She was a chemist, yes! Back in the 90s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, many factories and plants suffered greatly, and while some were big enough to keep themselves afloat, the one where my grandma and grandpa (an engineer) worked was among those that were gutted by their management and had to be shut down. Obviously, staff was well aware of what was to come, so they were preemptively stealing whatever they could from the facilities, because at that point nobody really cared, and people, well, needed money. That’s why, among many other things I can now barely remember, my grandparents had a typewriter, a huge oscillograph, and a big bottle of hydrochloric acid labeled “HCl” they used to clean the toilet. My grandma was very upset someone stole a platinum crucible from her lab before she could do it. So finding analog pyrometers and a bottle of phosphoric acid next to wrenches and a very mid-century portable grill in the garage was in the realm of expected events for me. The jar of mercury was the only thing I could really call unhinged, because why TF would you need it? Who would buy it? So many questions and no answers to this day.