A tough week indeed

(This is a Dany Joumaa production)

Aside from all the happenings in my life outside of the lab (spending my last day with Greg, copious amounts of recording, work for AUR, running into people), things are getting more complicated in chemistry world.

As you may recall, we spent Monday and Tuesday attempting to recrystallize -- or purify -- the basis compound for the light emitting molecule that I'm studying. One of the requirements of recrystallization is for full dissolution of any solids remaining in the solution. Well, on Thursday, we tried vigorously mixing our compound while heating it (and avoiding the ignition of a fire). Solids remained... that failed. Then we tried to employ another powerful solvent called dichloromethane, again, while mixing and heating. That failed as well.

So, what's left? Dr Zheng suggested that we try filtering the solution. That is to say, we merely run the compound through a filtration system such that only a purely supernatant filtrate (ie a filtrate completely free of any solid material and is transparent) was left. From there, we could try employing the principles of thermodynamics by cooling down the compound such that the solubility of the compound decreases and crystalline solid "needles" appear. These needles, by design, would be purer than their solid forebearers coming straight out of the Aldrich chemical container.

In the meantime, I finally met with a grad student named Laura who will assist me with running my first chemical modeling computations. I will be returning to a UNIX-like environment to complete the computations, which is a very nice blast to the past. Although I won't be programming in a Turing-complete language, I will be programming the setup of chemical molecules that will be approximated through Schrodinger's equations. And for that opportunity, I can't complain.

Finally, on my way out of the lab on Thursday, Steve, Dr. Zheng's graduate student, invited me to assist the research group clean the lab. Out of kindness and understanding (the place was a mess, I tell you), I agreed and showed up at 9am this morning (Friday, March 4th). We found old crystallized bottles dating all the way back to 2002 from old post-doc reactions that were never cleaned up... we also found an apparently spilled chemical that reacted with the lab table surface itself and deformed its top... and of course, I got to "wash the dishes." Although this many seem boring to the uninterested reader, one must remind oneself that karma pays back accordingly: at an out-of-state post-grad fair for chemistry coincidentally happening on the same day, I got to munch on shortbread, donuts, and bagels. And free soda (but I don't drink soda, so I just had water). Take that, Gabe.

Outside of the lab, things have been pretty fantastic. I ran into my production manager at the Rialto on Thursday, who was coincidentally doing sound outdoors on the UA Mall for some sort of drunk-driving awareness campaign. Thanks to that encounter, it looks like I will have a job starting later this March to run sound for a "battle of the bands" happening at the UA mall. Bam. Furthermore, I am sitting in on sessions happening on the UA recording studio whenever possible. Yesss.

Could things be better? I couldn't tell you for certain, but I am not displeased. And that must be an indication of something :)