August 9

One of the first things that I did today at work was to put mother liquor with a volatile halogen component in the non-Halogenated waste, and since it had some water in it, it reacted quite strongly.  That also meant that instead of two things to dispose of, we had three.  So that meant three massive buckets of ice to kill the solvent.  The whole place smelled pretty terribly for a while, but the cool thing was that I got to use a massive separating funnel (probably a little less than 10L) to separate the phases for further disposal.  Ten liters is a pretty big amount to use, considering that previously, in OChem lab at Calvin we were making about a gram of substance and using maybe 15 mL maximum of solvent.  At that point it was too late to start another reaction, so I will do that tomorrow, after preparing for it today.  After work I wrote some postcards and got some groceries at ALDI.  I'll mail the cards tomorrow hopefully.  Most of them will then be sent out, I just have one or two more to get.  Biking is going to be a pain if this injury lingers I think.  Doable, but a pain for sure.  That will be nice because then neither Nathan nor I will be at 100%.  I cannot believe that I only have one week left after this one.  It is kind of crazy to think.  I am kind of ready to get back though.