37 degrees and light.

Yep, May 1st marks the start of the outdoor biodiesel brewing season. It's also the day we're supposed to take the studs off the tires, but since there was a big snowstorm the last few days of April the state is letting us keep them on until May 15th.

There's little bit of snow on the shady side of the house, and a few of the big dumb mosquitoes flying around. Thankfully their tiny, fast and numerous cousins haven't hatched yet.

It's only 37 degrees out, but I pulled the clear frying oil cubies out of their cardboard boxes and let them sit in the sun all day. They flowed smoothly out of the boxes and through the paint strainer into my 55 gallon drum. Although the little harbor freight clear water pump was a little slow moving the oil from the drum to the appleseed. This year's new addition is a refrigerator compressor that pulls some suction to prime the pump. That priming feature is a very, very nice addition.

I've got the first 2008 batch drying in an open top drum with a bubbler in it, but I don't know how much drying it will do in the wet, heavy, almost-freezing air.

I'm also just about out of the few hundred gallons of SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil) that I filtered for 2-tank SVO driving all winter. It's time to get busy!

Oh yeah, today I sent my $1.72 in taxes to the state for my April SVO use. I'll have to have a talk with my representative about personal-use exemptions. He lives a couple miles down the road, and Alaska is very familiar with subsistence and personal use issues.

All this and I'm working by the twilight at 11:00 pm.

Yep, May in Alaska.

Veg On!