Grapes in the air

On wednesday the movers came to our place in the Presidio, loaded up all our junk onto a truck and dropped it off at our new place in Fruitvale; right now most of our things are sitting in stacks of boxes on the concrete floor.

After finally getting a chance to have the bladder in my kite fixed at KiteWindSurf in Alameda, I headed back to our place to meet Chloe. As soon as I got out of my car I was greeted a really strong smell of grapes in the air. However, this was not the mellow smell of freshly crushed grapes, but rather the artificial sweetness of purple grape chewing gum. As it turns out we now live next to the Gatorade factory and I'm guessing it was "purple" day. I don't mind it at all though; it reminded me of my organic chem lab in which we synthesized a variety of different aromatic (not aromatic in the chemical sense) esters, and all of a sudden our austere 1920's era Williams College laboratory was filled with the powerful aromas of bananas, oranges and apples. It certainly could be a lot worse.

I'm guessing it was this stuff

It also reminded me of a story I heard on This American Life about the gub'mit cracking down on chocolate factory emissions in Chicago