Plans? Plans for what? The rest of my life? Tonight? This weekend?

I know what I’m doing tonight and what I’m doing this weekend, not so much what I’m doing with the rest of my life. And now I’m sitting here, taking careful notes so that my lit review becomes a matter of piecing together facts that I’ve already written down instead of a whole entire project of a paper. I’ve learned to write in steps.

I keep moving my product in and out of the freezer. It’s fascinating me, because I move it in and it crystallizes, out and it melts. The freezing point of toluene is something ridiculous like -97°C, and I know the freezer is not that cold because I can touch the vials that I am pulling out of it with my bare hands, so it’s not toluene. Hexanes don’t freeze either, so it’s not hexanes. My product shows up beautifully by TLC… so why won’t it stay crystallized?

When I see Brad again, I’ll pose the question. $10 says we just go get an NMR and see what’s up.

Earlier, I sneezed quite violently. It felt sort of good when the aftershocks had worn off. Right now I am eating my granola bar. I have learned a trick to eating. If I let myself get as hungry as I can stand while knowing I have food with me, when I finally eat the food it will taste exceptionally delicious. Hence I am eating the BEST GRANOLA BAR OF MY WHOLE ENTIRE LIFE.

I just ate a chunk of MK’s sourdough bread. It was very nice, and appropriately sour. I had sourdough at the Cheesecake Factory on Saturday night (free bread, hooray!) and also rye-with-oats. Both were delicious, but the sourdough was not particularly sour.

I’m thirsty.

Currently I’m rotavapping as much DCM as possible off of my product. Then we’ll put it on a Schlenk line overnight, which means that at some point I will be totally free to sit down and concentrate on my paper. And, of course, when I have that freedom I will certainly not be eager to make use of it. I’m contrary (how does my garden grow?).

Sometimes when I’m writing, I look back at what I wrote and it doesn’t really feel like me who wrote it. I like to say that I write the way I speak but I don’t. I think I write the way I think, so to a lesser extent I write the way I speak. If that makes sense. It feels so weird to think that the summer is halfway over (at least). I feel like I’m in stasis, living here in a dormitory in Evanston, doing my own laundry, spending my own money, occasionally keeping my room clean and getting huge monthly checks (thanks, NSF!).

I have a lot to say, but when I go to say it, it’s just not there. I finally got warm after bundling up in my green ESF hoodie and sitting in my office with my hands resting on my warm laptop. It is freezing in here, and way colder in actual lab. I should go check on my rotavapping material. I have a bit of rotavapping phobia: I’m afraid it’s going to bump or evaporate while I’m gone, even though Omar has informed me that he would be very surprised if the product boiled over about 230°C.

I don’t recall that I was this cautious about boiling points when I worked for FX. I’m beginning to think that I wasn’t, because as an organic chemist I had a fairly good idea of how much I could heat something. I didn’t have this sort of mystical fear of all things organic (they blow away like dust in the wind!).

Oh man oh man oh man! It is 5:17. That means that I can leave now, if I want to. I want to. I should make sure that my product is supposed to stay on the Schlenk line tonight, and then I’m out of here. To write my paper. I’ll probably actually write most of it tonight, unlike the times I said I’d do it over the weekend and didn’t. Deadlines are the best motivation, but they must be looming to be effective.

Out!