I like making hot sauces and salsas, so I wanted to get a wide variety of pepeprs. I have made fermented hot sauce and really like it, so I want to do that some more, as well as trying my hand at pickling.

I live in CA, and with the current economic situation, I really wanted to help supplement my pantry/fridge with some every day use veggies as well. I love gardening, so it is good for both my mental health and my wallet, which is a win-win.

I also have a lemon tree and an apricot tree. The lemon tree is crazy productive, but the apricot tree hadn’t been pruned in years and was struggling after a heatwave last summer, so I think this year will mostly be growback while it gets healthy after some major pruning.

My edible garden, including a ton of different peppers, 6 parisian cucumbers, 2 types of Zucchinis (black beauty and cocozelle), Winged Bean, 3 types of Tomatoes (July 4th, Cherry, and Cherokee Purple), Tomatillos, Okra, Boysenberry, Mint and Basil. I am also cloning my tomatoes as gifts for friends.

I am starting to get cucumbers, half of my peppers are flowering/fruiting, and my tomatoes/tomatillos just started flowering. I have also upgraded the trellises for my beans/cucumbers with more suitable sticks/rope for climbing.

My peppers in increasing order of spice. Peppers marked with * are plants that I bought last year that I managed to barely overwinter and am trying to recuperate.

• Yum Yum Sweet (0 Scoville)
• Mellow Star Shishito (~200 Scoville)
• Mexibell (100-2.5K Scoville)
• Numex Joe E. Parker Anaheim (500-2.5K Scoville)
• Purple Jalapeño (3K-5K Scoville)
• Purple Serrano (8K-22K Scoville)
• Serrano* (10K-23K Scoville)
• Pequin (30K-60K Scoville)
• Thai bird’s eye* (50K-100K Scoville)
• Scotch Bonnet (100K-350K Scoville)
• Chocolate Habanero (~350K Scoville)
• White Peach Ghost (~1M Scoville)
• Death Spiral (~1.3M Scoville)
• Carolina Reaper* (~1.6M Scoville)

I was curious and looked, Jeppsons does actually sell malort spritzers sold in a can! Never seen one irl, so probably not very popular, but it does exist oddly enough

Sip of malort is too much malort. I have to correct myself though, Jeppsons does sell malort spritzers sold in a can, which is more in line with how to actually use malort in making a cocktail, but still probably nasty.

That is just a can of beer, I don’t think you can get Malort in a can. Old Style is a cheap pilsner from the north mid-west

Chrohns pill 4× daily, adderall 1-2× daily, multivitamin 1× daily, D-Vitamin 1× daily, so 7-8 per day. I am 29, so I have gotten a head start on my pill quota. I start back up on injections for Crohns next week, so four of those should be going away in the next month or so.

Yup, though the $50K was specifically the R&D cost to develop a technique for making the lens. It used a nano-scale pattern on glass to focus light via diffraction, as opposed to standard refractive lenses or mirrors. The ultimate goal was to develop a process for manufacturing these lenses en masse, for deployment in a large particle detector where traditional lenses wouldn’t work. They succeeded, and nowadays (6 years later), they can basically print the pattern using the same techniques as in microchip manufacturing. Back then, though, there was just then one prototype that represented that $50K of research, so I am really glad I didn’t fuck it up haha

In my first year of grad school, I was visiting a colleague’s lab and was asked if I wanted to test some of their new diffractive optics. I said sure and started toying with the big lens on the table, no gloves, no precautions other than trying not to drop/smudge it. After about 5 minutes of geeking out over the fact that a perfectly flat, transparent lens was focusing the light, I asked how much it would cost to get one sent to my lab for an experiment I was working on. He said that it was the only one of its kind in existence, but the manufacturing r&d cost for it was over $50K alone. My heart nearly fell outta my chest.

I am very happy that 75% of my PhD in particle physics was hands-on lab work doing detector R&D. Sure, creating simulations and doing data analysis are immensely important, and skills I had to develop, but I think that many scientists are being done a disservice by not getting the opportunity to see how their work will interface in the real world.