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Good morning, everyone. Yesterday was mostly spent travelling from Kalampaka (this town appears to have three different latinizations and I have used all three with reckless abandon) to Corfu, by bus then by ferry. I finally tried ouzo at the hotel bar once we got here and it was horrible, but at least I can cross it off my list.
It is now mid-May and I don’t remember the last time we had rain. I still have some rainwater saved, though not much, but it doesn’t look like it’ll rain any time soon. It’s not good.
Germans have this weird tendency to use colloquial names for chemicals. For example, rather than nitrous oxide they say “Lachgas” which is laughing gas (I know it is also used in English, but you wouldn’t use it in a scientific context) or “Essigsäure” (vinegar acid) instead of acetic acid. It’s also the standard labelling for chemicals produced in Germany (though they also have the formula and most of the time the English name nowadays).
Yesterday I was talking to a technical assistant from another group, and she mentioned “Ameisensäure”, which is ant acid. Now, with “Essigsäure” even if you don’t know what it is, it’s easy enough to deduce, since vinegar contains acetic acid. What do ants contain? Normally I would have no idea… but! A few years ago I wrote a short story about Nordic fine dining, and during my research I saw that some dishes were decorated with ants. This restaurant only used Nordic ingredients, and while there’s no lemon in Scandinavia, there are ants, which contain… formic acid! It’s to make them less palatable, apparently. So, they use ants to give their dishes some acidity. So, I knew that the colleague was talking about formic acid.
And this is the story of how writing food porn romance helped me in my day job. So I thought I would share this extremely important piece of knowledge with you.
Finally quit my previous job today and moved up to the Bay Area where I’ll be starting my new job tomorrow (time off between jobs is for losers amirite). I’m hoping for a massive improvement to my mental health, especially since the Bay Area (especially where I am near Berkeley) is far more awesome than LA will ever be.
When my old lab takes me off their website I’ll probably go through the absolute shitshow that’s been going on in the past few months (the shitshow at my lab and organisation being very closely linked with the shitshow that is the current government) and why it was time for me to leave. Let’s just say there’s a reason I’ve been self-censoring myself a bit over the past month or two. I still don’t think I’m completely safe, but I’ve at least pushed myself further back in the queue of potential scapegoats and much less worried about ending up in an offshore concentration camp than I was a few weeks ago.
On a related note, turns out I’ll be sharing my new office with a billionaire. It’s kind of intimidating as billionaires are powerful people and, while they’re nice to have on your side, you don’t want them to be too close. I genuinely have no idea how I would even start a conversation with him. What does he do in his spare time? What are his hobbies? How does he socialise and who are his friends?
So, if you found yourself sitting next to a billionaire, what would you ask him? I mean, apart from “can you buy me a nice house/car/yacht/wife please?”
Some ants found some fruit juice I forgot about the other day. Makes me want a pet anteater; I don’t know if they can be domesticated, though.