Category: General

I’m not sure where I got this desire from, but since we got back from over seas, I have had the urge to grow tomatoes on our balcony. So today, we went to the hardware shop and bought the necessary equipment and a grafted tomato plant. Apparantly, the grafted ones are much better. It’s a Might Red veriety (how can you go wrong with a name like that?) We bought a huge self watering pot for it, and some nice big bamboo steaks to support it when it gets a little bigger, and then I planted it this evening. It looks kind of cute, the little tomato plant in its huge pot, but I’m sure it will grow pretty big.

Last night I tried to start up the lantern to show Ed, but once the blow torch was going, and heating up the vaporiser, the cracks in the glass just started to get bigger. I didn’t think it was safe to proceed so I turned off the blowtorch. I’ll be going to the lantern supply shop on Saturday to hopefully get parts for it.

This is a photo of the lantern working.

Since we got back, Maissa and I have been wandering around in this kind of post travel depression. I’m not quite sure why we are both feeling it. Maybe it’s a kind of culture shock? or maybe its a combination of jet lag and having to face going back to work and getting back into the grind?
Whatever it is, it’s been effecting both of us. We have been going up and down like yoyos. Unpacking was a major stumbling block for us and to top it off, the bloody crap water heater has sprung a leak while we were away and had gently moistened all the boxes we kept in the cupboard where the heater is, nicely incubating some sort of black fungus that grew all over everything..

As night fell tonight, I was looking forward to having another go with the pressure lantern. This time, I wanted to try the slow light method, which is supposed to be a little more gentle, and requires less pumping. Basicaly, you fill this special resevoir with metho and light it and let it burn out, then do it again, and this time, before it compleetly goes out, you turn the valve on to let the kerosene start flowing.
The only problem for me was the metho appears to have over heated the knob and melted it a little bit so it no longer turns the shaft of the valve. Of course, I didn’t realise this until it was too late. I tried to light it by adding a little more metho, lighting the resevoir again and then turning the valve with pliers. But I think by the time I got it going again, the evaporator part had cooled down too much and the top of the lantern burst into flames, indicating liquid kerosene was coming out (instead of vapours). Then just to top it off, the glass cracked from over heating *sigh*. I’m not very happy.

This is a cool bit of history about the development of pressure lanterns.

When we were in Syria, I saw pressure lanterns for sale and I realised that that is what I needed to make my life complete. So I asked around and they seemed to be going for around AU$20. Maissa was a little surprised that I wanted but insisted I wait until we get back to Lebanon as we would be able to buy one there, and her mum might even have one we could have.

When we got back to Lebanon, Maissa’s mum said that she had just thrown them all out because they never used them any more so it was off to the markets to get one.
We eventually found one that looked ok. It looked new, but as though it has been sitting in the market for about 5 years before someone bought it. Once I got it, I was itching to try it out but I knew I would have to wait until we got home.
Today I finally had a play with it. I put the mantle on it, filled it with kerosene, and tried to work out how to light the thing. It didn’t come with any instructions so I had to guess. After fiddling around with it for a while I realised that there was little hope of me working it out and so I resorted to searching the Internet.
I found that the lamp I have is a Chinese copy of a Petromax without the top reflector bit ( I supposed i could actually photograph mine, but I can’t be bothered). Anyway, after much reading, I discovered a few hints on how to light the thing. Mine has a rapid preheater feature, which basicaly squirts raw kerosene up into the glass chamber to heat the evaporator stage. I tried to get that going, but it just wouldn’t light. I realised too that my pressure guage is not working. Upon reading more, I found that it would require about 30-40 pumps to bring it up to pressure for the rapid heater to work, and would require pumping while the rapid heater was in use as it quickly depletes the pressure. The rapid heater needs to be used for about 60 seconds. Once I had this knowledge, I tried it again and quickly got the thing going. I wonder where I can get a new pressure guague for my lamp?

Got back last night after a fairly grueling flight back. At the moment, I’m finding it hard to come down to reality. I woke up at about 6:30 this morning, made coffee (it was good to finaly have my own coffee again) and sat on the couch wonderng how we are going to get ourselves together to put all our stuff away and get back into gear. I’ll rant later about why Gulf Air was so crap.

Today we went to the Louvre. The most impressive thing about the Louvre is its size. Its massive. Its quite difficult even to decide what to look at or for. We decided to do the tour, but we had to wait two and a half hours to get on the next tour, so in the mean time we just wandered around a bit. I found it really quite meaningless wandering around without any information on what we were looking at. We headed off to the Italian painting section to see if we could see any Caravaggio’s. I was quite dissapointed that they only have three, and they weren’t particularly interesting ones either imho.
The funniest thing though was the poor 18yo american girl who had obviously just finished reading The da Vinci Code, who asked the guide if we would be passing by da Vinici’s Last Supper. The guide responded in a rather pompous french accent “No, of course not, The Last Supper is a fresco in Milan, so we will not be passing by it on this tour” but the girl was undetered, she asked if maybe the Louvre has a copy of it? and the guide said, with obvious distain in her voice “This is the Louvre! We do not have copies here, we only have originals!”

I don’t know why I haven’t seen something like this before, but why not build a book reader into a mobile phone? One takes one’s mobile everywhere with them, and its a lot smaller than some books, so why not build them together? And while your at it, why not make it an mp3 player also? And come to think of it, why do we have to have ear phones that are coreded? Why can’t they be wireless? Binaural wireless earphones…. Mmmmm…..