New blog first post

Since I will be working on the development of a solar coffee bean dryer for Guatemala, I decided to start a blog about the process.  I find writing a blog to be helpful to me to stay focused and to get things done.  As a friend of mine said to me in China when he wanted me to enter a beer drinking contest, "Do it for your blog."  I did and I won.  So I will be keeping track of what I am doing and what others are doing as we work towards our goal of trying to dry coffee beans in a more environmentally friendly way.  I am also going to try and post some of what I am doing on my QQ blog, so my Chinese students will know what I am doing and hopefully be able to practice their English skills.  The project is really international.

This project should be very interesting.  I have made several good contacts with instructors at Illinois Central College and we should have several working models to test this fall.  I have one just about done and will start on another very soon.  I hope to have some students that are interested in collecting data from the working models so we can have benchmark data to work with.  I will be taking two solar energy classes at ICC this fall semester and hope to learn a lot more about solar power.

I can always use some help on this project.  Feel free to volunteer.  Any help would be appreciated.  I could use ideas, information, the name of an organization to contact for funding, labor and just words of encouragement.  I will be able to be more specific as the weeks go by.  Right now we are just in the process of getting started and waiting for the fall semester to start so all the faculty are back on campus.   I plan to post pictures of the area and the people of Guatemala, our project, and the people involved so people can see what we are doing.  I also will post information about the different types of driers we are testing so people can see what we are doing, offer suggestions, or start on their own solar drier to see if they can do a better one.   Time to go to work.   I need to finish my mini-grant for ICC to see if I can get some type of funding.