(Absolutely not a critique of Amy here)

As someone who lives by themselves and shops alone I find a store employee and ask when I can't find something. They are pretty much always down to give directions (the ones who are not are the folks who work for vendors that were stocking shelves and don't actually work for the supermarket, and I apologize to them and they apologize to me and we both move on with our lives).

At stores I shop at regularly I can usually guess where items I don't buy regularly are, but even when something gets moved (why, oh why did Ralph's move the unpopped popcorn from next to the bags of popped stuff to some random other aisle I will never fathom) the people working in the store know where it went. It's not some sort of mark against me as an adult to ask for help from someone whose job it is to provide that help.

Is this one of those "cis-het male learned helplessness" things? There is also a version for the cis-het female that involves a different set of things (that my mom likes to pull, which drives me up the wall).

Wondering at what point the "save bar soap scraps to form into a new soap" gets to be absurd. I can't bring myself to toss them, but haven't bought the cheap glycerin soap to reform them (and really don't want to tediously break them into little pieces since I didn't do that in advance and I haven't made a new "re-formed" bar in a few years so there are a lot of chunks). Do I try the real melting method? Just give up on them? Ugh. I hate the waste though.

While at food not bombs today I noticed a group of people wearing masks on the other side of the little park and put mine on and went over and offered to get them food if they didn't want to interact with people not wearing masks and that they could eat away from other people. And it turned out they were actually a covid cautious book club and they were heading into the library! It was their first time trying out this library, they have been bouncing between different branches in orange county trying to find a consistent space.

I was super excited and gushed at them and might have a buddy for buying and splitting a giant box of masks (they also didn't know of anyplace that wasn't amazon for auras at a discount, we commiserated about it).

I found my people! They don't even all read the same book, they just meet, talk about what they have read and maybe just read in companionable silence for a bit? I don't know. They seemed awesome though!

(World's least social person has two social events and might be joining another, someone should check me for pod marks...)

I hate recipes that involve a sentence like "batter will have some lumps in it". How many lumps? How large? Are you going to apologize to the person who gets a mouth full of dry flour if I screw this up?

Me: Orders 10 batteries from VWR for the little lab timers.

VWR: ok, 1 pack of 10 coming up.

What actually arrives: a box of 10 packs. 100 batteries. We now have enough batteries that we likely couldn't use them all before they expired, if the company had bothered to put an expiration date on them.

The problem with making a good batch of bread is that you end up eating half a loaf of bread in <24 h.

(KAF's pullman loaf recipe with a couple of tablespoons of better than bullion's "sofrito" to give it a hint of tomato flavor, the sofrito is much better for flavor than the "italian herb" one, too bad I have a giant jar of the italian herb and only a teeny jar of the sofrito...)

Was at work on time (as in before 9AM) for the first time in what feels like weeks and didn't futz around on the computer when I got in and hit the ground running.

So it's 4:30 and I'm looking around going "really? am I done for the day?"

And I think the answer is yes? Wild.

At least three separate responses discussing the Roman dodecahedrons. Which I vaguely knew about, but would not have remembered in this context. Fedi can be fascinatingly weird sometimes.

Currently trying to figure out if there really is a generational difference in lab work between when I was in grad school and now in terms of "figuring out if equipment is repairable/how to repair it" vs. a field difference (more biology vs. chemistry) vs. something else. When asked one of my coworkers figures they are just too focused on their individual projects to want to solve these problems, which could also be true and maybe more individual than any blanket statement?

I think it's kind of generational with more equipment now being a "black box" that you can't take apart and repair yourself without potentially having major issues so people don't see how to trouble shoot that sort of thing even in simpler systems. So unless they think of themselves as handy they never even try to fix things.