Fueled up and ready to Veg Out

I am writing this at 2:30 AM early Monday morning. Finally getting ready to get some sleep. Wow, what a long day. We are still in Lawrence, decided to spend one more night here. Actually, the oil filtration system decided for us, as it took much longer that we thought it would to filter the "harvested" oil. Getting the oil to begin with went great. We went back to the grease bin, and set up the pump system right there. Lawrence, being a college town, is pretty progressive, so we had some people walk by that seemed to give us a funny look for a second and then would give a "Oh, I know what you are doing" kind of look soon afterwards. No one really stopped to chat, but no one looked confused to see us either. We pumped the oil into many different containers: a couple of pickle buckets, an olive tub, and 2 other tubs that have special names but which are escaping me right now. We did 2 trips, filling 9 containers total. Since they were all about 5 gallons each, we got a total of 45 gallons of gas - and it only took us 10 hours from start to finish! OK, that may seem like a lot, but we ran into some difficulties along the way that taught us some lessons - like I said, the filtration system still needs some work.

So the oil needs to be run through these large fabric tubes, called "socks" (that name I remember because, uh, they look like big socks). We had to kind of jerry-rig some buckets together so the 4-foot-long socks could stand upright so the oil would flow through them. Passing this oil through the socks and buckets, and into other buckets. and then putting it either into the final buckets or putting it into the gas tank, turned out to be a massive task. At least one gallon of oil ended up on the street in front of Heather and Zeke's house. And all over our hands. And feet and flip-flops, and shorts, and t-shirts. I planned ahead, bought a t-shirt in a thrift store this morning. Brian of course planned ahead too - brought detergent. Excuse me - recycled detergent - one of our buckets was a bucket of "Joy" dish soap that had some left - so Brian bottled it up and that is what we cleaned up with. Nothing wasted with this guy. Even at 2 in the morning, when I was literally ready to throw in the greased up towels - Brian made sure we took the time to ring out each one into the final oil bucket. Why waste when you can not waste.
One thing that really surprised me was how my perception of the oil changed throughout the day. At first, when we came upon it in the "grease bin" out behind the restaurant, it had already lived its life and purpose of frying some kind of heart-wrenching food, and had been slumbering in this back alley for who knows how long. It was also the last thing I wanted to see, smell, or be near, let alone touch. Brian was nice enough to let me do the pumping so I didn't have to be right near the bin, but even then I was having plenty of thoughts of offering to buy a tank of gas so we could just get on the road and not spend my vacation hanging out with dumpsters. But throughout the day as we pumped it, collected it, filtered it, and finally funneled it into the gas tank, the stuff really did cease to be left over chicken wing grease, and transformed into this incredibly important and efficient liquid that would be able to power and lubricate the fantastic creation that is the car engine. It is difficult to explain the perception shift, except by telling you that at the end of the day I was squeezing this stuff out of rags as we got the last drops in to the buckets.
Since we stayed, I am writing this from Heather and Zeke's computer, I'll load up some pictures in the morning. Better get some sleep.