Fairly Honest Sam

He's had this nickname since I was a small child. My dad, the salesman. He even had a t-shirt made with that name once. He has had many nicknames over the years. After the second time he fell off the roof we started calling him Captain Gravity, and gave him a hat and one of those inflatable pool-rings to strap to his ass. Has also proclaimed to be BUFF, actually an acronym for Big Ugly Fat Fucker. Most recently, after helping me paint the interior of my old apartment, I have taken to calling him Drippy the Trim Boy.

As I stated in the last post, he's the Idea Guy. Always coming up with "new and improved" even if the everything is going along just fine.

One area of constant concern when you camp in the desert is water, both the liquid and frozen kinds. Sammy excels in hatching new schemes to provide both. His first idea, years ago, was to use dry ice in the coolers. Dry ice is really really cold, and it kept the food really cold too. Unfortunately, though it is really really cold, it doesn't stay that way for very long. Plus when it heats up it just evaporates, leaving nothing in the cooler but rapidly warming food. Plus dry ice costs, well, like a gazillion times more than the kind made from water.

His next idea was to build a bigger better cooler. "Those ones you buy only have maybe a quarter inch of Styrofoam in 'em", he says. So off he goes, buying sheets of 2" thick Styrofoam sheets. After gluing the pieces into a box-like shape, he applies a few coats of a product he used to sell called Miracote. This is basically concrete that can be applied in thin layers, good for coating driveways, sidewalks, etc. Sammy really likes this stuff. What we end up with is a four foot long concrete box that actually works very well. Kept the block ice solid for a whole week no problem. Except for the handles. It doesn't have any. And its heavy. If full, it cannot be lifted by two people. We only ended up using it once. Had to take everything out of it to move the box onto the boat, put everything back in, then take it all out again to move the box from the boat to camp.

This year his idea ended up working very well. The though was that since we have to take bottled water and we need ice, why not just freeze all the bottled water? So he did. And it worked! The plastic bottles seem to insulate the ice in the bottles very well, and we had ice all week long. They actually worked too well. You could take a bottled ice thingy out of the cooler in the morning, let it sit in the sun all day, and it would still mostly be ice well into the afternoon.

Next year Drippy plans on fine tuning this method using gallon sized jugs and keeping the drinking stuff separate. We'll let you know.