Alexander's

The other day, after a restful night, I noticed a quite painful, big scarlet--red mark on my leg. My first thought was that this had to be a some kind of strange bruise.

Even though I could not remember hurting myself or hitting something, it was not that improbable. After all my girlfriend likes to torture me in my sleep.

At noon I still had no good explanation.

I could only be sure of one thing: this was not a normal bruise!

So I did what every good physicist would do, marked the outline to see if it was getting bigger, noted the time of the measurement and continued with my day.

By nightfall the blotch had turned into a deep shade of Harvard crimson. It was hot and quite painful. Slightly worried I turned to my parents for help:

This has to be a spider sting! I can even see the two bite marks!
What bite marks?
The two round shapes -- what else.
Those are the two zeros from 13:00!

Next time I'll make sure he wears his glasses when inspecting my lesions!

But the fact remained that unless there was a giant spider[^1] in my room something was really wrong with my leg.

The next morning I went straight to the hospital.

This is a "necrotic soft tissue infection"[^2] But it's very rare -- especially amongst young people like yourself.

So basically I contracted a very rare disease, only a few days after being tortured?

I'm not sure how coincidental these things really are. After all I still didn't tell her my password.

[^1]: the span of the bite marks was around one centimeter! [^2]: Sorry I'm no doctor so I don't remember the latin name and I no idea what the right english translation is

Good thing I'm not a Werwolf.

Next: transit of Venus 2012.

So a day after I nearly killed myself with the ant poison guess who is back.

Yup my beloved ants -- and they learned something new!

Light is bad.

So now I can't even shoot pictures of them, because as soon as I turn on the lights they run away.

Anyway after the last fiasco with the powder I decided to be more careful this time. I got special cans that contain a sticky sweet glue. Just click the thing open and let the ants grab as much poison as they want. Perfectly save and no mess for me to clean up.[^1]

Great -- the only problem is my apparent lack of poison handling skills. I managed to get the stuff all over my hands again.

I mean Seriously?!?

I build nanostructures smaller than a hair, I used machines that can resolve single atoms, I smashed atoms together in the worlds biggest particle collider, I build a biped robot from scratch and I can't use ant poison?

Hell I even have a piece of paper that certifies my ability to handle dangerous chemicals and this stuff is supposedly usable by anyone.

While the old stuff was more like a downer with the ants dying in cramps this new thing seems to be some kind of ant-party-rave-drug. They start to run twice as fast, bump into each other, run sideways and jump -- I swear I saw an ant jump![^2]

[^1]: The packing claims that the ants will die in their hive (yea right) [^2]: Either that or I'm starting to feel the influence of the new drug