Monday class

I’m feeling much better. I just have a bothersome tickle in my throat now, made worse because my cough is so dry. It’s not even satisfying. But it’s better than the pain of a rattling, hacking cough, so I’ll count my blessings.

I also have the sense that I am going to have a hard time figuring out what to write about today, and I know I’m not obligated to write, but sometimes you like to have that little item on your mental to-do list checked off.

Andy’s class seems to me to be leaving the realms of usefulness, at least for me personally, as it coalesces into the class that I took two years ago.

[obligatory panic break for TWO YEARS AGO?! where’s the time gone?!]

We spent some useful time talking about protecting group strategies – although he was out of town and one of the new professors taught for him, pinch-hitting by reading through the notes at the front of the room and annotating as we went along. It was (surprisingly) a really effective way to learn the material, and there was a level of focus there that is ordinarily absent.

Plus we were treated to quotes like “and now we leave the comfort and joy of the silyl ethers for the pain of the MOM ethers,” and he giggled a lot when he struck himself as funny. Giggling fits will probably never not be contagious.

Since then, we've talked about aldol reactions and their close relatives, crotylations and allylations. Andy was convinced that Diane had done a crotylation, staring her down from the front of them room. “No,” said Diane, laughing nervously, “I never ran one.”

“I ran a crotylation,” I finally said, letting Diane off of the hot seat, and ultimately no conversation even came of the topic, so I confess to being a little bit confused about the need to establish who had run one before.

But now we’re sliding into discussions of total syntheses and these I’ve had before – same slides, even – and I’m not sure the utility of the course is there for me anymore. I think Andy might be sad if I stopped attending class, though, so I suppose it is what it is.

And it is what you make of it, so it could be all right.

Lunch was a long-ish and mostly boring affair, punctuated by some discussion of Ben’s difficulty making it to the end of Ender’s Game (the book, not the film adaptation) for his second time. The sink in the kitchen is hopelessly clogged, and even when I mustered up the fortitude to put my hands into the clammy water and to try to dislodge whatever lumpy, water-logged object was blocking the flow, I couldn’t find anything.

So I guess it needs some Drano. But I’m not going to deal with it. So I washed my bowl and spoon over a tepid sink of half-hearted soap bubbles, and then headed back to my desk.

Lab seems slightly dimmer and more subdued without Jen around.

Happy Monday.