've taken an interest in creating a vertical garden ever since reading a New York Times article on the subject.

There are two available vertical garden setups online, but both are expensive and are not the design I'm looking for. So for the past several weeks I've been trying to find the right materials to build one. There are several problems to tackle:

First off, there needs to be a medium that plants can grow in that can be vertical without having the medium crumble or fall away. Initially I was considering multiple layers of mesh with separate layers of soil, charcoal, orchid mix, small gravel, and large gravel. The mesh (of different sizes) would hold things together when moved into a vertical position. Unfortunately this would take too much effort and is too prone to failure. I eventually settled on a spun-volcanic glass foam made for hydroponics, the material feels like insulation and is cuttable, produced by a company called GroDan.

The next issue involves which plants to select. I essentially ignored this question and just selected a variety of plants that like to stay indoors and need about the same amount of water; various philodendrons, ferns, mosses, and bromeliads.
Since I'm using a hydroponics medium, there is a lack of nutrients, which in this case is taken care of by special additives and a root enhancer to encourage the plants to get a good grip in the medium (very important for them to be well rooted before going vertical).

Finally there's the need for a container to grow things in that can be flipped vertically once the plants take root. This hasn't been addressed yet, at the moment I'm growing the plants in containers that are the right shape. They will stay horizontal for several weeks to get well-rooted before going vertical.

Hydroponics medium and trays for initial growth:



Medium in the trays:


The medium was cut into shapes that fit into plastic trays and plants were uprooted from their starter pots and inserted into the foam medium. The medium actually soaks up a surprising amount of water. At the moment the plants are looking well and we shall see how they progress.

Various Projects

I've started this blog as a way to document to share various projects that I'm working on. Most of my projects are long-term and some have started long ago. All of my projects also have nicknames for easier reference.

Some of the projects I'll be recapping and documenting:
Project Monarch: the race to build the largest collection of fossil butterflies in the world.
Project Tepui: the attempts to build a verticl garden wall.
Project Nomenclature: the effort to find new species and work on naming them

Other random projects will pop up from time to time. I will begin shortly with the documenting of Project Tepui, which commenced yesterday.

-YvW