Had to do a flame test to identify old fuel for recycling.

Made blue dye from indigo, and red and orange dye from madder, mixing in alum and other things. Making blue is amazing, it comes out green then changes colour all at once. Get the mix wrong and you get the wrong colour… Also we boiled one batch of madder and got orange instead of scarlet, so even the temperature had to be regulated.

Most recently, been making etched plates from the inside of soft drink cans, etching with copper sulfate (they sell it in Bunnings as a fertiliser). Lots of fun!

So yeah mostly art projects.

That said even baking a cake is pretty fancy chemistry.

Come visit Australia sometime. I am certain no children will knock on your windows begging for food and water when you stop at traffic lights (which happened both in cities and the occasional local township) even if you have a rental car (we were borrowing cars from locals, rentals are often too pricey for me). No one will try to steal your bag of groceries either.

If we passed through Gary I didn’t notice. The map puts it in the suburbs of Chicago anyway, perhaps we drove through at the end of our stay? Spent a bit of time in Illinois, then went through Cincinnatti on the way out toward the coast.

These stories are not any one trip, or any one city or state. This is an overview of everywhere in the US as a foreigner. People were begging me for food and stealing food on street corners from (the illinois bit of) Chicago to New Orleans, from Texas to New York. They tapped windows of the car, they stopped me in the street. It was like travelling through what the yanks choose to call a third world country… It isn’t like that in Australia.

The roadworkers? Three seperate sites in chicago, then similar seen again in New York State, and in Louisiana. Other places too but they stood out.

Knocking on our windows to beg for food and water? Everywhere on the east coast. The kid happened in New York State, but similar happened in Pennsylvania, in tenessee, in illinois, in Louisiana, and everywhere really.

I was mobbed in Pennsylvania during the notorious Apple Incident, it happened again to a friend in Charlestown with a large bag of peaches, but when we were telling this story to a bunch of other Aussies they told me a chilling tale similar that happened to a girl of their number in Tenessee. The third one happened to strangers, but they had no reason to lie to me.

I don’t rightly know what to tell you, but we saw so many beggars everywhere except manhattan. We did not like getting restaurant meals, tried to stick to takeaway, because waitstaff were upsetting everywhere we went. And if you haven’t seen the massive holes in your roads, society and infrastructure in your time there, it’s likely because you are overused to them.

America is terribly full of the desperately poor.

Edit; I have learned not to talk of the incidents that happen once, if I can help it, as I get told they are “isolated incidents” or “just happen in that state”. The girl with the dog crying in louisiana, the orphans we met in ohio, the shaking window knocker, poor bastard… That said, those isolated incidents also add up to a larger truth. All of them were due to a lack of health care or social care. All could have been cured with a little kindness, or the yanks being a little less blind to their fellow man. It is a very harsh place.

Honestly was shocked when I first visited. On TV the streets are wide there and everyone has enough to eat.

Visit (and at this point I have spent time in about half their states) and it is a different story. Broken roads in disrepair. Beggars everywhere, fighting for the chance to ask you for food, water, anything. We stopped at traffic lights and a teenage boy shaking with palsy knocked on our windows begging for food. People mobbed me in one city because I was carrying a bag of apples and they hoped for one as my bag split. I was careful never to give, but was still followed everywhere as an obvious tourist. The only place I did not get food begging on every single streetcorner was Manhattan. I am told this is because they deported beggars to the mainland there. Heartless sods in a capital that gets snow told me “there’s less beggars in winter, the cold gets them”.

I think you’re right about the jobs, too. There were roadworkers on those broken roads, using jackhammers without ear protection, or even foot protection. I was told it was because they are “free” to bring their own PPE. They looked injured and sick but determined.

Shops were similar. Waitstaff looked half starved, serving the rich in an obsequious yet hateful way unnervingly like a roleplaying slave. It was disgusting, and ruined many a meal by constant disingenious artificial attention.

You won’t regret visiting, but it is a ridiculously heartless broken place. The most expensive travel insurance too, for reasons most obvious in their medical stories.

Yanks are no doubt going to downvote this to oblivion, but it is how I have so far experienced their miserable cities.

Friends did, Big Bang Theory does all the time, but yeah pretty much every yank comedy contains some negativity towards Indian food. I don’t watch much comedy, but it seems to be a meme in their shows.

The yanks insist it is short for gasolene, but it is actually short for the name of the guy who marketed it in their country. Like saying “hoover” for vacuum cleaner or “wettex” for sponge.

It always sounds wrong to me as we have both gas (natural gas) and liquid petrol (refined oil) powered cars, as well as deisel cars. What they call gas is a liquid. But no one said language has to make sense I guess. Diesel, btw, is also a name based on a persons name…

Reddit was at the extreme end of emoji rejection as far as I ever saw. Odd that you experienced differently. I often saw well-upvoted comments such as “downvote due to emoji use” next to heavily downvoted emojis on Reddit.

Not an emoji fan myself, but each to their own.