I think I have a bit of an obsessive-compulsive problem.

I can't step on the cracks in sidewalks. This is not necessarily due to me not wanting to break my mother's back. I mean, of course I don't want to break my mother's back, but I never believed that there was one iota of truth to that childhood sing-song "don't step on a crack -- you'll break your mother's back!"

It just kind of always hangs out in the back of my mind, even now that I'm 21 years old, and as I'm walking along, I'm thinking of the rhyme -- not of my mother, of the rhyme -- and trying to adjust my steps to be perfectly placed so that I don't have to think about not stepping on the cracks.

This, of course, never works, because either I would have to take really long steps (yes, even for me and my really long legs) or I would have to take comically short steps. So usually I sort of trip-hop along. Sometimes I count cement slabs as I walk. There are 53 of them going across the quad from Illick to Marshall (and, I expect, vice versa).

Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. You see, I get distracted by these cracks. I am constantly looking at my feet to try to avoid them... so I see the breaks in the neighboring slabs, or in the curb bordering the sidewalk, and if they don't line up, even though I am not walking directly on them, I cannot step where the extrapolation of the line would fall.

So the other day I was doing this, and I started to think about how ridiculous it was. And as I laughed at myself, I raised my chin so that I couldn't see the cracks in the sidewalk and kept walking, only to find that it bothered me so much that I might be stepping on those cracks that I cannot stand it, and had to look back at the ground.

When I'm walking on bricks, I can't avoid stepping on cracks. Obviously. So instead I try to walk with the "grain" of the bricks. I place my feet either perpendicular or parallel to the longest side of the bricks, or, in the case of a sort of crosshatching pattern, I walk with my toes pointed towards the point of the bricks. If the bricks change color, when I place my foot, it cannot touch more than one color.

The takehome message: please please please just use asphalt.

I'm also weird about stepping on parking lot lines.

Today I cleaved the coupling reaction, which looked very pitiful by GC (I only used 0.1 eq extra of the THP ether, after all, so having so much remaining didn't make sense!), and then I quenched it, went to teach my freshmen about the gas law, which they haven't touched in lecture but which is very easy (side note: the lab should probably not be referred to as 'Determination of R' if R is never actually determined), came back, took off the solvent, added new solvent, dried it, took off the solvent, added recrystallization solvent, and BOOM!

I'm telling you, this baby just does not want to be in solution. And that would be okay with me if it didn't mean I had to do all of these gymnastics to separate my lovely crystal babies from the oily brown gunk at the bottom. Oh well... I took a pipette and sucked out the oil while the diol was still dissolved (the whole thing was still in the rotavap at 60*C or so), and then set that aside in a mini Erlenmeyer (note to self: go get that out of Adam's freezer -- you forgot to move it), and put the 'supernatant' (ugh, biochemistry) into the freezer.

Voila! The loveliest crystals I've made yet!

Says Adam: "well, gee, it's almost like you know what you're doing!"

Thank you, Adam.

Sometimes I just want to sleep but there is so much work to be done that I can't even let myself sleep. I'd wish for the weekend, but that would bring me THIS MUCH CLOSER to the end of the semester.

At least Christina helped me get my dress for soiree ;-) I think I shall have to get black tights to wear with it, for it is certainly a short little thing.