I get another holiday, it’s ridiculous. We just got back into the labs, and now we are off again. What kind of circus are you running here?

I don’t have class until Friday; although, when I do get back, I have that three-lab week that I thought was last week. So there really isn’t much that I can write, I mean I saw that new Angelina Jolie movie Couture about the life of a model, and a bit about breast cancer. It was an okay movie, it wasn’t great.

I plan to see a whole bunch of movies, so maybe July will be better.

Here’s what I did in my short week that I had come back.

Analytical Chemistry

I still have a report to do for Analytical Chemistry though, and it was involving these stupid plasticizers. We were working with PVC (did I tell you this already?), PVC is brittle and hard. So, what manufacturers do is add plasticizers to them, which makes the PVC more flexible.

Using 10mL diethyl ether, I added the sample plastic (.47g) so the plasticizer would be extracted and then I ran a TLC plate (Thin Layer Chromatography), and if there were any additives we would see them as a spot on the TLC plate.

There were no significant spots, there were to faint spots and I measure the distance to the most visible spot. You then I used potato pomagranite (what I call potassium permaganate, KMnO4), and again there were nothing but a film of purple.

Analysis using an ATR-FTIR machines showed that there were two large peaks around 2900 wavenumbers before the analysis, then after extraction there were still two peaks but less than half of the magnitude, which means that I extracted a plasticizer, just not fully. It makes absolute sense to me, but I could be biased and because I don’t really read IR tables well, I think I am justifiably skeptical.

Ecology Lab

So, we went to the farm. We saw flowers, talked about how the university farm is becoming more accessible and that they are trying to branch out and start making their own beer, and have future plans for Maple Syrup.

I didn’t take many pictures, we were counting pollinators and my lab partner (Daisy Bright-Mckee), who was also my lab partner for my course on Genetics and Behaviour that I included a small post a while back on a paper criticism (it was a small entry).

Because of the heat warnings, as well as the number of ticks are on the rise. I am seriously debating whether or not this course is worth it. I might be freaking out, and I think it’s because I am just generally afraid of diseases that I can’t see.

Like at least with the bacteria, you kind of know it’s there. But viral, molecular parasitic? Please, all I know is that if I start being less risk averse, there might be some T. gondii floating around, just hanging out in my body.

Home Experiments

My home experiments are not really going anywhere anymore. I have that pineapple being chilled in my fridge and my plant is barely hanging on. What is really cool is that as I am watching, the yeast/bacteria is producing CO2 in rreal time. I can watch bubbles forming, at least when I take it out of the fridge, and it warms up a little bit, I start to notice the bubbles.

Seeing that I will have some time this week, so on top of my chemistry report, my studying for my development psychology which is interesting because we are talking about learning, and this upcoming week we will be talking about emotions.

This isn’t like something that I haven’t studied before, however know I will be looking at the side of how emotions play in development. I really want to understand emotions well, because people have said that I am an emotional or dramatic person, when I graduated from my first degree I remember being part of an exercise and having an expressive personality.

Ever since I had acquired my brain injury which resulted in permanent head damage, I can remember key instances where I would be quite expressive and dramatic.

Man, I love science.