Capitan H's Grand Plan

Set up plan for this year...

The Official 54th post on Camp 54.

Bicho's lovely pirate bar. I will also be making pink/black/red 54 banners with little pink skull and crossbones. Also, I think we should consider making this the entrance to our dome-home area.

Op. also, we need a trashcan or something.

Also, acquired yesterday... the wonderful... the glorious... the unfortunately terribly photographed "camp kitchen". It even has a sink feature and a place to hang H20 for watery goodness. And it folds into a handy box.

Not only an eclipse, but a meteor shower!!
Meteor Shower: Aurigids
Late Friday night-Early Sat morning Aug 31- Sep. 1:
Aurigids, a rare and spectacular meteor shower will be peaking at 4:36 a.m. in the east- north eastern skies. Visible from Nevada. It will last about 1.5 hours. Best to watch between 4 and 5 am, with up to 160 Aurigids meteors per hour.
http://aurigids.seti.org/
This very rare shower will occur again on 1 September 2007. A brief shower of tens of meteors will radiate from the constellation of Auriga, many as bright as the brighter stars in the sky. The Earth will be in the thick of it during the one hour centered on 04:36 a.m. PDT. The
shower will be visible by the naked eye from locations in the western United States.
Best viewing: Keep Moon out of field of view (best to block behind obstruction such as telephone pole, then watch whole sky), avoid city haze that scatters moonlight Best direction: East and Northeast Best time: Start one hour before peak, then see the rate of meteors increase and decrease while Earth travels through the shower.

One of the noobs needs to buy some cheap-o walkie-talkies. For the ride out.

Our trailer is reserved, courtesy of Mark.

JRS

Just reading the JRS newsletter and clicked to the playatech.com page which has some really brilliant ideas for plywood furniture that can be broken down into small, easily shippable units.

Signs

Above: A rough idea of what the shadowbox could look like. Not sure if it should be painted black... as it'd be much more difficult to see during the day. But we could put glass, or something like that, behind the cutouts to defuse the light. Actually dyed cloth or thick paper might work the best-- as glass would be liable to break if the sign got blown over. Depending on how hot the lights would be.

This one may be a bit ambitious... but it'd be cool to elevate the numbers and make them as a sort of entrance way to our dome. Obviously the numbers would be a bit thicker to allow more light through.

This one may actually make the separate entrance idea more workable by attaching a top box to secure it. If we screw it onto larger boards and make holes in the board for rebar attachment into the ground it may actually achieve relative sturdiness. Also it would come apart into three boxes for travel and storage.

I don't know precisely how they do it, but the banners below would be cool... and easy to appliqué the 54 on everywhere. I think the more 54's we have around the better. That way when people ask what our theme camp IS we can look at them funny and say something ambiguous about 54.


It'd also be kinda cool to make a stencil and spray paint the dome with 54s. Maybe. Assuming we are going to roll with the 54 theme for more than one year, which I would assume is highly likely. It's ambiguous enough to go about anywhere.

Also, I read somewhere that you can use your run-off water from the shower and stuff to water a plant that you bring. I personally have no problem dumping it into the road (now somebody random is going to read this and freak out) because they spray it down with H20 anyway and we use biodegradable soap. However, the plant idea is a good one-- and probably something we will do whenever we get an awesome trailer.

Assets, Needs

Alas, you really do have to stake your tent.

Assets- (As a group)
I've recently acquired another parachute, some white winter shade coverings (the guys at the surplus store swear they are virtually unrippable (which I giggle at), two 6-foot folding tables, camp stove, fire pit. John has (I belive) gotten our shower stuff.

Things we still need (As a group)- Hammock stand, barrel for fire (if we decide our fire pit is too unstable for the playa winds), bike pump (John is checking into this), coolers, black tarps for H20 evaporation pond (people get really snarkey if you don't have one of these), plywood and El-Wire for sign

Everybody needs to be gathering up a tent for themselves, a bike and a camel pack of some sort.
Who has coolers? We need at least 3 for the dry-ice system I previously posted about.

Also from my experience purchasing H20 in Winnemucca (despite Johns extreme hatred for the city) is a really good bet. Hauling all that water from Kansas seems wasteful, and is probably more expensive than buying it. That said, we may still need to think about getting some water containers-- like the green 5 gallon kind, so we can better pack the water in. The website says we will be needing 1.5 gallons per person per day. From previous experience this is PLENTY of water. However that will mean we need 13.5 gallons per person and for 7-8 days that equals around 100 gallons. Thats HEAVY!

Finally, check out this really cool site in comic book form of pics from the last 10 years of Burning Man.

Glowsticks... more planning

We are nearing on the time when we are going to order glowsticks and such. Really need to get an idea of what people want to buy.

Also, I bought a parachute yesterday. It's a regular army green one. I was looking at some white ones, but they were twice as expensive, and I'm really not sure how well they would take dye, being nylon and all.

Tent heater... tent cooler... other

Camp evaporative cooler (aka portable AC that runs off of an icechest!)

Tent heater...

This seems like a really cool link to a whole bunch of guides from Alternitive Energy Camp. I'm trying to figure out how to make an effective evaporative cooler battery free.

Also, this is an interesting list of meal ideas and suggestions.

Here's a quote about keeping food cold that is interesting...
"I take three ice chests (for the 2 week stay) I try to keep them all in the shade.
1.Small one for the day of travel and the first day setting up: snacks, one light dinner and frozen water bottles to keep things cold and later drink
2. Medium one for the first two full days in camp
3. The large coffin (2'x6') plywood box lined with 2" Styrofoam, covered with 1 reflective fireblanket.
This is not opened until the third day when camp is set up and we can begin to enjoy our bounty. It's packed with ~100# dry ice and about 2 dozen frozen liter bottles of light lemonade, in addition to 2 - 5 gallon plastic containers of frozen water (the ice melts and the water is contained and drinkable).

Labeled frozen food is placed on one end near the dry ice. Fresh food (vegetables, eggs, butter, salami, and a little milk and cheese) are in assorted Tupperware in the end furthest away from the dry ice. Cans of soda and V-8 fill in the spaces. Very important to me is that everything is contained. - I dislike to have to deal with partially decomposing food floating in dirty cold water.

We don't need to buy ice and the last two years I have returned home with some ice still intact."

Bob and I got a food shrink wrapper (for lack of a better term for it) for our wedding, so we can encase meats and whatnot in plastic and keep them very fresh in dry ice.

Camp showers

This is a pretty cool thing, a water heater powered by propane. It sucks water from any water source and heats it.


Then you can use this tent to suspend the hose on the inside. This isn't particularly shamey- but is a good solution for height. Without having to get oversized PVC.


This also would work, 29.99 from this site.

FYI- this is posted by Jys, after setting up Marks ability to post.

Camp 54 map

Ok, so I'm slightly bored. Here is the tentitive layout for camp 54. I made this so when looking at it if somebody gets an idea, (like oh, we need this)... and will post on it.