Projects – Page 18 – Ephemerality

Our house is neighboring the house on the corner. On the perpendicular road from this intersection, one house down from this same house, is a house filled with feral children. These children, in their angst to visit the park, save precious moments by bypassing the intersection altogether and instead blaze a trail through my backyard, driveway, and front yard.

As any self-respecting old man suburban homeowner would do, I’ve conspired in secret to find subtle ways of mitigating the problem. I laughed evilly to myself as I fantasized over hedgerows of blackberries and poison ivy. But these are mere irritations. What I needed was something extreme: Unnecessary escalation to get my point across.

So I pondered the archives of knowledge I spent years of college acquiring–knowledge others have since called useless. I scoff at their uneducated masses of business degrees.

A vision of Romans and Gauls flashed through my mind, and I recounted the Battle of Alesia–the first major battle to earn the booby-trap notoriety. Introducing, the Lilly. Interestingly, Googling the Lilly Trap returned an odd amount of pornographic images. I perused the thumbnails for a few minutes out of sheer curiosity before returning to my writing, naturally. My point is, I have no appropriate visual aid to append to this paragraph, so I will describe:

The Lilly Trap was a small pit with a sharpened stick in the center. The stick was deeply secured, and the pit was either covered with brush or filled with water. The idea was to hide the trap, so that an unlucky infantryman would step upon it, impale his foot on the stick, and be subsequently immobilized. Yes, this would subtly get my point across, muahaha. I began digging.

Okay, enough of that. This is the part where I tell you that maiming children is not my objective, although chasing them away with a 20 gauge certainly has crossed my mind. But I had other problems to contend with, namely the drainage situation from the downspouts.

The prior owner had installed extensive waterproofing measures in the basement. The perimeter had been trenched, and a sump pump installed. And when we were viewing the house, there had indeed been water in the sump. But, that was the last time it’s ever held water.

Shortly after moving in, it became obvious that the problem lied in the rainwater’s current drainage paths. Downspouts, dutifully installed, channeled their contents directly against the house. These areas had not been graded, so the water simply sat against the foundation. After the first heavy rain, I deduced something was amiss when I saw the house adjacent to several small ponds. That, I cleverly declared to myself, holding an authoritative finger of pronouncement to the sky, was not right.

So I began trenching. But the problem with this particular corner was that the grade went up before down. So in order to get the water away from the house, I’d have a very deep trench. Also, the remnants of a stump were between the downspout and the far side of the rise, and I was not keen on chopping through many feet of roots.

Trench Introducing, the water garden. I would trench as far as possible, then dig a deep hole, fill it with permeable material, and surround it with plants that tolerate flood/drought cycles. The cold weather broke and we were blessed with a beautiful weekend.

And sure enough, I started hitting roots, so I ended the trench in said deep hole. I lined the trench with bricks to provide a solid bottom, then planned to fill the remaining trench and hole with river stone, as I had on the drainage trench in the front yard. Then it got really cold again, and we were hit with our first spring storm that flooded the project.

So good news: the water goes where it’s supposed to now and doesn’t pool near the house. When the hole filled with water, it overflowed down the hill and away from the house. Success!

Unfortunately, now the rain garden is a hole of muddy water almost two feet deep. But, I have appeased the laws of hydrodynamics, and hopefully in the meantime I’m frightening the children away with my bizarre hole-digging project. Next step: caltrops!

–Simon

It’s a question as old as alcohol itself: “The aesthetics of this drink are pleasing, but the cloudiness of the ice is juxtaposed to the refractive index of the crystal vessel.” I’m fairly certain those were the words used.

Historical interpretations aside, the question has been asked before. “How do I make clear ice?” I know this because a quick internet search revealed this dilemma to be ubiquitous. It is the natural progression in drinking: Discovery –> Refining tastes –> Enhancing the function of vessels –> Presentation/Aesthetics. Each stage in the discovery is dependent on its predecessor. Alcohol must be discovered before one can develop personal taste. A refinement of taste is required before the functionally enhancing aspects of the vessel can be appreciated. And ultimately the primary and secondary purposes of alcohol, namely its inebriating and tasty qualities, must be acquired before the ultimate tertiary properties of aesthetics can be applied.

As an experienced drinker (or depending on who you ask: functioning alcoholic), I have long since advanced upon this hierarchy of needs. Having mastered the art of garnishes, and having acquired a respectable quantity of crystal bar-ware, one point of concern remained.

So, as with all of life’s great mysteries, I immediately started a journey through the Internet. The Holy Oracle, i.e. Google, referred me to numerous blogs and forums which attempted to address this glaring deficiency in mixology.

As a side note, I wanted to jest a moment on the nature of Internet forums. After the golden age of the Internet’s nubile novelty and innocence, its inevitable ubiquity brought with it the general trash of humanity. Trolls. But after the tipping point, when the Internet became universal, when more forums entered existence than could be discovered in a lifetime, well, trolls tend to gravitate towards the larger masses of Internet presences to achieve maximum effect. That is, the more esoteric the discussion, the more decreased the likelihood that a troll will crawl out of the filth to infect the core of knowledge. While I only found limited information on the way of ice and its translucency, there definitely weren’t any trolls in those discussions.

But back to the problem at hand. I compiled a list of repetitious advice:

Use distilled water
Freeze slowly
Use hot water
Use boiled water
Use twice-boiled water
Freeze in large blocks

After thorough testing, most of these were either nonsense or had no measurable impact. I will elaborate:

Use distilled water More importantly, use relatively clean water. The focus here is to reduce dissolved impurities, so the quality of local tap water is paramount. If it’s very bad, then yes, I suppose distilled would net obvious improvements.
Freeze slowly Nonsense, and not worth the effort.
Use hot water Bingo! Hot water of course holds fewer dissolved gasses, which are the primary cause of cloudiness.
Use boiled water The temperature hits a point of diminishing returns. Any variations above say 130 degrees were negligible. And if the water is too hot it’s just dangerous to handle, and it can melt plastic.
Use twice-boiled water I’m not sure what the logic on this one is. Maybe it purges any gasses not purged the first time? I’m sure someone with more knowledge in chemistry/physics could explain this theory, but in practice it’s negligible.
Freeze in large blocks Also bingo! The volume allows the trapped air to congregate as the ice freezes inward, leaving the periphery devoid of air. [Edit 2017.4.28: Leave the water sit out for 20 minutes before placing in freezer. This will allow it to offgas more before ice traps the air, without allowing so much time that the cooling water absorbs more gas]

Conclusion: reduce the total amount of dissolved gas by heating the water, then freeze the water in a volume large enough that the amount of remaining dissolved gas isn’t noticeable at the edge of the resultant ice. This second part–the volume–is open to experimentation. I’ve tried various volumes and container shapes with wildly different and inconsistent results. I will say that long and flat Tupperware seems to work better. Maybe it’s the increased surface area of exposed water.

One problem remains–how to separate the clear ice from the cloudy. I found the solution lay, as it often does, in violence and needless waste. A hammer and old steak knife chipped the ice into manageable chunks, and a running faucet of hot water could melt the cloudy ice off the clear. Is the latter wasteful? Yes. But…the cost of perfection always leaves casualties in its wake. Besides, look at this:

P-Ice

Also, the clear ice melts slower, so bonus. Your guests might not appreciate it, but there will be no argument on your pretentiousness. Toast yourself on having achieved drinking self-actualization.

–Simon

Category: Projects

Get Off My Lawn!

Pretentious Ice