Wed, 07 May 2025 02:14:00 UTC
chat! i touched grass today!! it was good :3 theres things out there! i saw birds! many of them!! there was even a duck! theres also squirrels! you ever look at those lil guys? so clueless, yet so focused. also! turtle!! check this shit out
image: a turtle amidst some leaves
like, i know they live there given i was at a lake and all but its still neat, yknow? also the lake smelled like lake. have you ever smelled a lake? its nice. its a different smell than the ocean. it still has the wet sand smell but it doesnt have the ocean smell. it also has like a wet dirt smell and wet rock smell too. you should go smell a lake. touch it too. touching the lake is neat. the smell of lake reminds me of minnesota. theres so many lakes there to smell. so much grass to touch. ive never been one for being in water but i still like lakes. water is pretty, i just dont want to be in it.
i was always in charge of pool chemicals at my parents house. i never really got in the pool but i still tended to the chemicals. i dont know how it became my job. probably some combination of me taking initiative at one point and my autistic perfection of making sure what was done was done right. eventually it felt a bit unfair that i was always made to be in charge of pool chemicals. sometimes it felt more like a chore than anything else. i still think overall i enjoyed it. its the closest i ever got to a chemistry class, being homeschooled and all. im still interested in learning more about chemistry so theres that at least.
one time we got all the water in the pool and i got to work with the chemicals. the thing i usually did first was to get the pH and alkalinity where i wanted them. now, usually these are the same thing, but with pool chemicals they somehow arent. i suspect the thing they call alkalinity really is something else. this particular time the pH was high and the "total alkalinity" was low. this makes no sense from a chemistry standpoint but pool chemicals dont care what makes sense i guess. i started with lowering the pH by ading muriatic acid. youre supposed to do this by filling a bucket with water and carefully pouring the muriatic acid into there before pouring it into the pool. this reduces splashing, which is generally a good idea when working with acids. after a couple buckets of diluted muriatic acid the ph started to budge, but only a little. the total alkalinity, however, had plummeted. i added some "alkalinity up" product which if i recall correctly was just some household thing in pool packaging. probably baking soda or some shit. this brought the total alkalinity back up and the pH stayed put. fantastic, time for muriatic acid round two. fill the bucket, pour the acid in, pour the concoction in the pool. pH a little lower, total alkalinity dropping again. more alkalinity increaser. same deal, repeat. eventually i gave up on the bucket thing. yeah its the "right way to do it" and all but lifting 5 gallons of liquid isnt easy. or maybe it is. idk, im weak as shit but i make do. the rigamarole of getting the bucket, filling it, and stirring in the acid was getting old too, it wasnt just the lifting. at some point i realized i had made two or three trips to lowes just for a gallon or two of acid and decided to just buy four gallons of the stuff at once. fun fact: they dont check your ID! they dont even look at you weird! just some teenager walking away from self checkout with nothing but four gallons of muriatic acid. not weird at all. this stuff is usually used to etch concrete by the way. like, its definitely acid. its no hydrochloric acid but thats still a lot of acid. wait hold on. whats that? no that- huh. okay. sorry, uh, im getting word that its the same product. like, actually literally the same thing. reports seem to differ on whether muriatic acid is diluted hydrochloric acid or just straight up hydrochloric acid and i dont really feel like looking into it more right now but like, yeah. i did know this at the time for what its worth, this was just me doing a bit for some reason. so yeah, theres your lesson for the day: hardware stores dont really give a shit if you are a teenager buying 10 gallons of acid in the span of a couple days. not suspicious at all.
oh also? go touch some grass today. its nice.
