My mom was a solar astrophysicist who worked for NASA. She studied solar flares and solar gamma rays; she led a team that designed equipment that floated on giant hot air balloons, looking at the edge of the sun, hoping to see flares and gamma ray bursts. Very late in her life, she actually got to put one of her instruments on a rocket payload.
So my mom was a rocket scientist, back in the day when being a rocket scientist was even more brainy than being a brain surgeon. And when people say things like, "Explain this [technical material] so that your mother could understand", well, they didn't know my mother.
As the kid of an astrophysicist, I knew only bits and pieces of actual physics. I knew that every 11 years, we'd have super busy times (because apparently that's how often those sun spots and gamma rays become super active). I knew that when my mom talked about "proposals", she meant grant proposals and not marriage proposals. I knew how to count up to 31 on one hand, by counting in binary (although that might have been the influence of my dad, who was a nuclear physicist).
My mom's biggest direct impact on my career was probably the Xerox machine, which was brand new in her office. (We still had mimeograph machines at school: the kind with purple ink). I loved the magic of xeroxing things: my sisters and I would draw things on our hands and copy them; we'd close our eyes and xerox our faces. I also loved helping the cafeteria ladies in the basement of her building wipe down tables after lunch; they'd give me ice cream afterwards. Maybe that's why I volunteer at the soup kitchen still.
Indirectly, though, as a kid I was kind of fascinated by the possibilities of solar power. I had the idea that when I grew up, I'd build a solar-powered 18-wheeler truck and drive around the country, giving presentations to school kids. My mom had nothing to do with solar powered technology, so this fantasy was all me. Clearly, my 18-wheeler never materialized. But those early fantasies might explain part of why I keep building my own homemade solar ovens.
The first solar oven I built about a decade ago was essentially two cardboard boxes with a storm window. I'd found a small black pot at a yard sale (25 cents, of course), and built out from that: a small foil-lined cardboard box that holds the pot, a bunch of newspaper insulation, and a larger cardboard box for the outside. That worked really well, until the squirrels ate the box.
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| A black pot baking in the sun. |
By "really well", I mean it heated things up to about 200 degrees, as long as they fit in that small black pot. It was a great system for low-heat projects: melting wax, slow-cooking. Not so good for things like spaghetti that required actual boiling, or anything that needed crispness. Oh, but it could cook eggs! That was cool.
Last summer, I started "up-grading". I have a larger black pot -- one that I use for our Thanksgiving turkey -- and I build a wooden box that can hold it. I built the box so that it exactly holds a particular old storm window, and has a slightly slanted top. That was last summer; this summer I added the reflective insulation (newspaper wrapped in aluminum foil), and then I spent *real money* and bought caster wheels that I screwed on underneath.
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| This is before I screwed wheels on; the solar oven is sitting on a wheeled toy so I can move it about. |
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| Cheese-y solar cabbage |
As a hobby, solar ovens are cheap and easy things to build. Our next house has a back patio with a southern exposure, so I'm really looking forward to trying out a few more recipes and seeing how they come out.
Maybe this blog post is my version of taking my truck "on the road". My solar oven doesn't have 18 wheels, and it's not going to go around visiting school kids, but I'm kind of tickled by it anyway.
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