a new semester

Some days, the universe seems to be conspiring against me.

Today I decided (better late than never) that I wanted to set up a pair of reactions.  The prep – basically a recipe – that I was trying to follow was frustratingly vague, to the point where I wondered how it was even publishable to have a paper supposedly detailing a method where the recipe is basically something like this…

Ingredients:

Some eggs

Some flour

Some sugar

Some butter – maybe ½ stick per egg

Exactly 1.5 teaspoons of shortening to grease a pan (BUT WE WON’T TELL YOU WHICH ONE)

Mix sugar and butter.  Add eggs.  Bake for specific time.

Seriously.   This prep had one weirdly exact amount for something that didn’t scale with anything else, no concentration, no temperature, and a ratio.  I am not kidding.  It didn’t even MENTION one of the reactants.  And then it concluded with “stirred for specific time”.  Well I scoured that paper and there was no specific time, or any specific anything else.

Ugh.  Science.  It’s stuff like this that makes you wonder. 

So I faked up some conditions and prepared to set some reactions up.  And then I went to go get my solvent from our solvent system.  The solvent system just keeps it dry, basically; solvents will collect water over time if not kept dry and water messes with reactions sometimes.  Since I was running this bad boy over a dessicant, I figured I really owed it to those molecular sieves to start with dry solvent.

And then the nitrogen tank was being changed out on the solvent system.  So I pouted a little bit, and Bennett said he’d come get me when he was done changing out the tank, and I picked a good solvent because it was not one of the current problem-child-solvents.  But I resigned myself to a good half hour wait and headed back to my desk to start writing.

Then Bennett came by, maybe five minutes later, and I felt less petulant and went back to set up my reactions.  They are now stirring merrily away, but I will admit that I don’t have particularly high hopes for their results, given that I had to follow a recipe with more holes than substance.  Nevertheless, it is a bit of productivity.  You have to start somewhere.

Andy is teaching a class this semester, and Diane and I went to sit in on it this morning.  It occupies the unfortunate lunch time slot of 11:35am to 12:50pm, and I am accustomed to eating my lunch between 11:50 and 1:00, somewhere in there, so this was a bit distressing.  Not quite as distressing as the original 9:00am start time, so I’ll count my blessings instead of whining.  The class itself seems pretty similar to the natural products class that he taught a couple of years ago so I might not go to all of it, but there are a few classes that look pretty good.

It is kind of funny to go to the class, though, because the organic first years are all pretty scared, and Andy likes to pick on people and also likes to have his peanut gallery (“minions!” he said gleefully upon arriving to class and seeing us there) for asides during independent work time.  So I think it’s all right, after all.