Sexy Back

Or just happy back. Back is fixed (almost) and I've now stopped screaming at people when they disagree with me.

Summer school

My group is a member of the Nucleic acid center (better known as NAC). Every year NAC organizes a summer school in Odense which PhD-students from all of Europe are attending.
Now I'm not yet a PhD-student but in order to become one I should definitely spend some time on my Master Thesis. But my Thesis is suspended for the upcoming week because of NAC summer school.
We were politely told that our presence was not optional. So I have to spend five days incl. this sunday afternoon, which was supposed to be a total hangover-day, at the zoo being a social human being. The rest of the week I'm stuck in a lecture room listening to about 8 lectures a day.
This is not why I became a chemist!

Red wine

Now seriously, is there anything better than red wine?? I'm pretty sure nobody dares to argue. :-)
The reason for my love of red wine is its many talents:

- It tastes wonderfully
- It looks great
- It goes neatly with chocolate (me second great love)
- It comes in 3 L boxes
- It's a better painkiller than any over the counter drug

The last reason is especially important since I have had a constant headache for a week due to tensions in my back and I couldn't get an appointment at my "back-fixer" untill saturday.
Of course I can't round around tipsy at the lab, and do prefer painkillers in work-situations. But in the evening there's no one to stop me. ;-)

Choices

This Sunday I did something I would have sworn I would never do. I cast a blank vote. Not for the election for the european parliament but for the election about the succession to the throne.
The question was whether ot not a woman should have the same right to the throne as a man. The whole thing was put up to be about equal rights for women but in reality this has no impact on any one except two people in 60 years.
We are voting for equality for people who are in no way equal to the rest of the population. They pay no taxes, no VAT and they still expect freebies at restaurants. Also we are paying an entire family, including Queen and husband, firstborn son, his wife and their two children, their second son , his new wife, and his three kids. Anyone who claims that a president would cost just as much, has a math problem!

Hm...

So the wonderfully pure compound I was talking about in the post "Lucky" turned out to be a beautifully pure impurity. This should teach me not to count my chickens before they're hatched.

Lucky

Purifying compounds is a tedious and often repeated task in the life of an organic chemist. Column chromatography which is essentially a filter with varying affinty for different compunds is the standard in the lab (and most others).
Today I was to run a column on a compound for the second time, since it didn't get entirely clean the last time. So I start out with my solvent mixture and half way through the column I realise I used the wrong mixture. Way to go!! The impurities start coming out in a mess and I figure I'm going to be doing this column again tomorrow.
Surprisingly my product comes out totally clean without any impurities. I'm slightly amazed.
I finish the column and start collecting the fractions. After removing the solvents I discover that I have collected impure and pure fractions!! Fantastic!! Again I figure I might have tomorrows work cut out for me. As it turns out the pure fractions that I have isolated contain more compound than the mixed ones!!
How lucky can you be!!! :-)

Milestone

It is now oficially summer! How do I know that? Well, there are several signs to point you in that direction, for example the number of dresses seen on the street, the smiles on peoples faces, the sound of children playing outside, the abundance of sunglasses, the icecreampapers on the ground, the picnics in the park and of course the sun shining from a cloudless sky.
But the most obvious sign that summer has finally hit the country is my annual sunburn on the back. ;-)