June 14

Another Monday come and gone now; they’re pretty much flying now. Well, one of my reactions was a failure again today. It’s the difficult one, that no one gets on their first try, but even so, it’s a little frustrating. I’ll try again tomorrow I suppose. I got started doing a batch today to test how susceptible a reaction mixture is to water. We only introduced 1% by mass, but water can do a lot of damage to the right system. We’ll see how that ends up tomorrow. Today Barbara checked how I was doing on writing in the E-lab journal. It turns out that I have plenty of things to work on. Hopefully I can catch some bad habits early and mitigate them as much as possible. Unfortunately there are a lot of things that I need to catch, especially concerning making technical observations in a language that I’ve learned for a semester. I’m praying for quick learning and to make mistakes as gracefully as possible (if that’s even possible).
After work today I headed to the shoe shop nearby to see if I could find a pair of cheapish shoes. Adidas is a German company, so I thought I might find a nice pair at a good price. I really could not have been more wrong there. They were really nice shoes, but at prices that were really not in my price range. Oh well, at least I looked. I then went to ALDI, where most everything is in my price range, and got some groceries for the week. They didn’t have any WhiteFlakes though! They’re delicious like Frosted Flakes, but were not to be found, so I got some Choko-somethings instead. Who knows, maybe they’ll be delicious. Also, I bit the bullet and bought some honey, and what I hope is mustard. So I can at least make curry chicken, or maybe just curry rice, because I don’t have an oven. I did manage to find a kilogram package of Jasmin rice here. That will be nice with some wurst or chicken I hope. Fußball is on a lot on German tv, so I can watch most of the matches that I want to. I watched Paraguay-Italy tonight and they just interviewed one of the Paraguay players who was fluent in German. I’m beyond impressed with him, and another Italian player who was interviewed as well in German. These Europeans are crazy good with their languages. It gives me some incentive I suppose. That way the next time I’m interviewed after a World Cup match, I can hold my own in an interview with the German press. I went for a run tonight to Großwinternheim and back, running the whole way this time, which felt great. I’m still incredibly slow of course, but at least I’m consistently slow. Well, I should stop watching World Cup stuff, stop writing and go to bed.