August 12, 2017 at 11:22PM

Today I Learned: 1) ...what thyme smells like. I know, I know, I really should have known this already -- but somehow I'd only encountered thyme when it was mixed with other spices, and I never knew what part of the smell/flavor to attribute to thyme. I hope to use a lot more of it in the near future. 2) There's a little latin market a couple of blocks from my house. And when I say little, I mean it. I think it's smaller than my living room. But the important thing is that it's close! Today I went there for the first time. There's a wierd mix of stuff crammed in there, including but not limited to: lots of dish soap; tortilla chips (but mostly uncooked tortillas); racks of spices, just like you'll find in the "latin foods" section of most grocery stores around here; bags of "spices for tamales", which seem to be mostly sesame seeds and a few huge hot peppers; super-cheap mustard, ketchup, nutella, mayo, and that kind of thing, mixed with cans of chipotles in ancho sauce and enchilada sauce; vinegars and lemon juice and baking soda all right next to each other; tons of different kinds of snack chips, including some that I'm pretty sure weren't made in the US; and, above and beyond anything else, lots and lots of alcohol and sodas. 3) ...how to make custom legends with Matplotlib. There are a bunch of matplotlib classes called "artists" that each know how to draw something on a plot -- for example, Line2D can draw a 2D line (shocking, I know). To make a legend with custom symbols, you make a list of artist objects, each one of which describes how to draw a thing, and a list of labels so matplotlib knows what to call each thing, and then you do plt.legend(artists, labels) and that's it.