June 29

Haha, I ran the new reaction today.  It even went well, and ran really crazy cool.  At one point when I was adding a solvent, it changed colors pretty drastically about 3 or 4 times (same solvent).  Twas fun, and the product turned out ok, I think.  We based the procedure on a paper that Dr. Heckmann found, and I noticed during the course of doing the reaction that they either outright lied with some numbers (giving an amount of grams and moles that do not agree) or were very vague.  Apparently people don't do science for the joy of expanding our knowledge of the universe.  Who knew?  So we will see tomorrow if I actually made some good substance with a decent yield.  Here's hoping.  Dr. Heckmann showed a group of youth through the lab today, which was interesting for them hopefully.  I had another German lesson with Oliver today, which was nice; there is always more to learn, and more mistakes to make.  After work, you might be surprised to learn that I watched soccer.  But what you would never guess is that I also ate an apple while watching.  Anyway, I also figured out, during the course of my run what the recipe is for a not horrible run.  It is simpler than you might think.  The first and only thing that you need to do is not fill yourself with carbon dioxide before you go out.  For those who do not know, much of the water that you buy here is mineral water, which can be bought with bubbles.  In the intent of having a more authentic Germany experience, and because I find it quite refreshing, I have started buying water with gas.  That gas is bad because it means that there is also carbonic acid in it.  It turns out that every time I have started running after drinking mineral water, it goes poorly.  So, I did the opposite and things worked well.  Also, on the way back during my cool down, I walked past an old lady sitting at a green light.  It was like her eyes were connected to the light via fiber optics, but the traffic light was flying away from her so quickly that it looked red to her.  I caught her eye, pointed at the light and gave her a thumbs up and just kept on walking.  For some reason, that was the impetus she needed to understand that it was in fact ok to go.  Maybe they should have thumbs up and down instead of red and green lights.  The part I enjoyed the most about the whole thing was the astonished look of recognition, then the waving of both arms off of the wheel in thanks.  By enjoyed I think I mean that I am afraid to walk alongside the street in Ingelheim now.  In other news, the Portugal-Spain game has been pretty great so far.  Hard to expect less I suppose.  Oh, and also, I got to have a short Google chat with Mark my roommate today.  He will be going to work in Singapore for the rest of the summer working on his own and his brother's film stuff.  That is pretty cool.  In even more news, the German station that is displaying the soccer matches here, really likes to do slow motion segments of players doing things.  Usually it is just running or tackling, but they just showed a goalie doing the thing where you blow air through your lips and let them wag about all crazy like.  Good stuff to be sure. Also, kudos to the people who spot the poorly made physics joke/observation that I made.