Day Sixteen: Everything That Could Go Wrong

It probably didn't help that the sleet started to fall on my uncovered head as I walked to Milliken this morning.

On the other hand, I had a voucher for free coffee and ordered a large one.  The Pop-Tart and Oreos were good, too.

Anyways.

I was feeling quite productive as I wandered into the laboratory this morning, having set my large coffee in the hallway where it would be protected from chemicals.  I quickly spotted three TLC plates with samplings of my thirty-five test tubes from yesterday and prepared a new solvent chamber to develop them while I drank my coffee.  Unfortunately, things don't always go according to plan.  The solvent touched my samples immediately instead of gradually in the absorbance process, and the plate was left in the chamber for too long, rendering the test useless.

However, all was not lost, as I realized that I wanted to test a larger sampling of my test tubes and prepared a new set of TLC plates: one for the original, and then four sets of every three.  They developed uniformly and displayed great results under the UV light.  I happily documented my results in my notebook.

Everything went downhill from there.

Dr. Bass and I decided that we would attempt to oxidize my impure 2-benzylcyclohexanol product and see what results we could get.  So while my TLC plates were developing, I scrounged through his old laboratory for a three-necked flask, West condenser, separatory funnel, and thermometer adapter that would be the appropriate side for about 15 mL of reagents.  The final apparatus was actually quite adorable:

The unfortunate part occurred when the supposedly half-hour reaction took an hour and a half to complete.  And when I had to constantly adjust the heat setting to maintain a warm temperature.  And when I left an important TLC plate in the chamber for too long.

Yeah.  That's how the day ended.  We can only hope that Monday will be more successful.  There is still a distillation to complete.

Have a wonderful weekend!