So today I had my four hour organic chemistry lab. This is actually my favorite class of the week. It does start at eight o'clock in the morning, but still. Favorite class. We get to wear nice smelling, powder-free, latex-free purple gloves and do cool experiments. For four hours! Anyway, today was the first time that I actually utilized all four of my allotted hours. Basically before this, I had always completed my lab work in about three. However I found that the extra hour makes all the difference in terms of the goggle marks. Every week as soon as I finish my work, I go directly to the bathroom and check out the damage. Today was particularly terrible. I don't care if that sounds vain or whatever. All my lab friends do it too... I always feel really awkward leaving that class and walking back to my co-op. It's like a 7 minute walk and I always have to walk past like a bunch of people. It's really bad.
I didn't make any weird mistakes this time though. Last week, I swear, my TA probably thought I was retarded or something. First, I connected my condenser tubing backwards and then some of my glassware got stuck together when I was trying to pull it apart. Apparently, I didn't put enough glycerin on the joint or something. My TA lectured me on this for like three whole minutes. It was terrible. I attribute my lack of awareness that day to not being able to drink coffee in the morning. Obviously it was detrimental to my lab performance. This week however, one of my lab partners kind of screwed up. First, her condenser tubing shot out of the condenser and shot water in our whole group's faces and got our fumehood all wet. Hopefully we didn't inhale any weird carcinogens or anything, so fingers crossed. Then, she put in another piece of condenser tubing and it blew up into this huge bubble thing. It was like there was this big old water balloon stuck on her tubing. It was so weird. And then, she got the wrong sized heating mantle thing and our reaction mixture was taking forever to distill. So then we had to get another one and re-heat up. Oh man... I asked her if she drank any coffee that morning and she said no! She is usually pretty smart too. We made a pact to always drink coffee before chem lab. Always.
All in all, it was a pretty eventful action packed day of lab. I was a fan. And we got another TA helping us instead of the one I had last week. He was much nicer and was a native speaker of English. He was pretty funny too. Also, he was quite cute, which is never a bad thing.
